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The anticipated NATO action has triggered a thunderous propaganda campaign from the East. In October, Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev threatened that Western Europe would face grave dangers if it accepted the new nuclear arms. In late November, at a Bonn press conference, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko argued that NATO need not deploy new weaponry because a European military balance already exists, and warned that to change the equation would "undermine the prospect of negotiations" and create "new and adverse effects on detente." From East Germany last week came the straight-faced announcement that 96% of its citizens over 14 had "voluntarily" signed petitions denouncing NATO'S arms plans. And this week the Warsaw Pact's Foreign Ministers will be arriving in East Berlin for what appears to be a hastily convened meeting. "It's part of the pressure and propaganda game," observed a West German diplomat. "The Soviets still haven't caught on that they are overplaying their hand."
Indeed, all their heated fulminations have served mainly to persuade doubters in the West that the Pershing II and cruise missile must be extremely effective weapons systems; otherwise, why should Moscow be so agitated? Says a NATO official: "Brezhnev did the West a favor by forcing the issue out of the closet. He raised the political stakes. The issue now has such momentum that it is difficult to oppose." The Kremlin's bullying, moreover, has infuriated many Western Europeans. Even a member of the dovish left wing of West Germany's Social Democratic Party has angrily declared that "if the Soviets think that they can beat us into the ground, they are wrong."
In any case, Moscow's arguments against the new NATO weapons have been widely dismissed. Replying to Gromyko's assertion that a military balance already exists in Europe, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher stresses that "the problem is not the Western modernization program but the continuing arms advantage of the East. We don't want superiority, only balance." This viewpoint is shared by many strategic experts. General Sir John Hackett, author of the bestseller The Third World War, argues that with the SS-20 missile and Backfire bomber, the "Soviet Union now has a deep strike capability that can do immense damage to Western Europe."
The consensus of most experts is that the Pershing II and cruise missile are the best instruments available for restoring the nuclear balance and NATO's deterrent credibility in the European theater. First, they would vastly increase the alliance's firepower and thus the punishment that a potential attacker could expect to suffer. More important, if war erupted, the Pershing II and cruise would give Washington the option of responding with a European-based "theater nuclear weapon" rather than with a strategic weapon launched from inside the U.S. or from a submarine.