A constructed Peace The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963

The real American view was that for the MC 48 strategy to be effective, very rapid action--and probably even preemptive action--might be essential. But such swift action might only be possible if SACEUR was authorized to make the crucial decision in an emergency. Eisenhower, a former SACEUR himself, certainly felt the NATO commander had to be given some discretionary power in extreme circumstances.⁵⁶⁶ And Admiral Radford, the JCS Chairman, later remarked that the "decision would really have to be made by SACEUR."⁵⁶⁷

In fact, SACEUR actually did have a certain recognized authority to order his forces into action in extreme cases. The NATO Council in 1954, in approving the principle that SACEUR should seek political guidance "when appropriate," had recognized the NATO commander's authority to interpret the "when appropriate" proviso as he saw fit.⁵⁶⁸ In 1956, a NATO Military Committee paper noted that SACEUR did not have to seek political guidance "in cases where the degree of urgency precludes following the full procedures."⁵⁶⁹ And of course, given America's clear refusal to accept any allied veto on the use of American forces in an emergency--and this to a certain extent even included forces based on that ally's territory⁵⁷⁰--no specific NATO authorization was even necessary for SACEUR to have predelegated power. Given that the NATO nuclear forces at this time were essentially American, the predelegation could be made to SACEUR in his capacity as the U.S. commander in Europe.

Eisenhower understood that authority to initiate military operations could legally be delegated to high military commanders, provided that they were Americans. The principle of predelegation was recognized in the Basic National Security Policy document for 1956, and had in fact been implicit in the interpretation given to an important paragraph on the use of nuclear weapons in NSC 162/2, the first BNSP paper in the Eisenhower period.⁵⁷¹ What if action absolutely had to be taken immediately? If a fleet of enemy bombers suddenly showed up on the radar screens, Eisenhower asked, wasn't a commander justified in using "every weapon at hand to defend himself and his forces?"⁵⁷² This sort of argument was the standard foot in the door, the device commonly used to establish the legitimacy of a certain degree of predelegated authority. But how far could the principle be carried? Should it in fact include the authority to launch a preemptive strike?

It seems that this issue was dealt with mostly on an informal basis: the President reached a certain understanding with his top military commanders, especially SACEUR and the commander of the Strategic Air Command (CINCSAC). Even as late as 1959, the assumption was that SACEUR, in his capacity as the U.S. Commander in Europe, "would probably begin the fighting on the principle of the inherent right of a commander to defend his forces."⁵⁷³ Eisenhower's personal relations with General Gruenther, the man he had effectively chosen as SACEUR in 1953, were so close--the two men were on such intimate terms, had such a high regard for each other personally, and took the same basic approach to practically every major strategic and political issue--that formal arrangements were never really necessary during the period when Gruenther was NATO commander. With Gruenther's successor, Air Force General Lauris Norstad, the President's relations were not as intimate, but even here the issue of war-making power was apparently handled in a relatively informal way. When Norstad was asked by the British foreign secretary in 1960 whether the U.S. government had "delegated authority to him on its behalf," he replied simply "that the answer to that question depended upon the relationship between him and the President," and he implied "that his present relationship with President Eisenhower was such that no understanding was required."⁵⁷⁴

Similarly, it seems that the SAC commander, General Curtis LeMay, had reached a certain informal understanding, perhaps nothing more than a tacit understanding, with Eisenhower on these issues. In 1957, LeMay met with Robert Sprague, one of the members of the Gaither Committee, a body that had been set up to look into the problem of surprise attack. He told Sprague that he might strike preemptively in extreme circumstances, without direct presidential authorization, but simply on his authority as SAC commander. "If I see the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack," he said in substance, "I'm going to knock the shit out of them before they get off the ground." When Sprague objected that this was not national policy, LeMay replied that he did not care, that this was his policy, this was what he was going to do.⁵⁷⁵ It is hard to imagine that LeMay would have been so open with Sprague--the comment might well have gotten back to the president--unless he had been given some indication that Eisenhower understood the need for such a policy.

