>> The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
>> such action as it seems necessary, including the use of armed force
There's no mandatory requirement to deploy specific weapons, but I believe all NATO forces would be subordinate to CMC (rotating) and SACEUR (has always been a US leader)? Inasmuch as multinational command structures work.
Right but OP said it’s “effectively impossible to invade a country that has nuclear weapons” and I’m curious how that is relevant to non nuclear NATO members like Germany.
I don’t see how it helps Germany (or Finland, Poland etc etc) that France and UK have nuclear weapons, apart from deterrence against specifically nuclear Russian attacks. A conventional land invasion against a non nuclear NATO power would likely be very difficult to stop without US support, at current defense levels, or without UK or France threatening a universal nuclear defense of other nato members.
It's ambiguous (or I haven't seen it written) under what conditions NATO would retaliate with NATO-controlled nuclear weapons to an attack on a NATO member.
But it's definitely shy of 'never'
I know during the 80s there were detailed plans to tactically nuke the larg(er) Soviet armored formations in eastern Germany et al. in the event of hostilities. I believe even before Soviet nuclear escalation.
I'm unaware of those, but I do know that US nuclear targets from the 50s were relatively recently declassified [1], and they were far more macabre.
We focused on taking out Soviet air forces (to eliminate their ability to deliver nukes of their own - as this was before the USSR had developed ICBMs), but also focused on targets marked simply as "population" as well as medical production facilities. The goal was not to just defeat the military, but to literally destroy the nation. And I'm certain the USSR had, more or less, identical plans. And I suspect those still remain the plans for both sides to this day.
Nukes aren't going to falling out in the middle of nowhere trying to take out military bases, they're going to be falling in NYC, San Francisco, Moscow, and St. Petersburg - to try to completely take out the other country's population and economy. Nuclear war is do or die. The goal is going to be to eliminate the enemy's country from the face of this Earth, so that they can't just recover to become a threat 10 years down the line.
There are always a menu of pre-built reaction plans, because even in the days of strategic bombers over the arctic there wouldn't have been enough reaction time for anything custom + dissemination to combat commands.
Much less once ICBMs become common.
And at that point, the only requirement for a total war / civilian+industry apocalypse plan is that your potential opponent might also have such a plan.
It's tremendously unlikely to be used except in a "like for like" response scenario (absent an insane president), but if the US saw the Soviets throwing everything they had up with population centers targeted... there'd better be a ready to go plan to respond similarly.
And, as Dr Strangelove memorably quips, indeed the most effective deterrence effect of such a plan is to loudly tell everyone you have such a plan -- so they will have to consider that's one of your response options, and thus be disincentivized from starting a nuclear exchange.
By which it makes a lot of sense that even if the US didn't have such a plan, they fabricated one and announced they did!
(Not that I think they didn't. The Cold War was way too real to bet on a 0% chance that superpowers weren't going to escalate to total war)
That was not a reaction plan, it was an offensive plan. That's why they even bothered with targeting Soviet airfields. At the time the USSR had not yet developed an ICBM and so nukes would have been delivered by air. If it was a response plan, then targeting those airfields would have been wastes of nukes. The idea was to destroy their entire country and nuclear capability, before they could do anything.
Remember, there's only one country that's ever nuked another country.
>> The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
>> such action as it seems necessary, including the use of armed force
There's no mandatory requirement to deploy specific weapons, but I believe all NATO forces would be subordinate to CMC (rotating) and SACEUR (has always been a US leader)? Inasmuch as multinational command structures work.