A Plan to Reshape NATO

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conventional attack. Therefore, the doctrine would require a nuclear response at an early stage. Yet strategic nuclear parity deprives the threat of strategic nuclear war of much of its credibility; mutual suicide cannot be made to appear as a rational option. And no alternative nuclear strategy has been developed. Partly for this reason, public opinion, essentially unopposed by most NATO governments, is moving powerfully against any reliance on nuclear weapons—even tactical ones.

The alliance is thereby trapped in a precarious combination of (a) inadequate conventional forces, leading to (b) reliance on nuclear weapons in (c) a strategic environment that makes the threat of their use, and therefore their deterrent value, less and less credible, and (d) a public climate of growing nuclear pacifism that undermines what credibility remains. Lack of a coherent defense policy leaves the alliance, possessing a huge stockpile of enormously destructive weapons, disarming itself psychologically.

2) Intermediate-range weapons and arms control. The arrival of the new U.S. intermediate-range weapons in Europe late last year was properly hailed as a major success. For if public demonstrations and Soviet pressure had succeeded in blocking that deployment, the Soviet Union would in effect have achieved a veto over NATO's military dispositions.

But unless the alliance clarifies the purpose of these missiles, the accomplishment is likely to be transitory, since the basic European attitude toward the missiles is that of a host toward a now unwanted guest whose invitation to dinner it would be too awkward to withdraw. Some prominent Europeans purport to see in the missiles' presence a hidden American design to confine a nuclear war to Europe. Others treat them as one of those peculiar American aberrations that periodically upset the alliance's equilibrium. Too few recognize, and even fewer are willing to admit, that in fact the missiles link the strategic nuclear defense of Europe and the U.S. Weapons capable of reaching Soviet territory stake the American homeland to the defense of Europe; they do not enable America to remain immune.

European ambivalence makes it excruciatingly difficult to define "progress" toward arms control, while the nearly desperate eagerness with which progress is pursued makes its attainment less likely. The Soviets have refused even to discuss any proposal balancing U.S. intermediate-range missiles in Europe against the Soviet arsenal at a lower level. They insist on total withdrawal of American missiles while retaining a large number of their own. The goal of leaving Europe vulnerable to Soviet nuclear blackmail is obvious. Yet significant segments of European opinion persist in blaming the U.S. for the deadlock. In Europe and in the U.S., this attitude must in time erode the public support needed not only for missile deployment but also for coherent arms control.

3) East-West relations. Behind the sharp differences over defense strategy and arms control lies a parallel dispute over the alliance's posture toward the Soviet Union. Too many Europeans accept the caricature of a U.S. run by trigger-happy cowboys whose belligerence has provoked Soviet intransigence. Many Americans, on the other hand, consider such European notions naive and believe that together with the pacifist and neutralist demonstrations, they