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Of all the demonstrations for disarmament, perhaps the least expected was the one that suddenly boiled up in Spain on Nov. 15, when 400,000 people gathered in a vast, dusty, open space at the University of Madrid. What made the demonstration all the more remarkable was that Spain, which will soon apply for NATO membership, has made it clear that it will not allow U.S. nuclear weapons to be stationed on its territory. But a wide variety of political parties and pressure groups, rang ing from the Communists to parent-teacher organizations, joined in a loose federation to organize the spectacular meeting on the theme of "Peace, Disarmament and Liberty." The main speaker was Socialist Leader Gonzalez, whose party calls for a national referendum on the question of Spain's joining NATO. Gonzalez criticized both superpowers equally on the issue of disarmament. Said he: "It is the same to us whether the missiles come from the East or from the West."
What if Europe's doves succeed in blocking deployment of the new Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe? That outcome would, of course, be an immense victory for the Soviets, who would have achieved one of their main diplomatic objectives without making a single concession at the arms negotiations that are about to begin. Moscow would vigorously and artfully exploit so blatant an example of U.S. weakness and Alliance disarray. But in the short run, Europe's security would not be directly threatened. "It is not as if we were starting from zero," says Martin Hillenbrand, director-general of the Paris-based Atlantic Institute for International Affairs and a former U.S. Ambassador to West Germany. "The U.S. has 6,000 tactical nuclear weapons in [Western Europe], and the French and British have their nuclear forces." The rejected systems could be replaced by cruise missiles carried by U.S. planes and submarines based in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.
European rejection of the missiles would also break a crucial link in the complex chain of defenses that constitutes the West's deterrent against Armageddon. The Soviet Union would have the edge in most categories of armament, nuclear as well as conventional, deployed between the Atlantic and the Urals. At a tune when Pentagon specialists worry that the nation's own land-based nuclear weapons within the continental U.S. have become vulnerable, the growing military imbalance, while pleasing current pacifist sentiment, might revive a longstanding European fear: that the U.S., for all its vows, would not stand by its allies in the event of a Soviet conventional arms attack in Europe. Nor is there any guarantee that a reversal of the decision to deploy new missiles would satisfy Europe's antinuclear movement. On the contrary, emboldened activists would most likely seize upon their victory to demand, as British and Dutch unilateralists already have, the total denuclearization of Western Europe, even in the absence of any Soviet reciprocity.
If this attempt were to succeed, the American public, and Congress, would probably be so angered that they would start a movement to bring U.S. forces home. That idea has already come up under much less provocative circumstances: in 1971, Mike Mansfield, then a