Given the uncertain fate of arms control today, and growing concerns about the ability of the United States to deter potentially two-peer nuclear weapons states, Susan Colbourn’s book on the Euromissile debate, deployment, and elimination is important, essential, and timely. Stephan Kieninger calls it “an outstanding achievement.” James Cameron agrees it is “an outstanding book…it should become the go-to text for scholars of this topic and a necessary one for those working on the US-Soviet arms race, arms control, and the Cold War’s final decade.” He is particularly impressed by the breadth of Colbourn’s research in government, private, non-governmental organization (NGO), and international organization archives across seven countries. Marilena Gala describes it as “a persuasive reconstruction of about two decades of NATO history,” and is impressed by “the inclusion of a wealth of essays and newspapers articles published at the time of the events described in the book…almost plunging the reader into the atmosphere of those years.”
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 15-9
Susan Colbourn, Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781501766022
16 October 2023 |PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt15-9 | Website: rjissf.org
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Thomas Maddux
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan
Contents
Introduction by James Goldgeier, American University. 2
Review by James Cameron, University of Oslo. 5
Review by Stephanie Freeman, Mississippi State University. 8
Review by Marilena Gala, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italy. 12
Review by Stephan Kieninger, Global Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Center. 16
Response by Susan Colbourn, Duke University. 20
Introduction by James Goldgeier, American University
Given the uncertain fate of arms control today, and growing concerns about the ability of the United States to deter potentially two-peer nuclear weapons states, Susan Colbourn’s book on the Euromissile debate, deployment, and elimination is important, essential, and timely. Stephan Kieninger calls it “an outstanding achievement.” James Cameron agrees it is “an outstanding book…it should become the go-to text for scholars of this topic and a necessary one for those working on the US-Soviet arms race, arms control, and the Cold War’s final decade.” He is particularly impressed by the breadth of Colbourn’s research in government, private, non-governmental organization (NGO), and international organization archives across seven countries. Marilena Gala describes it as “a persuasive reconstruction of about two decades of NATO history,” and is impressed by “the inclusion of a wealth of essays and newspapers articles published at the time of the events described in the book…almost plunging the reader into the atmosphere of those years.”
What is perhaps most striking about the Euromissiles saga is that what appears to be a perfect policy outcome was in fact highly controversial. The Soviet Union deployed SS-20 missiles, and NATO responded with intermediate-range deployments coupled with calls to eliminate the entire class of missiles. The Western strategy worked, and President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed a treaty eliminating those weapons. It is hard to imagine a better playbook. As Colbourn shows, however, Reagan was excoriated by members of his own party for this arms control agreement. In fact, in November 1985, Congressman Newt Gingrich (R-GA) got so worked up about the first meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev, he called it “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.” Conservative comparisons of Reagan/Chamberlain and Gorbachev/Hitler continued when the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was announced two years later.[1]
Part of the reason for this ambivalence and even opposition to a remarkable arms control agreement, rather than the thunderous applause that seems more fitting, is due to the fact that the biggest proponents within the Reagan administration supported the so-called “Zero Option” at the start: They assumed that there was zero chance that the Soviets would accept the deal, and that the Europeans would thus have to accept American intermediate-range missile deployments. As Cameron notes, some allied officials and leaders were not happy either. West German defense minister Manfred Wörner worried that his country would be more vulnerable to Soviet shorter-range weapons systems, and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher feared that the Reagan administration sought the continent’s denuclearization, thereby in her view undermining nuclear deterrence. Neither the anti-arms control individuals who proposed the elimination of these weapons in the belief that this would never happen, nor the pro-arms control crowd that worried that the Zero Option was a publicity stunt, had enough imagination to believe that the deployments could lead to a treaty banning this entire class of weapons.
In her review, Stephanie Freeman cites the importance of Colbourn’s vast archival research across seven NATO countries in showing that the alliance struggled mightily with decisions on the Euromissiles throughout the process. She lauds Colbourn for writing “the first monograph that offers a comprehensive look at the entire Euromissiles episode from NATO’s perspective.” Freeman suggests, however, that the book is overly focused on elite policymakers and does not to develop a full picture of the European and American anti-nuclear movements.[2]
In her response, Colbourn replies to questions raised not only about her focus on elites, but also her assessment of the West German role, her understanding of Reagan’s views, the implications of this history for thinking about the future of arms control, and whether or not NATO really could have come undone by the Euromissiles. Her response reminds us of the uncertainties of history and the role that individual leaders can play in shaping the future amidst the constraints they face at home and abroad.
As part of the general unraveling of arms control between Russia and the United States in recent years, Russian violations of the INF Treaty led to President Donald Trump’s decision to walk away from the agreement that Gorbachev and Reagan signed. Meanwhile, NATO appears more unified than ever in its response to the Russian aggression against Ukraine. For those looking for background on both arms control and alliance deliberations, Colbourn’s book is a great place to start.
Contributors:
Susan Colbourn is Associate Director of the Program in American Grand Strategy at Duke University. A diplomatic and international historian, she is the author of Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO (Cornell University Press, 2022)
James Goldgeier is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a Professor of International Relations at the School of International Service at American University, where he served as Dean from 2011–2017. He has held appointments or fellowships at the Library of Congress, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Wilson Center, the German Marshall Fund, the Hoover Institution, the State Department, and the National Security Council staff. He serves as a co-editor for the Oxford University Press Bridging the Gap book series. His most recent books are Evaluating NATO Enlargement: From Cold War Victory to the Russia-Ukraine War (co-edited with Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson; Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and Foreign Policy Careers for PhDs: A Practical Guide to a World of Possibilities (co-authored with Tamara Cofman Wittes; Georgetown University Press, 2023).
James Cameron (PhD, University of Cambridge) is a postdoctoral fellow in the Oslo Nuclear Project in the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo. He is the author of The Double Game: The Demise of America’s First Missile Defense System and the Rise of Strategic Arms Limitation (Oxford University Press, 2018). He is currently working on a history of arms control, from the nineteenth century to the present.
Stephanie Freeman is Assistant Professor of History at Mississippi State University. She is the author of Dreams for a Decade: International Nuclear Abolitionism and the End of the Cold War (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).
Marilena Gala is Associate Professor of the History of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of Roma Tre. Her research interests include the history of transatlantic relations, the history of nuclear power and the arms control process and the more general evolution of international security policy. She is a member of the advisory board of the Young Women and Next Generation Initiative of the EU Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Consortium, and, since its inception in 2011, has been one of the instructors of the Nuclear Boot Camp—a summer school created as part of the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project funded by the Carnegie Foundation.
Stephan Kieninger is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the author of two books on US Cold War foreign policy and European security: The Diplomacy of Détente: Cooperative Security Policies from Helmut Schmidt to George Shultz (Routledge, 2018) and Dynamic Détente: The United States and Europe, 1964–1975 (Lexington, 2016). He is currently working on a new book project, a study on Strobe Talbott and the rise of the post-Cold War order based on Talbott’s personal papers and newly declassified archival materials. Kieninger received his PhD from Mannheim University in 2011. Formerly, he was a Wilson Fellow, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS, a fellow at the Berlin Center for Cold War Studies, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution’s Archives, and a senior researcher at the Federal German Archives.
Review by James Cameron, University of Oslo
Susan Colbourn’s Euromissiles is an outstanding book. Pulling together governmental and non-governmental archival research from across the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Colbourn weaves an extremely compelling narrative that explains the multifaceted origins, course, and denouement of the 1975–1987 Euromissile Crisis. As such, it should become the go-to text for scholars of this topic, and a necessary one for those working on the US-Soviet arms race, arms control, and the Cold War’s final decade.
