During the Cold War, Western Europe lived in the shadow of Soviet military power and the NATO countries obviously had to be concerned with the military balance on the continent. If there were no effective counterweight to Soviet power in Europe, the Europeans would be at the mercy of the USSR. Even if the Red Army never actually invaded Western Europe, an imbalance of military power, it was assumed, would almost certainly have far-reaching political consequences.
What sort of counterweight could be put in place? During the heyday of American nuclear superiority, the period from late 1952 through mid-1963, the Soviets could be deterred from invading Western Europe by the threat of US nuclear retaliation. This was a threat the US government might actually execute in extreme circumstances: if the attack was massive enough and was launched quickly enough, the United States would not suffer really heavy damage from whatever counterattack the Soviets were able to mount. But by September 1963, the US government had reached the conclusion that even if the United States were to “attack the USSR first, the loss to the United States would be unacceptable to political leaders.” It was understood at once that Washington could no longer, even in theory, respond to an act of aggression in Europe with a full-scale attack on the USSR.738
How then could NATO Europe be protected? In principle, the European countries could build deterrent forces of their own and, in fact, a number of NATO countries wanted to go in that direction. The Germans, in particular, were interested in building a nuclear force they themselves would control. Adenauer, for example, certainly wanted Germany to have nuclear weapons -"we must produce them," he said in 1957 - and Ludwig Erhard, who succeeded him as chancellor, told President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 that "it was impossible to assume that Germany will go forever without a nuclear deterrent."739 The Germans very much wanted to keep their nuclear options open; it was for this reason that many German leaders in the late 1960s did not want their country to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
But the Soviets were dead set against the very idea of a German nuclear force and opposed anything that pointed in that direction. This was one issue, it seemed, that the USSR might actually go to war over. As for the Federal Republic’s allies, the British were totally opposed to the notion of a German nuclear capability from the very outset. The French attitude, somewhat ambivalent in the late 1950s and early 1960s, hardened dramatically after Franco-German relations went downhill in 1963. By the mid-1960s, de Gaulle was very much against the idea of the Germans getting their hands on nuclear weapons.
And the Americans, by that time, were absolutely determined to keep the Federal Republic from acquiring a nuclear force. President Johnson had no doubt that the Germans would want to build such a force as soon as they could, but he also thought it would be disastrous if Germany went nuclear. The US government tried to deal with this problem by pushing its plan for a "multilateral force" (MLF); the huge effort it put into that very dubious project, especially in 1964, is a good measure of the seriousness with which it took this problem. It eventually gave up on that idea and thus needed to deal with the problem in a more direct way - namely, by laying down the law to the Germans. They were warned that their country "might well be destroyed" if they tried to develop an independent nuclear capability.740 They could scarcely resist this sort of pressure, and by the end of the decade it was clear that the Federal Republic was not going to become a nuclear power.
But if a German nuclear deterrent was out of the question, and if the American nuclear deterrent could no longer, in itself, keep the Red Army at bay, how then could Europe be protected? US leaders thought that NATO needed to move away from nuclear deterrence and should instead place much greater emphasis on conventional forces. But there were two problems with the conventional strategy. First of all, the forces needed to sustain such a strategy were simply not available. Throughout the 1960s, the United States, and Britain as well, were under pressure to cut back on their military presence in Central Europe for balance-of-payments and other reasons, some connected with the Vietnam War. Indeed, and despite the emphasis American leaders placed on conventional forces at that time, US force levels in Europe declined substantially during that period, and the NATO defense ministers were told in 1968 to get ready for yet further cuts. France’s withdrawal in 1966 from the NATO military system, of course, further aggravated the problem.
The second problem was more basic: no matter what sort of conventional defense was put in place, NATO would still have to worry about the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack. People wanted to build up NATO’s conventional defenses because they assumed the United States would not be willing to use nuclear weapons against the USSR no matter what was happening in a conventional war for fear of provoking a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States. But would the threat of escalation be any less great if nuclear weapons were used in response to a Soviet nuclear attack on Europe? Why would the United States be more likely, in such circumstances, to take action that could lead to a Soviet attack on America? Wouldn’t the Americans in that case be likely to accept defeat, or at most to use nuclear weapons only against battlefield targets and targets in Eastern Europe, avoiding Soviet territory entirely? But if Soviet territory was treated as a "sanctuary," then what exactly was the USSR being threatened with? What deterrent value would the Western forces then have?
US officials generally dismissed this problem out of hand. But the Europeans were not convinced that a nuclear war in which the two superpowers’ homelands were spared was simply out ofthe question and their concerns had some basis in fact. The Soviets, it seems, had by no means ruled out the possibility of a war in which "the use of nuclear weapons would remain restricted to the theater level, leaving both homelands inviolate."741
That meant that the nuclear issue could not be dismissed as unreal. One could not just assume that nuclear weapons were "unusable" for both sides, that the two nuclear arsenals simply "cancelled each other out," and that the conventional balance was the only thing that really mattered. One had to think about how nuclear weapons would be used, if a conventional defense proved ineffective or if the enemy used nuclear weapons first in a European war. It made little sense to launch an all-out attack in such circumstances; if nuclear weapons were used at all, they would obviously have to be used in a more limited and more controlled way. And NATO, in fact, adopted a strategy of controlled escalation. But how would that strategy work? What "philosophy" would govern the use of NATO’s nuclear forces?
