‘Last Resort’: Last Gasp For NATO?

The Center for Security Policy today warned against the accelerating pace at which the Western alliance’s military capabilities are being dismantled. Nowhere is this more evident than in the various measures already announced by NATO or in the offing for this week’s summit meeting in London.

A year ago, President Bush agreed to enter into negotiations on short-range nuclear forces, despite the utter unverifiability of any negotiated limitations that on such forces that might arise and despite the fact that they were the last such deterrent systems deployed in Western Europe. Earlier this year, the Bush Administration announced that it would not pursue modernization of NATO’s obsolescent artillery and short-range Lance missiles, effectively ensuring that — with or without new arms agreements — NATO’s tactical nuclear weapons will lose their military effectiveness.

And now, in the run-up to the NATO summit, leaks to the press indicate that the Administration is prepared to go even further toward the denuclearization of alliance defenses. According to published reports, the United States is proposing to withdraw unilaterally all nuclear artillery shells from Western Europe and to revise NATO doctrine in a manner that makes retaining the remaining air- and ground-launched systems utterly problematic.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director and former chairman of NATO’s High Level Group — the senior politico-military committee charged with alliance nuclear strategy, policy and hardware issues — said, "The U.S. proposals now under consideration, coupled with several misguided actions previously taken, go to the very heart of the deterrent posture that has contributed so directly to the peace in Europe for three decades. If adopted at the NATO summit, they will impart a powerful new impetus to the alliance’s unravelling as a security bulwark against highly dynamic and increasingly unpredictable events in the Soviet Union."

Gaffney added, "What is at stake is nothing less than NATO’s future ability to maintain in the mind of any potential adversary the greatest possible uncertainty concerning the consequences of an attack against the allies. Such uncertainty, in the final analysis, requires a doctrine like that of ‘flexible response’ and the panoply of modern weapons (in appropriate numbers) needed to implement it."

The Bush Administration’s actions in the arena of theater nuclear forces appear to flow from the same dubious premises that have prompted it to embrace several other initiatives recently. Each of these actions is being justified on the absurd grounds that it is necessary to "assure" the Soviet Union about the West’s benign intentions. They include:

• U.S. endorsement of Bonn’s plan to perpetuate the deployment of hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops in the eastern portion of a unified Germany — and to have the German government underwrite this continuing occupation;

 

• an open-ended endorsement of Germany’s commitment to provide massive economic assistance to Moscow (Point 9 of the Baker plan for German reunification) including multi-billion dollar subsidized financial credits;

 

• the wanton decontrol of militarily relevant high technology; and

 

• the notion of accrediting Soviet diplomats (and, inevitably, KGB personnel) to NATO as "observers."

Gaffney noted, "The Western alliance is in serious danger of granting the Soviet Union unnecessary — and probably irreversible concessions — at best, out of a misplaced notion of noblesse oblige, at worst, under the coercive pressure of a rapidly emerging Soviet-German condominium. Paying virtually any price (whether measured in credits, subsidies, technology flows, or opportunities for intelligence penetration) Moscow or Bonn demands for ‘keeping Germany in NATO’ will simply ensure that the resulting alliance arrangement is not worth having."

Instead, the Center for Security Policy calls on the Bush Administration to employ its leverage at the London meeting and the upcoming Houston Economic Summit to ensure that the Western alliance aims at effecting fundamental and irreversible changes in Moscow’s doctrine and military capabilities in the only way that is sure to work: through the transformation of the Soviet political and economic systems by the adoption of urgent, radical democratic and free market reforms. The West’s aid, trade, lending, technology transfers and military adjustments must be firmly conditioned on such Soviet systemic changes being put into place first. Otherwise, we face the virtual certainty that misguided Western largesse will retard, not catalyze, realization of the needed changes.