The breadth of Colbourn’s research is extremely impressive, spanning governmental, personal, non-governmental organizations’ (NGO), and international organizations’ archives in Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom. This multi-archival scope provides the basis for an approach that combines the best of international and transnational approaches—a method that is often advocated but less commonly achieved, especially by a single scholar.
Divided into three broad sections, “Decide,” “Deploy,” and “Destroy,” Colbourn’s book contributes to the debate on the Euromissiles Crisis in several ways.[3] In “Decide,” she demonstrates that the origins of the crisis stretch back to the late 1960s. The 1967 Harmel Report on the future of NATO recommended the alliance’s dual pursuit of defense and détente, and Colbourn demonstrates how complex this task became. West European members of NATO broadly welcomed US-Soviet détente through strategic arms control as a respite from the Cold War, yet at the same time became nervous that superpower parity in strategic-range missile launchers that was encoded by the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) would “undercut earlier promises that superiority would provide sufficient firepower to deter the Soviet Union” (45).
Meanwhile, Mutual Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) talks, which were focused on addressing the NATO-Warsaw Pact military balance in Europe, went nowhere. Negotiations on a successor to the Interim Agreement, SALT II, dragged on for years and ultimately did nothing but codify superpowers’ existing plans. The SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), armed with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), broke onto the scene in 1974–75, supercharging European anxieties about the credibility of the US nuclear guarantee. Colbourn shows that under these conditions, West German policymakers began to talk of a “Eurostrategic balance,” (49), thus casting doubt on the contention that existing US strategic and theater forces were sufficient to deter the Soviet Union.
In a fascinating chapter, Colbourn shows how the Carter administration’s abortive attempts to deploy the neutron bomb to Western Europe provided both a template and a cautionary tale for the later Dual-Track Decision on intermediate-range forces. Like the Dual-Track Decision, the US deployment of the neutron bomb as a counter to the SS-20 was intended to be combined with a proposal to eliminate both systems. However, the strength of European domestic opposition, anxieties from most NATO governments, and US president Jimmy Carter’s own doubts meant that the US president cancelled the deployment at the last moment, generating significant ill will from those governments that had actively backed the decision and further exacerbating the question of US credibility.
Spurred by the neutron bomb debacle, the Dual-Track Decision was more politically adept, with wider consultation and greater buy-in from more NATO states, which also helped to obscure the centrality of West German anxieties and preferences in shaping the deployment of intermediate-range forces to counter the SS-20. Yet Colbourn shows how politics trumped any kind of military necessity. The timeline for deployment was drawn out to allow time for arms control negotiations. The number of 572 warheads was essentially a “Goldilocks figure,” neither “too high [n]or too low” (93). The mix of land-based systems also struck a balance between the need that the new deployment be a “visible” reminder of the US guarantee to Europe, but without provoking too much local opposition. Ground-launched cruise missiles were “slow” and therefore it could be argued that they were not “a first-strike weapon,” while the Pershing II IRBMs “could be billed as a routine upgrade” (94).
Suffice to say that many West Europeans were not reassured by the deployment’s finer technical details. Prospective deployment of Gryphon ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) and Pershing II’s set off a wave of antinuclear protests that were practically unequalled during the Cold War, encompassing a broad swathe of different groups. Through several telling anecdotes, Colbourn does a great job of highlighting the “absurdity of the situation” (112) in which thousands of West Europeans turned out to protest weapons that were supposedly there to keep them safe. As one West German antinuclear activist put it when observing the heavy security presence during US president Ronald Reagan’s 1982 visit, “the police were ‘protecting the protector from those he was protecting’” (112).
Colbourn makes it clear that these protests had a considerable impact on the policies of both East and West states. NATO’s proposed deployment of new theater-range nuclear forces set off a far-reaching debate over the wisdom of the alliance’s nuclear posture, notably “that security could be best preserved through the acquisition of weapons that could unleash untold destruction” (155). Activists believed that the Reagan administration’s proposal for a “Zero Option” under which all INF missiles would be eliminated was an unserious position transparently designed to derail arms control talks. They also worked for “détente from below” (169) by attempting to reach out to the fractured, suppressed, and compromised peace movement on the other side of the Iron Curtain. “The long lag time between decision and deployment,” which was designed to make the decision more palatable by allowing time for talks, provided ample opportunity for several rounds of protests and growing pressure on European NATO governments (194).
Observing all of this, Moscow believed that it could hold fast to its superficially attractive but uncompromising arms control proposals in the hope that NATO and the United States would break first. Yet the tide began to turn in late 1983. Moscow overreached with its walkout from US-Soviet negotiations in response to the first INF deployments. Now the onus was on the Soviet Union to reengage, and in a year it became clear that “Moscow’s position was simply untenable” (215). The early attempts of the new Soviet general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, to dress old Soviet objectives up in new clothes at the US-Soviet Nuclear and Space Talks failed.
Soviet concessions came quickly in 1987, with Gorbachev first agreeing first to de-link the question of INF from strategic arms talks, then to unprecedented and intrusive verification measures, and then finally to accept the “double zero” in Europe, and then a “global zero” that eliminated all US and Soviet ground-launched intermediate-range systems. By December of that year, Reagan and Gorbachev signed a deal that was in almost complete alignment with the United States’ professed negotiation objectives. As Colbourn notes, the INF Treaty was “asymmetrical” in several ways: the USSR destroyed 1,000 more missiles than the United States, while leaving Washington’s superiority in air- and sea-launched cruise missiles “unaffected” (263).
Yet sometimes, one can have too much of a good thing. As in the 1970s, what appeared to be a step forward for US-Soviet détente created new problems for NATO. The United States and its allies were not entirely happy that Gorbachev had adopted their position wholesale. Behind the scenes, West German defense minister Manfred Wörner complained that double zero would place the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) “in the worst of all worlds” (232) by leaving it exposed to Moscow’s enormous arsenal of shorter-range systems. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who was a staunch believer in nuclear deterrence, worried that the Reagan administration was pushing toward the opposition Labour Party’s goal of “the denuclearization of Europe” (244).
In the book’s final chapter, Colbourn reminds the reader that the path from the INF Treaty to the end of the Cold War was in no way clear to policymakers at the time. With Soviet power in Eastern Europe apparently still very much intact in 1988, the treaty “unraveled years of work” by West German leaders to reduce NATO’s “reliance on short-range, tactical, and battlefield nuclear weapons—the weapons most likely to destroy their homeland” (246). Caught between the general euphoria over nuclear reductions and the continued need for extended deterrence, NATO procrastinated over the pressing need to modernize or retire its short-range forces. The precipitous collapse of pro-Soviet regimes in Eastern Europe pulled NATO’s chestnuts out of the fire.
In August 2019, in response to Russia’s testing and deployment of the 9M729 ground-launched cruise missile in violation of the treaty, the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the agreement. The demise of the INF Treaty provides a neat, if unfortunate, conclusion to Colbourn’s book. Her expertly marshalled narrative makes several important points that today’s policymakers should consider in today’s post-INF world.
First, and most obviously, the apparent ease with which NATO countered and then dispensed with the threat post by Soviet INF deployment is entirely the product of hindsight. Those advocating a symmetrical response to the Russian Federation’s deployment of the INF-range nuclear-capable 9M729 ground-launched cruise missile would do well to consult Colbourn’s book to understand how such moves can do as much—perhaps more—to exacerbate the dilemmas of extended deterrence in a large multinational alliance than they can do to solve them. Even if the Euromissiles did not quite “nearly destroy NATO,” they certainly, as Colbourn concludes, “cast doubt on the very foundations of the transatlantic bargain” (267) in ways that today’s policymakers would do best to avoid.
