The multilateral force

Abstract

T HE control of nuclear strategy has presented a problem for the Western allies with which they have been aittempting to grapple, by fits and starts, ever since the advent of the missile age made final nonsense of any simple policy -of massive strategic action in response to any form of aggression in Europe. Many factors and arguments have been thrown int-o the debate as to whether and how the European allies should share with the United States the responsibility for strategic decisions whose implementation still depends overwhelmingly on American owned and based weapons: they have included -the revived economic strength and potential political strength of Western Europe; the danger that the nuclear weapons programmes of Britain and France may lead -to imitation on the part of the Federal German Republic; the problem of the credibility of the American response to a serious attack on Europe in the light of the growing vulnerability of her own civilisation; the military requirement to offset by some means the growing Soviet MRBM threat to Europe; the need to share the burdens of strategic deterrence more equitably between the United States and her European allies. Out of these debates, official and non-official, three possible courses of action for the alliance began to emerge in the early 1960s. The first was to recognise that NATO is a coalition of sovereign states (even though it 'has a standby international command system for certain kinds of forces), and to accept the fact that the principal nations in it are not prepared to delegate major decision's of policy, let alone of peace and war, to each other or Ito a central system. This 'is the so-called multinational approach, and those who have advocated it believe that the central problems, of confidence and co-ordination could be met by a reorganisation of the machinery of NATO, both to give those responsible for civil policy a greater control over military action and to give the European allies a more constructive relationship to American planning. Certainly a permanent solution involves bringing more and more national nuclear forces within the scrutiny and authority of the alliance itself, working towards a 'distant day when the whole of the American strategic force as well as the British and French forces are within the system.