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decouple from Western Europe the balance of forces would shift even
more massively in its favor. Its political and military strategy is
directed at attaining this goal . The Soviet military build-up of the
last decade should be understood in light of this overarching political
objective . It is a fact that there is a military imbalance between
NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations and that, unless reversed, this
imbalance will have the political consequence of eroding West
European sovereignty. At the conventional and even more at the
nuclear level, the Soviet Union has attained clear advantages in
Europe. In response to the Soviet build-up , NATO made the now
famous "double decision " of December 1979 both to deploy missiles
in Western Europe and to enter into arms-control negotiations with
the Soviet Union on reductions of intermediate-range missiles in
Europe . By placing missiles capable of reaching the Soviet Union in
Western Europe, the United States would let its allies know that it
would come to Europe's defense
even though Soviet SS-20s were not
aimed directly at the United States .
It would also be deterring the Soviets
by raising the possibility that a Soviet attack on Western Europe
would entail the risk of nuclear attacks on the Soviet Union. The
deployment of the missiles is intended to " recouple" the American
nuclear deterrent to the defense of Western Europe, to rule out a
possible nuclear war limited to Europe, and to restore a balance of
forces upset by Soviet initiatives.
If
America had meant to limit nuclear war to Europe , the
decision to deploy Cruise and Pershing II missiles was the wrong
way to go about it. The last thing one ought to do to facilitate a
limited nuclear war, given nuclear parity between the superpowers,
would be to install missiles able to reach the Soviet Union in Western
Europe. On the contrary, the best way to prepare for limiting
nuclear devastation to Europe would be to continue the current
trends in the military balance. A weaker Western conventional
defense combined with existing tactical nuclear weapons for use only
in Western Europe is the best way to insure that nuclear conflict will
not engulf the United States and the Soviet Union . Hence to claim
that the double decision intends to limit devastation to Europe, in
Howard's words , "stands reason, logic and history on its head."
The installation ofthe SS-20s has been perplexing to those who
insist that numbers of weapons do not matter in the nuclear arms
race once the capacity for a retaliatory second strike has been
achieved. Whether or not the Soviets believe that nuclear war can be