Secondly, Colbourn’s book highlights the importance of personality—and particularly that of Gorbachev—in the ultimately successful denouement of the INF issue. Without Gorbachev’s extreme flexibility, delinking INF talks from negotiations on strategic offensive and space weapons, acceptance of the Zero Option, and groundbreaking verification measures to ensure compliance with an agreement, the INF Treaty would not have happened, and the INF issue could have rumbled on as a strong and persistent headache in transatlantic relations.
Today’s situation could not be more different: Russian president Vladimir Putin, and the Russian elite more generally, believe that Gorbachev sold out the Soviet Union, including by making huge concessions at the arms control talks with the United States. We should not expect that any countervailing nuclear deployments would lead to a change to Russian negotiating positions on the now-frozen US-Russia strategic stability discussions of the type that Gorbachev forced through in the 1980s. Instead, we should be prepared to live with the intensified security dilemma and resulting strains that any counter-deployment would create. So far, NATO has shied away from suggestions that it should deploy new nuclear weapons in response to 9M729. If today’s leaders read Colbourn’s book, they should be even more convinced of the wisdom of this course.
Review by Stephanie Freeman, Mississippi State University
In reflecting on the Cold War’s endgame, Western leaders have often emphasized the importance of NATO’s policy on Euromissiles. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl credited the NATO Dual-Track Decision with paving the way for the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification by redressing Soviet nuclear advantages in Europe.[4] US Secretary of State George Shultz declared that the deployment of US Pershing II missiles in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1983 was “the turning point in the Cold War,” which demonstrated NATO’s resolve and prompted the Soviet Union to improve relations with the United States.[5] These statements suggest that a unified Atlantic Alliance pursued a straightforward course of action that was destined to end the Cold War on terms favorable to the West. In Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO, Susan Colbourn draws on newly declassified material from across the alliance to underscore the contingency of the Euromissiles episode.
Colbourn’s book is “a transatlantic history of the Euromissiles,” which are alternatively known as theater nuclear forces (TNF) or intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) (3). Colbourn focuses on NATO’s reactions to the Soviet deployment of SS-20 missiles, which began in the mid-1970s, and the alliance’s “successive decisions to field, deploy, and destroy” US Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles (3). The first part of the book illuminates NATO’s winding road to the Dual-Track Decision in December 1979. The first track of this decision called for the deployment of 108 US Pershing II missiles and 464 US ground-launched cruise missiles in Belgium, Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. The second track proposed US-Soviet negotiations on both sides’ INF. In the second part of the book, Colbourn discusses the rise of mass anti-nuclear movements in Western Europe and the United States, which mobilized against the planned Euromissile deployments. She traces NATO’s implementation of the Dual-Track Decision amid this public outcry, culminating in the arrival of US missiles in Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Italy in November 1983 after the INF negotiations failed to produce an agreement. The book’s final section examines the path to the 1987 INF Treaty, which US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed just four years after the Soviets broke off INF negotiations following the start of US Pershing II and cruise deployments. The INF Treaty eliminated US and Soviet land-based INF missiles. Colbourn concludes this section with a chapter that considers “the political fallout from the INF Treaty,” namely NATO’s contentious debate over the future of its short-range nuclear forces, which the INF agreement did not cover (197).
Drawing on extensive archival research in seven NATO member states, Colbourn convincingly demonstrates that none of the decisions related to the Euromissiles were easy for the alliance. Instead, they spotlighted old “fault lines” within NATO, namely “tensions between détente with and deterrence of the Soviet Union; the paradox of guaranteeing Western Europe’s security with weapons that would destroy the continent (and likely much more of the planet); and the delicate balancing act of maintaining a security system that constrained the Federal Republic’s power without alienating the West Germans” (262). In fact, Colbourn argues that “the debate over the Euromissiles nearly destroyed NATO” (262).
Colbourn credits “the Warsaw Pact’s troubles” with ending this debate before it tore NATO apart (260). She shows that the Euromissile issue continued to beleaguer the alliance even after the conclusion of the 1987 INF Treaty. The destruction of US Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles under the INF Treaty heightened the “strategic, political, and psychological significance” of the remaining short-range nuclear forces in Europe (241). With the elimination of US land-based INF missiles, short-range nuclear forces became even more important to NATO’s strategy of flexible response. Yet the alliance was bitterly divided over the planned modernization of these short-range forces and the desirability of negotiations to reduce these weapons. Although Alliance members worked to devise a compromise on these issues at the NATO summit in May 1989, it was the dramatic East European revolutions that ultimately resolved the alliance’s dilemma over short-range forces. The fall of Communist regimes across Eastern Europe undermined the rationale for deploying modernized short-range nuclear forces aimed at Eastern bloc targets. As Colbourn contends, “what saved the Atlantic Alliance was not the wisdom of its policies nor the strength of its arguments, but the fact that the [Warsaw] pact’s problems turned out to be even more acute” (260).
Colbourn provides the most complete account of NATO’s role in the Euromissiles episode to date. Other historians have used newly available archival material to consider a specific phase of the Euromissiles crisis or the role that an individual country played in the affair.[6] Colbourn, however, has written the first monograph that offers a comprehensive look at the entire Euromissiles episode from NATO’s perspective. By highlighting NATO’s fragility during the Euromissiles affair and Gorbachev’s central role in facilitating the 1987 INF Treaty, Colbourn also offers a compelling corrective to triumphalist accounts of the end of the Cold War.[7]
Beginning her analysis in the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and ending with the 1990 NATO summit in London, Colbourn makes a persuasive case for taking a long view of the history of the Euromissiles. She demonstrates that the Soviet deployment of SS-20 missiles, which began in the mid-1970s, exacerbated already existing European concerns about the credibility of US extended deterrence. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union embarked on a nuclear build-up, enabling it to approach nuclear parity with the United States in the late 1960s. Superpower parity upended the notion that US strategic nuclear superiority would deter a Soviet attack on Western Europe. In the face of superpower parity, West European officials feared that the United States might be disinclined to use US strategic missiles based in the United States in defense of Western Europe. Perhaps the Americans would choose to keep a conflict limited to Europe rather than use strategic weapons that risked Soviet retaliation against the American homeland. This heightened West European policymakers’ concerns about Soviet medium-range missiles aimed at their countries—years before the Soviets began deploying SS-20s.
In presenting a new periodization of the Euromissiles episode, Colbourn also extends the story beyond the conclusion of the 1987 INF Treaty. As noted earlier, she shows that this agreement contributed to a bitter debate within NATO over the future of short-range nuclear forces. The 1989 East European revolutions finally brought this debate to a close. At the 1990 NATO summit in London, “flexible response was tossed onto the ash-heap of history, and with it went the logic that underpinned any modernization of NATO’s short-range nuclear forces” (259).
Yet Colbourn’s book does not fulfill the promise set forth in the introduction to present an integrated “diplomatic, political, social, and cultural history of the Euromissiles” (4). Elite policymakers dominate the narrative, and she provides a much richer analysis of government officials’ views and policies regarding the Euromissiles than of the anti-nuclear movements which mobilized against them. The reader is left without a fully developed picture of the European and US anti-nuclear movements that worked for the elimination of INF. For example, Colbourn does not detail the composition of these movements, which is vital to understanding why West European and US policymakers had to pay attention to them, even if they did not always embrace activists’ specific initiatives. The ability of organizations like the Dutch Interchurch Peace Council, European Nuclear Disarmament, and US nuclear freeze groups to draw support from across the political spectrum meant that government officials could not ignore these movements when crafting policy on the Euromissiles.[8]
Although Colbourn acknowledges that “there was not one, single peace movement in the early 1980s,” the book does not fully explore the differences among the various groups that campaigned against the Euromissiles (132). In particular, it does not delve into the different aims and approaches of the West European peace movement and the National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign in the United States, which hindered their efforts to cooperate and shape policy. During the early 1980s, the top priority of most West European peace activists was blocking US Pershing II and cruise deployments. By contrast, US freeze activists sought a superpower freeze on the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons, which they viewed as a more significant disarmament measure than preventing Euromissile deployments. Freeze activists also believed in the value of a bilateral approach to disarmament, which made many hesitant to prioritize the delay or cancellation of INF deployments by the United States. The Freeze Campaign’s belated advocacy of a congressional resolution to delay American INF deployments in the fall of 1983 was too little, too late, much to the chagrin of European activists.[9]
Nevertheless, Colbourn has produced an insightful diplomatic and political history of NATO’s role in the Euromissiles episode. She should also be commended for writing about nuclear strategy and nuclear weapons in clear and accessible prose. Scholars of nuclear history, the late Cold War, and NATO will not want to miss Euromissiles.
