Much writing on International Relations has pondered the implications of a very unequal distribution of power in the relations between states. There is a tradition in the West going back in part to decision-making mechanisms within the Holy Roman Empire and to practices of peace negotiations that gives each represented state-like entity a formally equal right to be heard, a custom that precedes the intra-state principle of one-citizen-one-vote that was to become the essential hallmark of democracy. This has culminated in the formal equality of all members of the United Nations (UN) in the General Assembly, a practice reflected also for decades in decision-making in the European Communities/European Union. Nevertheless, this theoretic equality of all states, the large and the small, stands in blatant contradiction of the differences in size, wealth, military and economic strength, or at least historic standing, reflected in the UN in the distribution of permanent seats of the Security Council or in membership of the Group of Seven/Eight. Diplomatic practice has always aimed to find a middle way between these conflicting considerations.
International Relations theorists of the so-called Realist persuasion have strongly emphasized the importance of differences in power and have largely denied the differences of ideology and political culture in the way great powers have wielded their assets in relation to smaller powers. International Relations as an area of research “took off” after the Second World War, when the Cold War dominated European security. Even in that context, unbelievable though it may seem in view of the deeply ideological nature of the Cold War, there is plenty of evidence to sustain “Realist” theories about the treatment of allies by the two opposing superpowers. As we shall see in the following, it took America's Allies almost two decades of intermittent and often dead-ended negotiations to bring the successive Washington administrations around to taking their NATO Allies' concerns into consideration in their deterrence posture. And even after 1967, when MC 14/3 was adopted and the Nuclear Planning Group (NPG) was set up, the Americans sprang many unilateralist surprises of considerable consequence on their Allies in contravention of previous agreements.
In the following we shall reflect upon the influence of Western traditions of state equality and of consultation on NATO's deterrence posture. The assumption, resulting from my culturalist or mentalité approach which argues that political culture, ideals, and mentality not only influence strategy but also the decision-making apparatus and procedures through which strategy is formulated, is that NATO, as an alliance of democracies, must have been different in quality, in the strategies it adopted and the way in which it adopted them, from an alliance of communist party dictatorships. I therefore shall use the admittedly patchy knowledge I have about the workings of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) — as it is referred to in official documents emanating from this organization and its member states — as a point of comparison and contrast to evaluate the extent to which democratic values influenced NATO's nuclear deterrence stance.
At the time of the signing of the Washington Treaty in April 1949, three members of the newly formed Alliance had the habit of close joint military planning, which was still being carried on, in part as a legacy of the Second World War. These were the United States, Britain, and Canada. At the same time, the Brussels Treaty Organization (BTO), also known as the Western Union Defense Organization (WUDO), established in 1948 for the members of the Western Union (Britain, France, and the Benelux countries) conducted a limited amount of military coordination of defense planning under the chairmanship of the British Field Marshal, Lord Montgomery of Alamein. Britain was thus in the position of being involved in two sets of military planning that contained many contradictions known primarily to the British.1
Moreover, for this period the United States was the only nuclear power in NATO, as Britain only held her first nuclear test in October 1952, and Britain's own nuclear bombs were first ready to be dropped from British aircraft in the late 1950s. (Before that, from late 1956 — the time of the Suez Crisis — British bombers were able to carry American free-fall bombs, doubtless a factor explaining the exaggerated feeling of strength which led the Eden Government to intervene militarily in Egypt.)
Montgomery, through his position in the BTO and, subsequently, as second in command to the newly established Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR), was keenly aware of the fears of abandonment by the “Anglo-Saxons” (rightly) entertained by his French, Belgian, and Dutch colleagues in the Western Union. At the same time, he believed that these countries, and even Italy, if properly organized and inspired by the commitment to their defense of the United States and Britain, could make a considerable contribution to mutual defense. In the early 1950s, he played, perhaps, the key role in changing the US and British strategy to serve the interests of the European Allies to a greater extent, persuading them to agree to an Alliance strategy that would henceforth seek to defend, not merely stage a fighting withdrawal in, Norway, the Benelux countries (at least up to the Rhine-IJssel line), France, and Italy, with some hope perhaps even of having Greece and Turkey fend off total occupation.2
Realists would find it difficult to understand why Montgomery and the successive Attlee and Churchill governments backing him used all their influence to improve the defenses of their continental Allies. The explanation is simple, however, in that Realism fails to take into account the benefit to all deriving from Alliance solidarity, collective defense, and a pooling of effort.
The British were, and remain to this day, the initiates into America's most highly guarded secrets, the targeting plans for its strategic nuclear force. Other than (successfully) the British and (unsuccessfully) Charles de Gaulle in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Europeans did very little until the 1980s to demand that the United States account for its general nuclear strike plan, in case of an escalation to greater and finally all-out nuclear exchanges. Just as the 1969 “Provisional Political Guidelines for the Initial Use of Nuclear Weapons by NATO” (PPGs) had concentrated on initial nuclear use by NATO, NATO strategy until the adoption of the “General Political Guidelines for the Employment of Nuclear Weapons in the Defense of NATO” (GPGs) in 1986 concentrated almost exclusively on this area and gave much less attention to questions of follow-on use or the whole series of options further up the escalation ladder. NATO's General Strike Plan (GSP), later renamed the Nuclear Operations Plan (NOP) of NATO, was not at the center of NPG deliberation, it seems, while most time and effort was devoted to pondering first and follow-on use options. In turn, the strategy of the WTO, including its nuclear use options, according to a former head of the Nuclear Activities Branch in the Supreme Head quarters of the Allied Powers in Europe (SHAPE), were “largely ignored” by NATO planners, who gave “most attention… to other matters.”3 This means that NATO's nuclear use guidelines were drawn up almost exclusively as a function of what planners from NATO member states, especially the United States, Britain, and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), thought reasonable and morally defensible, not as a function of the adversary's observable principles for nuclear use.
Before the establishment of the NPG in NATO, only Britain managed to obtain some consistent influence on US nuclear planning, bought clearly with Britain's own possession of nuclear weapons. Even in the late 1950s, British planners were allowed into joint targeting planning talks with the United States, and the enduring result of this are the British officers permanently stationed at the US strategic command in Omaha, Nebraska, dual-hatted as NATO's European liaison officers.4
The imbalance between the United States and its NATO Allies is of course both geographic (where only Canada shares the advantageous position of the United States) and military. North America's greater distance from potentially invading WTO forces does not need commenting upon, and it suffices to list the military advantages of the United States by pointing briefly at their size and state-of-the-art equipment (both functions of US economic might). America's nuclear arsenal, unparalleled in the world until the late 1960s, and then only by the USSR, in the last resort did and does of course give the United States an enduring ability to decide unilaterally whether, when, and how to use its strategic weapons without cooperation from, or the agreement of, its Allies. Basically, the argument can be made that the United States could discard any promises made to the Allies and proceed as it saw fit in case of a crisis or war. Indeed, there were many instances of US unilateralism.
These conform to any Realist's interpretation of the world where instances of American unilateralism, with Washington following policies or making decisions without consulting its Allies, would be seen as normal. Such instances include the US's flirtations in the mid-1970s with a “nuclear war-fighting” strategy. As US Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger said, “Our nuclear weapons in Europe are present for deterrence, and deterrence is made credible by a credible war-fighting capacity.”5 Schlesinger's successor, Donald Rumsfeld, later serving again in the George W. Bush administration, in the mid-1970s told the US Congress that his administration “plans its theater nuclear forces on the basis of war-fighting missions.”6 There is every sign that these ideas, elaborated in limited forms of “selective options” and “limited responses” and in quite extensive nuclear use options associated with the term “countervailing strategy” were taken very seriously by Allied governments and defense experts on both sides of the Atlantic.7 But as we shall see, America's Allies managed to block any translation of this into NATO strategy.
