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

This applied especially to problems in the nuclear area. Control over nuclear weapons was the key to political independence. This was why de Gaulle put it at the heart of his policy. And Eisenhower sympathized with French nuclear aspirations. In June 1959, for example, the president remarked to General Norstad (who by this point was quite fed up with de Gaulle) that "we would react very much as de Gaulle does if the shoe were on the other foot."⁸⁰⁹ A year later, he told Norstad that the United States should be "generous" with the allies on the nuclear sharing issue, that cooperation could not be a one-way street, and that "he had considerable sympathy for the point of view of de Gaulle in this question. He is trying to build up his country, and we persist in treating them as second-rate."⁸¹⁰ He told Herter that on the question of a French nuclear capability, "he really was sympathetic."⁸¹¹ And he never fully blamed de Gaulle for the difficulties in relations between the two countries. The more basic problem in his view lay at home. In May 1959, for example, the president again "expressed sympathy with the French." The problem was that the administration was "handcuffed" by the "senseless limitations" Congress had placed on the executive branch.⁸¹² France, he thought, should have the bomb. "I would like to be able to give it to you," he told de Gaulle when the two men discussed the issue in December 1959. It was "stupid" that France had to spend huge sums of money developing a weapon her allies already had.⁸¹³ And the president never shut the door entirely on bilateral nuclear cooperation with France.⁸¹⁴

Nevertheless, it was clear that relations between the two countries had gone downhill, and that the nuclear question lay at the heart of the problem. Certain sections of the American government, largely in reaction to de Gaulle's own policies, had turned with particular force against the idea of nuclear cooperation with France. It was not just that Congress had been alienated by de Gaulle and was now less willing to liberalize the law. Even within the administration, the balance was shifting against the idea of helping the French with their nuclear program. It was because of de Gaulle's generally uncooperative attitude on NATO issues in general that Norstad came to oppose so sharply the idea of nuclear assistance to France, and his opposition played a key role in shaping opinion within the administration. There was no military need for any sharing arrangement that went beyond the stockpile scheme, Norstad told top officials in August 1960, and he threatened to testify to that effect before Congress. There was no point trying to appease de Gaulle; helping the French nuclear program, he said, would "not 'buy' any better French cooperation in NATO." The intensity of Norstad's feelings convinced Secretary of Defense Gates not to press the issue of nuclear assistance to France. Gates had earlier thought the issue had to be resolved, even if that meant a showdown with the State Department. But Norstad's strong opposition had "shaken" Gates and had led him to instruct "his people to prepare the paper [on nuclear sharing] in a way that would show no sharp splits with the Department of State position." And the issue was in effect put on ice for the rest of the Eisenhower period.⁸¹⁵

The French, for their part, also hardened their line, and showed no interest in anything the Americans now suggested. If the remarkably liberal U.S. policy that Dulles had outlined to him in 1958 had not been enough to win de Gaulle's cooperation, it was scarcely to be expected that the new proposals for a "NATO nuclear force" would lead to a more forthcoming French policy. To de Gaulle all this talk of "NATO control" or even "European control" was just smoke and mirrors. The whole "idea of a NATO nuclear force," he told Macmillan, "had no reality. The nuclear forces were American and the Americans would use them or not as they wished."⁸¹⁶ SACEUR in the final analysis was just an American general. Giving Norstad control over the Polaris missiles would "change nothing." "What do we care," he asked, "if the U.S. forces in Europe are under the control of an American in Europe or in Washington?" It was a question of same pants, different pockets: "In reality the United States would continue as before to control these nuclear weapons." So the idea of a powerful SACEUR, with a nuclear force under his own control, "had little interest" for France--although de Gaulle would complain loudly enough when, during the Kennedy period, SACEUR's wings really were clipped and he became little more than an ordinary American field commander.⁸¹⁷

