Playing Nuclear Poker

• Share

(4 of 12)

week brought the extraordinary spectacle of France's Socialist President François Mitterrand delivering a tough and gutsy speech to the West German Bundestag, urging his audience, but especially his fellow Social Democrats, to rebuff Gromyko by showing their support for the firm missile stand endorsed by Chancellor Kohl, a Christian Democrat. Said the French leader: "Whoever gambles on the decoupling of the European continent from the American continent would call into question the maintenance of equilibrium and thus the maintenance of peace."

Many French military analysts feel that a partial deployment—say 50 American missiles after a Soviet reduction in SS-20s—would be preferable to Reagan's zero option. This way the Soviets would know that an attack on their part would be met by at least some retaliation. "Deterrence," says Pierre Hassner, a foreign policy expert at the University of Paris, "is a state of mind."

Flexibility, too, is a state of mind, and it is one that the chief U.S. negotiator on INF, Paul Nitze, has been trying to encourage in Washington and communicate to the West Europeans. After meeting with Reagan last Friday, Nitze said that while the zero option remains the Administration's position, the U.S. might consider some compromise if the Soviet Union showed "give" on its own part.

Nitze knows that American stubbornness does not translate into allied firmness. Quite the contrary. And with every crack in NATO unity, the credibility of his negotiating position is diminished; the threat of deployment looks more like a bluff; and the vicious cycle takes another turn for the worse. The Soviets have less and less incentive to give up anything in the negotiations. As the American hand gets weaker, the stakes get higher. For the Soviets, the winner's pot includes the possibility of seriously, perhaps irreparably, dividing NATO.

However, if for any reason the new American missiles fail to arrive in Europe by the end of the year, the military consequences would not be nearly so dire as President Reagan suggested last week. The collapse of the deployments, he warned, would leave Europe with "no deterrent on our side." But even without the Tomahawks and Pershing IIs, NATO has a panoply of American nuclear weapons—shorter-range missiles, fighter-bombers, carrier-based planes aboard aircraft carriers in the Sixth Fleet—plus the independent nuclear forces of the British and French. Together these weapons still pose a formidable threat of retaliation.

In fact, there could be a severe political cost if NATO overcomes its internal resistance and moves ahead with the deployment plan. If hundreds of thousands of demonstrators try to block the installation of the missiles, the trauma could leave lasting scars on the already battered body of transatlantic solidarity. The U.S. would be blamed for having pitted allied governments against large portions of their own constituencies. It would be that much harder to make a decision, not to mention implement it, the next time an escalation of the Soviet military threat required a unified response by NATO.

Actually, the West Europeans have themselves partly—and the Soviets largely—to blame for the whole dilemma. The rhetoric of the building European anti-nuclear movement has absurdly cast the U.S. as the