Another outstanding instance of American unilateralism came on April 7, 1978, when US President Jimmy Carter took the Allies by surprise when, suddenly and without warning, announcing publicly that the US program for neutron bomb development and deployment would be postponed (indefinitely). As the enhanced radiation weapons (ERW) would have been deployed on European NATO territory for use in battle areas, European NATO governments would have needed to agree to this. There had thus been a long period of intra-NATO negotiations in which the United States had persuaded their Allied governments to “educate” their publics about the good sides of ERW, a campaign with massive resistance on the part of the peace movements which in 1977 regained their early 1960s strength over this issue. Having antagonized a vocal sector of their own electorates in this matter, and in the case of France, having decided to develop neutron bombs herself, European leaders were none too pleased to find that all their efforts had been in vain, and that in the case of the FRG, the Netherlands, Belgium, and others, governments were nonetheless left with well-organized, vocal anti-nuclear movements, which would give them much grief in the following years.
The last peak of the Cold War with its Euro-missile Crisis, 1979–85 included further remarkable instances of US unilateralism. A less prominent one was the US decision to set up a command center in High Wycombe in England as a fallback HQ for wartime use. The better-known US initiative was President Reagan's “Star Wars” scheme, announced in 1983, at the height of the Euro-missile Crisis. Neither had been discussed in NATO in advance of US public proclamation. Then, according to Marco Carnovale, an Italian nuclear historian who later joined the International Staff at NATO, “in February 1985 a leaked secret Pentagon document revealed that, under certain circumstances, the US planned to station nuclear weapons” on the territory of some NATO members including Canada, Spain, and Iceland “without their permission, even though it is a fundamental condition consensually agreed upon for US nuclear deployments.”8 Two years later, the Europeans had practically no influence on US President Ronald Reagan's decision jointly with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik to withdraw their Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) from Europe. This decision came as a shock to many European initiati, as it had only been one year earlier that NATO had agreed on their GPGs, which relied especially on the cruise and Pershing II missiles eliminated by the INF agreement. Not even the leading US officer in Europe had been consulted in advance and was barely kept up to date with the evolution of US policy. SACEUR General Bernard Rogers remembered:
Those of us who have been assigned the mission of making our contribution to the deterrence of war within NATO have not been consulted on the intermediate-range nuclear force proposals… What happens is that when the United States negotiators come to brief- quote “consult” — the allies on its proposals, I have not been invited to those meetings, although I've had a representative who sits in. He informs me of what the proposal is or, in my US role, I may have been able to receive from the United States at my SHAPE headquarters the national message traffic so that I could read what the political authorities were briefed on by the negotiators. But sometimes that consultation was held the day before the proposal was tabled in Geneva. Once we caught up with the proposals, I would then exercise the initiative to make my position [known] by messages to the United States when I felt it was necessary.9
General Rogers articulated the European governments' opinion that after INF NATO was worse off strategically than it had been in 1979 before the Montebello decision and the deployment of INF.10 Again, this is a blatant example of US unilateralism, but fortunately one which paid off in view of Gorbachev's readiness to make all sacrifices necessary to ban the specter of the Third World War. Had the United States tried to consult its Allied governments in advance, most of them would have argued against the INF Treaty.
Overall, however, the United States soon learnt that in its (and its Allies') pursuit of deterrence, Alliance solidarity counted for very much, as did the support for the Alliance among the governments and indeed populations of the member states. American unilateralism only served to undermine this solidarity and was thus repeatedly recognized by US leaders as not being fully in the United States's interest. This is borne out by the very conciliatory stance the United States chose to adopt, time and again, vis-à-vis the wishes of its Allies, singly and collectively, as we discuss later.
Due to the US's nuclear monopoly within NATO — or after the achievement of nuclear power status by Britain and France, its nuclear preponderance — for the entire Cold War and after, nuclear warheads available to NATO countries, deployed in countries other than their owners', have always been US property, and in US custody.11
Nevertheless, the United States had to tolerate an impressive degree of anti-hegemonic behavior on the part of its Allies. Very early on, Norway and Denmark with their recent experience of German occupation decided not to allow the United States to station any nuclear weapons on their territory. Even before the signing of the Washington Treaty, on February 1, 1949, the Norwegian government decided that it would not allow foreign forces to be stationed in Norway as long as Norway was not under attack.12 The Soviet Union had put pressure on the Norwegian government not to sign the North Atlantic Treaty; Oslo sought to appease Moscow by promising not to allow the establishment of foreign military bases unless it felt aggression was being threatened.13 At least (and unlike Sweden which anyway was outside the Alliance), the Norwegian government was prepared to engage in formal negotiations about how foreign forces would be deployed to Norway in case of war, and, in 1952, at the Lisbon North Atlantic Council (NAC) meeting, Norwegian Foreign Minister Halvard M. Lange conceded that his government was prepared to host “visiting airplanes for short periods of time.”14 But in the summer of 1957, after the United States had decided to offer its European Allies nuclear weapons for deployment on their soil, the Norwegian Labor Party, then in government, decided at a party convention that no nuclear weapons should be allowed on Norwegian territory in peacetime. The Norwegian Prime Minister, Einar Gerhardsen, announced this principle as official policy of his government at the NAC summit meeting in December 1957. Even peacetime preparations for the use of Norwegian F-104 Starfighter aircraft in wartime in a nuclear role were ruled out in 1963.15 The Americans (and Norway's other allies) were forced to acquiesce in this Norwegian posture, even though the defense of Scandinavian territory with tactical nuclear weapons made much more sense in view of the low density of population of parts of this region than, for example, for the densely populated Central Front. (This practical fact was recognized by the Swedes who until the early 1960s pursued a nuclear option of their own for this very reason.)16
Government and public attitudes were similar in Denmark, which, in the words of Nikolaj Petersen, “joined the pact somewhat halfheartedly.”17 In 1953, the Danes elected a new Social Democratic Government, which, following the Norwegian example, decided not to allow the peacetime stationing of foreign forces on its soil.18 In December 1957, Copenhagen at the same time as Oslo proclaimed that Denmark would not allow nuclear weapons on their soil in peacetime. In 1964, the Norwegian Prime Minister Gerhardsen once again repeated its 1949 base declaration: “We do not want foreign forces and… atomic weapons on our soil so long as we are not attacked or threatened by attack.” Nor do Iceland or Portugal host nuclear weapons, Iceland having demanded the withdrawal of all US military personnel from its soil in 1956, but having relinquished this demand shortly thereafter.19 France forced a withdrawal of all foreign forces (i.e. mainly Americans) from its territory in 1966, with effect from January 1, 1967, all objections proving vain. Spain, which of course joined NATO only in 1982, does not allow nuclear weapons on its territory, although the United States have used its ports with nuclear-armed vessels since before this date on the basis of special bilateral arrangements.20
Whereas these countries refused to let American nuclear weapons into their borders, and whereas NATO countries are not obliged to grant American air forces overflight rights, these constraints are largely offset by the early decisions of Britain and Canada (during the Second World War), the FRG, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Greece, and Turkey (Greece revoking this permission in the 1970s) to allow US forces and nuclear weapons on their territory. On balance, however, it is clear that as members of NATO state governments do not forego the option of modifying their defense relationship with the United States, and even when the threat of WTO invasion was looming large the United States could not use force to change its Allies' respective stances. Although it did have available diplomatic and economic tools, including in particular the leverage of arms supplies, transfer of technology, and the withholding or sharing of intelligence, it did not manage to impose a change of policy on Norway, Denmark, or Greece.
Those NATO member states that agreed to host US nuclear weapons, or on whose territory US nuclear weapons might have been used, exercised a growing influence in the Alliance. They repeatedly managed to persuade the United States to revise its operational doctrines and nuclear deployment plans. Most notably, the Germans gradually persuaded the Americans and the British to move their imaginary line of defense ever further east in Central Europe, from early plans for a defense of the Rhine (which would have left parts of the Netherlands and almost all of the FRG undefended) to a defense in the depth of the territory of the FRG under the motto of “forward defense” and then “defense at the front” (vorne).21 The Germans also persuaded the British and other allies to accept the idea of early nuclear use by NATO, including even initial use, being targeted deep into WTO territory, possibly even into Soviet territory. The FRG's nuclear allies initially much preferred planning for nuclear use on FRG territory. French short-range nuclear forces notoriously could only reach West German (or Belgian) territory, if fired from French soil. This repeatedly led to strong German government protest and to a keen interest in changing French planning. But it was only with the end of the Cold War that German protests resulted in French relinquishment of these short-range weapons.