Review by Marilena Gala, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italy
The history of NATO is a complex subject. Telling it is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle of many political and military dimensions. The pieces of the puzzle are complex objects: the countries that make up the alliance (which in turn means taking into account the dynamic relationship between governments, parliaments, and public opinion in each of those countries; the institutional bodies that govern the functioning of the alliance); and the military authorities who are responsible for ensuring the operational capability to protect the alliance’s interests and defend its members, with all of them bound to set the alliance’s political and military agenda. Moreover, the story of NATO, like any story, cannot be told properly without a framework that modulates the dynamic interrelationship of the jigsaw pieces by indicating the ultimate purpose of the reconstruction.
In this volume, Susan Colbourn makes it clear that her aim is to provide a history of Euromissiles, the military systems deployed in Europe to underpin the credibility of extended deterrence, which encompasses all the major dimensions in which this story can be told. NATO is thus the protagonist, while the account of the deliberations leading to the deployment and withdrawal of Euromissiles unfolds in the book’s twelve chapters, with a focus that shifts from inter-allied diplomacy and politics to social movements and defense strategy. The underlying rationale, in Colbourn’s words, is to “bring policymakers into conversation with protesters to show how and why Euromissiles mattered” (3) for the history of NATO. This conversation is structured in three parts, developed along both chronological and thematic lines. The first traces the origins of the December 1979 Dual-Track Decision back to the 1960s and explains the political and strategic motivations that eventually converged in that NATO decision. The second part is devoted to the anti-nuclear movements, their growing appeal during the years when the Dual-Track Decision was formulated and then implemented, and their impact on the West’s ability to proceed with intermediate-range nuclear force (INF) deployments in the early 1980s. The third and final section of the book deals with the revival of arms control discussions between Moscow and Washington after 1984, and the extreme results that this process achieved in a few years, despite the considerable misgivings expressed by some allies (especially the West Germans).
Overall, Colbourn succeeds in constructing a convincing puzzle. The way she “brings the various strands back into conversation” (4) provides us with a persuasive reconstruction of about two decades of NATO history. She makes use of a very wide range of archival sources, including documents from various countries, all of which are complemented by an extensive literature on the subject. Among the elements that contribute to the persuasiveness of Colbourn’s volume is the inclusion of a wealth of essays and newspaper articles published at the time of the events described in the book, which clarifies how and why the debate on Euromissiles developed as it did, almost plunging the reader into the atmosphere of those years. Among other things, this is a very effective way of highlighting the role of experts and pundits in shaping public debate and political decisions.
However, on closer inspection of the puzzle, a few of the pieces appear blurred. At times the reconstruction falters, caught between the need to consider all the many elements and the need to remain consistent. The discussion of events during the 1960s—where Colbourn rightly locates the origins of NATO’s Dual-Track decision—ignores a crucial factor introduced by Washington in those years. Colbourn fully describes the relevance of European dependence on US nuclear protection as a crucial dilemma for NATO, especially during the Cold War. However, her description of the context in which the NATO decision of December 1979 was taken ignores the importance of the non-proliferation policy pursued by the United States in cooperation with Moscow since the mid-1960s.[10] The US determination to delegitimize the proliferation of nuclear military capabilities outside the then-small group of nuclear weapon states, while reasserting the role of the nuclear deterrent as the ultimate guarantor of Western (and European) defense, could only create the conditions for a lasting structural change within NATO. It was a tectonic shift that the alliance would have to absorb over the next decade. In linking deterrence and détente, the 1967 Harmel Report, which recognized that dialogue with the Eastern bloc had become pivotal for the security of Europe, was more than the result of an exercise of public relations, as the author suggests (23). The report implied a political vision and proved instrumental in rallying the entire Alliance around a security policy based on both military buildup/modernization and arms control. Arms control was at the heart of the détente between the two superpowers until the end of the 1970s, while the adoption of the Harmel Report by the Atlantic partners ultimately ensured the approval of the doctrine of Flexible Response by NATO countries and heralded the Ostpolitik of West German chancellor Willy Brandt.[11] The central role of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the Euromissiles saga, which Colbourn fully acknowledges in her book, stemmed from the change in approach to the German question that the US decision in favor of arms control implied. Once dialogue with the Eastern bloc became a pillar of the alliance’s security policy, the German question remained linked to the pursuit of détente and thus arms control, as a complement to forward defense.
Colbourn rightly recalls that Helmut Schmidt, Brand’s successor at the helm of the West German government, was a protagonist in the NATO security debate of the 1970s. But to understand the origins of the Dual-Track Decision, Schmidt’s vision and competence on security issues must be complemented by the acknowledgement that, as head of the FRG, he was naturally at the center of the NATO stage.[12] Indeed, the chancellor’s ability to shape the European security debate was inherent in the ontological importance of the German question for NATO’s existence. This means that the Dual-Tack Decision was not simply a scheme aimed at reassuring the West Germans. For NATO’s European partners, and especially for the two nuclear powers, Germany’s relevance was obvious, even more so in the late 1970s, when it posed a twofold risk for them. The first, which Colbourn describes well, concerned the support that any government might see wavering if the public became skeptical about its leaders’ commitment to arms control. The second risk, which the book does not really address, is that of an expansion of the scope of the arms control negotiations that led both London and Paris to participate actively and directly to the formulation of the 1979 NATO decision. Both European nuclear weapon states feared that the two superpowers might deviate from the arms control process by including their national deterrents, as the Soviets repeatedly proposed. British and French governments therefore listened carefully to the request made by Schmidt in October 1977 and were prepared to advocate a response that would safeguard their nuclear status. In his speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Schmidt emphasized the need to strike a balance between arms control and arms build-up. Over the next two years, the support of both France and Britain, along with that of other non-nuclear-weapon states such as Italy, was crucial in reaching a compromise and in deliberately linking arms control and military build-up, as laid down in the 1979 Dual-Track Decision.[13]
The formula adopted by the Allies in December 1979 was potentially deceptive, as it “might increase pressure for arms control to take the place of modernization.”[14] Indeed, for the US administration, which in 1981 inherited the negotiating process that had started in Geneva the previous year, the Dual-Track Decision was problematic because it sanctioned “the basic notion that arms control offered a substitute for a coherent defense policy.”[15] Ronald Reagan, who won the presidential election in November 1980, rejected the rationale behind the 1979 NATO decision because it gave the Soviet Union a significant bargaining chip while making the chances of new nuclear deployments in Western Europe unlikely. But his opposition was not enough to reverse the decision of the alliance. As Colbourn explains in the second part of the book, the only choice left to the Reagan administration was to circumvent the obstacle, which it did by adopting the Zero Option (i.e., no deployment of Western systems if the Soviets withdrew all intermediate-range ballistic missiles aimed at European allies) as the US negotiating position in late 1981. The author also provides a brief and balanced overview of the debate that has since developed in the literature about the ultimate goal Reagan was pursuing with the Zero Option.[16] She does not take sides on this specific issue but in the rest of the book her thesis on Reagan’s determination to reduce—even eliminate—nuclear arsenals since the early days of his administration emerges clearly. Colbourn writes that there was no “sudden reversal on the part of the president” in the autumn 1983; “if anything, these events [viewing the made-for-TV movie The Day After, or NATO’s November 1983 exercise, Able Archer] encouraged him to double down on his existing strategy” (205-206).
