ABSTRACT
The early days of the nuclear age seemed to be at once a Mahanite’s dream and his nightmare. On the one hand the United States and its allies held unquestioned ‘command of the seas’; on the other, the advent of the atomic bomb appeared to make navies obsolete - superfluous - in any future war against the most likely enemy, the Soviet Union. With the admission of Turkey and Greece into the Alliance in 1952, the maritime command structure in the Mediterranean was altered. The Greek and Turkish air and land forces came under Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces South, but the naval units were earmarked for a new North Atlantic Treaty Organization command, Allied Forces Mediterranean, which was created in December 1952 with the British Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean Fleet as CINCAFMED, a position subordinate to Supreme Allied Commander Europe and on a par with the other three regional commands.
