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

tion approach to a missile defense shield in Europe,
which involved cooking up bilateral arrangements
with a couple of key allies while the rest of <strong>NATO</strong> observed
somewhat peevishly from the sidelines, may
have maximized the diplomatic hurdles. But even the
Obama administration’s “reset” campaign with the
Phased Adaptive Approach, which was more easily
digestible by <strong>NATO</strong> skeptics <strong>and</strong> Russia, may have
bought only a certain amount of extra time <strong>and</strong> room
for maneuver. The recent renewed rumblings from
Russia suggest that the whole scheme may still be very
much hostage to the fortunes of U.S.-Russo relations,
<strong>and</strong> that in turn could still affect <strong>NATO</strong> perspectives.
There was a time when <strong>NATO</strong>’s residual forwarddeployed
nuclear weapons formed part of a much
larger arsenal of thous<strong>and</strong>s of nuclear weapons in Europe
that was a perfect recipe for the Cold War. They
provided “glue” for the Alliance, ensuring the credibility
of the notion of extended nuclear deterrence,
while spreading out the risks, <strong>and</strong> at the same time
answering the conundrum of how to make up for the
massive Soviet conventional superiority when no one
in the Alliance was ready to foot the bill for doing so
by conventional means.
However, it is not a world now in which <strong>NATO</strong>
can draw on any credit for the fact that it has already
removed the vast bulk of that arsenal. Memories are
short. What is past is past in that sense, <strong>and</strong> also in
the sense that the origins of the remaining weapons
stem from that bygone era. The 150-200 bombs, <strong>and</strong>
their associated U.S. <strong>and</strong> allied aircraft <strong>and</strong> air crews,
in Germany, Belgium, the Netherl<strong>and</strong>s, Italy, <strong>and</strong>
Turkey, resemble a hangover from the Cold War at
a time when the world has, arguably, moved beyond
the post-Cold War era to a post-post-Cold War age.
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