Even the idea of a "European force," as it was taking shape in American minds, had little appeal for de Gaulle. There was no sovereign European authority to control that force, only an ersatz-Europe with no real political personality of its own. This "'integrated' Europe, as they call it," he said, would have no policy, and would thus follow the lead of "some outsider who did have a policy."⁸¹⁸ Such a Europe would be a passive instrument in America's hands, and indeed this was why, he claimed, the U.S. government had been such a strong supporter of an integrated Europe à la Jean Monnet. For the Americans, the proposal for a multilateral force was meant to be a major new departure. But de Gaulle had seen it all before. The MLF, like the EDC before it, was simply a gimmick: a new structure would be set up, but the basic political question, the question of control, was being evaded. The Americans could go ahead with this nonsense if they wanted, since it would make no difference one way or the other. But France would not take part in the charade and would continue to build a force under full national control.

So in their very different ways, neither Britain nor France was willing to go along with the new thrust of American policy. But it was Germany that was the crucial country in this context. Indeed, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that no one would have cared much about British or French nuclear weapons if it had not been for the implications with regard to Germany. And the most important point to note about German policy is that the German government, and Adenauer in particular, also very much wanted eventually to acquire an independent nuclear capability.

Beginning in 1955, German policy began to take on a more "nationalistic" cast. With the ratification of the Paris accords and the beginning of German rearmament, with Germany's admission into NATO and the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, the Federal Republic had come of age: Germany, Adenauer declared, had once again become a great power.⁸¹⁹ And a major country like Germany, he felt, could not forever remain a mere "atomic protectorate." A state incapable of defending itself, in his view, was no real state at all. It was "intolerable," he said, that only America and Russia had large nuclear forces--"intolerable" that those two countries had so much power, and that the fate of every nation on earth rested so exclusively in their hands.⁸²⁰

In 1955, German relations with the United States cooled dramatically. The great 1949-54 love affair between Adenauer and the Americans now came to an end. There was a real danger, the chancellor thought, that the Americans were getting ready to make a deal with Russia at the expense of their European allies--above all, at the expense of Germany.⁸²¹ He disliked the 1955 Geneva summit conference and everything it symbolized--in spite of the fact that he had pressed strongly for talks and that American policy at that meeting was very much in line with the plan he himself had put forward at the time.⁸²² It sometimes seemed at this point that it was the simple idea of détente that he objected to. Détente seemed to imply that both sides had come to accept the status quo and thus the division of Germany. The notion of détente thus merged in his mind with the idea of the United States and the Soviet Union dividing up the world between themselves, and of America selling out German interests in the process. But Adenauer did not believe that an intransigent policy would force the Soviets to disgorge East Germany or that détente would rule out reunification. He in fact took exactly the opposite line when discussing the issue with other CDU leaders in early 1955. Reunification, he argued, would have to follow détente--the implication being that if one were serious about reunification, one would first have to achieve a relaxation of tensions in Europe, and thus that his criticism of the détente policy was unwarranted.⁸²³

By 1956 it seemed as though Adenauer was looking for excuses to attack American policy. He now questioned America's willingness to go to war for the sake of Europe. In a world ruled by the United States and the Soviet Union, Europe would no longer count, and NATO would be superfluous. That, he said, was why America was thinking in terms of a withdrawal from the continent, and why the Pentagon was working out plans--the so-called "Radford Plan"--for cutting back on the American troop presence in the NATO area. The United States, he insisted, could not be trusted. Donald Quarles, the U.S. Air Force Secretary, had met with him in September and had told him, Adenauer said, that even if the Soviets launched a nuclear attack on the United States, the Americans would allow a whole week to go by before retaliating. It was not hard to see what Adenauer was implying. If the Americans would be so slow to respond even if they themselves were struck, how could one expect them to react quickly in the event of an attack on Europe?⁸²⁴

