Trade Europe’s Land Missiles for Seaborne

The current haggling over how to respond to Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s zero-option proposals is disturbing--not only for how it reveals the disarray in the Atlantic Alliance but also for how it underscores the fact that the West is merely reacting when it should be taking the initiative and defining how security and deterrence in Europe can be maintained in the foreseeable future.

At present, Europe’s security and deterrence depend on the presence of large conventional forces, including roughly 320,000 U.S. troops, coupled with American nuclear weapons. Some of the latter are bound to be withdrawn as a result of the emerging agreement between Washington and Moscow on intermediate nuclear weapons--the Soviet SS-20 and the American Pershing 2 and ground-launched cruise missiles. Others will remain, in particular the almost 5,000 “battlefield” nuclear weapons, for use by artillery, aircraft and ships. In addition, there are a few hundred British and French nuclear warheads, some U.S. strategic missiles allocated to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s supreme European commander (a U.S. general), and a score of U.S. sea-launched cruise missiles.

However--and this explains the bevy of Cassandras on both sides of the Atlantic--once you take away the intermediate-range nuclear forces, the rest is largely of doubtful deterrence value.

Take the battlefield weapons, which have been poured into Europe in almost mindless fashion to reassure nervous allies and make use of available technology. But most of them depend on delivery systems of such short range that, in a crisis, they would emit a signal to a potential aggressor that is scarcely credible: namely, that the West would both want to use these weapons recklessly and that it would release them early enough (the U.S. President has to make that decision) to make any difference in a European conflict. The U.S. strategic forces, at the other end of the spectrum, are similarly doubtful deterrors. They are simply too big a bang. To use them would be the last step to worldwide nuclear war, and thus they are scarcely capable of putting the fear of defeat into an aggressor with limited military objectives against Western Europe.

The uneasiness of European governments to be left, after the zero deal, with these less workable systems is therefore understandable. But the attempt to hold onto the remaining systems is, at the same time, misplaced. To block Gorbachev’s initiatives--he proposed to ban all missiles of a range of 500 to 1,000 kilometers from Europe--is a rear-guard action that the West cannot win. It also locks Western governments into short-term reactions when long-term thinking is needed.

Instead of all the tactical maneuvering that currently goes for policy, NATO governments should accept Gorbachev’s challenge and put nuclear deterrence in Europe on a sounder basis. That requires, apart from sufficient conventional forces, a small number of credible nuclear weapons--credible because they would be stationed well to the rear instead of on the front lines, where they could be overrun or create pressure on political authorities for premature firing; deployed in an invulnerable mobile mode, not in vulnerable fixed positions where they would invite Soviet preemption, and linked to deterring conflict in Europe, not precipitating it.

It so happens that an existing weapon combines these conditions. It is already being deployed--if not on European territory, then in European waters: the Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missile on American warships. The Navy has ordered 4,000 of these weapons, of which up to one-fourth are expected to carry nuclear munitions, and they are rapidly entering the inventory.

A small force of these missiles, clearly dedicated to the European theater, would allow NATO to get rid of all questionable short-range systems and base deterrence in Europe, perhaps for the first time, on politically as well as militarily sensible forces.

There are, of course, problems with this proposal. For one, the U.S. Navy has always been reluctant to have its cruise missiles allocated to Europe or any other region. The admirals want them as a “floating” asset. That attitude would have to be revised, and NATO’s supreme European commander would have to be given authority over a sea-going cruise missile force in European waters, just as he has authority over all U.S. nuclear weapons based on land in Europe.

No less important, a cruise-missile force dedicated to Europe must involve the Europeans themselves. European vessels could provide protection for the missile carriers, which should be home-ported in Europe.

Of course, there would be political reservations about this as well. But these could be overcome if the creation of the new deterrence force were clearly coupled to the removal of all existing land-based nuclear capabilities from the old continent.

The West, that much should be clear, cannot afford to leave the definition of its deterrence requirements to Gorbachev’s initiatives, nor can it afford to drag its feet. It has to regain the initiative, in the interests of both security and arms control. A dedicated sea-going cruise-missile force attached to Europe would serve these interests well. NATO governments should now stop quibbling and roll up their sleeves. They have no better alternative.