The US veto over the use of those of its weapons that were made available to the Alliance from the mid-1950s had in principle existed from the beginning. It is now generally accepted that during the second Eisenhower administration, the American control or oversight of its Europe-based nuclear weapons earmarked for allied use in wartime was fairly flimsy. In November 1957, the French government was aware that US custody of such weapons was intentionally nominal, designed to satisfy the requirements of US legislation, but also to give the Allies the assurance that they could lay their hands on these weapons and use them in times of crisis and war.22 It is not clear, however, that the Allied governments were always aware of the implications of this.
In 1965 NATO adopted an arrangement whereby American-owned nuclear weapons in nine NATO countries were placed on Quick Reaction Alert (QRA), meaning that they would be ready for launching at 10–15 minutes' notice. The countries concerned were Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, the FRG, Italy, Greece, and Turkey, with Canada and France withdrawing from the arrangement again. As some of these QRA weapons were air-launched, only some armed US guards would stand between non-American Allied airmen and their ability to fire or drop these American nuclear weapons from non-American Allied aircraft.23 This does not mean, however, that they could have achieved a nuclear detonation of these weapons.
From about the same time that QRA was adopted, the release mechanisms for such US nuclear weapons made available to Allies were carefully controlled by the United States, and effectively constituted a US veto over their use. Permissive Action Links (PALs), code-based devices that allowed the United States to enable or disable nuclear weapons, were adopted under the Kennedy administration to prevent the seizure and unauthorized use by other NATO members (or anybody else) of American weapons, reflecting the concern of Kennedy's advisers about accidental or unauthorized use.24 This was part of a new policy of extreme dislike of nuclear sharing, associated mainly with Robert McNamara and his advisers, which emphasized the need for central control so as to improve crisis stability. Ideally, McNamara wanted America's Allies to get out of the nuclear business altogether, which is why he was so displeased with the outcome of the Nassau meeting of December 1962 between Kennedy and the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, which ensured the survival and modernization of the British nuclear forces for another generation.
US custody of American nuclear bombs and warheads on Allied territory, prior to matching warheads with missiles or deploying missiles and bombs on Allied aircraft, was also stepped up considerably in the 1960s and 1970s. In Britain, for example, US air bases and the depots for air-launched nuclear weapons were and are very strongly guarded, eliciting angry responses (and long “sieges”) not only from anti-nuclear protesters but also from ardent defenders of British sovereignty against foreign encroachments.25 The same was true for Spain in the years immediately after Franco's death, and even in the early 1980s, Spanish anti-Americanism and anti-NATO protests focused on American air bases in Spain, the permissions for the establishment of which having been granted by Franco to Truman early in the Cold War, when both were united in their anti-communist crusading fervor.26
The US veto over the use of US nuclear weapons earmarked for use by the Allies in times of war was thus one of the longstanding grievances of certain European members of NATO, namely those with common frontiers with the WTO, from Turkey on the Southern flank to Norway in the North. Highlighted by the lack of US nuclear support for European policies in France's defeat in Indochina in 1954 and Britain's and France's checkmate in Suez in 1956 and by McNamara's attempt to restore the American nuclear monopoly within NATO, Europeans and Turks from time to time worried about excessive US reluctance to use nuclear weapons. Britons since the Second World War, but also Frenchmen, Italians and West Germans after the Suez Crisis in late 1956 were very keen on nuclear weapons independent from a US veto. London and Paris procured their own respective nuclear arsenals, whereas Italians and Germans attempted (but failed) to realize their joint project for a European nuclear force free from an American veto.27
Perceptions of the US President's unilateral control over American-produced nuclear weapons depended on the rhetorical posture of US governments, which fluctuated wildly throughout the Cold War period. On occasion, the extent of US control of nuclear release in NATO was welcomed in Europe. A perception that the United States would err on the side of caution comforted those who were afraid of unnecessary or premature use of nuclear weapons in a crisis or conflict. On other occasions, a perception of US nuclear trigger-willingness if not trigger-happiness was seen as enhancing deterrence. Any US administration, without the need for internal government or cabinet consultation on nuclear use due to the President's exceptional powers in such an emergency, could act much faster, unilaterally, to release and use its own nuclear weapons than NATO could collec-tively, or than the co-owners of any European nuclear force might have. In some Cold War contexts this could be reassuring to the Europeans and Turks, as it might mean a stronger deterrence posture. In other contexts, the perceived US nuclear trigger-happiness was seen as very dangerous in Europe, such as during the Quemoy-Matsu Crisis in 1957, when it was feared that an incident in the Far East might through an overly bellicose American reaction result in a more general nuclear conflagration that might not be contained in that part of the world.28
The imbalance between the United States and its Allies was aggravated by American secretiveness. During the first decade-and-a-half of the Cold War, US information sharing with Allies was fettered by the McMahon Act prohibiting the sharing of nuclear know-how with any other country (amended in 1958 to accommodate Britain or, more generally any Allied country that had by itself achieved an advanced stage of nuclear expertise). Consequently, Americans were very chary of telling their Allies anything about the workings of American arms, of their targeting plans, or even the location of American nuclear weapons. Famously, this humiliated and angered de Gaulle when he returned to power in 1958 and significantly contributed to his incremental policy culminating in his 1966 decision to turn all foreign (and especially US) forces out of France.29 Less famously, this worried the Canadians even in 1950, when at the outbreak of the Korean War they had to face up to the crucial importance of Goose Bay, Labrador, to the delivery of US nuclear weapons to strategic targets in the Soviet Union, should the war escalate to involve America and the USSR directly. While they were happy for the United States to retaliate instantly to any “major outright Soviet attack against continental North America” with nuclear weapons, including the use of air bases in Canada, the Canadians strongly preferred to be given the right to veto the storage of US nuclear weapons on their territory, and to be consulted, not merely informed, about the delivery of nuclear weapons from Canadian territory in case of a less extreme conflict scenario.30 The West Germans were by far in the worst position. While their political and military leaders became aware through joint NATO exercises that the Americans (and the British) intended to use nuclear weapons against WTO invaders on German (including West German!) soil, the extent of the destruction this would have entailed in Germany only became clear by and by. The famous Carte Blanche exercise of June 1955 and the Lion Noir exercise of 1957, both of which were reported upon in the press, included millions of putative deaths among German civilians in their scenarios, which occasioned an uproar in the FRG.31
At the beginning of 1962, the West Germans did not even know how many US nuclear weapons were deployed on their soil.32 Around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis of the end of 1962, Atomic Demolition Munitions (ADMs) were furnished to US forces in Europe, especially along the Central Front. Still the Germans were not told what the American plans were for these ground-burst nuclear weapons with their extremely high development of nuclear fall-out (and consequently, contamination of all local human and animal life as well as vegetation for years to come).