And this was no isolated incident. Adenauer was now highly critical of American policy in general. The United States, he complained to Dulles, was placing excessive emphasis on nuclear weapons. As a result, any U.S.-Soviet war, "even if arising from a cause of no decisive importance in itself," would lead to the "complete annihilation" of most of the human race. Europe, including Germany, was therefore "losing confidence in the reliability of the United States."⁸²⁵

The Americans were puzzled and wondered what they had done to provoke this kind of reaction. The point of view Adenauer had attributed to Quarles was absurd, as Robert Murphy, now Deputy Undersecretary of State, told Adenauer when the two men met in October. In fact, even the German record of the original meeting with Quarles shows that Adenauer had totally misunderstood, or had deliberately misrepresented, what the Air Force Secretary had said.⁸²⁶ As for Adenauer's criticism of America's general military policy, it soon became clear that his complaints could not be taken at face value. He was not interested in getting the United States to support a more balanced NATO strategy. He ignored the American response that ground forces were indeed necessary, that the United States could not do everything, and that countries like Germany had to "carry the part of the task most appropriate for them."⁸²⁷ What he actually objected to was that America, by herself, should have this life-or-death power. To complain about the United States was to lay the basis for some sort of arrangement that would give the Europeans some real control over their own fate: if America was "unreliable," then the European countries, including Germany, needed nuclear forces of their own.

German defense policy now shifted course. The emphasis was placed not on conventional forces but on a relatively small but highly trained and well-equipped army prepared to operate on the nuclear battlefield. German units would not be mere "cannon fodder." The Federal Republic had to be treated as an equal, and that meant that the Bundeswehr had to be armed with the same weapons as the other NATO forces--that is, nuclear-capable weapons, with the Americans turning over the warheads in an emergency.⁸²⁸ But the question of whether an arrangement of this sort should be set up was never the real issue. It was obvious to both Dulles and Adenauer that the German army had to be prepared to fight with nuclear weapons. A purely conventional force would be no match for a great nuclear-armed adversary. Even in 1953 the Americans had understood that German forces would have to be equipped "with new weapons as they become available." The Americans had worried that France would take a different line, but by 1957 the French had reached the same conclusion. Their foreign minister, for example, now "stressed the importance of nuclear weapons for Germany." This had by now become the standard view within the western alliance.⁸²⁹

The key issue was not whether the Bundeswehr should be armed with nuclear-capable weapons, but rather whether the warheads would be under German national control--that is, whether the Americans would have to give the green light before the weapons could actually be used. And Adenauer's view was that the Federal Republic needed an independent nuclear capability. In October 1956, he thought Euratom might provide a way for Germany to "produce nuclear weapons herself."⁸³⁰ A year later, when the French proposed joint production of nuclear weapons, Adenauer was delighted to go along. It was not enough that the weapons be available in an emergency. "Wir müssen sie produzieren," he declared--"we must produce them."⁸³¹ This remained his view even in the 1960s. Just weeks before his death in 1967, for example, he attacked the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which confirmed the non-nuclear status of the Federal Republic, as the "Morgenthau Plan squared."⁸³²

This goal of making Germany something more than an American "atomic protectorate" obviously did not mean that Adenauer was determined to end the alliance with America or to pursue a totally independent course in international affairs. The other major western powers all wanted nuclear forces under national control, but this did not mean that any of them wanted to end the western alliance. Why should it be different for Germany? What Adenauer was striving for was natural, especially in the context of 1950s attitudes about nuclear weapons and nuclear warfare. But he knew that his goals would not be easy to reach. Enormous obstacles lay in his path. The mere thought of a nuclear-armed Germany aroused great anxiety even in the other western countries, and there was a major domestic problem as well. So he had to proceed cautiously and opportunistically, preparing the ground for later action and testing the waters as he went.

