Tactical Nuclear Weapons and NATO.pdf - Program on Strategic ...

TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND <strong>NATO</strong>:
AN INTRODUCTORY REMINISCENCE
Major General William F. Burns, USA, Retired
Only since World War II has the United States involved
itself—contrary to the advice of leaders beginning
with George Washington—in foreign alliances in
peacetime. This book does not address this question
in particular. However, it does consider one of the
keystone strategies that serve as the basis for the cohesion
of our longest peacetime alliance, the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (<strong>NATO</strong>). The deployment
of tactical nuclear weapons was a major decision not
reached lightly by ourselves <strong>and</strong> our allies <strong>and</strong> continues
to be a point of concern to this day. As a preliminary
to the chapters to follow, I want to address
the issues surrounding the deployment <strong>and</strong> potential
use of tactical nuclear weapons within <strong>NATO</strong> from a
users’ perspective.
My experience coincides roughly with the history
of <strong>NATO</strong>. I took my first oath under the Constitution—as
an ROTC cadet—when Harry Truman was
President <strong>and</strong> General Dwight Eisenhower was the
first Supreme Allied Comm<strong>and</strong>er in Europe. Now in
my 80th year, I can look back over the decades <strong>and</strong> see
the evolution of the Alliance <strong>and</strong> its strategies. Principal
among these strategies was the employment of
nuclear weapons in defense of Europe. While strategists
at high levels debated the “should” <strong>and</strong> “could”
arguments, we at the battery <strong>and</strong> battalion levels of
the U.S. Army <strong>and</strong> the squadron level of the U.S. Air
Force were more interested in “whether” <strong>and</strong> “how.”
As a rather junior first lieutenant of field artillery,
I took comm<strong>and</strong> of my first battery at Fort Sill, OK,
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