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

But the fact that China was not included was bound to affect what was done with Germany. Part of the reason the United States had originally been so interested in including China in the arrangement was that if she were not a party, "the undertakings would in fact be directed against the West Germans alone."¹⁴²³ Now that China would not be included, the Federal Republic would thus be left as the only real target. The treaty therefore would mean that the United States would be guaranteeing West Germany's non-nuclear status. For this not to be a simple gift to the USSR, the United States had to be given with a certain quid pro quo. And that tacit quid pro quo related to the stabilization of the status quo in central Europe, and around Berlin in particular.

The Berlin issue was in fact linked to the German nuclear question and thus to the test ban, and that linkage was an essential part of the structure that was taking shape in 1963. These issues were not tied together in any formal way: there was no secret deal whereby the Soviets agreed to respect western rights in Berlin in return for an American commitment to keep Germany non-nuclear. But by mid-1963 the two sides had come to understand that these issues were in fact related. Indeed, it had become clear, as Macmillan put it at the time, that a test ban, coupled with a non-dissemination agreement, was "the real key to the German problem" as a whole.¹⁴²⁴

This understanding was a product of the political process which culminated in the test ban agreement. From the late 1950s on, the Soviets had made their feelings about the prospect of a German nuclear capability quite clear. The Kennedy plan for a settlement of the Berlin crisis had taken those feelings into account. The March 1962 "Principles" paper laid out the sort of arrangement the Americans had in mind. The Soviets would respect the status quo in Berlin, and the two countries would cooperate in preventing "further diffusion of nuclear weapons."¹⁴²⁵ When the plan was initially presented, the Soviets objected to the very general way in which the non-diffusion provision was framed. As Gromyko told Rusk, earlier U.S.-Soviet talks "had dealt with this problem with specific reference to the two Germanies," and he still wanted the understanding to apply specifically to Germany.¹⁴²⁶ But the Americans refused to give way on this point. It was important to be able to tell German leaders, as Kennedy himself did in April 1962, that "our policy was a general one not directed at Germany."¹⁴²⁷ By August, the Soviets had come to accept the American approach.¹⁴²⁸ Both sides had come to understand that the German nuclear problem could be dealt with by means of a general arms control agreement.

It was also understood that that agreement did not have to be a formal non-proliferation treaty. A test ban treaty would serve the same purpose. The U.S. negotiators in the talks with Russia were instructed to stress the importance of the test ban in preventing proliferation. It was quite clear to U.S. officials, moreover, that current policy on the test ban question was rooted in the earlier U.S.-Soviet exchanges, beginning with the Rusk-Gromyko meeting in March 1962--that is, in the efforts to deal with the Berlin crisis by working in the issue of a German nuclear capability.¹⁴²⁹

So all these problems were related, and this was reflected in the way these matters were discussed. When, for example, Khrushchev met with Harriman in April 1963, the American brought up the test ban issue; the Soviet leader replied that the German question was more important. "He was not saying these two subjects were linked"--although in fact, as Harriman noted, "he linked them twice." Khrushchev then said flatly that Berlin was no longer a problem, and proposed an arrangement which directly tied the two issues together. "I will give my word that I will find a basis for a test ban agreeable to both sides provided you agree to work out the basis of a German settlement which would recognize the two Germanies as they now exist."¹⁴³⁰ And when Kennedy endorsed the idea of a test ban treaty in his June 10 American University speech--"the best statement," Khrushchev thought, "made by any President since Roosevelt"--the Soviet leader responded positively, adding, however, that the test ban should be linked to a non-aggression pact between NATO and the Soviet bloc. This new proposal automatically raised a whole series of issues related to Berlin and the German question--would a cut-off of access to Berlin constitute aggression? would a western attempt to maintain their rights through force be considered aggression?--showing once again how the test ban was being tied to fundamental political questions.¹⁴³¹