In 1964–65, West German and American military planners jointly conducted a study on how the Americans might use ADM in Germany. Much to the horror of their German colleagues, the US planners (at least for the purpose of this study) deployed ADM into a depth of up to 200 km within the FRG. They wanted to distribute ADM in all three zones, very often in built-up areas. Their intention was to detonate many of them in West German villages and even towns, to create mounds of debris, destroy harbors, railway junctions, and centers of supply and energy production. Apart from this very different choice of target, in itself completely unacceptable to the Germans, the American proposals included yields of up to 45 kilotons TNT. The consequence would thus, again, have been several millions of civilian deaths within the FRG.33
In 1963, the West German Ministry of Defense suggested that all NATO nuclear forces should be controlled by a “NATO Nuclear Executive Committee,” attached to the NAC, of which the FRG should of course be a member — one of the many European initiatives of the early 1960s which culminated in the American concession that a NATO NPG had to be formed in 1967. Like the Canadians and the British before them, the Germans also pressed for a veto on American use of nuclear forces from their territory, but the West Germans were singularly desperate in their attempts to acquire a veto power against use on German territory, which Bonn took to include also the German Democratic Republic (GDR).34 Understandably, the West Germans, who often had relatives in East Germany, felt uneasy when confronted with US or Allied plans for the nuclear bombing of the GDR.35
Between 1949 and 1967, then, America's Allies fought a hard but ultimately relatively successful campaign of persuasion to induce the Americans into sharing more information about the location of American nuclear weapons, and American plans for their use. From 1967 and the constitution of the NPG onwards, America's Allies compelled US administrations to air their principles governing nuclear use against the WTO in NATO committees and to accept Allied criticism of these plans. Indeed, they managed to prevail upon the Americans to agree to the joint formulation of such principles that were to govern nuclear use in the context of NATO. America's Allies thus managed to gain a substantial influence on the quality and the quantity of US nuclear forces in Europe and were not forced to accept the preferences of the “hegemon,” in all their permutations.
Whereas WTO procurement policy was decided unilaterally in the Soviet Union, the American arsenal assigned to NATO was increasingly configured according to European as well as American wishes. Still, there are some points of comparison. Hope Harrison has shown very persuasively that from 1955 to 1961, the relative strength of the GDR's government within the WTO had commonalties with that of the FRG's in NATO. This waned for a while when the building of the Berlin Wall and the fortifications along the inner-German border in 1961 put a stop to migration from East to West Germany and thus to the argument that sacrifices had to be made by Moscow and the WTO to appease the East German population.36 But Vojtech Mastny argues that East Germany once again wielded substantial influence under Honecker from 1971.37
The degree of secrecy about nuclear weapons-related issues (including strategic, operational level, and tactical planning) which the Soviet Union was able to uphold concerning vis-à-vis its allies right until the last decade of the Cold War differs greatly from that in NATO. The contrast between NATO after 1967 and the WTO could not be greater. The leadership of the GDR was merely informed when Soviet forces first deployed nuclear weapons to be fired by special forces of the East German National People's Army (Nationale Volksarmee, NVA). Officers of the WTO countries who were invited to study at Soviet military academies were barred from sitting in on lectures and other classes dealing with overall strategy, as opposed to operational art and tactics. In the 1980s, staff exercises involving the “played” use of nuclear weapons were conducted on two levels: on the lower level, many of the highest-ranking officers of countries allied to the USSR never knew that nuclear use was part of the upper level scenario, to the point where a NVA general of the GDR claimed at a conference in March 2003 that WTO strategy did not provide for any nuclear use.38 In my article on WTO doctrine of 1993,I wrote that the exercise Stabstraining-89 did not contain a nuclear element, which all the documents on it then available at the interim archive in Potsdam seemed to suggest.39 Shortly thereafter, however, I found a set of documents in Russian relating to the same exercise, obviously furnished to “players” on a higher level, which contained information on the “played” nuclear bombing of 76 targets in northern Germany with nuclear weapons of 10-500 kiloton yields.40 A further example of WTO secretiveness is that the member states compiled annual diaries of their militaries’ activities, which were treated as top secret — to the extent that one of several Vice-Ministers of Defense of the GDR, General Joachim Goldbach, and several of his lower-ranking fellow generals, asked about these documents (which intriguingly carried the title “War Diary” in 1979 and 1983) in an oral history session conducted by myself in 1995, did not even know that they existed.41
Another structural inequality in the negotiation process leading to the adoption of common strategies, policies, and other decisions arises from the varying degrees of expertise in the respective member states' governments. The United States largely took the lead on many technical issues, providing its allies with information that the US could select with a view to supporting its own policies. As Scilla McLean noted toward the end of the Cold War, “Many European ministers lack interest, expertise, skilled back-up or the intellectual resources required to challenge American input into N[uclear] P[lanning] G[roup] deliberations.”42 Throughout the Cold War, Britain as a nuclear power did have engineers and other scientists who were experts on most of the technical matters that needed to be resolved in the context of formulating and revising NATO's nuclear posture. West Germany, with a range of generously funded think tanks, just about kept abreast with the major issues. (This did not mean, however, that the intimate acquaintance with American strategic and technical jargon helped German defense experts explain the rationale behind weapons and doctrine to their own politicians, let alone their own public. The more German defense specialists delighted in their mastery of American and NATO acronyms and jargon, the less they could make themselves understood in non-expert circles or persuade the anti-nuclear campaigners of the rationality of their stance.) The other countries represented in the NPG had a more difficult stance with regard to both expertise and input into doctrinal discussions.
A late example of the American monopoly in expertise, but also of information sharing, is the working of the High Level Group in NATO, 1977–79. At the NATO summit in May 1977 in London, President Carter initiated a Long Term Defense Program. Ten different working groups were assigned to drafting it, one of which being charged with looking at nuclear issues, and this Task Force 10, due to the high ranks of the government representatives charged with this study, became known as High Level Group (HLG). The main body of information on the options available by way of American nuclear technology was provided to the HLG by a US administration inter-departmental group, referred to as PRM-38, created under the US President's mandate in June 1978, which presented its set of “military options” papers to the HLG in October 1978.43 The land-based option was agreed upon by the HLG and subsequently by the NPG because, thus the argument ran, “land based systems could be targeted with greater accuracy than sea-based systems, and hence could be configured to carry warheads with a lower yield, and by being based on countries' soil” symbolized their direct involvement in NATO's deterrence posture.44 In September 1979, the HLG reported to the NPG, based on 2 of the 4 options that PRM-38 had outlined, both involving the deployment of Tomahawk cruise missiles and Pershing II ballistic missiles as “Theatre Nuclear Forces” (TNF, in American parlance) in Europe.45 Interestingly, from the point of view of democratic Alliance decision-making, as we shall see, the HLG's report did not recommend the option most favored by the Americans at the outset of these negotiations. Such an outcome would have been inconceivable in the WTO.
Another long-term structural factor with which the Europeans had to contend was that the Supreme Allied Commander of the European theater of NATO, SACEUR, and also of course the Supreme Allied Commander of the Atlantic theater, SACLANT, were always Americans. Both were “dual-hatted,” that is, simultaneously held the posts of American commanders-in-chief of these two theaters, respectively CINCEUR and CINCLANT. De facto, successive SACEURs tended to become sympathetic very soon to European concerns within the Alliance. SACEUR's headquarters, SHAPE, was originally installed in Fontainebleau near Paris, and after de Gaulle “expelled” NATO forces from France in 1967, they were moved to Mons in Belgium. A former chief of the West German armed forces commented: “SACEURs come as Americans but become Europeans; they look at European maps, work with European soldiers, meet European policymakers and thus understand and often embrace European causes.”46 This was especially true for General Lauris Norstad (SACEUR 1956–63), who, appointed by US President Eisenhower, clashed fundamentally with President Kennedy and his advisers, and for General Bernard Rogers (SACEUR 1979–87).
Below the level of SACEUR, however, top command posts are shared throughout the Alliance with a view to the military and geographic weight of member states. The actual structure has changed a few times, but important command posts are held by British, (West) German, Italian and, until 1967, French officers.
Admittedly, all nuclear weapons in NATO were always under a chain of command of officers from the state that had supplied them (United States and United Kingdom respectively), with additional input made possible for some weapons from the governments of the countries in which they were deployed through the “dual key” structure (i.e. both owner and host could veto their use). But with an overwhelming preponderance of nuclear weapons being owned by the United States, the strange situation arose in the late 1950s, with the deployment of battlefield nuclear weapons (very short range missiles and ADM) that it might very well not be possible for commanders to consult SACEUR or even Washington about permission to use them, let alone for consultation to pass through NATO committees. Therefore, when Eisenhower was in his second term, and Norstad was SACEUR, the US had a policy of pre-delegating the authority to use battlefield nuclear weapons to local commanders, especially on the Central Front. Much secrecy has shrouded this matter, but the historians Marc Trachtenberg and Klaus Maier with their relentless archival spadework have unearthed conclusive documents that pre-delegation was indeed standard US policy until the advent of the Kennedy administration in 1961.47
The period from the second Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1957–62 is that for which pre-delegation of the authority to order the use of certain nuclear weapons existed, at least among American commanders, within NATO.48 Many tactical nuclear weapons deployed with NATO forces during this period, including ADM, were “forward-based,” that is deployed near NATO borders with the WTO's member states, and were likely to be overrun quickly if they were not used early on in a confrontation, leading to a “use them or lose them” logic.