In suggesting this, Colbourn does not discuss the strong anti-Soviet rhetoric with which Reagan accompanied his arms control policy moves during the early years in office. This is not a negligible detail, especially when it comes to the sweeping negotiating positions such as those the White House advocated on both theater and strategic nuclear forces at that time. In 1982, Washington and Moscow began a new round of talks on their strategic forces, which Reagan wanted based on a rejection of the logic that had guided the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) process. Between 1981 and 1983, the negotiating process in Geneva stalled because of an unbridgeable gap between Moscow and Washington, which Reagan’s Cold War rhetoric against the Soviet Union did not narrow, but rather widened. This element is, in my view, difficult to reconcile with the idea of a US president who, since the beginning of his term, had been consistently committed to the deep reduction or elimination of nuclear weapons. In fact, there was a clear reversal in Reagan’s rhetoric between 1983 and 1984, which in turn makes the identifying of continuity in Reagan’s nuclear policy questionable, unless we want to separate the public speech from the actual policy of a leader with an institutional role.[17]
Greater continuity than that shown by the White House in the first half of the 1980s characterized the FRG’s approach to national and European security. As Colbourn notes, Helmut Kohl, who had served as chancellor since October 1982, “spearheaded a campaign to emphasize the alliance’s desire to improve relations between East and West” (203). To be sure, he went further: in mid-October 1982, speaking to the Bundestag, while expressing his government’s full adherence to NATO policy, he openly referred to the Harmel Report as the document that established the guiding principle for the alliance policy on security and relations with the East.[18] Consistent with that, the Federal Republic of Germany did not reject the consequences of the INF Treaty signed in 1987 that eliminated all theatre nuclear systems with a range between 500 and 5,500 km. Although Bonn was uncomfortable with the idea of leaving in Europe (in West Germany, to be precise) short-range nuclear forces (SRF) that NATO would use to support its forward defense, it did not exploit the argument of singularity to prevent the treaty’s conclusion. In the aftermath of that accord, however, the West German government revived its opposition to the process of modernization of SRF unless it was coupled with arms control.
Susan Colbourn’s decision to devote the final pages of her book to the reconstruction of the years following the signing of the INF Treaty in December 1987 is commendable. Her choice provides us with a comprehensive account of a crucial debate within NATO that is the real conclusion of the Euromissile saga. She thus introduces us to the further discussions that developed between the two sides of the Atlantic and involved in particular the new US administration of George H.W. Bush, who was elected in November 1988, and the FRG’s government, which was still headed by Kohl. She effectively reconstructs the reasons that almost led to a gulf between Bonn and Washington on the issue of SRF modernization, which was a priority for the latter, while for the former it remained subordinate to an attempt at arms control. Colbourn deftly takes us along the path of the NATO security debate, which was caught between the need to reconcile different national priorities and the appeal of a formula—the common European security—that the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev invoked against the more traditional security pattern that Washington favored. But Colbourn’s conclusion, although consistent with the arguments in the book, is not entirely persuasive to me. Colbourn argues that only the shelving of forward defense, which had become irrelevant after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, saved NATO. In my view, despite the critical importance of forward defense to NATO, such a direct causal link is difficult to prove, if only because of the adaptability that the Atlantic Alliance had demonstrated since the 1960s, when its founding elements underwent changes comparable only to those produced by the end of the Cold War.
Review by Stephan Kieninger, Global Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Center
Susan Colbourn’s book on Euromissiles is an outstanding achievement. This first comprehensive historical monograph on the Euromissile crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s draws from a uniquely broad range of archival materials, investigates the nuclear arms race against the backdrop of NATO’s strategy debates and the transformations in Europe’s Cold War security system, and shines new light on the nitty-gritty of arms control and its relevance for the end of the Cold War. In fact, the book goes well beyond the Euromissiles crisis and the return of nuclear fear. Its trajectory takes into account the broader framework of NATO and the transatlantic bargain, exploring the longevity of America’s security commitment in Europe, Germany’s self-integration in the Atlantic Alliance, Soviet nuclear threats, and widespread public protest against nuclear deterrence as the best possible way to provide Europe’s security (267).
One of the book’s main accomplishment is that Colbourn captures the ups and down of NATO’s arms control policy over time. After all, there was no linear path from NATO’s 1979 Dual-Track Decision to the 1981 Zero Option, the start of the Euromissile deployments in 1983, and the conclusion of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987. NATO was in a constant process of adaption and strategy debate. Decisive policy discussions often took place outside of NATO’s official consultations forums, something that Colbourn vividly describes throughout the book. Another feat is the way in which Colbourn manages to combine a multitude of themes and perspectives including diplomatic history, alliance politics, the impact of new social movements, strategy discussions, and electoral politics in the United States and Europe (4). The book will be a standard work and an invaluable resource for students, scholars, and policymakers alike. Its first part covers NATO’s decision strategy debate until the adoption of the Dual-Track Decision in December 1979 (chapters 1-5). The second section explores the four tense years between December 1979 and the start of NATO’s Euromissile deployments in November 1983 (chapters 6-9), and the final portion depicts the resumption of the arms-control negotiations, Mikhail Gorbachev’s arrival as the Soviet leader, the conclusion of the INF Treaty, and its aftermath.
The book opens with a chapter on transatlantic strategy debates in the 1960s, when the emergence of détente profoundly changed NATO’s statecraft. In the aftermath of the Cuban Missiles Crisis in 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union found a modus vivendi and a “constructed peace”[19] based on general respect for the status quo in Europe, the non-nuclear status of Germany, and a continuing, large-scale American military presence in Germany. The 1967 Harmel Report “On the Future of the Alliance” advocated a strong defense and dialogue with the states of the Warsaw Pact. It was a sign of a modernized alliance that “put détente front and center in NATO’s new public image,” (25) as Colbourn points out. Meanwhile, the adoption of flexible response was another milestone in the evolution of NATO’s strategy that combined forward defense and flexibility of response. At the same time, Colbourn highlights the fact that the strategy did not address a number of key questions: “At what point would the allies decide to use nuclear weapons? When and on what terms would they resort to deliberate escalation, let alone a general nuclear response? How far would they first be willing to let the situation in Europe deteriorate?” (27).