In any event, it was at about this time that formal rules governing predelegation were being worked out. The development by 1957 of a Soviet rocket with enough thrust to deliver a thermonuclear warhead halfway around the world meant that warning time was soon going to be cut very considerably, and that the national command authority in Washington might well be wiped out before it had a chance to authorize nuclear operations. For the sake of deterrence if nothing else, something explicit in the way of predelegated authority was needed to cover this sort of contingency.⁵⁷⁶

In May 1957, the President issued a basic "authorization for the expenditure of nuclear weapons." This authorization was "premised upon the inability of the authorized commander to contact higher authority at a time when survival depends upon immediate action." Its purpose was to "provide authority for use of nuclear weapons in certain defensive and retaliatory" contingencies, although the precise nature of these contingencies is still not very clear. What does seem beyond dispute, however, is that by the end of the Eisenhower period, the main nuclear commanders--especially CINCEUR and CINCSAC--had formally been granted a certain degree of predelegated authority to order the use of nuclear weapons. The basic idea was that if a commander was under attack--not just threatened with, but under actual attack--and communication with higher authority could not be established, then nuclear weapons could be used. The presidential letters conveying this delegated authority, all rather short, were quite general in scope. Little was said about the nature or scale of the attack, or even about whether it was nuclear.⁵⁷⁷

The delegation letters and related documents are still highly classified, but even if they were available, they would probably tell us little about what was in the minds of people at the time--about what Eisenhower really intended, about how he explained his thinking to top military officers, about how the commanders understood the authority they were being given. One does get the sense, however, that Eisenhower was willing to give high military commanders a good deal of latitude in situations where hours, perhaps even minutes, were crucial. His basic thinking was fairly straightforward. In a U.S.-Soviet war in Europe, nuclear weapons would certainly be used. To limit damage to themselves, the western countries had to prevent the Soviets, to the extent possible, from launching a nuclear attack. That meant that the western forces had to strike as soon as they could, and as effectively as they could, focusing their initial attack on the USSR's nuclear force. The West was not going to "start" the war, but this meant simply that the United States and her allies would wait until Soviet responsibility was clear. They could not, however, wait too long: the greater the delay, the greater the risk of disaster.⁵⁷⁸ One might therefore have to strike preemptively. As Eisenhower put it in a meeting with the Congressional leadership during the Berlin crisis in 1959: "when we reach the acute crisis period" it might be "necessary to engage in general war to protect our rights."⁵⁷⁹ The nuclear attack, in other words, might have to be launched before the enemy had begun to fire on NATO forces, or at least before large-scale conventional fighting had broken out. And a policy which placed such a great emphasis on extremely rapid, and indeed on preemptive action, implied that the high military authorities, especially SACEUR, would play a key role in deciding when the attack had to be ordered.

Eisenhower was not thinking in terms of SACEUR exercising his predelegated authority entirely on his own, and certainly not in terms of SACEUR ordering an attack semi-defiantly, against the wishes of the president, in order to force his hand and oblige him to order SAC into action. What Eisenhower probably had in mind was a process of constant and intense consultation between the president and SACEUR, with some additional consultation with the three main allied governments. The decision to execute the war plans would develop from that process in a natural way, on the basis of political and especially military data. The presumption was, however, that the president would be strongly inclined to defer to the military judgment of SACEUR, the commander on the scene.