Kennedy and his main advisors also understood that the test ban was not just a simple arms control measure, but was rather closely linked to the most central political problems. The State Department wanted to move cautiously on these political questions, but a number of high officials thought the test ban talks would provide an opportunity for seeing whether some sort of "package deal with Moscow" could be worked out.¹⁴³² Harriman, who was going to the Soviet capital to negotiate the test ban, sought to explore the prospects for a fundamental agreement. He and Kaysen, who was accompanying him to Moscow, objected to what they saw as the State Department's overly cautious line. If the State Department view reflected official policy, Kaysen wrote Bundy, he and Harriman "might as well stay home," and a less senior official could be sent to negotiate with the Russians. McNamara also favored a "serious and wide-ranging" discussion of a whole range of political issues.¹⁴³³

And the president basically agreed that such an attempt should be made. He now parted company with the State Department on two major issues: the MLF and nuclear assistance to France. The State Department fought the idea that the MLF might be an item in the concessions column--that it could conceivably be negotiated away as part of a settlement with Russia--and in the NSC on July 9 Kennedy supported Rusk on this point. But that did not prevent him from telling Harriman in a private meeting the very next morning that he could take a more flexible line in the Moscow talks. The MLF might be dropped if the two sides could reach agreement on the China problem or on some other issue. Harriman should make no definite promises, but he could use his judgment in deciding how far to go.¹⁴³⁴ And in fact a few days earlier Kennedy had told British leaders (this time with Rusk present) that the "West might want to trade the idea off" in the Moscow talks.¹⁴³⁵

Similarly, on the question of nuclear assistance to France, people like Ball remained opposed in principle, but Kennedy insisted on taking a flexible line. The president wanted to bring the French into the test ban regime. If they agreed to stop testing in the atmosphere, it would be harder for potential nuclear powers like China and Germany to break what would in that case be an almost universal ban and to move forward with their own nuclear programs--and easier for America and Russia to prevent them from doing so. And the way to bring France into the system was to help her with her atomic program--to help her test underground, and to assist her in other ways as well. "President Kennedy," Harriman told the British, "was ready to consider very seriously giving nuclear weapons or information to the French as the price of getting them in to this agreement."¹⁴³⁶ Kennedy, in fact, made a major effort to work out some kind of arrangement with the French, and the Soviets were quite happy to go along with the idea. De Gaulle, however, refused to cooperate, and so France did not sign the treaty. But the episode shows how far Kennedy was willing to go. The simple fact that he intended to apply the non-proliferation policy in such a selective way again shows that he was reaching for something much more important than a simple arms control arrangement: he was trying to build a political system, and he still very much wanted the French on board.¹⁴³⁷

So the president was prepared to move ahead, and in the Moscow talks the two sides cautiously broached the issue of a general political settlement. The Soviets had brought up the question of a non-aggression pact; this was negotiable, Harriman suggested, if the USSR was willing to agree that interference with access to Berlin would be considered aggression. The Berlin issue was now on the table. It was a central part of the "package." Harriman went on to point out that the United States did not simply expect the Soviets to accept the status quo in Berlin without getting anything in return: "we desired no one-way arrangement, the interests of all are involved, and we came prepared also to include language on boundary lines and demarcation lines which would be of interest to the USSR's allies, if the USSR so desired."¹⁴³⁸ So now the Oder-Neisse line and the question of the inner-German border were also being introduced into the talks.

The Soviets, however, could not quite bring themselves to accept the sort of arrangement the Americans had in mind. They hinted at times that they were willing to give the Americans a certain degree of satisfaction in this area--to put the Berlin issue on ice as part of an arrangement to stabilize the status quo in central Europe. When Rusk, for example, argued that if a non-aggression pact were followed by a sharp Berlin crisis, "we should all look like fools," the Soviet ambassador replied ("with some significance," Rusk thought) "that such a pact would make such a crisis far less likely."¹⁴³⁹ And when the issue came up in October, Gromyko read Kennedy a statement on Berlin that might be issued in conjunction with a non-aggression pact. The statement was somewhat ambiguous, but the Soviets seemed to be accepting the principle that the use of force would be ruled out in connection with the "situation in West Berlin."¹⁴⁴⁰ And indeed when Khrushchev discussed these issues with Harriman, he stressed that Berlin was no longer a problem, and that he felt quite comfortable with the present situation there.¹⁴⁴¹