In the second chapter, Colbourn addresses the implications of the US-Soviet strategic arms control negotiations in terms of European security, NATO’s alliance management, and the credibility of extended deterrence in a new age of nuclear parity between the superpowers. In the early 1970s, German policymakers were quick to realize that the nuclear balance had to address not only strategic arms, but also medium and intermediate range ballistic weapons (37), as well as strike aircraft, bombers, submarine launchers, short-range missiles, and air-launched systems (43). One pivotal arms control problem was that these systems remained unchecked and were neither included in the US-Soviet SALT negotiations nor in the multilateral negotiations on Mutual and Balanced Forces Reductions (MBFR). They remained in a “grey area.” Colbourn emphasizes that “accepting parity could erode the foundations of extended nuclear deterrence and diminish Western Europe’s security.” She continues: “parity, on other words, raised the old bogeyman of NATO’s strategy. Decoupling Western Europe’s security could end up separated from that of the United States, and the protection previously afforded by NATO’s extended deterrent would be rendered null and void.” (35)
The third chapter looks into the mid-1970s, when European policymakers began to lose faith in the credibility of the US nuclear umbrella, after the provisional US-Soviet arms control package that was signed at the November 1974 Vladivostok summit did not include any of the systems mentioned above. After several years of protracted NATO discussions on this “grey area,” West Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Schmidt went public with his concerns on 28 October 1977, when he gave a landmark address at London’s International Institute of Strategic Studies (66-68). Schmidt was especially keen to protect the potential deployment of the newly developed American cruise missiles as a way to counter the Soviet SS-20 deployments (60-61), particularly after President Jimmy Carter decided to cancel the new US B-1 bomber in June 1977 (62). The important point here is that Colbourn puts Schmidt’s address in perspective. His London speech has often been interpreted as the beginning of the Euromissile Crisis. In fact, Colbourn shows that German concerns over the erosion of extended nuclear deterrence had begun long before (68).[20]
Colbourn’s fourth chapter, on the neutron bomb, is an excellent case study on the widespread political problems that the potential deployment of new weapons system could cause within the alliance. Drawing from a multitude of archival sources, Colbourn vividly captures the transatlantic arguments and NATO’s inability to take a firm decision on the unpopular weapon that “was designed to kill people through the release of neutrons rather than destroy military installations through heat and blast” (69). Eventually, in April 1978, Carter pulled the plug and opted for a deferral of the neutron bomb’s deployment. Beyond NATO’s decision-making process, Colbourn provides a perceptive assessment of the neutron-bomb’s longer-term political and psychological implications: NATO had a hard time adapting; it was often too timid and took great pains to find a persuasive response to the new Soviet threat; it seemed that the Soviet Union’s aggressive public campaign against the neutron bomb gave Moscow a “droit de regard over security policy in Europe” (83); and one key lesson from the neutron bomb affair for NATO was that the alliance would devise a new approach to arms control. It could only introduce new weapons if it offered to cancel their deployments in case the Soviets reduced their armaments (89). This was the rationale of NATO’s 1979 Dual-Track Decision of December 1979.[21]
In the fifth chapter, Colbourn masterfully recounts why the debates over the Euromissiles almost destroyed NATO. There was widespread opposition to the deployments of new US nuclear weapons, especially within the governments of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark. When NATO’s foreign and defense ministers met to adopt the Dual-Track Decision, Belgium and the Netherlands adopted a “fence-sitting solution” (108) in terms of their commitment to host forty-eight cruise missiles each on their territory. In fact, they deferred their final commitment to a later date—in Belgium’s case six months later, and in the Dutch case two years (108). Moreover, Colbourn emphasizes the importance of the parallelism between the defense track and the détente track. Deployment and negotiation were intertwined. “If the modernization track was defense in nature. The arms control track was proactive,” she writes (108). Colbourn quotes West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher’s comment that “we are giving the political signal [to make] the eighties a decade of arms control” (108).
In the second part of the book, Colbourn sheds new light on the intricacies of NATO’s Euromissile deployment and the impact of widespread public protest and record-breaking anti-nuclear rallies as a new manifestation of public discontent.[22] Chapters 6 and 7 trace the origins of the anti-nuclear protest movement and NATO’s response in the shape of its Zero Option that offered to cancel deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles provided that the Soviet Union removed its own medium-range systems. While the protesters saw it as a cynical plot to justify the deployment of new US missiles in Europe, President Ronald Reagan envisaged the Zero Option as NATO’s most feasible bargaining position. Reagan’s attitude was that “we should simply go in and say we are negotiating in good faith for the removal of these systems on both sides” (141). Colbourn emphasizes that Reagan’s ultimate motives still remain contested among historians. Was Reagan primarily driven by the desire to achieve deployments? Or was he guided by a larger vision for a global Zero Option and his desire to reduce the nuclear threat and abolish nuclear weapons over the long term? While most contemporary observers saw the Zero Option as a public relations stunt, historians have been drawing a more nuanced picture of Reagan and his ideas that emphasizes the authenticity and the sincerity of his nuclear abolitionism.[23] Colbourn too argues that Reagan’s Zero Option was a serious attempt to reduce the nuclear threat, while pointing out that Reagan still remained something of an enigma and left very little evidence of his ultimate motives (142).
In the last part, Colbourn covers the four years between the start of the Euromissile deployment in November 1983, and the conclusion of the INF Treaty in December 1987.[24] In chapter 10, one of Colbourn’s key findings pertains to NATO’s willingness to engage the Soviet Union at a time when the Soviet negotiators had walked away from the nuclear bargaining table after the start of the Euromissile deployments. Actually, despite his condemnation of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” (206), Reagan had begun to champion the resumption of leadership diplomacy in the shadow of missile deployments.[25] Secretary of State George Shultz had blazed the trail for a more proactive approach, based on the assumption that NATO needed both a firm defense and the willingness to see a constructive relationship with the Soviet Union emerge. “If you go to a negotiation and you do not have any strength, you are going to get your head handed to you,” Shultz declared. “On the other hand, the willingness to negotiate builds strength because you are using it for a constructive purpose. If it is strength with no objective to be gained, it loses its meaning. […] These are not alternative ways of going about things,”[26] he argued. Indeed, post-deployment, the European allies in particular thought that NATO’s focus on the resumption of dialogue was important to emphasize the continue validity of the Harmel concept (202-208). NATO remained “a successful alliance of peace” (209) and a collective defense institution which knew how to build a credible deterrent. Colbourn skillfully weaves together NATO’s dual track approach throughout the book.
In chapter 11, Colbourn explores the ramifications of Gorbachev’s ascent to power. The NATO allies had mixed feelings about the bold arms control diplomacy of Reagan and Gorbachev. On the one hand, the European allies endorsed it as a promise to reduce the nuclear threat. On the other, the October 1986 Reykjavik Summit caused especially profound anxiety about Europe’s defense if the zero INF option would eventually materialize. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was particularly upset (228). “The elimination of all nuclear weapons would strike at the heart of our deterrence strategy,” Thatcher wrote. She continued, “the Soviets clearly have conventional superiority. Doing away with nuclear weapons would leave the Soviets with the upper hand.”[27] Colbourn investigates how the elimination of intermediate-range nuclear forces and deep reductions of strategic nuclear weapons brought conventional arms control and the imbalances in short-range nuclear forces to the front burner of NATO’s arms control agenda. Both issues necessitated in-depth allied consultations. NATO needed time to adapt and to reel in Gorbachev’s arms control proposal in its own agenda.
In chapter 12, Colbourn looks into the consequences of the INF Treaty in terms of European security, given the prospect that the only weapons left in Europe might be stationed in and targeted at East and West Germany. “The shorter the missile, the deader the German,” quipped Volker Rühe, the deputy floor leader of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) in the Bundestag and its defense spokesman (246). The easiest solution would have been another zero option on Short-Range Nuclear Forces (SNF). That, however, was not in sight. NATO needed short-range nuclear weapons for deterrence in order to balance the Soviet Union’s conventional military strength. Colbourn recounts how NATO sought an analysis of what it needed for its security in the aftermath of the INF Treaty. From a German vantage point, the key issue was not to become singularized as a special nuclear zone in Europe. The bottom line for the Kohl government was that the number of short-range nuclear forces with a range of up to 500km could not indefinitely stay unconstrained (247-251).
Finally, Colbourn recounts how the INF missiles on both sides were destroyed under the unprecedently detailed INF Treaty inspection and verification regime. The bulk of US military records on this crucial aspect still remain classified. The history of the Cold War has not been told to the end yet—but there is one desideratum less thanks to Susan Colbourn’s powerful book on the Euromissiles.