It was this presumption that lay at the heart of SACEUR's special authority. For SACEUR in the 1950s was no ordinary military commander. He occupied a "unique position" with the president; he did not take orders from the JCS; he had a considerable degree of personal autonomy, which enabled him to relate to the European governments as something more than a mere tool of U.S. policy. Eisenhower, the first SACEUR, had played a key role in developing the system based on this concept. Before he had agreed to accept that appointment, he had gotten Truman to grant SACEUR the degree of autonomy that Eisenhower had felt was necessary.⁵⁸⁰ And after he became president, he continued to support the basic concept of a strong SACEUR--that is, a SACEUR with considerable war-making power. Even at the very end of his presidency, he was still thinking in these terms. SACEUR, he thought in late 1960, should have the authority to decide when and how nuclear weapons would be used.⁵⁸¹

Thus the MC 48 strategy--the strategy based on the massive and extremely rapid use of nuclear weapons, both in the theater and against the sources of Soviet power in the USSR itself--was quite extraordinary. And indeed this strategy, with the premium it placed on preemptive action and the incentives it created for the transfer of war-making power to high military commanders, made many people uneasy, particularly in the European governments. How then did this strategy come to be accepted? Was it essentially forced on the Europeans by the United States?

The U.S. government certainly took the lead in pressing for the new strategy, and indeed Eisenhower's personal role was fundamental. From the outset he knew that nuclear weapons could play a major role in the defense of Europe. In January 1951, shortly after his appointment as SACEUR, he laid out his basic strategic concept at a meeting in the White House. NATO could build up its air and naval power in England and the North Sea, and in the Mediterranean and North Africa. Then "if the Russians tried to move ahead in the center, I'd hit them awfully hard from both flanks. I think if we built up the kind of force I want, the center will hold and they'll have to pull back."⁵⁸² Nuclear strikes would be particularly effective in this context, and in fact from 1949 on, Army thinking on the defense of Europe had focused on the tactical use of nuclear forces.⁵⁸³ Eisenhower himself was particularly interested in using atomic weapons in this way.⁵⁸⁴ But the weapons only started to become available for this purpose in 1952, as the nuclear stockpile began to expand dramatically and advances in weapons design made it possible for fighter aircraft to be armed with nuclear explosives.⁵⁸⁵

By this time, however, Eisenhower was no longer SACEUR. His successor, General Matthew Ridgway, was of a more conservative bent. Ridgway's whole approach to the problem of the defense of Europe, it was widely felt, just did not take adequate account of the effect nuclearization was bound to have on the nature of ground warfare. Ridgway sought simply "to superimpose nuclear planning on conventional force postures." Hence the requirement for very high force levels: whenever a NATO unit deployed in the standard way was wiped out by nuclear fire, it would have to be replaced. And Ridgway's requirements for the defense of Europe also simply ignored the impact of the strategic air war: it was as though NATO and SAC would be fighting two entirely separate wars, with neither campaign having any impact on the other. The result again was to magnify estimates of force requirements, and thus to trap Europe in a situation where, given political realities, even great efforts were bound to be considered totally inadequate. The Ridgway approach meant that an effective forward defense would be forever beyond reach.⁵⁸⁶

Eisenhower and Gruenther from the start disliked this sort of hide-bound military philosophy, which, incidentally, was shared by many top Army officers.⁵⁸⁷ The "Tank-for-Tank and Division-for-Division approach," they felt, was "exactly what we most wish to avoid."⁵⁸⁸ The problem was not insoluble: "we can have security without paying the price of national bankruptcy," Eisenhower wrote, "if we will put brains in the balance." "Preconceived notions" had to be put aside; if a radical change in strategy was appropriate, then sobeit; the implications of the nuclear revolution had to be thought through and accepted unflinchingly.⁵⁸⁹

When Eisenhower took office as president in January 1953, he knew exactly where he wanted to go, and the first thing he did was to take control of the strategy-making process. The terms of the principal members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were about to expire, and the new chief executive decided to replace them all. He then pulled Ridgway back from Europe by making him Army Chief of Staff; the other new Chiefs, especially the Chairman, Admiral Arthur Radford, and the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Nathan Twining, placed much greater reliance on nuclear, and especially on strategic nuclear, weapons. This meant first of all that the JCS would be divided on the most fundamental issues of strategy, and Eisenhower would therefore play the crucial role of arbiter. But Eisenhower had also created an opening in Europe: he had gotten rid of Ridgway and could now make his close friend Al Gruenther the new SACEUR. If Eisenhower had had his way, Gruenther would have been his immediate successor as NATO commander, but Truman had given the job to Ridgway instead. But now, shortly after taking office as president himself, he was able to arrange things the way he wanted. And with Eisenhower's full support, Gruenther was able to stage-manage the process culminating in the adoption of MC 48 in December 1954.

