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On the other hand, the U.S. itself does not want to go too far in offering nuclear participation to the Germans. For one thing, Washington is committed to the idea of preventing proliferation. For another, West Germany's acquisition of any real nuclear capacity would almost certainly doom any prospect of continued detente with Soviet Russia —including eventual reunification of Germany.
This is the bind in which the U.S. is caught. One attempt to squirm out of it was the ill-fated MLF, which called for nuclear-armed surface ships to be manned by NATO crews in order to create an illusion of participation (actually the warheads would have remained under U.S. control just as they are on land). The Germans liked MLF and still do, but nobody else does. A British variation known as ANF (for Allied Nuclear Force) is disliked by the Germans because it would let Bonn help pay for British weapons and still have no say in the deployment of the U.S. weapons that directly protect Germany. The nub of the problem is that nuclear weapons simply cannot easily be shared if they are intended to be ever used in a hurry.
The U.S. is now pushing the less-than-sensational idea of a "special committee" to bring the Alliance closer round the nuclear hearth by simply giving the members more information and more responsibility in planning. In Paris last week U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara met with nine other NATO defense ministers for a kind of initiation session into the top-secret technicalities, awesome responsibilities and costs of nuclear forces. The committee concept suggests that the U.S. hopes that nothing really new has to be done about NATO.
The Coal of Unity
The larger problem remains and would exist even without De Gaulle: to create within the Alliance a situation, as Jean Monnet puts it, "not of equality of power, but equality of rights." It is a problem that has grown rather than diminished since NATO's founding, for the disparity between American and European might has grown rather than diminished since 1949. Indeed, some Europeans insist American strength has so burgeoned that even Russia has been outstripped, and the bipolarity of the 1950s has given way to a world of "monopolarity," where a single superstate, the U.S., overshadows all others. The only way in which the Europeans could in fact gain near equality of power with the U.S. would be to achieve their own, Europe-wide nuclear force. This idea of a separate European force balancing the U.S.—and linked with it by a common arm of policy—is known, in a particularly unfortunate metaphor, as the "dumbbell" (after the two equal, connected weights of an exercise bar). The concept depends first on Europeans' willingness to pay the tremendous cost of such a nuclear force—and so far few Europeans have shown this willingness. More important, it depends on the creation of true political unity, which is undoubtedly far away—and thanks to De Gaulle, farther away today than five years ago.