All of this had a certain significance, even if the Soviets were not willing to go all the way and guarantee the status quo in Berlin. Even though no formal settlement was possible in 1963, the fact that these discussions had taken place was of considerable importance. Linkages had been established; there was a general sense of connectedness; the test ban was tied to the German nuclear question, which in turn was tied to the Berlin problem.

It was the Berlin crisis that had pulled these issues together. An American guarantee of Germany's non-nuclear status was the most attractive carrot the U.S. government had dangled in front of the Soviets in its attempt to reach a negotiated settlement of the crisis in late 1961 and early 1962. The Americans had also made this issue work the other way: Soviet pressure on Berlin, U.S. leaders suggested, might well lead to a German nuclear capability; the Soviets should therefore settle the crisis by accepting the status quo in Berlin. Kennedy himself made the point in a meeting with Adzhubei on January 31, then in a letter to Khrushchev on February 15, and again in a meeting with Dobrynin on July 17.¹⁴⁴² A variant of this argument was used with the Germans: if they were interested in saving Berlin, they should not go nuclear. The threat of doing so could have a powerful deterrent effect on the Soviets, but the threat-value would vanish as soon as the Germans built a nuclear force. Linking non-proliferation to a Berlin arrangement would thus serve to "hold the Russians" to the agreement. When the point was made to a top German official in March 1962, that official had to admit that he was "impressed by this argument."¹⁴⁴³

A web of linkages had thus come into being during the Kennedy period, and the Soviets could hardly act in Berlin as though these linkages did not exist. To threaten the status quo in Berlin would put Germany's non-nuclear status at risk. The same point applied to the Germans, but in reverse: they could not move ahead in the nuclear area without creating tension around Berlin. The existence of a connection--not formal, but tacit and structural--thus tended to tie both Germany and Russia into the status quo. There was no overt "deal," but a system was taking shape. And at the heart of that system was the link that had established itself, both objectively and in people's minds, between Berlin and Germany's non-nuclear status.

The test ban treaty, the one formal agreement that was worked out, thus came to have a certain symbolic value, like the tip of an iceberg that had come to represent a whole web of understandings that lay just below the surface. It is not to be understood--and was not understood at the time--as a simple arms control agreement, devoid of broader political significance. The three powers involved in the Moscow talks--the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain--were aware of what was going on. But so were the opponents of the treaty--above all, Adenauer and de Gaulle. As Couve pointed out at the time, the arms control measures then on the international agenda were not to be taken at face value. "In the guise of formal disarmament," he noted, "the subject of all of them is Germany, her status, her future." De Gaulle was more direct: the test ban treaty, he said, was "another Yalta," a new division of Europe between Russia and the Anglo-Saxons.¹⁴⁴⁴

Kennedy very much wanted France to come into the new system. If France supported the new structure, it would be harder for the Germans to challenge it. The "Gaullists" in the Federal Republic would no longer have a "French card" to play, so mending fences with de Gaulle would help stabilize the system. The United States and France, he felt, had had their differences, but this was now just history. De Gaulle had objected to the American push for negotiations with Russia in late 1961 and early 1962. But Kennedy, looking back, had come to agree that that earlier policy had been a mistake.¹⁴⁴⁵ American opposition to France's nuclear program had been another source of tension. But by now, he told Couve in May 1963, this issue had been settled. The United States accepted the fact that France had become a nuclear power, and indeed the door to nuclear cooperation had been opened right after the Nassau meeting.¹⁴⁴⁶ And even now, at the time of the test ban, he was prepared to assist the French with their nuclear program. If they signed the test ban treaty, he was prepared to help them test underground, and if they cooperated with the United States on the core political issues, he was ready to do a whole lot more. But de Gaulle refused to make any arrangement with the United States, claiming that such assistance would only be given subject to "conditions which would limit" France's right to use nuclear weapons.