But this is not to say that the new strategy was simply rammed down the throats of the Europeans, who accepted it only grudgingly and with serious misgivings. Indeed, one can almost say the opposite. The French military authorities, and certain key British officials as well, were as concerned as anyone else with the glaring defects of the Ridgway strategy. Under that strategy, there was a persistent gap between NATO capabilities and requirements, a gap that generated a constant demand for increased military spending. And yet the NATO countries were clearly reaching the limits of what they could realistically be expected to devote to defense; military spending was in fact leveling off. Wasn't the obvious solution to take into account the implications of the "new weapons" then becoming available, and to radically adjust one's way of fighting a war in Europe so as to take full account of the nuclear revolution? Didn't it make sense to have a more integrated defense strategy, and especially to develop a strategy for the defense of western Europe more closely bound up with America's strategy for general war?⁵⁹⁰

If this was the problem, the solutions were obvious, especially from the point of view of the French military leaders. A highly integrated NATO defense strategy, a strategy in which nuclear weapons played the major role and in which the defense of Europe was so tightly linked to the American air-atomic offensive--all this had been the goal of French military policy for quite some time.⁵⁹¹ This was why the French military authorities embraced the MC 48 strategy as unambiguously, as wholeheartedly, and indeed as enthusiastically as they did. This policy, the French chiefs stressed, would "for the first time" make an effective defense of Europe possible. If it were rejected, the Americans might well give up on forward defense and revert to the "peripheral strategy." But forward defense was vital for France, and the French chiefs had no problem accepting a German military contribution, which, they agreed with Gruenther, was essential to the success of the new strategy. The French had for years taken the lead in pressing for highly integrated NATO structures with three interlocking objectives in mind: keeping the Americans in Europe by linking them as closely and as inextricably as possible to the rest of NATO; providing a framework for German rearmament while still limiting German freedom of action, but in a way the Germans themselves would not find too offensive; and providing for a pooling of effort that would make for a more militarily efficient use of the NATO countries' limited military resources. The new strategy brought them closer to all these goals. If the price they paid was a certain sacrifice of French independence, well, wasn't that implicit in the nature of the alliance, an alliance in which the United States was bound to play by far the most important role? As for the political leadership, the Mendès France government certainly had qualms about the new strategy, but in the final analysis it was persuaded by the arguments the top French military leaders were making, and it swallowed whatever misgivings it had and fully accepted the new system.

Indeed, western Europe as a whole was quick to embrace the new strategy. The Americans had anticipated much greater opposition to MC 48 than they actually found, and were pleasantly surprised by the fact that the Europeans accepted the new strategy so readily at the NATO Council meeting in December 1954.⁵⁹² Even on the sensitive issue of predelegation, the Europeans quickly moved toward acceptance of American views on the subject--if indeed such views had not already been effectively accepted in 1954. At the NATO Council meeting in December 1956, NATO defense ministers generally backed the principle of delegating to NATO commanders authority to use nuclear weapons. The Dutch and West German defense ministers were particularly outspoken on this subject. The general attitude in NATO Europe was perhaps best summed up by a comment made by the Portuguese ambassador to NATO in an earlier discussion with Gruenther of nuclear use: "If the time comes, use them. Don't wait to ask us. We may hang you afterwards but for God's sake use them."⁵⁹³

The American government was pleased with the way the European attitude had evolved. The United States, Eisenhower said in 1956, had "made real progress in convincing our friends of the validity of our views on the use of atomic weapons. For example, the NATO powers were now clamoring that we share atomic weapons with them; whereas only a couple of years ago they had recoiled in horror from all thought of employing nuclear weapons."⁵⁹⁴ But this was a fundamental point: the MC 48 strategy implied that the European armies needed to be equipped with nuclear weapons. And this in turn meant that the United States, if it was serious about the strategy and serious about the alliance, had to help the Europeans acquire a certain nuclear capability.

