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

I learned here of some of the deep divisions in the political
world concerning tactical nuclear weapons. After
I left the government in 1989, decisions were made
to withdraw most of the U.S. tactical nuclear weapons
from Europe <strong>and</strong> virtually to eliminate U.S. Army
participation in nuclear armaments. I was called back
in 1992 to initiate negotiations with the new Russian
Federation over U.S. help to that fledgling government
in eliminating stocks of former Soviet nuclear
weapons <strong>and</strong> the nuclear explosive material they
contained. This has been an eminently successful program
in which three of the former nuclear states of the
Soviet Union have become non-nuclear nations under
the <strong>Nuclear</strong> Non-Proliferation Treaty. Moreover, the
Russian Federation has greatly reduced its stocks in a
more or less transparent fashion.
Those members of my generation have seen the rise
<strong>and</strong> demise of the Cold War <strong>and</strong> the ushering in of a
new phase of world history that has thus far not been
christened with a capital-letter name. <strong>Nuclear</strong> armaments
within <strong>NATO</strong> played an important role in the
Cold War, <strong>and</strong> <strong>NATO</strong> owes a debt of gratitude to the
soldiers of a number of nations who provided a safe
<strong>and</strong> secure tactical nuclear deterrent over the decades.
The question now is the one for political leaders that I
broached tentatively at the beginning of my remarks:
Can <strong>NATO</strong> retain a tactical nuclear capability for the
foreseeable future? More importantly perhaps is the
question, Should it?
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