Kennedy was frustrated. In offering assistance, he had not laid down any conditions.¹⁴⁴⁷ It was still hard for him to see what the conflict with France was really about. Couve outlined French policy for Kennedy at the May meeting and again at another White House meeting in October. France, he said, wanted détente in Europe. She wanted a continuing a continuing American military presence there, since Europe could not provide for her own security without American military support. She wanted a Europe that would include the British. And France, he insisted, was dead set against the idea of a German nuclear force. The Franco-German pact had "added nothing substantive to the relations between the two countries." France "would never help the Germans to make nuclear weapons." When Kennedy asked whether the French would cooperate with the Germans in this field if the United States "gave up on the MLF," Couve replied "certainly not." Indeed, he opposed the MLF in part because he thought it would "whet" the German nuclear appetite. To Kennedy all this sounded quite reasonable. Where then, he wondered, did the disagreement lie? Why did de Gaulle's policy seem so anti-American?¹⁴⁴⁸

The basic French argument, that Europe wanted to be "a going concern with her own policy, including her own means of defense," did not really provide much of an answer.¹⁴⁴⁹ De Gaulle called for a "European Europe," for a far-reaching transformation of NATO, and for a Europe stretching from the "Atlantic to the Urals," but who could tell what these phrases were really supposed to mean, or even whether de Gaulle had anything specific in mind? What did this sort of rhetoric translate into, in real political terms?¹⁴⁵⁰

The German nuclear question was the ultimate touchstone. Did de Gaulle want nuclear weapons under German control or not? The idea of a "European Europe," a Europe of nation-states charting its own course, a Europe built on close collaboration between France and Germany, a Europe with "her own means of defense"--all this implied a German nuclear force, and de Gaulle in early 1963 seemed to think that such a force was inevitable. But was he actually willing to accept a German force and all that it implied? Was he willing to face the prospect of a showdown with the Soviets over this issue? The Americans were not, so did de Gaulle think that France and Germany should be prepared to accept a confrontation with the USSR without American power to back them up? These were the real problems, but was de Gaulle facing up to them? In May, Couve now said that France was against a German nuclear force; in October 1962 he had said that the building of such a force might well lead to a third world war. But how did France propose to deal with the problem? The French nuclear program, and the Gaullist rhetoric which justified it, would not help keep Germany non-nuclear. In fact, the Americans argued, it would obviously have the opposite effect. Couve did not dispute the point. The only solution, in his view, was a genuine political unification of Europe, which would make it possible to have a European nuclear force whose elements would not be subject to national control. But this was hardly an answer. Under the best of circumstances, Couve admitted, European unification was a long way off, and in fact, as the Americans went on to point out, it would never happen as long as Gaullist policies, which placed such emphasis on national sovereignty, remained in effect.¹⁴⁵¹

So the French, in Kennedy's view, had no real solution to this fundamental problem. The United States had at least tried to deal with it in 1961 and 1962, by opposing national nuclear capabilities in general and by backing the MLF as an alternative. By 1963, however, Kennedy had come to the conclusion that these policies were bankrupt, and was now prepared to try something new. The United States had tried to finesse the issue of a German nuclear force, but he now recognized that the question had to be faced head on. Since the French agreed with the United States on fundamentals, why couldn't they cooperate with this policy of keeping Germany non-nuclear and of stabilizing the status quo in Europe? Britain, France and the United States should come together politically; the Americans, for their part, would help the French with their nuclear program. Why, if their fundamental policy was as Couve had outlined it, would they refuse to go along with a program of that sort?