It was for this reason that he now stressed--indeed, exaggerated--America's "unreliability." If the United States was not to be trusted, the Europeans had the right to build up their own defenses. At the same time, he began to talk vaguely about the need for changes in the 1954 treaties that had limited Germany's freedom to move ahead in the nuclear area.⁸³³ As for the unilateral declaration he had made in conjunction with those treaties, promising that the Federal Republic would not build nuclear weapons on her own territory, he started to tell the story that when he made that pledge, Dulles came over to him and stated that it would apply in accordance with the legal principle "rebus sic stantibus." This implied that as the general situation changed, the pledge would no longer be binding; Germany would thus eventually be able to build nuclear weapons of her own. But although the story was not entirely without foundation and Dulles did sometimes express this kind of thought, the American Secretary of State had not made an explicit declaration of that sort at the time.⁸³⁴ If Adenauer was exaggerating things, it was because this helped clear the way for measures that would lead to a greater degree of German strategic independence--that is, for an eventual German nuclear program. Similarly, in 1961, Strauss intimated that the 1954 pledge was binding only as long as NATO was able to protect Germany. To argue that the NATO system and American power did not give the Federal Republic the security she needed--and Adenauer's complaints about America implied that Germany did not feel fully protected by existing arrangements--was thus to suggest that the Germany was entitled to some real control over what was obviously the dominant form of military power.⁸³⁵

Collaboration with France seemed at times to offer an important avenue of advance. Adenauer understood that it was easier, especially given the American attitude and political conditions within Germany, to move ahead in a "European" framework than for Germany to proceed on a purely national basis.⁸³⁶ In October 1956, in a meeting with the French ambassador, he attacked the Americans for trying to keep nuclear weapons away from their allies, and linked this to what he saw as the prospect of America making a direct deal with Russia, selling out Europe in the process. He returned to the theme a month later. The European countries, he told some rather astonished French leaders, had to "unite against America."⁸³⁷ But Europe, he felt, could become a power factor only if it had some sort of nuclear capability of its own. The European countries should therefore cooperate with each other in developing nuclear forces: hence his interest first in Euratom in 1956 and then in the FIG arrangements in 1957 and early 1958.

After de Gaulle returned to power in 1958 and put a final end to the FIG project, the only road that remained open was the American stockpile plan. This brought Germany closer to a nuclear force of her own, and as a NATO arrangement it was more acceptable to other countries than a nuclear force under full national control. The stockpile plan, however, was simply a way station. In 1960 especially, there were many indications that the German government wanted to go a good deal further--although Adenauer understood that he could not be too open about his nuclear ambitions.⁸³⁸

A NATO nuclear force, with missiles able to destroy targets well within the Soviet Union, was yet another step in the right direction. And so the chancellor backed this idea and indeed was ready to tell the Americans what he thought they wanted to hear. The NATO force, he said, was necessary to head off an independent German program. The French argument that a country without its own nuclear force was a mere satellite had angered him, Adenauer told Norstad in September 1960. He was afraid that French nationalism would lead to German nationalism, and that after he was gone, no successor would be strong enough to oppose a German national force. The NATO MRBM plan was the only solution. If that plan failed, "nobody would be able to prevent Germany in the future from creating such a system for itself. And Germany could do that better and sooner than France!"⁸³⁹

Adenauer's strategy was to stress the points that the world could most easily accept: that a system based on total American control was unacceptable, that Germany could not be discriminated against, that the Bundeswehr had to be armed with the same weapons as the other NATO armies, that a special military status for the Federal Republic was a step toward neutralization and was therefore out of the question. The members of NATO, he told British leaders in early 1961, "could not accept that these weapons would only be used on the orders of the United States President, since in an emergency things might look very differently from Washington. Unless the situation was changed, one or another member would start to manufacture its own weapons, which were cheaper now. France was already doing so, and she would not be the last." The implication was clear enough. It was not hard to imagine who he thought the next country would be.⁸⁴⁰