Thus nuclear sharing was implicit in MC 48. A war in Europe would be nuclear from the start; it followed that forces geared to the nuclear battlefield were practically the only forces worth building up. The allies, as long as they were not armed with nuclear weapons, would essentially be marginalized by the new strategy. "We are now in effect indicating to our allies that the next war, if it occurs, will be largely an atomic war," Dulles told the NSC in late 1956. "Since they do not have atomic weapons they naturally deduce, from our statements, that they will be expected to sit on the sidelines while we fight the war. This attitude is not desirable either from their point of view or from ours."⁵⁹⁵ The allies, he said a year later, were being placed in an untenable situation. Nuclear forces were coming to play an "ever-increasing role" in the defense of the West. The result was that those allies without nuclear forces of their own, and who therefore felt that "they would have no voice" in the decision to use those forces, were left in a "state of considerable uncertainty and bewilderment."⁵⁹⁶

A more generous American policy was thus essential if the alliance was to be saved. The United States, Dulles explained to a very receptive Eisenhower, could not tell her allies "in effect that these new weapons are becoming conventional weapons, and at the same time tell them that they cannot have such weapons. He felt that now [late 1957] is the time for a decision in this matter -- the alternative is that the alliances will fall apart."⁵⁹⁷ Even as early as December 1953, Dulles commented that the U.S. government wanted to make sure that the allied forces would not have to "fight with obsolete equipment."⁵⁹⁸ How could America deny to her allies a form of weaponry the Soviets already had and indeed were deploying against them? What kind of alliance would it be if America so obviously did not trust her own allies?

With the MC 48 strategy, the United States was essentially asking the allies to put their fate in American hands--indeed, largely in the hands of an American general. Could one expect them to place such trust in America while the United States would not trust them with the very weapons most essential to their own defense? NATO had developed an integrated command structure. But if this simply meant that the Americans would be running the show and giving orders that the Europeans would have to carry out, would the alliance be viable? Didn't the basic idea of military integration imply that the NATO forces would be armed in a uniform way, without regard to national distinctions? It was absurd to think that a truly integrated force could be composed of national contingents, some of whom had the most modern armament while others were denied on principle the very form of weaponry most vital in modern warfare.

For Eisenhower and Dulles, the need for nuclear sharing was obvious from the start. It was impossible, Dulles said in 1957, to "contemplate a situation in which there were first and second class powers in NATO"--and this, in fact, had been his and Eisenhower's view all along.⁵⁹⁹ Already in 1953 Dulles had been talking about the idea of "atomic weapons 'being meshed into' NATO forces" so that the allies would not have to fight with "obsolete weapons."⁶⁰⁰ In late 1954, at the time MC 48 was being prepared, the U.S. government decided that henceforth American military assistance would be "geared into" the development of European forces "prepared for integrated action" in line with the new strategy. The goal was to make sure that the NATO forces would have a nuclear capability of their own.⁶⁰¹ And in 1956, Dulles agreed with the British foreign secretary that "the strategic concept contemplated that everyone should have an atomic capability," and that this "was the implication of MC 48."⁶⁰² Indeed, the great premium MC 48 placed on rapid action, and thus on forces-in-being and on operational readiness, meant that the weapons placed in European hands would have to be under their effective control for the strategy to work. In this way also, MC 48 pulled the United States toward a full-fledged policy of nuclear sharing.⁶⁰³