So the view was taking shape that de Gaulle was not fully rational--that if he spurned these American overtures, it was not because he was pursuing a policy that made sense in substantive terms. His policy was rooted instead in resentment, most recently over the way Germany had been forced to chose between American and France in early 1963.¹⁴⁵² Indeed, by September, the White House had come to take it for granted that de Gaulle's policy was "largely animated by anti-American prejudice."¹⁴⁵³ De Gaulle, it seemed, was nursing a grudge against America. He and his followers were cultivating a series of myths that had little to do with reality--like the myth that the Americans had never responded to de Gaulle's September 1958 proposal for a tripartite "directorate," or the myth that France had never asked for American nuclear assistance, or the myth that Russia and the Anglo-Saxons had divided up Europe at Yalta and that France had stood for a very different kind of policy.¹⁴⁵⁴ The view was therefore taking hold in Washington that one could not deal with de Gaulle on a businesslike basis. Kennedy had made a great effort to do so, but it was quite clear, by late 1963, that that attempt had not been successful.

In the final analysis, however, the French attitude was not of fundamental importance. It might be useful to mend fences with de Gaulle, but the fate of Germany was the central concern. And if, to paraphrase de Gaulle himself, the "battle for Germany" could be won, the "battle for France" would be of secondary importance. But in a sense the battle for Germany had been won in advance. The Germans had made their choice earlier in the year. The Bundestag had added a preamble of its own to the Franco-German treaty, reaffirming Germany's loyalty to the alliance with America. It had repudiated Adenauer's "Gaullist" policy. Indeed, Adenauer had been forced to resign the chancellorship, although he remained in office for a few months as a lame duck. The alignment with the United States, moreover, was supported by the great mass of the German people. When Kennedy visited their country in June, the reception, in Berlin especially, was enthusiastic and "triumphal"--or "almost hysterical," as Adenauer characterized it.¹⁴⁵⁵ And Kennedy was "willing to draw on this feeling," he told Harriman in early July, "if there was something to be achieved by it."¹⁴⁵⁶ If something reasonable could be worked out with the Russians, there was an excellent chance now that the Germans would follow the American lead.

[Put Figure Thirteen about here]

As it turned out, the Moscow negotiations in July did not lead to a formal east-west settlement. The test ban treaty was the only formal agreement to emerge from the talks. But now the Germans were asked to sign the treaty. This came as a rather unpleasant surprise. There had been no prior consultations with the Americans on this issue. The German assumption had been that the test ban question was not their concern and that this issue involved only the nuclear powers. But now the Americans made it plain that they expected the Federal Republic to sign the treaty. The effect, which Adenauer clearly understood, would be to yet further lock in Germany's non-nuclear status.¹⁴⁵⁷

So Adenauer opposed the treaty, which he called "senseless and pointless."¹⁴⁵⁸ His key argument against it was that the treaty, which East Germany would also sign, would enhance the status of the East German regime. The Americans warned that making a big fuss over the issue would backfire. If the Germans harped on this question, people would think that the treaty really would improve East Germany's international status, whereas in reality its significance in terms of international law was negligible. U.S. officials also warned that dwelling on this issue would make people suspect that the Germans were looking for an excuse to avoid signing the treaty in order to keep their nuclear options from being closed off completely.¹⁴⁵⁹

And Adenauer no longer had the political strength to resist this American pressure. The prevailing view within the country--within his party, and even within his government--was that the Germans had little choice but to follow the American lead.¹⁴⁶⁰ Where else could Germany go? It was absurd to think she could align herself with France and turn her back on America. France, in fact, had little of substance to offer Germany, in either political or military terms. On the nuclear issue in particular, France had turned out to be rather reluctant to engage in a full partnership with her neighbor across the Rhine.¹⁴⁶¹ Nor could Germany really turn toward Russia, although the specter of a new "Rapallo" was sometimes brandished by German diplomats and politicians.¹⁴⁶² A "Rapallo" policy would get her nowhere. The Russians had no interest in a strong Germany, and Germany would have to be strong if she burned her bridges with the West and tried to stand between the two blocs.