Oddly enough, in the particular circumstances of the time, this worked both in favor of Americans and Europeans. Since 1949, the threat scenario on which NATO strategy was based was one in which the WTO would attack NATO massively, at least on the Central Front (Germany) or even on all fronts (also Norway, Denmark, Greece, Turkey, and Italy through Yugoslavia). Western planners expected that the WTO would attack with all the forces at its disposition, probably including nuclear weapons. In such circumstances, it made sense for the United States (and through it, NATO) to have a massive response, both tactically on the battlefield and strategically, including a massive nuclear response posture. Should Moscow be planning for such an all-out war, it would be best to let Moscow know that the most destructive response possible would await them.
But besides an all-out attack scenario, the events of 1956 had forced Western government defense planners to take on board further planning scenarios, which generically fell under the category of a more limited conflict along a NATO border with the WTO. The strategy adopted by NATO in 1957, MC 14/2 or “Differentiated Responses,”49 also included a local defense scenario, without nuclear weapons, provided Soviet forces were not directly involved in the border clash.
Gradually, between 1952 and 1961, Western government defense planners very slowly came to believe that no rational leadership in Moscow could willingly plan for an all-out war, if they knew what NATO's reaction would be. The question this raised was, how could a war break out? The defense planners and their intelligence and diplomatic advisers gradually agreed that this could only be by accident or miscalculation. By miscalculation, if Moscow thought that either, its war aim was so limited that the West would not risk all-out war to reverse a minor fait accompli, or by accident, in which case the West should try to contain the damage by negotiating for a quick armistice with Moscow, presumed, in case of an accident, also to be adverse to further war. In other words, NATO had to be prepared not only for the all-out scenario, which was seen as decreasing in likelihood, but also for smaller clashes, for which it had to come up with proportionately smaller, and above all not self-deterring, solutions. If a more limited scenario seemed more likely, it made less sense to enable local commanders to use nuclear weapons, thereby escalating the conflict, when a quick armistice might be a real alternative. Both European and American governments were thus keen, from about 1961 onwards, to avoid unnecessarily escalatory nuclear use. But among the defense planners of the FRG, there was also the fear that reluctance to use nuclear weapons would result in a destructive conventional war on Germany soil, rather than in a restoration of deterrence through early battlefield nuclear use.50 In 1963, in the face of Washington's centralizing measures and keenness to raise the nuclear threshold, the West German Ministry of Defense proposed that certain scenarios should be defined in which a NATO Committee or even SACEUR could unilaterally decide on nuclear release and use.51 This was eventually translated into NATO operational arrangements: henceforth any NATO member or any major NATO commander (SACEUR, SACLANT, CINCHAN — that is Commander-in-Chief Channel, until the abolition of this command in the late 1990s, always a Briton) could request permission to use nuclear weapons. Once this permission was granted by NATO (the North Atlantic Council or under it the Defense Planning Committee (DPC)) or unilaterally by the United States or the United Kingdom, it was up to the military commander to decide on the timing and the targets, unless he were given further instruction by the political authority that had approved the release.
To parallel US pre-delegation of the authority to use nuclear weapons, historians have unearthed evidence that in the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet government delegated a similar authority to commanders of the Group of Soviet Forces in Cuba:
In a situation of an enemy landing on the island of Cuba and of the concentration of enemy ships with amphibious forces off the coast of Cuba in its territorial waters, when the destruction of the enemy is delaying [further actions] and there is no possibility of receiving instructions from the USSR Ministry of Defense, you are permitted to make your own decision and to use the nuclear means of the “Luna,” IL-28 or FKR-1 as instruments of local warfare for the destruction of the enemy on land and along the coast in order to achieve the complete destruction of the invaders on the Cuban territory and to defend the Republic of Cuba.52
Here it was clearly technology that dictated a policy on both sides of the Cold War divide and not culture: equally, both the United States and the USSR later pulled back from this risk-prone policy. On the NATO side, it was ensured that all nuclear use that could be requested by the major military commanders of NATO still had to be approved by the North Atlantic Council and the government of the owner state of the weapons concerned, (or at any rate the latter). On the side of the USSR, all nuclear release was to be authorized only by the top Soviet leadership.
NATO's decision-making processes, based on inter-governmental negotiations conducted on behalf of governments in the Headquarters of NATO in Paris until 1966, and since 1967 at Evère in Brussels, are also influenced by some constants. One is the enduring politico-military preponderance of the United States, which simply gives its representatives' voices more weight than to those of its Allies. This weight is aggravated strongly, however, by a factor which is not at first self-evident. And this is the acrimonious decision-making process in Washington, carried out through a very public debate and the taking of sides by major players on some important subjects, among which military ones are particularly prominent. As a result, policies agreed upon within US administrations, or even between the respective administration and Congress, tend to be finely honed compromises, to which American presidents are then publicly committed. This gives US government representatives in NATO a much smaller room for maneuver and scope for negotiations than just about all their colleagues. It makes US representatives come across as intransigent negotiators, even as errand-boys, who have no power to make concessions and who slavishly follow instructions from Washington line-by-line to insist on specific wordings of NATO agreements and policy statements.
The largely “closed,” that is, very secretive and non-public, decision-making process in Britain is the extreme opposite.53 This usually allows British representatives to put forward many alternative solutions that aim to find compromises between the rigid American instructions and the sometimes also restricted policy options of some of the European Allies, notably those with coalition governments or great public sensitivity to nuclear or other defense issues. As a result, NATO decisions, doctrines, and policies tend to be (often British-brokered) compromises between diverging aims and concerns on the respective sides of the Atlantic, negotiated in committee sessions most similar in style and tone to the committee system by which Britain is governed. This gives NATO doctrines, policies, and public statements a distinctively British flavor, over and beyond the obvious factor that they are written in the Queen's English, with a disproportionately high number of Britons working in NATO's International Staff at the Headquarters of NATO. NATO doctrines, strategies, and policies are also permeated by the deliberate ambiguity (deliberate, at the time of reaching the agreement on the language) that is typical for political compromises, and that is often well-nigh impossible for officials and military alike to implement. As the historian and specialist on national cultures, George Schöpflin, has commented so aptly about this central feature of British political culture, the pragmatic compromise, it is reached with that central feature of British thinking, common sense. Common sense persuades British politicians and officials to “concentrate on what is immediately in front of us” to reach a pragmatic agreement. Pragmatism is built on agreement to disagree but to concentrate on what can be agreed upon. A pragmatic agreement is therefore usually a compromise in which fundamental disagreements, which of course remain just below the surface, are papered over by the deliberate ambiguity of compromise language. The problem with this is that the resulting policies, strategies, and doctrines are nothing if not ambiguous, which only rarely can be turned into a strength.54 As Ivo Daalder, the leading academic expert on the nature and practice of NATO Strategy document MC 14/3 (which I call “Flexible Escalation,” as it was referred to as “Flexible Response” like its predecessor MC 14/2), has concluded, ambiguity is its essence.55 Marco Carnovale has rightly concluded in his study on the control of NATO nuclear forces:
To keep the requirements ambiguous may help to conceal interallied divergences in peacetime, but it could hardly smooth collective decision-making and contribute to the common security against an enemy in an emergency. That this has long been accepted practice does not justify its perpetuation.56
There is another element in the patterns of NATO negotiations, which can be seen as either justifiable in terms of democratic-demographic representation or as undemocratic in terms of the representation of states members. This is NATO's “Quad” — the informal meeting of the United States, British, French, and (formerly West) German ambassadors to agree on key issues in advance of putting them before the NAC as a whole. In January 1979, the Quad even had a summit meeting in Guadeloupe on the question of the deployment of the Euromissiles, and French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing as host, US President Jimmy Carter, British Prime Minister James Callaghan, and FRG Chancellor Helmut Schmidt agreed on this matter, followed only in November 1979 by a consensus decision in the NPG.