The key issue here had to do with tactical nuclear weapons - that is, with the question of how the thousands of such weapons NATO had in Europe would be used in the event of war. But the NATO countries had a hard time coming up with an answer to this question. The basic problem was clear enough. On the one hand, if the goal was to deter a Soviet attack on Europe, the USSR itself could not be treated as a "sanctuary." Use of the weapons, it was sometimes argued, would therefore have to be part of a process, perhaps a process no one could fully control, that might conceivably lead to nuclear attacks on the USSR itself. Those attacks, to be sure, might in turn lead to a Soviet nuclear strike on the United States. But as long as there was only a chance of this happening - as long as the US government did not have to take action that it knew with absolute certainty would lead to a general nuclear war - NATO, the argument ran, should be willing to run the risk.
On the other hand, there was a real aversion, not just on the part of the Americans but in practice on the part of the Europeans as well, to deliberately running any serious risk of general nuclear war. Given what was at stake, a strategy of that sort seemed utterly irresponsible. The risk of escalation was not a phenomenon to be exploited; it was a danger to be minimized. The Americans had no stomach for engaging in what Thomas Schelling called a "competition in risk taking" - for deliberately playing on the possibility that events might spin out of control, and thus for arranging things so that no one could be sure that the conflict would not escalate. Nor were the Europeans really committed to such a strategy: as US leaders sometimes pointed out, whatever the Europeans said in peacetime, if the moment of truth ever came they would draw back from any use of nuclear weapons.
So the Americans wanted to keep the lid on the escalatory process - or, as they put it even in official pronouncements, to keep the fighting at the "lowest level of violence consistent with NATO’s objectives."742 But this seemed to imply that if the Soviet attack was limited to Europe, the American response would also be limited to Europe. The USSR and the United States would be treated as "sanctuaries," but both Eastern and Western Europe would be incinerated. The problem here, of course, is that with this sort of strategy - with the Soviet homeland insured against attack - NATO’s nuclear forces would have little deterrent value. This strategy, moreover, would give the Soviets the upper hand in a crisis: if the two sides were faced with the prospect of a Europe-only war, it was obvious which side would be more likely to draw back. And there was yet another problem with such a strategy, one that contemplated a war in which Europe would be destroyed but America would get off virtually scot-free: it was bound to poison relations between the United States and the European allies, especially if East-West relations were bad and the threat of war had to be taken seriously.
Thus, the problem ofcontrolled escalation had no easy solution. In fact, the US government in this middle period of the Cold War had no clear sense for how the escalatory process was to be managed, and, in particular, for the role tactical nuclear weapons were to play. In 1965, for example, the US secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, told his German counterpart "that in his judgment there exists no rational plan for the use of nuclear weapons now located in Europe." In 1971, Henry Kissinger, President Richard M. Nixon’s national security advisor, complained that "we still don’t have a clear doctrine for their use."743 In Kissinger’s view, if such issues were not taken seriously - if the United States gave the impression that it was "not interested in fighting" - then the other side would conclude that the United States was just bluffing. Deterrence, he thought, had "to be based on a war-fighting capability."744
So the whole military situation was far from satisfactory. It was clear that the security of the NATO allies, and especially West Germany, did not rest on a solid military foundation. As Johnson was told by his top advisers in 1966, there were "gaping holes in all strategic options": massive retaliation would be "virtually suicidal"; an effective conventional defense "seems less attainable than heretofore"; and "tactical nuclear war" was "full of uncertainties."745 President Nixon, in 1970, felt the same way. Outside observers often made the same point. Lawrence Freedman’s view was typical: "An inadequate conventional defense backed by an incredible nuclear guarantee," - he said, was what the NATO strategy of "flexible response" really boiled down to.746
The assumption, in other words, was that nuclear deterrence was something of a sham. The United States would never launch a fall-scale nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in the event of a European war. Kissinger himself, in a famous speech, later admitted that the United States’ "strategic assurances" had been empty.747 Even the tactical nuclear option was unreal. "We will never use the tactical nuclears," Nixon said. The "nuclear umbrella in NATO,” in his view, was "a lot of crap."748
What all this meant was that in strategic terms, the Western position was not very strong. In the event of a crisis, the West would be at a disadvantage; the Soviets would have the upper hand. The NATO powers thus had an enormous incentive to make sure that they did not come anywhere near the point where an armed conflict was a real possibility. They had an enormous incentive, that is, to reach a political accommodation with the USSR.
The point applied with particular force to the case of West Germany. Brandt thought in 1968 that "West Germany cannot really depend on the Americans"; he thought that "as things now stand the United States would not be in a position to meet by military means a serious Soviet military offensive in Europe."749 The implication was that Germany could not afford to risk a confrontation with the USSR - that it instead needed to try to mend fences with its great neighbor to the east. Bahr was even more explicit. With nuclear parity, he told Kissinger, the Americans would certainly not launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union "if the Russians took Hamburg." Detente, he said, was "our only option."750 His country thus had a strong "structural incentive," as one astute German observer put it, to pursue a "policy of partial appeasement."751
But a source of weakness for the West was a source of strength for the Soviets. The structural incentives cut both ways. The Western countries, and especially the Germans, might feel that they needed to ease tensions with the USSR. But the Soviets might feel freer to take a tougher line in their dealings with the Western powers, especially on European questions.
What sort of policy would the USSR pursue in such circumstances? The West was basically content to live with things as they were. A threat to the status quo could therefore only come from the East. But would the Soviets try to take advantage of the position they enjoyed? Would they try to draw Western Europe in some way or other into their sphere of influence? Or would they pursue a more relaxed policy, a policy aimed basically at stabilizing the status quo?
World History
