When and how are we talking? As with all plans in warfare, it shifted depending on times and enemy aims. If you want something to read while you wait for more specific answers, believe it or not, Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy is a generally well-regarded projection of late Cold War probabilities in the event of non-nuclear warfare.

A guest speaker who was a special forces soldier from (Belgium?) told my history of insurgencies class that in case of an all out soviet invasion of the west, the main strategy was to incite and assist insurgencies behind enemy lines by dropping special ops troops all across eastern and Central Europe.

These units, in coordination with local anti-soviet elements, would wreak as much havoc as they could behind the lines to hinder soviet logistics, draw soviet troops away from the front, and hopefully even inspire popular uprisings.

I interpret that to mean that NATO was taking a pretty long-term, political view of the war and were willing to be very flexible in terms of geographic defense but big on irregular and political warfare.

How this may have looked in terms of troop movements across Europe? I have no idea. But I do know the Fulda Gap - a gap between rivers in Germany - would most likely have been the site of history's largest tank battle if war had occurred.

The strategy evolved overtime but the jist of it was that Germany would take the brunt of the invasion and it would be the main battleground for this conflict. The ultimate goal was to keep West Europe safe or at least keep the United Kingdom under NATO control. Of course that was the conventional strategy and with the growing nuclear stockpiles between the U.S. and the USSR hindered the success of said conflict.