All this contrasts very much with the inner workings of the WTO. Initially, the WTO took the form of bilateral relationships between Moscow and the other member states. As Vojtech Mastny has shown, it was only in the 1960s that the WTO adopted something of a collective defense alliance character, and little by little, over the following two decades, the periodic meetings of defense ministers, foreign ministers, chiefs-of-staff, and heads of state and government turned from very formal meetings in which each representative read out a prepared paper into meetings allowing for questions and answers.
Only the respective roles assumed by France and Rumania in NATO and the WTO are very comparable. The protocols of the meetings of heads of government and state, of defense chiefs, defense ministers, and foreign ministers, of the WTO, show many instances of Rumanian opposition to Soviet policies, which seem to have been met with stony silence most of the time. Nevertheless, Ceauvescu managed to claim for his country a large set of privileges, a policy that was easier to follow in the absence of Soviet forces on Rumanian soil. Cooperation with the rest of the WTO in joint exercises, joint planning, joint air defenses were thus invariably a matter for unilateral, and fairly free decision-making for Bucharest, much as it was for France in NATO.
Notwithstanding the overpowering military weight of the United States among Alliance members and its intransigent negotiation style within NATO, there are many instances in which members other than the United States have had a decisive influence on decisions and doctrines adopted. The most prominent members in this respect, not surprisingly, are the United Kingdom and the FRG. Britain successfully initiated strategy reviews in 1952–53 and 1956, even though the product of the 1956–57 review, MC14/2 (which I call “Differentiated Responses” as confusingly, it was also known at the time as “Flexible Response,” like its successor MC 14/3 — see earlier), was not to Britain's liking. British government strategists’ views prevailed in the negotiations leading to the November 1979 Euro-missile deployment decision: here it was the British, led by HLG member Michael Quinlan, who insisted on a land-based option, while US Defense Secretary Harold Brown and Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt would have preferred sea-based options.57
As far as West Germany is concerned, in the words of historian Saki Dockrill, “Even between 1949 and 1955, when West Germany was not yet a member of NATO, the Bonn Republic was already in a position to influence NATO's rearmament policy with its potential military and industrial power.” Once a member, the FRG, because of its key strategic position and its manpower contribution, began to play a role of considerable importance within the Alliance.58 The tensions between US unilateralism and Alliance dynamics were highlighted immediately. When the FRG first joined NATO in 1955, its government was seriously wrong-footed. Its government had been encouraged to join NATO and had since 1952 been encouraged to build up a large army on the assumption that this tallied with NATO's strategic posture (which had been the case in 1952). West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his government had not been kept abreast of more recent developments in strategic thinking within the Alliance (essentially, the rationale of MC-48, “Massive Retaliation”) and with thinking within the US administration. Both of these had since 1953 been moving towards a reduction of US manpower and an increasing reliance on battlefield nuclear weapons to offset the recently founded WTO's unabated strengths in conventional (including human) forces. US intentions to reduce personnel in Europe, a plan championed above all by US Admiral Arthur Radford, were leaked to the press in July 1956 (a typical feature of democracy), and triggered a furore in the West German public debate about the armament of the FRG. What point was it to rearm Germans, if the Americans were reducing their forces? Did this mean that the German soldiers would be used as canon-fodder in the nuclear battles between the United States and the Soviet Union? The Adenauer government slowed down the build-up of the Bundeswehr, and subsequent Bonn governments proved determined not to be caught out again, and to have their say in NATO strategy. From this point onwards, the weight gained by the FRG, as the most exposed state on the Alliance's Central Front, never ceased to be felt.
Joint pressure from Bonn, London, Rome, and other Alliance capitals forced the Americans to agree to the establishment of a committee within NATO in which the United States would explain their nuclear targeting and use rationale and open themselves wide to Allied criticism. Indeed, the US agreed to binding joint guidelines on nuclear use. In 1969, after years of debate, NATO Allies minus France agreed with the PPGs that initial nuclear use should have a political signaling function, and should not be designed to assure a battlefield victory for NATO.59
This was a victory for European preferences, and was reiterated in the GPGs of 1986. In the interim period, successive US administrations repeatedly tried but were not able to get their war-fighting strategy preferences accepted by NATO against European opposition. The European members consistently insisted that initial and follow-on nuclear use by NATO must be primarily a political signal, and that no effort should be made to defeat WTO forces in nuclear war, as the collateral damages to Europe resulting from this were deemed unacceptable. In 1973 the NATO NPG agreed that:
follow-on use of TNF [theatre nuclear forces] by NATO in the form of selective strikes against Warsaw Pact forces could result in a short-term military advantage in the area concerned, and quite possibly a pause in the conflict; but if the Warsaw Pact responded with a nuclear attack on a similar (or greater) scale, neither side would gain a significant advantage as a direct consequence of using nuclear weapons (save in some special circumstances such as using them to halt an amphibious landing).60
By about 1973, due above all to German pleading, it would seem, NATO relinquished the option of carrying out ground bursts on NATO territory, which among other things meant the elimination of ADM, which happened in the early 1980s. The maximum yield of weapons that might be used above NATO territory was limited to 10 kilotons.61
The Allies had no problems agreeing in their Nuclear Operations Plan that all NATO nuclear targets should be military, “and that their selection” should be “based on the twin criteria of achieving essential military objectives while minimizing civilian casualties and collateral damage,” in the words of SACEUR General Andrew Goodpaster in 1974.62 The objective of minimizing civilian casualties was clearly a bow in the direction of the anti-nuclear movements in Europe, who since the mid-1950s had not merely drawn their strength from fear of nuclear war, but also from retrospective revulsion against the two only nuclear bombings in history, against the hapless populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Europeans at the same time clung to the commitment made by the NATO members in the PPGs to regard initial and even follow-on nuclear use by NATO as serving political signaling aims, not aiming at military victory.
The GPGs thus reflected West German preferences over America's preference for conventional war or war-fighting tactical nuclear use with its twin political deterrent and military operational aim of forestalling enemy advances on the battlefield. SACEUR General Galvin commented retrospectively:
What those guidelines also show is a history in which there is a movement away from thinking of nuclear weapons as something that would be used in war fighting and more toward nuclear weapons as a political statement, which would provide for deterrence… And with the longer range weapons you can send a political message to the people who sent those forces in the first place.63
Historian Thomas Halverson concluded, “GPG guidance included parameters for SACEUR to take into account when planning his nuclear strikes. These clearly derived from Bonn's political considerations, like collateral damage and civilian casualty constraints.”64
A similar degree of influence by one of the Soviet Union's allies on WTO procedures can perhaps only be found in the Czechoslovak request of 1983, which resulted in the WTO's first training for actual defense (before starting the counteroffensive) in the exercise SHIELD 84!65
According to Marco Carnovale, “the first formal arrangements for nuclear consultation” not only between the United States, Britain, and Canada but also with other NATO members were approved by the North Atlantic Council on March 2, 1955.66 This was far from satisfactory for America's Allies. The “three wise men” (the Canadian Lester Pearson, the Italian Gaetano Martino, and the Norwegian Halvard Lange) who were asked to comment on the persistent problems in the following year could thus report that:
Consultation within an Alliance means much more than exchange of information, though that is necessary. It means more than letting the NATO Council know about national decisions that have already been taken, or trying to enlist support for those decisions. It means the discussion of problems collectively, in the early stages of policy formation, and before national positions become fixed. At best, this will result in collective decisions on matters of common interest affecting the Alliance. At the least, it will ensure that no action is taken by one member without a knowledge of the views of the others.67
At the Athens NAC meeting in May 1962, the famous Athens Guidelines were laid down, which have been summed up as a commitment to mutual consultation on nuclear use, “time and circumstances permitting.” In case of a Soviet nuclear attack against the NATO area, it was agreed in the PPGs that little time would probably be left for consultations. In case of a full-scale Soviet conventional attack, it was hoped that time would be left for consultation before NATO would resort to a nuclear response. If the Soviet attack was neither nuclear nor drew on overwhelming conventional forces, NATO members committed themselves to consulting in the NAC before resorting to the use of nuclear weapons.68
In the PPGs it was agreed that if NATO were attacked, short of the attack being an all-out nuclear one, negotiations about the release and use of nuclear forces would take place both in the North Atlantic Council (delegated to its DPC) and bilaterally between the US government and the government from whose or on whose territory nuclear weapons would be used.69 This and all subsequent set of guidelines on the use of nuclear weapons by NATO acknowledged, however, that ultimately, the decision on the use of nuclear weapons lies with its owners, even though the United States and the United Kingdom would try hard, as far as time and circumstances permitted, to take their Allies' views and concerns into consideration, particularly where their territory and/or forces might be affected.
