West Germany is at odds with NATO. The air is thick with recriminations. There is talk of a "soul mis-match" between Bonn and the rest of the Alliance. Three years ago Chancellor Kohl had to be arm-twisted into accepting the second "zero" of the INF agreement. Now he is moving rapidly in the direction of a third zero, egged on by his Free Democrat coalition partner and foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who appears more concerned with modernizing Western attitudes toward Gorbachev than with modernizing NATO's aging, West German-based, short-range Lance missiles.
Superficially, a third "zero" may seem a good deal. It would equalize a weapons category where the Warsaw Pact has a 1,400-100 advantage in launchers and a 6,000-700 advantage in missiles. But the downside is that it pushes a trend toward further zeros, which could eventuate in the denuclearization of Western Europe, before conventional asymmetries have been corrected. If the case is accepted that nuclear weapons have kept the peace, then the corollary that getting rid of them, in the wrong circumstances, makes the world safe for conventional war has to be pondered. Moscow is presently baiting the trail to a third zero, which has been made still more exciting by Gorbachev's latest offer of unilateral reductions in this category.
The Alliance position is that the Lance missiles must be retained and upgraded; if not, unilateral denuclearization will occur by default. London and Washington want it done soon. Kohl first said "yes." Now he says "sometime." It is feared that he really means "never." And as he prevaricates, his options are being foreclosed, for his foreign minister is telling the world that the weapons are unnecessary, and opinion-makers among his fellow Germans proclaim them a positive menace.
Ignoring all NATO pledges about common security and shared risk, their argument is that the presence of Lance missiles on German soil exposes the Federal Republic to a "singular" level of risk because these missiles are stationed in Germany and nowhere else, and because their range limits them to German targets. As they see it, these NATO missiles (modernized or not) put Germans in double jeopardy, for they are set to obliterate the Germans in the East, while Soviet ones in the East are set to return the compliment to Germans in the West. The wail from Germans on both sides is: "the shorter the range the deader the Germans."
The shift in Kohl's position on the nuclear question threatens to knock a hole in NATO strategy, which is based on the principle of "forward defense." This strategy was adopted in 1967 to allay Bonn's anxieties that in the event of war the badly outnumbered NATO forces would give ground to buy time, and thus expose the Federal Republic to Soviet occupation. The viability of "forward defense," however, depends on NATO having the nuclear means to nullify superior Soviet numbers. If the present short-range systems go down the tubes like the intermediate ones, scrapped under the terms of the Reagan-Gorbachev agreement, then General Galvin is in something of a fix.
The question that is taxing observers is, why is Bonn, formerly a cornerstone of the Alliance and resolute in its commitment to nuclear defense, going this way?
The truth is complex, but the short answer, and a large part of the truth, is that Chancellor Kohl is facing a
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