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PARTISAN REVIEW
sales of "games" offering excitement by the imitation of a nuclear war
in Europe (in the course of which the Federal Republic is totally
destroyed) has not only helped to promote anti-American feelings
over here, but has made more thoughtful Germans reflect on the psy–
chological gulf that separates the inhabitants of a continent that has
never suffered the massive destruction of modern war from their
European allies who actually experienced it.
It
is remarkable that at least one important secret was kept
most effectively for several months, both in the Pentagon and the
White House: the secret of the compromise proposal worked out by
Nitze and Kwizinsky during their "Walk in the Woods" at Geneva .
It
was guarded so well that not a word was communicated to any of
the European governments concerned, until some time after the
compromise had been rejected by both Moscow and Washington .
Helmut Schmidt, who was not only the single most important
originator of NATO's double-track decision but remained a staunch
supporter of stationing the American missiles after the negotiations
failed, has told the Bundestag before its final decisive vote that he
was never informed of the proposal, let alone consulted about it,
while he was Chancellor.
It
is not surprising, therefore, that large
numbers of solidly pro-Western West Germans have come to feel
that they are no longer treated by Washington as allies in a common
cause, but as mere pawns in a strategic game- and that , from their
point of view, the double-track decision was a mistake, because it
made their future security dependent on the outcome of a negotia–
tion over which they turned out to have no influence at all.
IV .
The forces, both long-term and immediate, accounting for the
- at least temporary - strength of the German peace movement,
which I have tried to analyze here, may be summed up as, first, a
growing sense of military insecurity giving rise to understandable, if
often irrational fear; second, in a large part of the young generation,
a loss of the understanding that the conflict with the Soviet Union is
not only
a conflict between two great powers and their associates, but
also a conflict between freedom and tyranny; third, a widespread
loss of trust in the rationality and responsibility of the conduct of
United States policy by the present administration, on which the fate
of the Federal Republic depends to a large extent.
If
one takes the
