(4 of 10)
Why? François-Poncet offered several explanations. First, Soviet adventurism in the Third World turned out to be costly and disappointing. Second, Western Europe had become an attractive target because it could be intimidated by a rapid Soviet military buildup, especially of SS-20 intermediate-range missiles, of which Moscow now has 351 deployed. Intimidation was made all the easier by the arrival of a so-called successor generation ol young West Europeans ignorant of immediate post-World War II history, thus uncertain of U.S. policy and fatalistic about Soviet power. Third, the Soviets are grappling in Eastern Europe with perhaps their most intractable problem, the growth of nationalism and dissent. Said François-Poncet: "If the Soviets could deal with a West European partner that would detach itself from the U.S., it would help them impose a solution in Eastern Europe." He wondered if the SS-20 program was simply the mechanistic reflex of the Soviet military establishment or part of a longer-term political strategy. If Moscow's aim is political blackmail, he said, then Western Europe should begin to brace for a period of high East-West tension after the deployment of NATO's own intermediate-range missiles.
Karl Kaiser, director of the Research Institute of the West German Society for Foreign Affairs and one of his country's foremost strategic thinkers, suggested an answer: "Probably at the beginning the SS-20 was just a modernization program, but now with the debate in the West, I am reasonably sure that the SS-20 program has a much wider, long-term perspective behind it." Kaiser got wholehearted support from Alois Mertes, Minister of State at the West German Foreign Office, who said that both the SS-20 and the proposed counterforce, NATO's Pershing Us and cruises, are essentially political weapons. Mertes maintained that the Soviet Union would avoid war, especially in Europe, because "the Federal Republic of Germany is a good fat cow; they will not slaughter it. They will draw it very slowly from the Western area to the Eastern area. That means that besides the risk of nuclear war, there is the risk of creeping Soviet influence in the Federal Republic."
Like many others on the panel, Mertes called for "a repoliticization" of the missile debate: putting less emphasis on military hardware and on the threat of Soviet aggression, which most West Europeans think remote, and more stress on making the public aware of the insidious political nature of Soviet military strategy and, by inference, the risk to the West of "self-Finlandization." At the same time, noted Kaiser, NATO'S missile decision, garlanded in the language of nuclear-weapons terminology, was hard to explain to people. Indeed, said Britain's Kurd, "our policies in Western Europe are formed to a large extent out of fears—that is to say they are defensive. We have had empires, we have fought about empires, we have abandoned empires, we are not any longer interested in empires. We are interested in preserving our way of life here, which is free and agreeable."