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Whatever the NATO council may decide, Strauss already has the German army in training for nuclear war, using weapons with dummy warheads. The German army has four battalions equipped with Honest Johns, which can fire a nuclear charge 20 miles, and by late next year will have three more equipped with the U.S.'s new Sergeant, a missile with a loo-mile range. The nuclear warheads for these missiles are kept near by, but they do not belong to the Germans. They belong to the U.S. and are kept in the custody of U.S. representatives, to be placed in the German missiles if and when the U.S. authorizes General Norstad to order their use by NATO forces.
Fight for Volkswagen? This week, in an obviously interim gesture, the Eisenhower Administration is expected to offer five or six Polaris submarines to NATO. But these are deep-sea deterrents and Strauss wants tactical nuclear weapons that are on German ground and in hand. The Germans say such nuclear weapons would be needed, for instance, in the event of a limited war with the East Germans, in which the U.S. might hesitate about using the atom because the Russians were not directly involved. Germany's retired Vice Admiral Hellmuth Heye, now an Adenauer deputy on the Bundestag's defense committee, last week cited a hypothetical case in which only a NATO deterrent might work: "Suppose the Communists organized rioting at the Volkswagen works, which is only ten miles from the Soviet zone. Suppose the Russians then moved in and occupied the plant. Suppose they announced they were acting only to preserve order, had no intention of advancing farther, and would leave as soon as 'workers' rights' had been assured. Would the U.S. use atomic weapons to save the Volkswagen plant?" Or, more bluntly, would the U.S. be willing to risk nuclear retaliation on its cities for the sake of a few acres of German soil?
Under Norstad's plan, the U.S. would turn over to a NATO "pool" certain quantities of the nuclear weapons now stockpiled by U.S. forces in Europe. The weapons would remain in the custody of U.S. representatives, who would teach the Germans and other NATO partners the technique of their use in combat. But when the time for combat came, the U.S. custodians would obey NATO's order.
Who would give that order? Would there be, as Norway's Finn Moe has already asked, 15 fingers on the trigger? No, says Strauss. Decision to shoot a missile in such cases should rest with a "majority" of NATO members. Yet just because it would be a limited war, he argues, there would be time for a decision by a committee—and this decision should be possible by Europeans alone.
The Counterweight. If Strauss has fixed his sights on Germany's own national interests, he argues those interests in terms of total commitment to the West.
Says he: "Because of the invasion of Russia into the heart of Europe, establishing a bloc stretching from the Pacific to the Elbe, Germany's policy no longer has an autonomous position; it is a function of European policy. But even a united Europe can no longer be a third power between East and West; the future of Europe as a third power is gone before it began. The necessary counterweight can be achieved only by an Atlantic community with two strong components—North America and Europe."