NATO and its member states’ governments fell well short of wider definitions of democracy, such as the publication of sufficient information to allow an educated public debate on major decisions, not to mention the encouragement of public debates. Even in the mid-1950s, NATO was not yet a decade old, sections of the public concerned about government policies particularly in the nuclear domain began to demand more information and formed vocal anti-nuclear campaigns, especially in Britain, West Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark. The anti-nuclear movements were less active during the period of détente in the 1960s and 1970s, but at the end of the 1970s, with the neutron bomb issue and the NATO decision to procure Tomahawk cruise and Pershing II missiles, they became very strong again, forcing very public debates on these issues, which led to the fall of at least one government (that of Helmut Schmidt in the FRG). Although the nuclear protesters were regarded with deep suspicion by NATO member states’ governments, and although internal security and intelligence services took an interest in them which at least in their view was quite undemocratic, this led to no imprisonment or serious persecution. I would argue that the democratic nature of the NATO member states was confirmed and enhanced by the power and influence of these protest movements, and by their insistence on public debates and on the disclosure of more information to the public at large than NATO governments would normally have liked to provide. There is a significant difference here between NATO and the WTO states where peace protesters were often jailed and their families were often harassed in ways which included barring their children from university education and barring them and their relatives from a host of jobs.
Defense analyst Scilla McLean argued that it was an error of political judgment on the part of NATO “to assume that governmental consultation on nuclear planning is the same as public consent for nuclear plans.” The failure of the governments to communicate persuasively the reasons for NATO policies supported by them to their own publics underlines this criticism. McLean went on to postulate that “what is required to gain public support for NATO decisions are visible, democratic and authentic forms of reassurance of peaceful intent.” Instead, democratic processes were clearly felt to be wanting in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As an article in the Guardian noted, right in the middle of the Euro-missile Crisis (October 14, 1983): the revival “of the peace movement since 1979 has gone a long way to undermining the decision-making process in the Alliance, which for all the mention of participational democracy in the Atlantic Charter has always been the responsibility of a very narrow élite.”70
Increasingly over the years, public opinion in NATO countries was thus at once a constraint on the policy-making of individual governments within NATO, as it was on the Alliance as a whole. As far as I am aware, no similar pattern of public influence through an open discourse in the press and demonstrations can be detected in the WTO's countries.
The preceding considerations seem to indicate that NATO as an Alliance of democracies in its attitude towards nuclear deterrence only in part reflects the distribution of nuclear resources and military might within it. In the early days and indeed in the first decade of NATO's existence, the United States showed many traits of hege-monic rule that conform with Realist theory. But even then, and increasingly in the following decades, NATO's Allies began to voice their own concerns, and Washington had to listen. Just as NATO's defense plans in the 1980s centered on the hope that WTO solidarity would prove fragile and that individual WTO members would declare their neutrality in the case of war,71 most NATO members understood the importance of solidarity among their own ranks. And solidarity would be severely undermined if the United States imposed its arsenals, strategies, and unilateral decisions upon reluctant Allies. Resulting strategies may have been marred by ambiguity but the Alliance kept together — voluntarily. It continues to exist today, even though the WTO's members agreed to dissolve that organization in 1991. The main reason, I maintain, is that NATO is not a means of American hegemonic control but a forum for transatlantic debate. The nature of this debate carries aspects of democracy, most notably the right for every member to voice its opinion (even though etiquette demands that the Luxembourgeois and the Icelandic representatives keep their interventions short and rare) and the need for consensus for any joint position adopted. American unilateralism under the George W. Bush administration has crucially not been able to instrumentalize NATO as force multiplier for its hegemonic ambitions. The reason for this lies in the nature of the Alliance.
1 For the details of this, see Beatrice Heuser, “Yugoslavia in Western Defence Strategy, 1948–1955,” in Yugoslavia's Security Dilemmas, eds, Marko Milivojevic, John B. Allcock, and Pierre Maurer (Oxford: Berg, 1988), pp. 126–63.
2 Heuser, “Yugoslavia in Western Defence Strategy, 1948–1955”; and Beatrice Heuser, NATO, Britain, France and the FRG: Nuclear Strategies and Forces for Europe, 1949–2000 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), chapter 2.
3 Quoted in Milton Leitenberg, “Background Information on Tactical Nuclear Weapons,” in Tactical Nuclear Weapons: European Perspectives, ed., Swedish International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) (London: Taylor & Francis, 1978), pp. 88f., see also Marco Carnovale, The Control of NATO Nuclear Forces in Europe (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), p. 56.
4 On the joint targeting plans, see John Baylis, Ambiguity and Deterrence: British Nuclear Strategy 1945–1964 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Ian Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship: Britain s Deterrent and America, 1957–1962 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
5 Quoted in Carnovale, The Control, p. 52.
6 Department of Defense, Report to Congress, FY 1978, p. 82, quoted in Ivo Daalder, The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response: NATO Strategy and Theater Nuclear Forces since 1967 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 135.
7 Philip Bobbit, Lawrence Freedman, and Gregory Treverton, US Nuclear Strategy: A Reader (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 338–426, especially Philip Bobbit's introduction pp. 338–46.
8 Carnovale, The Control, pp. 63f.
9 “General Rogers: Time to Say ‘Time Out’,” Army (September 1987), quoted in Thomas Halverson, The Last Great Nuclear Debate: NATO and Short-Range Nuclear Weapons in the 1980s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 92.
10 Halverson, The Last Great Nuclear Debate, p. 93.
11 Carnovale, The Control, p. 40.
12 Rolf Tamnes, “Defence of the Northern Flank, 1949–1956,” in Das Nordatlantische Bündnis 1949–1956, eds, Klaus A. Maier and Norbert Wiggershaus (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993), p. 191; Kjetil Skogrand and Rolf Tamnes, Fryktens likevekt: Atombomben, Norge og verden 1945–1970 (Oslo: Tiden, 1997).
13 Carnovale, The Control, p. 77.
14 Tamnes, “Defence of the Northern Flank,” pp. 191f.
15 Kjetil Skogrand, “Norwegian Nuclear Policy, 1945–1970,” in The Cold War, Military Power and the Civilian Society, ed. Karl Kleve, Norwegian Aviation Museum Series No. 5 (Norwegian Aviation Museum: Bodø, 2003), pp. 100–20.
16 Wilhelm Agrell, Alliansfrihet och atombomber — kontinuitet och förändring i den svenska försvarsdoktrinen 1945–1982 (Stockholm: Liber, 1985); Tor Larsson, “Swedish Nuclear and Non-Nuclear Postures,” in Dividing the Atom: Essays on the History of Nuclear Sharing and Nuclear Proliferation, eds, Cyril Buffet and Leopoldo Nuti, special Issue of Storia delle relazioni internazionali, year XIII, No. 1 (1988), pp. 101–20.
