Ian Klinke, 'Nuclear war, self-annihilation and West Germany's compulsion to repeat'

This paper begins by journeying to the now abandoned sites of West Germany’s Cold War, from nuclear command bunkers to tactical nuclear missile silos. It poses the question as to how a state that had explicitly abandoned geopolitics, the idea that states had to struggle for space in order to survive, was nevertheless so eager to participate in a new geopolitical conflict, which threatened to repeat the very same logic of 'survival through extermination' that had so recently turned the European continent into ashes. I discuss this question by zooming in on ‘Fallex 66’, a NATO nuclear war game that the West German Government staged in its command bunker in 1966. During this exercise, West Germany’s elites controversially simulated nuclear strikes on its ‘own’ targets and the resupply of NATO forces after a devastating nuclear war on German territory. Whilst in line with West German deterrence at the time, Fallex was read in East German intelligence reports and press coverage as an excessive game of playful self-annihilation in ways that, I argue, invite a psychoanalytic interpretation. Rather than dismissing the East German interpretation as propaganda, I thus explore Fallex 66 as a Freudian ‘fort-da’ game, a traumatic re-enactment that was tellingly set in the subterranean space of a German bunker. The young semi-sovereign Federal Republic’s compulsion to self-abandon, I suggest, sheds light both on the national trauma of WWII aerial warfare and on West Germany’s relations with its ‘parental’ NATO Allies, chiefly of course the nuclear armed United States and Great Britain.