When empires come to the Czechs, their armies invariably come to Brdy. The sprawling, closed military area of 266ha in the rolling hills of western Bohemia is used to unwelcome visitors. Hitler pronounced this stretch of central Europe a Nazi ”protectorate”, and the Wehrmacht used the Brdy training ranges as a playground, expelling many local people.
The Red Army invaded what was then Czechoslovakia in 1968, setting up camp deep in the forests of Brdy. And when the Cold War turned warmer in the Euro-missiles crisis of the 1980s, the Kremlin trundled its SS-20 nuclear-tipped rockets around Brdy while it mulled over which western European cities to aim for for a spot of mutually assured destruction.
For the past decade Brdy has been slumped in depression, with the bases closed down and the military lifeline cut. But now there is a buzz of expectation and a ripple of anger. For, in all likelihood, the Yanks are coming.
The Pentagon has selected Brdy as the nerve centre for the European platform of its contentious missile defence programme, planning to site a radar station on one of the hills here which would be capable of throwing a very fine beam thousands of kilometres into space to detect and track small objects outside the Earth’s atmosphere. Should one of those small objects be an Iranian intercontinental ballistic missile, so the theory goes, the Brdy radar will guide one or more of the 10 interceptor missiles, to be installed in Poland, which will fly into space to ”kill” the enemy rocket before any harm is done.
”It’s nonsense,” said Vaclav Konicek, a Czech army captain for 21 years, who now works as a security guard for a Volkswagen dealer. ”Anyone round here who is sane is against this.”
At least eight nearby villages have returned, in referendums, overwhelmingly hostile verdicts on the United States. And national polls show that at least 60% of Czechs oppose hosting the US military in the country for the first time since it reached the town of Plzen at the end of World War II.
”Without any warning, we’re just being told we’re getting a new radar station and that it is supposed to protect us,” said Frantisek Nerad, deputy mayor of Strasice, in Brdy. ”People here just view it as a new form of imperialism.”
But in Prague, as in Warsaw, the Czech and Polish elites view the missile shield as an act of fidelity to their indispensable ally and protector, the US. The protests in the villages are unlikely to sway the decision-takers in the two cities when crunch time arrives this year or early next year.
While Russia professes to view the missile shield deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic as a virtual casus belli, issuing what a senior US official describes as ”bloodcurdling threats”, the central European leaderships feel vindicated by the very aggressiveness of the Russian response. ”The closer you are to Russia, like Poland or the Baltic states, the more worried you become and the more vulnerable you feel,” said Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech Foreign Minister.
Relations between Russia and the West are going from bad to worse, and the missile shield in central Europe has become the biggest bone of contention in a new East-West conflict. Is this a new cold war or is it a phony war?
The Americans maintain the missile shield is directed at Iran and the Middle East. Yet the missile defence project has a highly chequered history, has never been shown to work, regularly fluffs its tests, and is directed against a phantom threat — Iranian long-range missiles.
The Russians claim they are the real target of the European deployments. Yet 10 small rockets in Poland, each weighing 75kg and incapable of carrying a nuclear warhead, are no contest at all for a country that could rain thousands of nuclear and decoy missiles on North America if it chose. Besides, the Polish interceptors are in the wrong place to ”kill” Russian rockets.
In Germany, the centre-left half of the coalition government routinely makes false comparisons with the 1980s when Europe was menaced by rival batteries of hundreds of Pershing, Cruise, and SS-20 short-range nukes.
The Poles and Czechs, meanwhile, do not feel remotely threatened by Iran, the ostensible reason for the shield. They do, however, feel pressured by Russia and are making bilateral deals with the Americans, bypassing European allies while demanding European Union ”solidarity” when it comes to disputes with Moscow.
The US has mishandled the diplomacy surrounding the missile shield in Europe, with the Pentagon riding roughshod over the state department, say informed sources. ”The American case is an argument against Nato and it undermines Nato,” said Karsten Voigt, the German government official overseeing transatlantic relations. ”The Poles and the Czechs think they can go national when it suits their interests, then argue for EU solidarity against Russia.”
For Sasha Vondra, the Deputy Prime Minister and strategic thinker in the Czech government, the radar station in Brdy is about nothing less than saving the US alliance with Europe, and Washington’s commitment to Europe’s defence. The US will go ahead with its shield in any case, with or without the Europeans, he reasons.
For Poland, too, the imperative is to get Pentagon boots on the ground in central Europe as an insurance policy against Russia. The Poles are driving a harder bargain than the Czechs. Initially they demanded billions of dollars from the Americans and are now asking for a US-Poland security pact and/or Patriot missiles to be deployed against Russia.
The problem is that the US might balk and that the Polish insurance policy will expose Warsaw to greater risk. ”Poland is turning into a frontline state against Russia,” warned Russia’s pre-eminent arms control expert, Sergei Rogov. ”And Moscow will not accept selective arms control on American terms.” —