by Anna Tomaskovic-Devey
Although nuclear disarmament has long appeared to be a dream of far leftist idealists and religious scholars, the past few years have shown significant political support for, as U.S. President Barack Obama called it in his Prague speech, “a world without nuclear weapons.” Unlikely former U.S. hawks have argued that international security threats are no longer dominated by a cold-war paradigm, but instead by terrorists, proliferation, and non-state actors; nuclear deterrence as a strategy is “increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective” and the world should pursue complete nuclear disarmament. Leaders from across the world have echoed Obama’s sentiment and pledged to work towards a world without nuclear weapons. While promoters of disarmament have been in favor of the current U.S. and Russian negotiations on a new START treaty, many are hoping for a new focus once Start is ratified: tactical nuclear weapons.
Since the 1950s, NATO has deployed U.S. owned tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) and their accompanying delivery vehicles at bases in Europe. Short-range missiles developed during the Cold War for use during in-theater conventional battle situations, TNW are non-strategic in the sense that they don’t provide strategic deterrence; they are militarily distinct from strategic missiles which are thought to provide a guarantee of “mutually assured destruction.” During the Cold War, it was thought that these short range TNWs would provide a “ladder of escalation” in fighting should combat take place on European soil. NATO did not have the conventional weaponry necessary to rebuke a Russian ground invasion of Western Europe, and would have been able to employ these sub-strategic TNW in conventional warfare while limiting the conflict from escalating to full-blown international nuclear war.
At the height of deployment there were over 7,000 U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe. Due to major reductions, including the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives of 1991, today there are only between 150-200 TNW that are stationed at bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey. Many experts argue that TNW no longer provide any military or strategic purpose for NATO but instead maintain symbolic security guarantees between the U.S. and European NATO allies. At the beginning of February, Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski and Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for new negotiated reductions for both U.S. and Russian TNW. This call was supported by a letter to NATO Secretary General Rasmussen penned by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs for Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, and Norway, asking for the topic to be discussed at the upcoming meeting in Tallinn.
Following the calls from European leaders to move towards a more focused discussion on the possibility of reducing or removing TNW from Europe, NATO Secretary General Rasmussen has stated that discussions on NATO’s nuclear policy and posture will continue up until the NATO summit in November when a new strategic concept will be approved. Though this sounds promising for proponents of disarmament, Rasmussen also emphasized practicality and that as long as nuclear weapons exist, “it would be wise to have and maintain a nuclear capacity as part of a credible deterrence.”
NATO will likely look to the U.S. for leadership on this issue. Although there have been rumors that the Obama Administration is interested in reducing the role of nuclear weapons in NATO’s mission, conservative domestic politics will continue to stress the importance of nuclear deterrence and indivisible security guarantees within NATO. Conservatives in the U.S. are also concerned about security issues for the Baltic States and some Eastern European states that have expressed their desire for continued NATO TNW deployment to strategically balance Russia’s increased revanchism. Additionally, neither Italy nor Turkey have expressed their desire to have the nukes removed from their bases; some suspect that the presence of TNW in Turkey is what has prevented them from developing their own nuclear weapons technology to counterbalance the growing threat of neighboring Iran.
Advocates for removing TNW from Europe should be careful not to push their agenda too quickly; if European leadership requests immediate removal of TNW at the same time that an increasing threat of a nuclear Iran creates more conservative domestic pressure in the U.S., Europeans may find themselves with TNW being moved from Germany, Luxembourg, and Belgium to the Incirlik base in Turkey, a situation which could be more dangerous and less helpful to the overall goals of disarmament than a maintenance of the status quo would have been. In Western Europe, TNW are militarily fairly useless, but in Turkey’s relative proximity to Iran, TNW may begin to be included in strategic planning once again. As NATO deliberates, caution and tact is advised, less disarmament advocates are left to shake their heads and repeat the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for ...” CR
Image from creativecommons.org
Anna Tomaskovic-Devey will graduate from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a Masters in Public Policy and Administration in May 2010, and has a Bachelors degree with double majors in Political Science and Russian and Eastern European Studies from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Her academic interests include arms control, nuclear nonproliferation, U.S. defense policy, and international security, but she also enjoys studying the growing field of intangible cultural heritage. An avid traveler, Anna loves hiking mountains, especially in the Tatras, the Torres del Paine in Chilean Patagonia, and the Rockies. When she isn't traveling, Anna loves to cook; her Polish grandmother's recipes are well-loved and always turn out delicious (the secret is plenty of butter and dill!).