17 Nikolaj Petersen, “The Dilemmas of Alliance: Denmark's Fifty Years with NATO,” in A History of NATO — the First Fifty Years, vol. 3, ed. Gustav Schmidt (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 277.
18 Tamnes, “Defence of the Northern Flank,” p. 193.
19 Winfried Heinemann, “Politische Zusammenarbeit im Bündnis,” in Von Truman bis Harmel, ed. Hans-Joachim Harder (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000), pp. 174–7; Winfried Heinemann, “1956 als das Krisenjahr der NATO,” in Das Internationale Krisenjahr 1956, eds, Winfried Heinemann and Norbert Wiggershaus (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999), pp. 617–21, 625–8; Winfried Heinemann, Vom Zusammenwachsen des Bündnisses (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998).
20 Carnovale, The Control, p. 77.
21 Bruno Thoss, “Forward Defence,” in GIs in Germany, ed. Detlev Junker (Washington, DC: The German Historical Institute, forthcoming).
22 Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 194–200.
23 Carnovale, The Control, pp. 38, 78.
24 Ibid., p. 68.
25 Philip Sabin, The Third World War Scare in Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986); Simon Duke, US Defence Bases in the United Kingdom (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987).
26 Jill Edwards, “Spain, Drumbeat and NATO: Incorporating Franco's Spain in Western Defence,” in Securing Peace in Europe, 1945–62: Thoughts for the Post-Cold War Era eds, Beatrice Heuser and Robert O'Neill (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 159–72.
27 Cyril Buffet and Leopoldo Nuti, eds, Dividing the Atom: Proliferation and Nuclear Politics, 1957–1969, special Issue of Storia delle Relazioni Internazionali (Florence, 1998).
28 For example, see David N. Schwartz, NATO's Nuclear Dilemmas (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1983); for all these views being reflected within one country's political debate see Catherine M. Kelleher, Germany and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975).
29 Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle, vol. 3, Le Souverain, 1959–1970 (Paris: Seuil, 1986), p. 466.
30 For details, see Beatrice Heuser, “What Price Solidarity? Nuclear Interdependence in NATO,” in The United States and the European Alliance since 1945, eds, Kathleen Burk and Melvyn Stokes (Oxford: Berg, 1999), pp. 155–61.
31 Hans Henrich, “Sozialer Faktor Atombombe,” Frankfurter Rundschau (April 24, 1957); “Frankfurt gegen Atomwaffenversuche,” Stuttgarter Zeitung (April 27, 1957).
32 “Sprechzettel für den Besuch des Herrn Ministers bei General Norstad” (March 5, 1962), NHP collection Bonn Document 88, p. 5.
33 For details of this study, see Beatrice Heuser, Nuclear Strategies and Forces for Europe, 1949–2000, chapter 5.
34 Ibid.
35 Johannes Steinhoff and Reiner Pommerin, Strategiewechsel: Bundesrepublik und Nuklearstrategie in der Ära Adenauer-Kennedy (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1992), pp. 38–42.
36 Hope Harrison, “Ein Superallierter und eine Supermacht? Sowjetisch-ostdeutsche Beziehungen, 1953 bis 1961,” in Militär, Staat und Gesellschaft in der DDR, eds, Hans Ehlert and Matthias Rogg (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2004), pp. 83–96.
37 Vojtech Mastny, Learning from the Enemy: NATO as a Model for the Warsaw Pact (Zurich: Forschungsstelle für Sicherheitspolitik und Konfliktanalyse der ETH, 2001).
38 Conference on the NVA in the WTO, organized by the Bundeswehr's Military History Research Institute (MGFA) in Potsdam, March 2003.
39 Beatrice Heuser, “Warsaw Pact Military Doctrines in the 70s and 80s: Findings in the East German Archives,” Comparative Strategy, Vol. 12, No. 4 (October–December 1993), pp. 437–57.
40 “Operativnaia Direktiva” in Russian, accompanying “Stabstraining-89,” Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv Freiburg/Breisgau, DVH 27/50214, p. 61.
41 Oral History Session, organized with the help of Colonel Prayon, Commandant of the Academy for Information and Communication of the Bundeswehr, Strausberg, April 20, 1995, minutes taken by Michael Ploetz.
42 Scilla McLean, ed., How Nuclear Weapons Decisions are Made (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), p. 230.
43 McLean, How Nuclear Weapons Decisions are Made, p. 226.
44 Daalder, The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response, p. 191.
45 For the details, see Daalder, The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response, p. 191.
46 Quoted in Carnovale, The Control, pp. 45f.
47 Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 146–200; Klaus Maier, “Die politische Kontrolle über die amerikanischen Atomwaffen als Bündnisproblem der NATO unter der Doktrin der massiven Vergeltung,” in Von Truman bis Harmel, ed. Hans-Joachim Harder (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000), pp. 39–54.
48 Conclusive documents on this matter can be found on the website of the National Security Archive: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/predelegation/pd01_01.htm, accessed 26 November 2003.
49 At the time referred to as Flexible Response, which is confusing for us retrospectively as two other strategies would be given that name in the next ten years — see Heuser, Nuclear Strategies and Forces for Europe, 1949–2000, chapter 2.
50 Bruno Thoss, NATO Strategie und Nationale Verteidigungsplanung in den Aufbaujahren der Bundeswehr, 1956–1961, Part 1 (Munich: Oldenbourg for the MGFA, 2005).
51 “Vorschlag für Einleitungsvortrag Minister” (for von Hassel talks in Pentagon, February 1963), NHP Bonn Document 128, pp. 36f.
52 Memorandum from Malinovskii and Zakharov to Pliev, 8 September 1962, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/620908%20Memorandum%20from%20Malynovsky.pdf accessed on 26 November 2003.
53 Zara Steiner, “Decision-making in American and British Foreign Policy: An Open and a Shut Case,” Review of International Studies, Vol. 13 (1987), pp. 1–18.
54 Baylis, Ambiguity and Deterrence; Carnovale, The Control, p. 56. See also my criticism of the deliberate ambiguity in a central NATO tenet, “Die No-first-use Debatte,” Soldat und Technik (February 1999).
55 Daalder, The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response, p. 70.
56 Carnovale, The Control, p. 61.
57 Daalder, The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response, p. 190; Sir Michael Quinlan, “The UK/FRG Defence Relationships, 1968–1981,” in Britain and Germany, ed. Manfred Görtemaker (Houdsmills: Palgrave, forthcoming).
58 Saki Dockrill, “No Troops Please, We Are American,” in Von Truman bis Harmel, ed. Hans-Joachim Harder (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000), p. 135.
59 For the development of NATO threat scenarios and strategy, see Heuser, Nuclear Strategies and Forces for Europe, 1949–2000, chapters 1 and 2.
60 Michael Legge, “Theater Nuclear Weapons and the NATO Strategy of Flexible Response,” RAND Paper R-2964-FF (1983), p. 26.
61 Daalder, The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response, p. 98.
62 Quoted in Daalder, The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response, p. 96.
63 Quoted in Thomas Halverson, The Last Great Nuclear Debate: NATO and Short-Range Nuclear Weapons in the 1980s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 72.
64 Ibid.
65 Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, formerly Strausberg, AZN32908, Protocol of the 29th Meeting of the Military Council of the WTO, Prague, April 24–27, 1984, p. 196.
66 Carnovale, The Control, p. 58.
67 “Report of the Committee of Three on Non-Military Co-operation in NATO” of 1956, The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation: Facts and Figures (Brussels: NATO Information Services, 1989), p. 389.
68 Carnovale, The Control, pp. 59f.
69 Ibid.
70 Quoted in Scilla McLean, How Nuclear Weapons Decisions are Made, p. 229.
71 General Sir John Hackett, Air Chief Marshal Sir John Barraclough, Sir Bernard Burrows, Brigadier Kenneth Hunt, Vice-Admiral Sir Jan McGeoch, and Major-General John Strawson, The Third World War (London: Sphere Books, 1978) and following editions of 1983 and 1985.