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

in pushing its cherished MLF proposal in the face
of Russian <strong>and</strong> French opposition until 1965. French
President Charles de Gaulle’s very different attitude
towards nuclear strategy was causing problems for
intra-alliance consensus, culminating in France’s exit
from the integrated military structure <strong>and</strong> joint nuclear
planning in 1966.
The limited pre-delegation of nuclear release for
certain forward-deployed <strong>and</strong> vulnerable U.S. TNWs,
which seems to have been allowed at the end of the
1950s, was reversed by McNamara’s insistence on
centralized control. In a similar vein, the United States
also began to apply great efforts to ensure that securely
coded Permissive Action Links (PALs) were fitted
to all U.S. nuclear weapons throughout the Alliance. 67
(As nearly 50 years of further technical ingenuity have
now been devoted to the development of PALs, it
must be doubtful whether the B-61s, which have been
extensively reworked <strong>and</strong> redesigned as America’s
sole remaining TNWs, could be detonated if seized by
terrorists or special forces.)
Flexible Response: MC 14/3.
The eventual 1967 compromise adaptation of flexible
response was as much an exercise in creative
ambiguity as a way to raise the threshold of nuclear
war by finally fielding credible levels of conventional
forces which would enable the Alliance to respond to
any attack at an appropriately calibrated level. <strong>NATO</strong>
would no longer plan to use its nuclear weapons
for fighting a war, but for war termination. The aim
would be to drive home to the Soviet leadership the
seriousness of the situation so they would halt their
offensive. Ambiguity had to be the essence of flexible
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