Andreas von B
Axis for Peace
Andreas von Bülow: ‘Our priority should be the fight against manipulation’
by Andreas von Bülow*
Former German minister and lawmaker, Andreas von Bulow was a member of the Parliamentary Secret Service Control Committee in which he disclosed the role played by the CIA in different criminal operations which brought mourning to Germany during the Cold War period. As his contribution to the international conference Axis for Peace 2005, von Bulow analyses the performing mechanisms of imperialist policy. He describes in detail and based on his experience, the complicity among organized crime, drug smuggling and the secret services. The manoeuvres exposed in this article open a door to debate on the information issue by affirming that information will be the major battlefield for future warfare.
Andreas von Buelow
15 January 2006
From
Brussels (Belgium)
What kind of balance of forces in the world could bring back equilibrium and guarantee the enforcement of international law?
Dr. Andreas von Bülow
Frankly speaking, I have no answer at all to the question posed for this panel to deal with. We had, over the past half a century, a military confrontation not only in Europe but around the globe between two blocs, which expressively swore to one another not to be willing to attack the other side, but non of them believed in that. So both sides put millions of soldiers who waited t for an alarm signal within minutes, thousands of aircraft on alert, tank divisions, nuclear warheads in artillery units, fighter aircrafts, short-range, medium-range, long-range missiles, submarines with missiles, aircraft carriers, battleships with cruise missiles cruising undetectable deep into the landmasses of the opponent. The secret services had the task to inflate the threat perception and the military industrial complex with its professors and journalists trailing behind the defence money was happy. To talk to the other side reasonably with the will to change the tension was stereotypically denounced as softness on communism. The official talks and treaties about force reductions were all things considered more or less a farce. They usually covered only the outdated material. But given the situation, that both sides were anxious not to be engaged into war, there was room for talks about force structures. So at the end of the east-west confrontation we had a situation, where the Soviets were willing to access the idea of defensive structures. If both sides are not willing to aggress each other You can ask the question: Why are you relying on masses of tanks ready to roll into your potential enemy within hours of alert time. So let’s reduce the capability to intervene, to transgress into the other guys territory. Instead both sides should restructure more to barrier instead of aggressive defence structures. If you are nervous about your defence, you may be allowed to spend more on barrier forces, antitank, antiaircraft, antimissile, but not in systems for deep penetration.
On the western side we could have enforced our barrier type conventional forces, reduce the tank force and by this restructuring on both sides dispose of the doctrine of nuclear first strike out of conventional weakness. That our allies were not always unhappy with NATO-reliance on nuclear weapons as a means of last resort again was understandable, because it has always been the double job of NATO to