Diagnosing The Defence of Europe

Diagnosing the Defense of Europe

The verdict: an ailing Atlantic alliance

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization received a thorough physical and psychological checkup last week and was found to be less than robust at age 30. The general diagnosis: flabby nuclear muscle and a creeping inferiority complex. The prognosis: satisfactory recovery only if it undertakes strenuous, and expensive, new body building.

The loudest cry of alarm came from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Brussels, where he chaired a three-day conference of 100 Western political and military experts that was sponsored by Georgetown University on the theme "NATO: The Next 30 Years." In an extemporaneous speech remarkable for its passion, Kissinger warned that the U.S. nuclear umbrella over Europe is fast losing credibility in face of the Soviets' military buildup in general and their nuclear versatility in particular. The Soviet Union's improving and multifaceted nuclear capacity, he said, not only is making it increasingly difficult for the U.S. to defend against Soviet missile systems, but also is cornering the U.S. into the "absurd" single nuclear option of destroying Soviet cities while U.S. population centers are wiped out in return. The lack of credible lower-level military options, he said, could render the U.S. helpless against Soviet pressure on threatened allies.

Kissinger's warning was echoed two days later, when the West German government issued a White Paper on European defense. It argued that the strength of the Warsaw Pact's conventional forces, compared with NATO'S, is continuing to expand, and that there is a "growing disparity" between the Soviet deployment of intermediate-range nuclear weapons not covered by the proposed SALT II treaty and the laggard Western development of comparable arms. The White Paper declared further that the Warsaw Pact armies appear to be geared primarily for attack rather than defense.

An equally worrisome assessment came from London, where the authoritative International Institute for Strategic Studies, taking annual stock of the global "military balance," declared that the Soviets' "impressive" all-round modernization not only gives the Warsaw Pact the edge over NATO in a prolonged ground war but also poses a direct threat to America's own intercontinental missile systems. "It will be eight to ten years before the United States could again restore a degree of invulnerability to their land-based deterrent forces," the IISS concluded.

All these warnings contained important recommendations for strengthening NATO's overall preparedness on three fronts by: 1) reinforcing and modernizing its conventional forces, 2) hastening the deployment of medium-range nuclear weapons in Western Europe, and 3) developing a new generation of strategic weapons in the U.S.

Kissinger's warning, which he later conceded might have been more floridly gloomy than he intended it to be, also contained a surprising personal admission: America's longstanding deterrent strategy based on all-out nuclear strike capability against Soviet population centers may have been ill-conceived in the first place. It was, he conceded, an overly limited, one-sided strategy "to which I myself contributed." Implicitly, he almost seemed to endorse Charles de Gaulle's skeptical rationale for building the French force de frappe in 1959; that is, in the final analysis, no U.S. President could be relied upon to put American cities on the line for the sake of Europe.

In any case, Kissinger said, the American strategic deterrent is now obsolescent because it has been neutralized by the Soviets' own first-strike capability, and it will soon be obsolete altogether as they improve the pinpoint accuracy with which they could knock out Minuteman ICBM silos in the U.S. Consequently, in the very next three or four years, he warned, Western Europe must make a greater commitment to its safety on its own ground, with stronger conventional forces and improved "theater" nuclear weapons. For its part, the U.S. had better develop a new "counterforce capability" aimed at Soviet military targets and not just civilian and industrial centers.

European rebuttals to Kissinger's alarm bell demonstrated how strategic worries continue to look different from each side of the Atlantic. "We never thought you [the U.S.] reached to the sky," countered British Political Economist Andrew Shonfield. "And the fact that you now recognize that you don't, and that you also look back nostalgically to the moment you thought that you did, impresses you perhaps more than it impresses us." Added British Strategic Expert Laurence Martin: "I would prefer to say not that deterrence has collapsed, but that certain illusions which were perhaps justified in the days of the American nuclear monopoly are now clearly no longer appropriate."

If it was Kissinger's intention to goad the Europeans and fuel new debate about defense on the Continent, he appeared to have succeeded. For one thing, Washington has been trying to overcome the reluctance of Western European countries to deploy long-range Pershing II and cruise missiles on their soil; so far only Britain and West Germany have accepted in principle. For another, the U.S. would like to ensure that all countries of Western Europe match its own new defense expenditures, currently set at a 3% military budget increase.

Ultimately, most conference participants agreed that the slipping balance of Western European defense must be redressed before it is too late, even at the expense of domestic spending programs. If any consensus emerged, it was that voters in NATO countries on both sides of the Atlantic must prepare for a period of costly defense buildup, even if it comes in an economic era when they can least afford it.

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