Herbert W Armstrong

In early September, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told a NATO study group meeting in Brussels that Europeans could no longer count on the United States to guarantee their security. NATO's strategic security philosophy, he said, is based on an out-of-date American nuclear doctrine to which he had contributed while in office and which is no longer valid because of growing Soviet power.

American nuclear doctrine, which rests on "assured destruction" of Soviet cities, industry and population, is no longer valid, Kissinger said, because of "the total vulnerability of the United States. "(Kissinger's spoken words 'I total vulnerability" were downgraded to "limited vulnerability in the official transcript typed up afterwards.)

Addressing a top-level experts' conference in Brussels on "NATO — the Next 30 Years," the former secretary of state said: "Don't you Europeans keep asking us to multiply assurances we cannot possibly mean, and if we did mean should not want to execute, and if we did execute would destroy civilization. That is our strategic dilemma into which we have built ourselves by our theories and the encouragement of our allies. It is not a declining will, but an objective problem. Of course a President will threaten, but will he do it?" (The phrase, "but will he do it?" was changed to "but is it a realistic course.")

NATO's unity, of course, has been based for 30 years on the premise that the United States would do it — would, in other words, treat an attack on Europe as an attack on the United States. In 1962 Charles De Gaulle decided the U.S. never would risk losing New York to save Paris and declared that France would go its own way in defense. The other allies have constantly asked the United States for reassurance on that point and received it. Now Kissinger seems to be retracting it.

"I have contributed some of these theories so I am not casting any blame," said Kissinger. "I have sat around the NATO Council table in Brussels and elsewhere and have uttered the magic words that the U.S. military commitment remained undiminished which had a profoundly reassuring effect, and which permitted the [allied] ministers to return home with a rationale for not increasing defense expenditures. And my successors have uttered the same reassurances. And yet if my analysis is correct these words cannot be true, and if my analysis is correct we must face the fact that it is absurd to base the strategy of the West on the credibility of the threat of mutual suicide."

Kissinger urged a rapid overhaul of U.S. doctrine, substituting a "counter-force" strategy that would concentrate on strategic Soviet military targets. At the same time, there would be development of a new system of "Eurostrategic" nuclear weapons in western Europe, which would be integrated into such a strategy. These would counterbalance the monstrous SS-20's the Soviets have targeted on major European cities.

Kissinger's message, reported Morton Kondracke in the New Republic, "was such a shock that it became the center of conference debate." Don Cook, writing in the Los Angeles Times added: "It is a rather sobering beginning to NATO's next 30 years to have one of America's most spectacular secretaries of state now saying that all the assurances he had given the alliance in the past were eyewash."

"The Window"

Kissinger, elaborating on some of his points, said in conversation that he thinks there is a period of about three years (others call it the "1,000-day period") in which the United States and its allies can turn the situation from growing vulnerability back to reasonable security. Unless this occurs the United States and its allies will enter the so-called "window of peril" period (or MOSCOW'S "open window of military opportunity") — roughly the time between 1981 and 1986, when the new MX missile system is expected to come on stream. During this "time of unusual peril" (to use the terminology of columnist Ernest Conine) the Soviets could either invade the west, or more likely, translate their military superiority into one of nuclear blackmail, or at the very least, heavy political leverage against Western Europe (the so-called "finlandization" syndrome).

French Ask Germans to Upgrade Their Nuclear Force

Mr. Kissinger has finally spoken the unspeakable words — that Europe is in a far more vulnerable position than anyone dared realize. Yet, the French, for one, have suspected this "ugly fact" for a long time.

And now the French — unofficially — have called for closer military cooperation in the nuclear field with the West Germans. The first Frenchmen to broach the idea, in mid-August, were Gaullists — despite the Gaullists' expressed fears that the West Germans would sell out NATO in return for any Soviet hint at possible German reunification.

The two Gaullists, retired general Georges Buis and politician Alexandre Sanguinetti, floated their idea in the unlikely pages of the leftist Nouvel Observateur. (London's Daily Telegraph called it a "spectacular trial baloon.") They argued that France now needs West Germany's money to stay in nuclear competition with the super powers.

The Gaullists' opener was accompanied by a new book by three young French officers called "Euroshima, urging France to share its nuclear power with other Europeans instead of continuing to go it alone. The three — including two officers on active duty — hardly speak for the French Government. Yet readers were quick to note that under French regulations they could not have published their treatise without the approval of their superiors.

"So far, the West Germans aren't nibbling," reports the Christian Science Monitor. Initial German comment has warned of an adverse Soviet reaction to any West German access to nuclear weapons that isn't harnessed to the Americans. Several newspapers reminded the French of West Germany's voluntary treaty renunciation of nuclear weapons of its own. The conservative Die Welt editorialized that "such wild utopian ideas...should be filed in the folder [marked] 'curiosities.'"

In fact a new West German Defense white paper unequivocally rejects any thought of a European nuclear force decoupled from the U.S. "Nothing could be farther from the aim of the federal government than to create a European nuclear force," the paper states. But, of course, the white paper expresses the view of the current Social Democratic Party in power. (Look for Franz Josef Strauss, former conservative Defense Minister and now CDU Chancellor candidate, to get much political mileage out of the Kissinger bombshell.

In other areas, the Germans and the French are co-operating to a remarkable degree, in a relationship the New York Times Magazine calls "the new entente cordiale." As doubts about America grow — and as long as Mr. Carter is in power — their mutual interests are bound to intensify.

Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau