Appendix Four (Chapter Six, Notes 18, 144, 148, 152): The Politics of the Nuclear Sharing Question

Appendix Four (Chapter Six, Notes 18, 144, 148, 152)
The Politics of the Nuclear Sharing Question

The whole complex of issues relating to the control of nuclear weapons within the western alliance, and above all to the question of nuclear forces under European national control, is not easy to sort out. In the FIG affair in 1957-58, for example, three major governments played a key political role: France, Germany and the United States. But all three governments were divided within themselves on the most basic issues raised by the idea of European nuclear cooperation. They were thus confused about each others' policies, getting mixed signals from foreign officials of divergent views. This had an important bearing on what everyone did, and maneuvering between different elements within each of these governments spilled over into the diplomacy of the FIG affair. And this episode was typical: the politics of the nuclear sharing issue was in general quite complex.

In France and Germany, for example, the defense ministries, and especially the defense ministers, were keenest about moving ahead with nuclear cooperation, while the foreign ministries in both countries were a good deal less enthusiastic--in the German case because of worries about the American reaction, and in the French case because of concerns about a German nuclear force. In France, foreign ministry officials like Joxe and Laloy disliked the idea of a German nuclear force and by February or April 1958 had convinced the foreign minister, Pineau, and the prime minister, Gaillard, in effect to suspend the nuclear part of the FIG arrangement.(1) On February 3, Laloy went so far as to urge the Americans to oppose what his own government was doing.(2)

The situation within the American government was even more complicated. As a general rule, Eisenhower was the strongest supporter of nuclear sharing, while the State Department, especially in the post-Dulles period, was hostile. The Defense Department generally supported the idea, especially toward the end of the Eisenhower period.(3) But sometimes the lines were drawn very differently. One document from late 1957, for example, noted a "sharp difference of opinion" between the State Department, on the one hand, and the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense on the other, on one of the key issues in this area, U.S.-U.K. nuclear cooperation. The AEC and the DoD took a very conservative position, while State Department representatives took the position that the AEC-DoD line "fell far short" of what had been envisaged in the agreement which top AEC and DOD officials--the State Department had not been involved-- had signed with the British and which had been approved by Eisenhower and Macmillan a few weeks earlier.(4)

In this sort of environment, Adenauer knew he had to move very cautiously; indeed, the policy that he opted for was not what anyone would call straightforward. He encouraged his defense minister to move ahead in the nuclear area (approving, for example, the line he took in his discussions with the French in 1957 and early 1958), but at the same time sought to make it seem that he was not really involved with what Strauss was doing--that in fact he was against the nationalistic sort of policy Strauss now stood for, and needed American support to hold the line against the forces headed by Strauss. It was thus not by accident that the defense minister came to be seen as the main advocate of an independent German nuclear capability, and that Adenauer came to be regarded as relatively uninvolved, and indeed as against doing anything which the Americans might oppose.

That Adenauer played a key role in getting people to see things this way is suggested not just by the fact that he did nothing to correct it. He also took certain positive actions, most notably by arranging things in a way that would lead the Americans to view Strauss in a very negative light--as someone who was pursuing goals so questionable that they had to be concealed, goals which were at variance with Adenauer's own objectives, and as a liar to boot.

In meetings with American officials in Washington in March 1958, Strauss in fact did lie about the FIG agreements, and in particular denied that nuclear weapons were involved. But Adenauer had already (in December 1957) secretly informed Dulles that the arrangements related to nuclear weapons. It is inconceivable that Strauss would have gone to America and misled the Americans without having first discussed this matter with Adenauer. Given the importance of the issue, and given therefore that it was obviously bound to come up during Strauss's visit to Washington, Adenauer's failure to tell Strauss about his conversation with Dulles must have been deliberate. Adenauer was keeping his defense minister in the dark on purpose, because he wanted the Americans to see Strauss in a certain light. In other words, Adenauer was not just allowing Strauss to lie, he was arranging things so that the Americans were bound to view him as a liar--in comparison to Adenauer himself, who had told the Americans the truth. All of this made it seem to the Americans that there were powerful and sinister forces which Adenauer was a bulwark against, and that Adenauer therefore needed to be supported. In other words, Strauss was being set up--and set up by the chancellor himself.(5)

One should also note that Josef Rust, State Secretary in the German defense ministry and a man who was very close to Adenauer personally, told the Americans in "closest confidence" in January 1958 about what was going on with the FIG business, and the following month gave them further damaging information about Strauss's thinking.(6) It is also important to bear in mind that Adenauer's personal relations with Strauss were not particularly good, and that Adenauer sometimes sought to give the allies the impression that Strauss was something of a loose cannon, not fully subject to the chancellor's control.(7) And in fact the Americans were taken in by all this, and came to view Strauss, and not Adenauer, as the champion of an independent German nuclear force.(8)

Adenauer knew that it was very important to manipulate American perceptions in this area, and the tactic of telling the Americans what he thought they wanted to hear was in fact used repeatedly during this period.(9) In January 1963, for example, Adenauer gave the Americans the impression that he was deeply opposed to the idea of nuclear forces under European national control, whereas in reality his attitude was exactly the opposite.(10) The artificiality of Adenauer's ostensible opposition to nuclear forces under European control is also apparent from his memoirs. There was a great danger, he wrote, that the European countries would try to build nuclear forces under their own control; this regrettable tendency had been rooted, he said, in the idea of certain European political leaders that perhaps Eisenhower could be trusted, but the Americans would have a new president in a few years, and the fate of Europe could not be allowed to rest so totally in the hands of whatever leader the American voters happened to elect. But he was "criticizing" what it turns out were his own real views; as the later text shows--and this point is confirmed by other sources-- these were in fact Adenauer's own standard arguments, and the text also shows that he himself supported the French nuclear program.(11)

It is amazing how long Adenauer was able to get away with this kind of thing. It was only in late 1962 that Adenauer's tendency to talk out of both sides of his mouth in this area began to catch up with him. When the German nuclear issue came up at the Anglo-American Nassau conference in December 1962, for example, Kennedy remarked that Adenauer had urged the Americans not to help France in the nuclear area to avoid creating pressure for a German nuclear program; but then Macmillan noted that de Gaulle had just told him that Adenauer was not opposed to a French nuclear force. This was bound to confirm the suspicion finally taking shape in the Americans' minds that Adenauer might be playing a double game, and that his policy in this area was not totally straightforward.(12)

NOTES

1. See Soutou, L'Alliance incertaine, esp. pp. 98-100, 109.

2. Elbrick to Dulles, February 5, 1958, PPS records 1957-61, box 151, Europe 1958, RG 59, USNA. My guess is that people like Laloy had never liked the idea, but had initially not opposed it energetically, expecting the Americans to block it and not wanting to expend political capital of their own; when Dulles, however, turned out to be supportive of the idea, they felt they had to do what they could to torpedo it, even urging the U.S. government to block a policy initiative undertaken by their own government.

3. Some Defense Department officials were sympathetic even in 1957-58. An informal Defense Department paper from early 1958 argued, for example, that as soon as the French had tested a bomb and begun to produce nuclear weapons, the United States should "be willing to assist the production of nuclear weapons in NATO-controlled joint facilities located in European countries." "Reassessment of U.S. Policy toward Europe," enclosed in Heppner to Cutler, April 18, 1958, PPS records 1957-61, box 151, Europe 1958, RG 59, USNA.

4. Farley to Dulles, November 19, 1957, PPS records 1957-61, box 130, Great Britain, RG 59, USNA.

5. Dulles-Adenauer meeting, December 14, 1957, DP/GCM/1/DDEL and ML; Schwarz, Adenauer, pp. 335-336, 399-400; Strauss meetings with Dulles and other State Department officials, March 5, 1958 (two documents), 740.5/3-558, RG 59, USNA; Schwarz, "Adenauer und die Kernwaffen," pp. 568-569; Soutou, "Les Accords de 1957 et 1958," pp. 131, 144, 152; Strauss, Die Erinnerungen, p. 313.

6. Schwarz, Adenauer, 2:29, 198-199, 356; Rust-Dean meeting, January 23, 1958, PPS records 1957-61, box 151, Europe 1958, RG 59, USNA; Ahonen, "Strauss the German Nuclear Question," p. 32.

7. See Schwarz, Adenauer, 2:272-274, 356-357; Conze, "La Coopération franco-germano-italienne," p. 128.

8. See Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, pp. 183-184, especially the passage from Bruce to Dulles, February 28, 1958, quoted there.

9. See the discussion in A Constructed Peace, chapter six, pp. 236-238.

10. Compare Under Secretary of State George Ball's account of his January 1963 meeting with Adenauer about the Nassau agreement of December 1962 and the multilateral force in Richard Neustadt, "Skybolt and Nassau: American Policy-Making and Anglo-American Relations," p. 107, NSF/322/Staff Memoranda: Neustadt/JFKL, with the discussion in Schwarz, Adenauer, 2:812-813, and especially with Adenauer's remarks in his meetings with de Gaulle, January 21 and 22, 1963, AAPBD 1963, 1:111, 139-140, 141 (for Adenauer's support of the French nuclear program). Note especially the implication here (pp. 140-141) that the Germans were more or less obliged to go along with these American plans, no matter what they really thought of them.

11. See Adenauer, Erinnerungen, 3:292-293, 295, and 324 (for his "opposition" to national nuclear forces), 3:325-328 (for his real views--note especially his reference to "equality" among all NATO states in this area on p. 328), and 4:71 (for his support of the French bomb). For his standard view that the American nuclear monopoly in the West was "intolerable," see his remarks in the CDU Bundesvorstand, September 20, 1956, in Guenther Buchstab, ed., Adenauer: "Wir haben wirklich etwas geschaffen," pp. 1029, 1073, 1079, or in a July 30, 1960, meeting with de Gaulle, Documents diplomatiques francais 1960, vol. 2, pp. 165-167.

12. Kennedy-Macmillan meeting, December 19, 1962, 9:50 a.m., p. 12, Prem 11/4229, PRO.