To be sure, he now officially supported the idea of a NATO nuclear force, and said--in that meeting with the British, for example--that SACEUR had to have the authority to use the weapons, but "not in his capacity as a United States General." In reality, however, a system which put the most fundamental decisions about war and peace in the hands of a military officer, especially an American general, could never be fully satisfactory to a political creature like Adenauer, and at no point was he enthusiastic about the idea of a NATO multilateral force under the control of SACEUR.⁸⁴¹ He thus often spoke about "European," and not just German, needs in this area, implying that some kind of European force, not subject to an American veto, might be a possible solution. But he was probably not thinking in terms of a true pooling of sovereignty and of a force controlled by a supra-national European authority. He was a good European, he said, but not a "super-European." He understood that a true European political union was not in the cards, not for many years at any rate.⁸⁴² That meant that a European force would have to be built up from national components, coordinated within, even integrated into, the common structure, but ultimately under national control--that is, the same way NATO as a whole was organized.

By taking the line he did, Adenauer was thus killing a number of birds with one stone. By supporting the plan for a NATO nuclear force, he was ingratiating himself with the Americans, and confirming their view of him as a key ally in the struggle against the dark forces of German nationalism--someone who had to be supported and whose views, especially in the key nuclear area, needed to be accommodated.⁸⁴³ At home, he would be coming across as an "Atlanticist": people could be confident that he was not the one who would put Germany's vital relations with America at risk.⁸⁴⁴ But at the time he was taking another step toward achieving his nuclear objectives. The Americans might agree that the NATO force would be built up from national contingents, ultimately under national control. A German force would then emerge as the Federal Republic's contribution to the NATO force, and the NATO framework would legitimate the German nuclear effort. But if things did not work out this way--if the NATO effort failed or was deemed inadequate--Germany would be justified in moving ahead on her own, if possible, together with her Europeans friends.⁸⁴⁵ The NATO project, after all, was based on the premise that Europe needed "something" in the nuclear area, free of American control; and if an effective NATO force could not be set up, that principle meant that it was legitimate for the individual countries, including Germany, to proceed on a national basis. Indeed, the chancellor predicted in late 1960 that if there was no agreement on a NATO force in which France participated, Germany would begin to build a nuclear force of her own--and he took this position knowing full well that de Gaulle did not support the idea of a NATO force and would take no part in such an arrangement.⁸⁴⁶ This was just a prediction, and his tone might even have been regretful: Adenauer certainly wanted to make his position as palatable as possible to his allies, and to come across as the great opponent of German nationalistic tendencies. But he was doing important spadework: he was preparing the ground for a policy he wanted Germany eventually to adopt.

Adenauer complained to the Americans about France, but the new thrust of French policy fit in perfectly with what he was trying to do. The basic philosophy which de Gaulle was articulating--the idea that Europe could not depend so heavily on America, that the European countries had to take charge of their own destiny and that they therefore had to acquire nuclear forces under their own control--struck just the right chord as far as Adenauer was concerned. This was not a philosophy which he himself could openly espouse. Germany was too dependent on America and too burdened by the past for him to take that kind of line in public. But de Gaulle was doing his work for him. The French leader was establishing the legitimacy of principles which could sooner or later be taken over, ready-made, and put at the heart of German policy. From Adenauer's point of view, it did not matter all that much that on a whole series of issues France and Germany were at odds. De Gaulle's proposal for an Anglo-Franco-American directorate obviously had little appeal for Germany; the French leader's acceptance of the Oder-Neisse line as a reunified Germany's final border was not in line with German policy, which wanted to keep the issue formally open as a bargaining chip; his apparent opposition to German nuclear weapons, reflected in the cancellation of the FIG agreements, also ran counter to Adenauer's policy. But none of this was of fundamental importance. What really mattered was what de Gaulle stood for. It was his basic political message that resonated with Adenauer, and that fact lay at the heart of an increasingly close Franco-German relationship. Adenauer sympathized with the basic thrust of de Gaulle's policy. In particular, he strongly supported the French nuclear program--although here again, for tactical reasons, he sought to give the Americans the opposite impression.⁸⁴⁷