Analysis : Mitterrand Could Jeopardize Plans for Controversy-Free NATO Summit

Carefully staged plans for a NATO summit without controversy or rancor may have been jeopardized by a rash of rhetoric from President Francois Mitterrand of France on the eve of the meeting of 16 leaders of the Atlantic Alliance.

In a series of speeches and interviews in the last few days, Mitterrand, who arrives in Brussels today for the opening of the summit, has said it would be “paradoxical and inopportune” for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to go ahead now with its plans to modernize and upgrade its short-range nuclear weapons.

These words have upset civil servants who, in line with the wishes of the White House and other governments, have already crafted a final communique for the two-day summit that tries to avoid the issue.

Somewhat Nerve-Racking

And they seem to indicate that France’s new attention to NATO may prove somewhat nerve-racking to some governments. Mitterrand will be the first French president to attend a summit of NATO since President Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO’s military command in 1966.

Both President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain favor modernization but have evidently agreed not to press the matter out of deference to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Kohl faces a German public that wants these weapons abolished out of fear that they would be used only on German soil.

But Mitterrand has not been in a mood to let the matter rest. He told U.S. News & World Report, in an interview released by his office Monday: “When, for the first time since World War II, the two blocs have started up a process of disarmament, it would be paradoxical and inopportune to overarm.”

Fit Into Philosophy

In Paris, there is a good deal of suspicion that Mitterrand’s comments may have as much to do with French politics as with NATO politics. Mitterrand, a Socialist, is expected to announce his candidacy for reelection in a few weeks. Under the French constitution, the president has the main responsibility for defense, and all Mitterrand’s talk about nuclear weapons tends to push Premier Jacques Chirac, a conservative who already has announced his candidacy, into the background.

But Mitterrand’s pronouncements fit logically into the philosophy of French nuclear policy.

Many people in the world fret about the immorality of nuclear weapons, but not the French. To French officials, writers and philosophers, nuclear weapons are moral, for they have prevented war in Europe for more than 40 years.

France is the most hawkish country in Europe on nuclear defense and the most distrustful of the historic Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty signed by President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Washington last December.

Many French officials look on the Reykjavik, Iceland, summit in October, 1986, as a success because it failed and the Washington summit as a threat because it succeeded. In a front-page cartoon during the Washington summit, the conservative Paris newspaper Le Figaro showed a plaintive woman labeled “Europe” looking on from afar while Reagan and Gorbachev kissed. “She was not invited to the kissing party,” the caption read, “but she got taken by proxy just the same.”

Such views may receive their most significant hearing at this week’s summit. The French have not played a prominent role at such meetings for more than 20 years.

Infuriated by De Gaulle

The United States and other Western allies were infuriated by De Gaulle’s 1966 withdrawal of all French troops and arms from the military command of NATO and the closing of the NATO headquarters in France. Since then, France, which remained on the political councils of NATO, has tended to treat the organization as a kind of lackluster, lower-class club, not worthy of much attention, and no president of France has bothered to show up at any NATO summit conference.

But that will change with Mitterrand’s arrival for this summit. This break with the practice of two decades comes at a time of a great change in perception. Although still independent of NATO’s military command, France is no longer looked on as odd man out in Europe. In the last few years, French analysts have set down probably the most coherent and influential philosophy of nuclear defense in Europe. And the French press expects Mitterrand to make a significant statement on nuclear policy while here.

Many European leaders, who sound less hawkish in public, agree with many of the French arguments privately but moderate their public pronouncements because of strong peace and disarmament movements at home. Mitterrand’s words here in Brussels will be followed closely.

Although nowhere near the league of the nuclear superpowers, France regards its military force as the third most powerful in the world. French launchers, submarines and planes can fire 300 nuclear warheads, two-thirds of them with enough range to reach the Soviet Union. France, like Britain, is not a party to the U.S.--Soviet INF treaty and is thus under no obligation to dismantle its missiles.

De Gaulle created the separate French nuclear force, motivated partly by the mystique of French nationalism and partly by a conviction that the United States would never fire its nuclear weapons and thus risk its own destruction just to save Western Europe from a Soviet invasion. The idea of French nuclear power is now enormously popular in France. There is no real peace and disarmament movement. Only a handful of French ever take to the streets to demonstrate for disarmament.

Two assumptions underlie French nuclear policy. The first is that the existence of nuclear weapons, on balance, have actually helped mankind. Millions died in wars on European soil this century before the nuclear era, but none since.

“Nuclear weapons have forced peace upon us,” wrote Philippe Forget, a French philosopher, in a recent article. Rejecting all arguments about the immorality of nuclear deterrence, Forget said that “the aggressor, in a classic war, can always hope for victory. The punishment that he may suffer is not evident to him. The sanction of a traditional war has a very weak preventive value.”

On the other hand, Forget continued, the fear of nuclear punishment has halted the advance of armed aggression in Europe.

Paradoxical Result

“The irrationality of nuclear conflict,” he concluded, “paradoxically opens the way to a rationalization of international relations.”

The second assumption is that the long-range aim of Soviet policy, even under Gorbachev, is a Europe that falls more and more under Moscow’s influence. There are no fancy scenarios in France about ideas and trade from the West gradually loosening the Soviet grip on the East in a denuclearized, peaceful Europe. The French scenarios are just the opposite.

“The long-range aim of the Soviet policy,” according to Pierre Lellouche, a deputy director of the French Institute of International Relations, “is to foster a denuclearized, neutralist Europe that is cut off from the United States and, moreover, that assures the Soviet Union the technology and resources it needs for modernization.”