Allies Fear Loss of Nuclear Shield : U.S., Europe Switch Roles Over Curbing A-Weapons

When NATO Secretary General Lord Carrington complained about a year ago that the Atlantic Alliance was splitting into timid “Eurowimps” and belligerent “American cowboys,” nobody paid much attention. That concern, with only minor variations, had been voiced regularly for at least 30 years.

But today, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is facing what may be its most severe crisis because of a sudden reversal of roles. The United States is nearing an agreement with the Soviet Union to remove hundreds of nuclear warheads from Europe, and many of the “Eurowimps” have discovered that they love the bomb.

“The (U.S. government’s) official line is that NATO is as healthy as ever and it always is in some sort of crisis,” a State Department official said. “All that having been said, however, the alliance faces a new set of challenges that are different from what it has seen before.”

Ultimately, European members of NATO are expected to go along with U.S. arms control efforts, aimed currently at eliminating medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe. In reality, they have very little choice. But the debate has already put new strains on the alliance.

The controversy has shredded the protective covering that once obscured a basic truth: Because Western Europe is unable and unwilling to defend itself with conventional forces against a conventional attack by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, it relies on nuclear forces that will either prevent war from breaking out or result in a holocaust that might destroy the planet.

All-or-Nothing Gamble

From the Europeans’ standpoint, this all-or-nothing gamble results from a sober assessment of the odds. Conventional weapons have grown far more effective since World War II, when they devastated the continent, and it is easy to see why many European leaders are as frightened by the prospect of a conventional war as by the specter of a nuclear one.

But the American interest is far different. Although the United States would surely suffer from a new world war fought with conventional arms, it could hope to survive with its civilization more or less intact. It could have no such expectation if the war were fought with nuclear arms.

No one doubts that the Soviet Union and its allies have a far more formidable force than NATO for fighting a conventional war.

The usual explanation holds that the democracies of the West are unwilling to use massive peacetime conscription to equal the standing armies of the East and to spend the huge sums necessary to match the Warsaw Pact tank for tank. But the current debate indicates that the Europeans have even more deep-seated reasons for resisting a buildup in conventional forces.

Fear of Conventional War

“The Europeans have always wanted to have more nuclear and less conventional defense because they didn’t want a conventional war ever to be fought,” the State Department official said.

Brent Scowcroft, former President Gerald R. Ford’s national security adviser, put it even more starkly:

“The Europeans really don’t want a conventional defense of Europe. The Europeans rely heavily, psychologically at least, on what they consider the deterrent value of nuclear weapons. They don’t want a nuclear war which would be fought solely on European territory, nor do they want to fight World War II over.”

Scowcroft said European members of the alliance are concerned that if the West came close to matching Soviet conventional power, that might lead Moscow to believe that a conventional war would not necessarily lead automatically to a nuclear one. By the inverse logic of nuclear deterrence, this could lead the Soviets to take chances that they would not otherwise take.

“One can test and probe with conventional forces if one is free from the risk of inviting nuclear retaliation,” he said.

Military Protectorate

David P. Calleo, director of European Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, said the United States “has maintained a military protectorate over Europe since the end of the Second World War.” Although European leaders sometimes complain about this American dominance, most of them are happy with the arrangement, he said.

“The nightmare is that there will be a war limited entirely to Europe,” Calleo said. “They (European leaders) feel that the best way to prevent that is to make sure that if there should be a war, the Americans would retaliate against the Soviet Union with nuclear forces so that neither superpower would be tempted to try out their toys at the expense of the Europeans. The U.S. interest is far different: If a war starts, it should be kept as small as possible so it would stay in Europe.”

Although there is nothing new about this division of interests, the prospect of a U.S.-Soviet agreement to ban medium-range missiles from Europe has forced the alliance to face the issue squarely for the first time.

And now the West cannot rely on a threatening and ham-fisted Soviet Union to cement its alliance. The present Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, is far subtler than his predecessors and may be able to exploit the natural divisions in the West.

Chance to Break Up NATO

George Carver, a former deputy director of the CIA who is now a senior fellow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that the Soviets may have a chance to break up NATO.

“It was relatively easy to hold NATO together against a monolithic and threatening Soviet Union,” Carver said.

But now the Reagan Administration, beset by the Iran- contra scandal, “is salivating at the possibility of a photo opportunity of a signing ceremony (for a nuclear arms control agreement),” he added.

That has left European government leaders in a squeeze between their own all-or-nothing nuclear strategy and the ban-the-bomb element of European public opinion. Calleo said European leaders are faced with a de facto “alliance between the Americans, the Russians and the peace groups in Western Europe.”

Most specialists believe NATO will eventually paper over its latest differences, probably during a meeting of foreign ministers scheduled for next month in Iceland. But the alliance may never again be quite the same, they say.