A European View: Security Not Dependent on Tanks : NATO: America and Europe appear to be at odds over continental security. Europe seeks a consensus that use of military force is inconceivable.

Apotentially calamitous rift between American and European thinking on the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is developing. Several visiting U.S. officials have said, in effect: “We must get a unified Germany into NATO--and be done with it.”

What they mean is that the Kremlin’s escalating difficulties should be exploited and the alliance’s military component strengthened. The worry here is that these assertions reflect State Department policy.

The preferred policy in Europe is exactly the opposite. Europeans have witnessed the crisis of communism in the East. They have followed the agony of the Communist parties in Western Europe. The sense of relief they now feel as a result of the changes coming out of 1989 is well justified: Europeans have lived with the Iron Curtain for decades.

In all the media analysis of the emerging situation, however, there is a fundamental omission. NATO’s conventional forces in Central Europe are now superior to the Warsaw Pact’s. This advantage is so recent and surprising that it seems incredible.

Assuming that the Bush-Gorbachev agreement to limit the number of American and Soviet soldiers, respectively, in Central Europe to 195,000 is enshrined in a treaty, NATO troop strength will be: 195,000 Americans, 400,000 West Germans, 70,000 British, 50,000 French and roughly 12,000 Belgians, Dutch and Canadians. Facing them will be the 195,000 Soviets troops. The armies of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary follow the orders of center-right or Christian Democratic governments, hardly knee-jerk communist allies.

The Vienna negotiations to reduce conventional forces, moreover, aim to severely deprive those and other Soviet soldiers up to the Urals of military hardware. Under such restraints, who could honestly expect a sudden Soviet conventional attack? How could NATO forces be surprised when the nearly signature-ready Vienna Protocols identify more than 140,000 pieces of offensive military equipment, from the Atlantic to the Urals, subject to international verification and inspection?

The Soviets, to be sure, will have their huge arsenal of more than 25,000 nuclear warheads. But nobody can foresee the circumstances in which such an arsenal would be used, even if unrest spreads throughout the Soviet Union and Mikhail S. Gorbachev is overthrown. This is precisely the reason why the Soviet leader should not be faced with such challenges as a militarily stronger NATO.

On this side of the Atlantic, more and more people think that “security” should be divorced from a balance of military power. Rather, it should be hinged to a consensus that military power is irrelevant. This belief is reflected in the views of several West European leaders who have stressed--most recently during the NATO meeting in Brussels on May 3--that the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, not NATO, is the best vehicle for maintaining security on the Continent.

At the heart of European thinking is the idea of “security areas,” a geographical zone in which people share loyalty to the principles of democracy, the renunciation of the military force, peaceful settlement of disputes and cooperation. Most of the 35 member states of the conference might eventually form a “security area.”

Is this utopia?

Not at all. Such a “security area” already exists in Western Europe--the European Community. That one of its 12 members would use military force against another is inconceivable. Thus, military force is irrelevant. The Scandinavian states certainly are another example of the triumph of this concept of security. The East European nations, now liberated from communism and adopting the principles and practices of democratic countries, may be the next converts.

Although the Soviet military threat to Western Europe has, for all practical purposes, disappeared, it certainly would require a large dose of optimism to conceive of the “security area” including the Soviet Union, at least in the near future. In calling for a NATO summit meeting in June “to consider the future political mission of the alliance,” President Bush rightly warned that “our enemy today is uncertainty and instability.”

Since both enemies are likely to come from the East, the alliance, with a unified Germany as a member, should be kept alive. Yet the Soviets should receive assurances that the ultimate goal is not a militarily stronger NATO but a more “secure” Continent.