The Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) talks were a series of negotiations held in Vienna between NATO and Warsaw Pact countries between 1973 and 1989.
The Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) talks were a series of negotiations held in Vienna between NATO and Warsaw Pact countries between 1973 and 1989.
The MBFR talks were first proposed at the SALT meeting between President Richard M. Nixon and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. The two leaders agreed that the political side of the talks would be held by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), while talks dealing with the military side would take place at MBFR. [1]
The preliminary talks started in Vienna in January 1973. [2] At the first meeting, the Russian side rejected the name "MBFR" on the grounds that the word "balanced" suggested that the Warsaw Pact forces – which had a numerical superiority in Europe – should be reduced more than NATO forces. Their proposed alternative was "Mutual Reductions of Forces and Armaments in Central Europe" (MRFACE), a title that was agreed upon but seldom used. [2]
The aim of the negotiations was an agreement on disarmament and control of conventional arms and armed forces in the territories of Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg (from NATO) and East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland (from the Warsaw Pact). The talks were attended by representatives from these nations, as well as the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and the Soviet Union.
The first meeting was held on 30 October 1973 in the Hofburg Palace, Vienna. [3] John Thomson, leader of the British delegation, commented:
Our grey little talks are no match for the Congress of Vienna. The Viennese have greeted us in friendly fashion but have probably been disappointed with our lack of glamour and our general 'invisibility'. We have been assigned the Hofburg as the site of our formal meetings whenever they may begin. But we are not destined to use the main salons. We drab bureaucrats are to gather in the room usually reserved for waiting footmen and coachmen in Franz Josef's time. The modern Metternich is not among us. His shadow does indeed fall darkly over us while he flits from Washington to Peking to Tokyo – everywhere but Europe in this 'year of Europe'. Nor do I discern a Talleyrand or a Castlereagh at our amiable 'plenary cocktails'. Instead we have hard-working lawyers and diplomats whose first thought is to engage in drafting and whose second is to avoid publicity.
— [4]
The West put its first proposals on the table on 22 November 1973. This 2-phase plan consisted of the following requirements:
The Warsaw pact response to NATO's position was that each side should reduce its forces proportionally rather than absolutely, and that equipment as well as troop numbers should be reduced.
The Warsaw Pact countries submitted a proposal that the USSR and the US should reduce manpower by 2 to 3 per cent, and that both the US and the USSR would remove the same number of nuclear warheads, 354 nuclear-capable aircraft, a number of SCUD-B and Pershing I launchers, 300 tanks and a corps headquarters. [3]
In 1976, the different estimates for the number of forces the Warsaw Pact countries were fielding in Eastern Europe became an issue that was never resolved during the period of the talks. (In 1976 the Warsaw Pact gave figures of 815,000 ground force personnel and 182,000 air force personnel, whilst NATO estimated that the Warsaw Pact had 956,000 and 224,000 personnel respectively.) [3]
In December 1979 the Soviets held up the talks because of NATO's decision to site new intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. [1]
The talks ended in on 2 February 1989 [3] and were replaced by the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe.
The Warsaw Pact (WP) or Treaty of Warsaw, formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland, between the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern Bloc socialist republics of Central and Eastern Europe in May 1955, during the Cold War. The term "Warsaw Pact" commonly refers to both the treaty itself and its resultant defensive alliance, the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO). The Warsaw Pact was the military complement to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), the regional economic organization for the socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe. The Warsaw Pact was created in reaction to the integration of West Germany into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1955 as per the London and Paris Conferences of 1954.
Arms control is a term for international restrictions upon the development, production, stockpiling, proliferation and usage of small arms, conventional weapons, and weapons of mass destruction. Arms control is typically exercised through the use of diplomacy which seeks to impose such limitations upon consenting participants through international treaties and agreements, although it may also comprise efforts by a nation or group of nations to enforce limitations upon a non-consenting country.
World War III or the Third World War, often abbreviated as WWIII or WW3, are names given to a hypothetical worldwide large-scale military conflict subsequent to World War I and World War II. The term has been in use since at least as early as 1941. Some apply it loosely to limited or more minor conflicts such as the Cold War or the war on terror. In contrast, others assume that such a conflict would surpass prior world wars in both scope and destructive impact.
The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were two rounds of bilateral conferences and corresponding international treaties involving the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War superpowers dealt with arms control in two rounds of talks and agreements: SALT I and SALT II.
START I was a bilateral treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union on the reduction and the limitation of strategic offensive arms. The treaty was signed on 31 July 1991 and entered into force on 5 December 1994. The treaty barred its signatories from deploying more than 6,000 nuclear warheads and a total of 1,600 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and bombers.