Response by Susan Colbourn, Duke University
Any author’s response has a natural starting point: a list of acknowledgements. This one is no different. I am grateful to the entire team at H-Diplo for making this roundtable possible, to Jim Goldgeier for writing its introduction, and, of course, to James Cameron, Stephanie Freeman, Marilena Gala, and Stephan Kieninger for taking the time to read and engage with Euromissiles.
Not unlike NATO’s road to 1979’s Dual-Track Decision, the way I came to this project was anything but linear. But since the spring of 2018, when I defended my dissertation and decided the book version would be very different, I knew what I wanted the final product to be. My goal was to write an engaging and accessible history of the so-called “Euromissiles”—the theater nuclear forces or intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe—in transatlantic perspective. I wanted it to be a sort of one-stop-shop to introduce readers to the Euromissiles no matter their pre-existing knowledge of the issue. I am delighted to see confirmation in the four reviewers’ comments that I succeeded.
In my response here, I want to focus on the biggest questions and themes raised in these four reviews: my cast of characters, why the West Germans mattered so much, what President Ronald Reagan really thought, the policy implications of this history, and that pesky subtitle.
The history I tell in Euromissiles is, as Stephanie Freeman puts it, dominated by elite policymakers. That emphasis largely reflects the nitty-gritty realities of nuclear policy. Decisions about whether and where to deploy nuclear weapons were the purview of some elected politicians and even more unelected bureaucrats, and efforts to control, reduce, or outright eliminate them occupied negotiating teams and figured prominently on summit agendas. Thus, in assessing nuclear decisionmaking, I focus on the actors who made the decisions.
This is not to suggest that other individuals, including those without formal positions of power, did not influence nuclear policy or shape the conversation in critical ways. It is for precisely that reason that I opted to dedicate space to a variety of anti-nuclear activists and peace campaigners, and sought out archival materials and contemporary media to showcase their arguments against the Euromissiles in their own words.
Freeman laments that I did not devote more space to the origins and make-up of groups like European Nuclear Disarmament (END), Interkerkelijk Vredesberaad (IKV), and the Freeze movement in the United States. But these well-known groups were only one part of an unruly landscape that mobilized millions. Much of what gave the so-called “peace movement” its influence was not the structure of a specific group or a campaign’s origins that predated the Euromissiles (like IKV, which was founded in the late 1960s): it was the sheer number of people who spoke out and the diversity of their ranks. I opted to foreground that—and the wide-ranging arguments that a spectrum of individuals marshalled to make their case—as most critical to understanding why they were seen as so dangerous by many of the supporters of the Dual-Track Decision.
The Dual-Track Decision itself was an outgrowth of earlier choices and debates in allied circles. Marilena Gala points to one of these subjects—nuclear non-proliferation—as under-explored context. Certainly, efforts to prevent the West German acquisition of nuclear weapons on its own shaped the conversation, as did the failure of earlier NATO schemes to stockpile weapons or develop an allied nuclear force. Much ink has been spilled on the alliance’s various nuclear schemes of the 1950s and 1960s, not least the Multilateral Force (MLF), and US-Soviet deliberations surrounding the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to contain any nuclear ambitions that Bonn might have had. I address these in the context of stage-setting, as it was not the negotiation of these items that shaped the story of the Euromissiles, but rather the final conclusions and agreements reached. As such, while I make reference to these structural preconditions—my discussion of the Federal Republic of Germany’s position in the European state system offers a good, concise illustration (35)—I concluded that a more in-depth treatment of the connections between earlier proposals and the Euromissiles was best left to a general history of NATO.[28]
Gala argues that the “central role of the Federal Republic of Germany” flowed largely from a shift in the thinking of US leaders about the German question linked to their nuclear non-proliferation objectives. To my mind, that is only one narrow slice of why the West Germans mattered so much. The Federal Republic of Germany mattered because of its vulnerability within the tenuous status quo that defined divided Europe; it was exposed geographically, psychologically, and militarily. That vulnerability gave the West Germans immense leverage, particularly when blended with historical anxieties about what German power might mean and very real types of German power, such as economic strength, that increased in relative terms even through the doldrums of the 1970s. The Federal Republic of Germany’s strength and influence was, in large part, a product of its own weakness. The threat of further weakness, such as exposure to political blackmail, in turn gave Bonn even more influence to wield in allied circles.
Bonn’s influence was never as large as Washington’s, of course. Those in power in the United States set the terms of debate—and critics often bandied about arguments that conflated the United States with NATO writ large. That takes me to one of the biggest puzzles: the intentions and strategy of Reagan. As Stephan Kieninger notes, Euromissiles fits in a broader school of recent historical work that takes Reagan’s aversion to nuclear weapons seriously. Gala, by contrast, sees my depiction of Reagan as one-sided, overlooking the president’s hawkish and anti-Soviet rhetoric in my assessment that there was not a “reversal” in late 1983 or early 1984.[29]
On Reagan’s rhetoric, I dispute Gala’s characterization of what I write in the book. The president’s rhetoric and its anti-Soviet bent, including how it spurred opposition to the Dual-Track Decision and frustrated fellow leaders, appear time and again in the pages of Euromissiles. But on the broader question of Reagan’s strategy, I distinguish between rhetoric and reality. It is entirely possible that Reagan trafficked in inflammatory, hawkish, and at times terrifying rhetoric about the Soviet Union, and that his broader strategy toward Moscow was defined by a desire to create favorable conditions in which to engage the Soviet leadership and to do so in ways that might make the abolition of nuclear weapons possible. The core body of evidence on which I rest my case about the president’s strategy involves the internal deliberations and memoranda produced by the Reagan administration in the spring of 1983. Those deliberations offer a clear depiction of a broader trend: a concerted effort on the part of the president to pursue engagement with the Soviet Union—and an awareness among his team that popular perceptions of his Soviet policy needed to be changed because they seemed to be out of step with his actual policy preferences.
Fast forward to the present. I was particularly pleased to see James Cameron highlight how Euromissiles might shape conversations today about how to engage the Russians or breathe new life into arms control talks. Cameron neatly summarizes one of the critical reasons why I remain skeptical of calls to repeat the Dual-Track Decision today: so much of the Euromissiles story and how it ended hinged on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. At the risk of stating the obvious, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is not Mikhail Gorbachev.
That leaves the big question: at any point in this entire ordeal, did the Euromissiles nearly destroy NATO? Gala expresses the most skepticism of the four reviewers, though Cameron hints in the same direction. It is a skepticism I can appreciate; after all, the story I tell is one where that outcome did not come to pass. And how does one evaluate what “nearly” looks like, especially when we know what ended up transpiring? Gala rightly notes that NATO might have found a way to escape the most immediate problems of spring 1989. My point is that the alliance did not have to do so—and recapturing that uncertainty about whether NATO could survive that challenge is a critical corrective to some of the most triumphant narratives about how the Cold War came to an end.
The argument encapsulated in the subtitle is twofold. In part, it is a classic historian’s argument about uncertainty. Despite all the speculation about NATO’s collapse over the years, we tend to eschew thinking about what the alliance’s disintegration might look like. Would it be a big bang triggered by a dramatic and sudden episode? Or would it come in dribs and drabs, barely perceived until it could no longer be ignored? The story I trace is one of halting, but steady erosion marked by waning confidence in the core principles and assumptions underpinning the alliance. NATO often performed well in public polls, even at the height of anti-nuclear campaigning in the early 1980s, but the components and capabilities that made it function—things like nuclear weapons, deterrence, and even the US presence in Europe—received far less support in those same polls. Could NATO be broadly popular yet still end up obsolete for all practical purposes, hollowed out by constraints imposed by voters’ preferences, budget sheets, and coalition politics?
