ABSTRACT
The Tenuous balance serves Soviet interests, including affording coercive leverage with West Europeans, better than it serves the West's. The Tenuous balance of conventional forces does less to serve western interests. It is only a fragile deterrent and it does not assure Europeans that they are secure. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) control difficulties have different causes but in the end amount to much the same thing—inability to coordinate the efforts of all its forces for maximum effectiveness. Despite NATO's unpromising prospects, the balance no doubt deters to some extent because the outlook from Moscow is surely different from that in the West. In the future, either alliance might improve its prospects in war and thus its ability to coerce or deter. To counteract recent or future NATO force improvements the Pact could, in its operational plans, increase the force of its initial assault by further increasing the weight of the first operational echelon.
