Put aloft by the initial DEFCON-THREE alert, they'd come east to what they still referred to as the inter-German border.

The Berlin Wall officially remained guarded after 9 November 1989, although the inter-German border had become effectively meaningless.

One official said the unification process would be "much more orderly and predictable in the sense that you don't have two governments on either side of the inter-German border with very different agendas."

The rationale for battlefield nuclear weapons was a reflection of the proximity of forces at the inter-German border, the risk of Soviet breakthroughs and the need to counter those breakthroughs.

That's what you're here to find out, boy . . . There were five Mainstays on duty, all a hundred klicks east of the inter-German border.

The inter-German border was gone.

The more serious stuff would be handled by the millions of armed troops glaring across the inter-German border; the genuinely serious issues by a pair of gentlemen with briefcases who could turn out everybody's lights.

The East German people, through their peaceful revolution in the autumn of 1989, removed the dividing effects of the inhuman inter-German border.

"Their cooperation with us is based on the idea that across the inter-German border is a hostile power and a hostile intelligence establishment," a Bush Administration official said in an interview.

On July 1, the day East Germany adopted the West German currency, all border controls ceased, although the inter-German border had become meaningless for some time before that.