Discussions about imposing limitations, and preferably reductions, on troop levels and some limits on specified conventional arms began in Vienna in 1973. Called, in the West, the Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions Talks (MBFR), these were initially aimed at reducing troop levels to 700,000 army personnel (and 900,000 army and air force combined) on each side. All Warsaw Pact countries participated in the talks, as did all NATO countries with the exception of France, Iceland, Portugal and Spain. However there was never very much chance of success, because the Western interpretation of ‘mutual and balanced’ involved a much greater sacrifice on the part of the Warsaw Pact, whose main strength at this time was simply their greater troop strength. The talks were politically useful to various members of the two blocs for their own reasons, so they continued for 15 years, finally being ended only in 1988 because the new world climate had produced a much more hopeful alternative. This alternative, which came to be known as the Conventional Forces in Europe talks, began in late 1987 and rapidly developed some basic guidelines.
Firstly they were to cover the whole of Europe ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’. Secondly they were to delimit not only troop strengths, and those quite strictly, but also weapon types. Limits were to be placed on tanks, armoured fighting vehicles, artillery and combat helicopters. There were inevitable definitional problems, for example how heavy did an armoured vehicle have to be before it became a tank? There were also problems about the share of force cuts which should come from each national contingent of the blocs, and about verification inspections and timetables. All of these were dealt with in a considerable spirit of co-operation, but the negotiations were continually outpaced by external political events. Essentially what happened was that the troop levels and deployments agreed upon, very roughly a reduction of 30%, were actually considerably higher than the individual preferences of both sides, and complicated by separate agreements within the Warsaw Pacts for the removal of Soviet troops from the territories of other former Soviet bloc countries. The treaty was signed in late 1990, a very short time for so complex a document, but even so history had overtaken it because the Warsaw Pact had already collapsed, Germany had been reunited and little more than a year later the Soviet Union itself was dissolved.
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