ABSTRACT
It is a paradox of East-West relations that the region where the armed forces of the two blocs most directly confront each other, along the border between East and West Germany, is regarded as one of the least likely flash points of a future conflict. In listing possible scenarios for the outbreak of a major conventional or nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, most analysts correctly give a low probability for a massive, standing-start attack across the inner-German border. Unlike the situation from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, when the status of the two German states and the city of Berlin were major sources of EastWest tension, the ‘German problem’ in the 1970s and 1980s has become one of quiescent normality, greatly overshadowed by the clash of superpower interests in the Third World, from Latin America to the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
