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Conventional Defense and European Security
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17398 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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1 / 1990 |
2,919 Words |
| Author
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Jed C. Snyder
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In February 1952, the leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) met in Lisbon to establish alliance defense needs for Europe. NATO ministers adopted a report that established force goals of 50 ready allied divisions and 4,000 aircraft. These goals were never met. Shortly thereafter, American defense planners determined that the alliance required 15,000 tactical nuclear weapons to erect a credible in-theater nuclear force to deter aggression by vastly superior Soviet forces deployed in areas adjacent to NATO territory. Fewer than half than number were ever deployed.
The Lisbon model of establishing prudent defense goals and then promptly abandoning them because they appear to politically contentious characterizes the alliance's approach to conventional defense over 40 years. NATO is in danger of repeating this practice as it enters the next rounds of conventional force talks in Vienna. "Helping Gorbachev" seems to be NATO's prime objective, rather than ensuring against the possibility that if his vision of a "common European house" fails to materialize, the alliance is not left with a conventional force posture that invites Soviet pressure.
The Lisbon goals, as well as a number of deployment decisions that followed, established a grim precedent early in alliance history that was adhered to often. At Montebello, Canada, in October 1983, NATO ministers met to determine how to modernize their theater nuclear forces in the wake of an unprecedented Soviet nuclear buildup. Decisions to upgrade the shorter-range component of NATO's deterrent were taken, but the alliance's refusal to implement the decisions (due principally to an anemic government in Bonn) doomed any meaningful modernization.
The Montebello meeting was prompted by allied concern that the enormous, decade-long Soviet buildup of conventional and nuclear forces had made a mockery of the NATO deterrent. Alliance planners had hoped that the 1979 "dual-track" decision to deploy Pershing II ballistic missiles and ground-launched cruise missiles in Western Europe would fill a gap between a threadbare conventional allied force and the rapidly eroding credibility of the American guarantee to protect Europe's integrity with its own atrophic nuclear deterrent. To NATO's great credit, the alliance was able to carry through with the INF deployment, which was a political success of some magnitude. Unfortunately, the deployment was short-lived and ultimately was the victim of the Reagan administration-inspired "zero-zero" solution. As soon as the weapons were in place, a 1987 treaty eliminated all intermediate-range nuclear forces. The INF Treaty made it politically impossible to proceed with any meaningful nuclear modernization, and as a result the delay in implementing the Montebello decisions would now be indefinite.
The Lisbon and Montebello meetings have become metaphors for NATO's inability to set and meet prudent goals for European conventional defense. The West's lack of success in meeting its planning goals, however, was never regarded by NATO's leaders as a debilitating weakness, since it was assumed that the power of American strategic nuclear weapons served as the ultimate deterrent to Soviet aggression globally, and therefore, as long as the U.S. advantage in intercontinental weapons was retained, NATO could afford to fudge its conventional defense requirements.
The shriveling of that advantage, however, and the removal of the INF weapons,
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