Tokugawa Japan & NATO by Christopher Portosa Stevens

Author:Christopher Portosa Stevens [Portosa Stevens, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-05-27T22:00:00+00:00

The Contentious Politics of

Arms Control in NATO

In hindsight, it might appear unsurprising that the US, the dominant member of NATO, ultimately embraced the view that it should retain executive authority and custodial control over NATO nuclear weapons, and that the capacity for nuclear deterrence should be given but not shared across NATO. However, the US gave serious consideration and support to increased burden sharing within NATO, including plans for nuclear sharing between NATO members. Instead of being imposed from above, US control over nuclear weapons – and the emergence of NATO as a means of preventing nuclear proliferation – occurred through a contentious process of political jockeying amongst NATO members. This process is itself an expression of the plural and quasi-federal structure of NATO: NATO members are sovereign, independent states with independent internal domestic politics, but the resulting policies of NATO military and security agreements, especially over nuclear weapons, resembles in practice a federal or quasi-federal structure. Greater burden sharing regarding the control of nuclear weapons within NATO did not occur because the UK successfully advocated continued US control over NATO nuclear weapons, and because the strategic communities of the US and continental European members of NATO could not initially agree on the strategic use and significance of nuclear weaponry (although over time, NATO members, including France, moved closer to the US’s views).

Instead of NATO emerging as a way of preventing the proliferation of wholly independent nuclear arsenals across NATO member states, there was serious consideration given to increasing burden sharing across NATO member governments, including several attempts to create nuclear sharing structures within the framework of NATO and also outside of it (see Freedman 1981: 327-9; Gregory 1996: 20-25; Young 2003). In the late 1950s a plan known as the European Deterrent Group (EDG) called for a nuclear sharing agreement independent of the arsenals of the US or the UK, which would have consisted of Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany. But it was unclear how this plan would actually work, and it also appeared to threaten US support of Europe and the existence of NATO. In part as a response to this plan, other ideas garnered more serious consideration in the early 1960s, particularly the Multilateral Force (MLF), and also a counter proposal to the MLF developed by the British government, the “Atlantic Nuclear Force” (ANF).

The MLF proposal called for the command and control of nuclear weapons to be shared relatively equally across all NATO countries, or perhaps a substantial subset of them. At least one US navy ship, the USS Claude V. Ricketts, “was crewed by British, Dutch, Greek, Italian, Turkish, US and West German officers” as a preliminary test for the project’s future implementation (Gregory 1996: 25). But there was probably only one enduring legacy of the idea: British ballistic missile submarines were assigned to NATO (Gregory 1996: 25). Like the NATO alliance of which it was a part, the MLF had no independent base of military support apart from its member polities;

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