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was an arms control treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed the treaty on 8 December 1987. The US Senate approved the treaty on 27 May 1988, and Reagan and Gorbachev ratified it on 1 June 1988.
The RSD-10 Pioneer was an intermediate-range ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead, deployed by the Soviet Union from 1976 to 1988. It carried GRAU designation 15Ж45 (15Zh45). Its NATO reporting name was SS-20 Saber.
The original Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) was negotiated and concluded during the last years of the Cold War and established comprehensive limits on key categories of conventional military equipment in Europe and mandated the destruction of excess weaponry. The treaty proposed equal limits for the two "groups of states-parties", the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact. In 2007, Russia "suspended" its participation in the treaty, and on 10 March 2015, citing NATO's de facto breach of the Treaty, Russia formally announced it was "completely" halting its participation in it as of the next day.
CFE may refer to:
START III was a proposed bilateral arms control treaty between the United States and Russia that was meant to reduce the deployed nuclear weapons arsenals of both countries drastically and to continue the weapons reduction efforts that had taken place in the START I and START II negotiations. The framework for negotiations of the treaty began with talks in Helsinki between US President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1997. However, negotiations broke down, and the treaty was never signed.
Seven Days to the River Rhine was a top-secret military simulation exercise developed in 1979 by the Warsaw Pact. It depicted the Soviet bloc's vision of a seven-day nuclear war between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces.
The Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty is a post–Cold War adaptation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), signed on November 19, 1999, during the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe's (OSCE) 1999 Istanbul summit. The main difference with the earlier treaty is that the troop ceilings on a bloc-to-bloc basis would be replaced with a system of national and territorial ceilings. Furthermore, the adapted treaty would provide for more inspections and new mechanisms designed to reinforce States Parties’ ability to grant or withhold consent for the stationing of foreign forces on their territory.
The NATO Double-Track Decision was the decision by NATO from December 12, 1979 to offer the Warsaw Pact a mutual limitation of medium-range ballistic missiles and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. It was combined with a threat by NATO to deploy more medium-range nuclear weapons in Western Europe after the Euromissile Crisis.
The Third World War: The Untold Story (1982) is a war novel by Sir John Hackett portraying a fictional Third World War between NATO and the Warsaw Pact forces, which breaks out in 1985. It is written in the style of a non-fiction, post-event historical account. It was published in 1982 by Macmillan in New York and Sidgwick & Jackson in London. The book is an update to Hackett's 1978 novel, The Third World War: August 1985.
The Soviet Army or Soviet Ground Forces was the main land warfare uniform service branch of the Soviet Armed Forces from 1946 to 1992.
The Vienna Document is a series of agreements on confidence and security-building measures between the states of Europe, starting in 1990, with subsequent updates in 1992, 1994, 1999 and 2011. The Vienna Document 2011 was adopted by 57 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) participating states, including the states of Central Asia and Russia. It described its zone of application (ZOA) as "the whole of Europe, as well as the adjoining sea area and air space".
Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991, 22 U.S.C. § 2551, was chartered to amend the Arms Export Control Act enacting the transfer of Soviet military armaments and ordnances to NATO marking the conclusion of the Cold War. The Act sanctions the Soviet nuclear arsenal displacement shall be in conjunction with the implementation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. It funds the Nunn–Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program.
The Warsaw Pact Early Warning Indicator Project was a highly classified US and Allied program designed to gather intelligence that would provide indicators of impending Soviet nuclear attacks before they occurred. It was the American analogue to Operation RYAN. The project aimed to observe and find ways to prevent conflicts with the Soviet Union and its allies from the Warsaw Pact. It consisted of intense clandestine reporting, and Indicator and Warning Methodology.
Nuclear escalation is the concept of a large conflict escalating from conventional warfare to nuclear warfare.
The Helsinki Summit (1990) was a private, bilateral meeting between American President George H. W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that took place in Helsinki, Finland on September 9th, 1990. Due to the vested interests of both the Soviet Union and the United States in the Gulf Crisis' resolution, August 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was the primary topic of discussion for the leaders during the Helsinki Summit. The concerted efforts at easing American-Soviet tensions in the aftermath of the Cold War was another prominent topic, among other notable current events. At the summit's conclusion, Presidents Bush and Gorbachev produced a document of joint statements that illuminated the areas in which the leaders had committed to aligning their foreign policy goals. The summit was followed by a press conference wherein members of the media questioned Presidents Bush and Gorbachev about the content of their meeting and the justifications for their joint statements.