COMMON MARKET

The heart of the matter

LEONARD BEATON

It is now three years since I proposed the idea of a joint Anglo-French Nuclear Deterrent which could be held in trust for Europe.

Mr Edward Heath, Foreign Affairs, October 1969. Because the nuclear risk is not divisible, any nuclear cooperation which might have a strategic character 'is simply not possible. The decision to employ nuclear weapons can only be made by a single nation.

M Michel Debr6, Foreign Aftairs, April 1971.

One of the predictably recurrent themes of British negotiations for entry into the Euro- pean communities is something called a nuclear arrangement, usually between Britain and France. The bankers who made the European Movement have never been strong on questions of power or the nature of the state. Their weakness is nowhere more striking than in the illusions they have generated about weapons of mass destruc- tion which somehow they feel can be mani- pulated to seduce Tories and Gaullists who are so often so reluctant to understand the destiny that has been prepared for them.

It is sometimes forgotten just how long and how consistently the European Move- ment has been playing at defence. The European Defence Community came before the economic community and only failed at the point of French ratification. That caused a major alliance crisis of confidence, as did the equivalent event of the 1960s, the scrap- ping of the NATO multilateral nuclear force. This extraordinary conception has usually been attributed to a combination of the us State Department and the West German government. The GerMans, however, took almost no initiative in the matter and merely Insisted on their emotional need for it because the Americans told them to. Those who were pushing it against general opposi- tion in Moscow and Washington were the European Movement and the old-established Marshall Plan ideologists who have lived for twenty years with a vision of Europe com- parable with the dreams that western intel- lectuals used to have about Soviet Russia; But the difference between the EDC in the 'fifties and the mix in the 'sixties was that in addition to the Five and the French centre the MLF enjoyed the uncritical support of the Foreign Office, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and the British government. So far as is known, they never knew where or why it vanished.

Up to the middle-1960s, the European Movement and the State Department assumed that British and French nuclear weapons were a Tory Gaullist illusion which neither could afford. Miich were ineffective. and which anything N.% ith a European label on it (however .ineffective) would readily supplant. But President de Gaulle changed all that. The Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defence kept raising the question of control—who could fire the weapons?— but their politicians preferred not to listen. Pe Gaulle, however. carried this essential issue into the international dehate. Who but the leader of a nation, he would ask, could hold the power of life and death over its People? He insisted that in a power system dominated by these weapons, France must make her own and control her own.

As this line of argument became generally acknowledged, the Europeans decided that the obvious key to Franco-British recon- ciliation was a nuclear arrangement. The Tories in opposition had guilt feelings and a sense of danger about these thoughts but they suspected that somehow this was the key to the European future. Mr Heath went much further. He formally proposed what he called an Anglo-French nuclear deterrent and has been talking to the French about it ever since. He has not made this part of the negotiations, since it has nothing to do with the Rome Treaty: but he clearly sees it as a part of the general British com- mitment to a European destiny even though he continues to insist that governments learning to work together are the only foun- dation for European political union.

Mr Heath has not said what he means by a joint deterrent. The question raises a number of separate issues. There is, first, the interchange of knowledge on both sides. While this is clearly part of what he is referring to, it would not lead to anything that could be called a 'joint deterrent'. The Americans certainly do not think they have a joint deterrent with Britain because the two countries share their research results and (when needed) weapon designs. Nor can we assume that Mr Heath is proposing the sort of joint consultation and target planning which is practised in NATO since he has specifically said that Britain and France should bring the rest of Europe into this kind of relationship with their joint deterrent.

Could it then be joint development and manufacture? To the British. it is now an accepted practice to buy prime nuclear systems elsewhere. Skybolt was to be bought in • the .United States and its replacement, Polaris, has been manufactured by the Lockheed Company in its American plants. To the French, on the other hand, it remains a major objective to have national control over research, production and spares. No doubt the British would like to talk about joint development of future weapons, seek- ing maximum American cooperation and using the sort of joint but separate tech- niques used for the Concorde. This would at least lay the foundations for an exciting political event when a future government embarked on some economic crisis decides to NA ithdraw from the escalating Anglo- French projects and buy .finished American

equipment. (Washington's European en- thusiasm and hostility to British nuclear weapons are never quite able to overcome the prospect of a big contract.) It is possible that what Mr Heath wants is a beginning on a batch of joint projects.

The tragic fate of the Anglo-French vari- able geometry aircraft may already be for- gotten. Curiously, the one joint project with major implications for nuclear weapons was entered into by the Labour government with the Dutch and Germans against the strong resistance of the French. This is the gas centrifuge method of uranium enrich- ment which may be removing the main technical and industrial harriers to the manu- facture of hydrogen bombs. If there is to be a nuclear issue bearing on these negotia- tions, it is likely to concern the great political sensitivities which surround the tripartite agreement on the centrifuge.

None of this, however, meets Mr Heath's notion of a joint deterrent. These words in their plain connotation would appear to imply a force which would probably be jointly developed and manufactured and would certainly be jointly operated. It is not surprising that we have heard nothing about where the power of decision would lie: whether each was to be usable only on a joint decision; or the separate but inter- mingled forces of either could be used on national decision; or whether some more elaborate refinements might be developed with different components of the force governed by different rules. On past form, we could expect the kind of people who play at this kind of game in the Foreign Office to he unconcerned about these essen- tially technical questions on the grounds that in any case no one is going to use these weapons. Happily, the French have put major public emphasis on the control prob- lem and the MLF attempt to avoid it is probably unrepeatable.

Once the matter is examined, the Govern- ment is likely to find that Britain has only two things to offer the French: nuclear weapons technology, most of which is now American: and the promise of future British support for future French development pro- jects. Clearly referring to the first, Mr Heath has conceded that his joint deterrent 'could not be implemented without American sup- port': and we might thus face the prospect that the Americans would be asked to accept the dispersal of their most sensitive informa- tion as well as trade discrimination and the loss of a large maize market as part of the price of enlarging the EEC. A British under- taking to buy equipment produced for the force de frappe after the present generation could be written into a contract. If this contained reasonable provisions for cancella- tion. this cash sum could then be applied as one of the costs of entry.

These modest realities are about all that there is to a nuclear arrangement. On the other hand, the subject is an admirable one for the creation of myths. The French per- suaded not only themselves but most other people that Britain committed herself to America at Nassau when in fact Mr Mac- millan got rid of a had American weapon and replaced it with a good one, thus ensur- ing that one country in Western Europe would have an effective retaliatory force in the 'seventies. The main importance of nuclear arrangements seems to derive from the fact that people find them incomprehen- sible while feeling they must be immensely important. When the time comes for invent- ing the myths about Britain and the EEC, 1971, they will no doubt play a major part.