Very few places evoke the Cold War quite like Berlin. A city literally divided between East and West, it represented the international divisions from its capture in 1945 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Starting in 1958, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev put Berlin back in the center of the Cold War by threatening to end the Western presence in the western sectors of the city. Over the next five years, the status of Berlin remained at the heart of the relationship between the superpowers, and the possibility of war, especially the possibility of nuclear war, hung over the events of the period, including the building of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This project examines the development of the policies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in response to the perceived Soviet Bloc threat to Berlin from 1958 to 1963 by placing NATO at the center of an examination of the Western response to the Soviet challenge. The tensions between national and collective interests have been an important theme in Cold War history, but the role of NATO within these relationships has not been examined adequately. By placing NATO at the center of my work, this study shows how it became a central pivot around which allied governments approached the Soviet challenge. Doubts about nuclear strategy during the crisis meant that a conventional deterrent was necessary, and NATO provided that conventional deterrent. NATO’s forces complemented and enhanced the main American nuclear deterrent, and helped to protect Western interests in Berlin and Germany during the crisis. Without NATO to harmonize Western policy behind the American lead, the Allies would likely not have been able to properly confront the Soviets over Berlin, and the presence in West Berlin could not have been maintained. The loss of credibility from losing West Berlin would have severely damaged Western credibility in the face of the Soviet presence, and the stability of West Germany and Western Europe would have been substantially undermined. Thus, NATO and what it represented were vital to the successful protection of West Berlin, mainly through the prevention of a direct Soviet move on the city.