But the other way the Euromissiles might have destroyed NATO was with a big bang. Any use of these nuclear weapons, something which was hardly out of the realm of the possible in the atomic age, would have unleashed untold destruction on the territory of NATO’s members—and much of the planet. The subtitle is, in part, a reminder that this danger always hung over the alliance.
[1] Samuel Kleiner and Tom Zoellner, “Republicans’ ‘Munich’ Fallacy,“ Los Angeles Times, 20 July 2015, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-zoellnerandkleiner-munich-and-iran-20150720-story.html.
[2] Fortunately, for that we have Freeman’s own book, Dreams for a Decade: International Nuclear Abolitionism and the End of the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).
[3] Leopoldo Nuti, Frédéric Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey, and Bernd Rother, eds., The Euromissile Crisis and the End of the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); Philipp Gassert, Tim Geiger, and Hermann Wentker, eds., The INF Treaty of 1987: A Reappraisal (Vadenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021); Christoph Becker-Schaum, Philipp Gassert, Martin Klimke, Wilfried Mausbach, and Marianne Zepp, eds., The Nuclear Crisis: The Arms Race, Cold War Anxiety, and the German Peace Movement of the 1980s (Berghahn Books, 2016); Andrea Chiampan, “The Reagan Administration and the INF Controversy, 1981-83,” Diplomatic History 44: 5 (2020): 860-84; Stephanie Freeman, “The Making of an Accidental Crisis: The United States and the NATO Dual-Track Decision of 1979,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 25 (2014): 331-55; Henry H. Gaffney, “Euromissiles and the Ultimate Evolution of Theater Nuclear Forces in Europe,” Journal of Cold War Studies 16, No. 1 (2014): 180-99.
[4] Clayton Clemens, Ronald Granieri, Mathias Haeussler, Mary Elise Sarotte, Kristina Spohr, Christian Wicke, and Andrew I. Port, “In Memory of the ‘Two Helmuts’: The Lives, Legacies, and Historical Impact of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl,” Central European History 51:2 (June 2018): 285.
[5] “Reagan Administration Secretary of State Reflects On His Tenure And Tillerson’s,” NPR, 4 October 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/10/04/555710502/reagan-administration-secretary-of-state-reflects-on-his-tenure-and-tillersons.
[6] See, for example, Andrea Chiampan, “The Reagan Administration and the INF Controversy, 1981-83,” Diplomatic History 44: 5 (November 2020): 860-884; Marilena Gala, “The Essential Weaknesses of the December 1979 ‘Agreement’: The White House and the Implementing of the Dual-Track Decision,” Cold War History 19: 1 (2019): 21-38; Leopoldo Nuti, Frédéric Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey, and Bernd Rother, eds., The Euromissile Crisis and the End of the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015); Christoph Becker-Schaum, Philipp Gassert, Martin Klimke, Wilfried Mausbach, and Marianne Zepp, eds., The Nuclear Crisis: The Arms Race, Cold War Anxiety, and the German Peace Movement of the 1980s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016); Stephanie Freeman, “The Making of an Accidental Crisis: The United States and the NATO Dual-Track Decision of 1979,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 25:2 (2014): 331-355.
[7] For the triumphalist interpretation of the end of the Cold War, see, for example, Peter Schweizer, Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph over Communism (New York: Doubleday, 2002); Francis H. Marlo, Planning Reagan’s War: Conservative Strategists and America’s Cold War Victory (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012).
[8] On the Dutch Interchurch Peace Council’s influence on Christian Democratic politicians, see Ruud van Dijk, “‘A Mass Psychosis’: The Netherlands and NATO’s Dual-Track Decision, 1978-1979,” Cold War History 12:3 (August 2012): 381-405. On crowds showing up in conservative areas of Britain to listen to European Nuclear Disarmament co-founders E. P. Thompson and Bruce Kent, see Edward Palmer Thompson, WGBH Educational Foundation Interview, 15 October 1987, https://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_30B5C742B3FF4FAFB5B4A282CC0C1644. On support for the nuclear freeze movement in areas that had voted for Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election, see, for example, “Mothers’ Day Rallies in 20 Cities,” Freeze Newsletter 1, no. 2 (July 1981): 10; “Barnstorming through South Dakota and Oregon,” Freeze Newsletter 1, no. 2 (July 1981): 11.
[9] Stephanie L. Freeman, Dreams for a Decade: International Nuclear Abolitionism and the End of the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 106-107.
[10] Roland Popp, Liviu Horovitz, and Andreas Wenger, eds., Negotiating the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty: Origins of the Nuclear Order (New York: Routledge, 2017).
[11] Helga Haftendorn, NATO and the Nuclear Revolution: A Crisis of Credibility, 1966–67 (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 1996), 322-372.
[12] Kristina Spohr, The Global Chancellor: Helmut Schmidt and the Reshaping of the International Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 33-59.
[13] Leopoldo Nuti, “The Nuclear Debate in Italian Politics in the Late 1970s and Early 1980s,” in Nuti, Frédéric Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey, Bernd Rother, eds., The Euromissiles Crisis and the End of the Cold War (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2015), 231-250.
[14] Marilena Gala, “The Essential Weaknesses of the December 1979 ‘Agreement’: The White House and the Implementing of the Dual-Track Decision,” Cold War History 19:1 (2019): 21–38, at 27, DOI: 10.1080/14682745.2018.1462339
[15] Gala, “The Essential Weaknesses of the December 1979 ‘Agreement’,” 27
[16] Thomas Risse-Kappen, The Zero Option, INF, West Germany and Arms Control, trans. Lesley Booth (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988); Strobe Talbott, Deadly Gambits. The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 56-84; Andrea Chiampan, “The Reagan Administration and the INF Controversy, 1981–83,” Diplomatic History, 44:5 (2020): 860-884, DOI: 10.1093/dh/dhaa052; Marilena Gala, “The Euromissile Crisis and the Centrality of the Zero Option,” in The Euromissile Crisis and the End of the Cold War, ed. Nuti et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 158-175.
[17] Beth A. Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997); The Myth of Triumphalism. Rethinking President Reagan’s Cold War Legacy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2020), 22-34.
[18] The National Archives, PREM 19/765, Telegram from Bonn to FCO, Chancellor Kohl’s Bundestag Statement, Foreign and Security Policy, 13 October 1982.
[19] See Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
[20] See Kristina Spohr, The Global Chancellor: Helmut Schmidt and the Reshaping of the International Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
[21] See Leopoldo Nuti, Frederic Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey, and Bernd Rother, eds., The Euromissile Crisis and the End of the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
[22] See Christoph Becker-Schaum, Philipp Gassert, Wilfried Mausbach, Martin Klimke, and Marianne Zepp, eds., The Nuclear Crisis: The Arms Race, Cold War Anxiety, and the German Peace Movement of the 1980s (New York and London: Berghahn Books, 2016).
[23] See William Inboden, The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink (New York: Penguin Books, 2022).
[24] See Philipp Gassert, Tim Geiger and Hermann Wentker, eds., The INF Treaty of 1987: A Reappraisal (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021), https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/48658.
[25] See Simon Miles, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War (Itaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2020).
[26] Interview between James E. Goodby and George P. Shultz, The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016, http://www.afsa.org/groundbreaking-diplomacy-interview-george-shultz. See Philip Taubman, In the Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023).
[27] Telcon Reagan and Thatcher, 13 October 1986, Ronald Reagan Library, Executive Secretariat, NSC System File, 8607413; see also https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/143809.
[28] Anyone interested in continuities and similarities across a variety of allied nuclear proposals, including the Dual-Track Decision, will find ample to consider in David N. Schwartz, NATO’s Nuclear Dilemmas (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1983).
[29] This argument and terminology comes from Beth A. Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997).