Mixed -Manned-Muddled
LEONARD BEATON writes : The Government is faced with a very difficult decision over the proposed NATO mixed- manned Polaris force. It obviously thinks the plan half-baked militarily and incapable of justi- fying the expense; and yet the Americans have become deeply committed to it and are all but begging Britain to come in and make it possible.
The case for the force is political and not military, and it is on political grounds that it Must be answered. It is said that Lord Mount- batten has advanced powerful arguments against spending large sums of money to deploy Polaris missiles in vulnerable ships run by sailors of several nationalities. Mr. McNamara can also see these objections and, indeed, the West Germans are unlikely to be deceived about how important these surface ships will be. The point is whether the plan starts the alliance down the right road and will lead to a desirable organisation of its nuclear forces.
Once these ships exist, the commanders of the force will naturally start to plan a more effective successor. Since the main aim is to give the West Germans (and for that matter the Russians) the assurance that Western Europe can act even When Washington hesitates, there will also be Pressure for revised control arrangements. This will reveal the dangerous ambiguity in the Present position. The Americans are talking about working out a control system while fully Intending to keep a veto in their own hands: the 9ermans, on the other hand, are openly advocat- ing majority voting. This question should be had out with the Germans before the force is agreed. It looks dangerously as if they are being induced to go into this effort on false pretences. But if the Americans really intend ultimately to aban- don their own control, the matter becomes very serious. A scheme which was to prevent the pro- liferation of nuclear weapons will itself represent the first occasion on which nuClear weapons have been transferred from one authority to another.
Yet when this has been said, the American case has not been answered. They are pursuing the mixed-manned force as the solution to what they conceive to be two urgent problems: the prospect of a German national nuclear pro- gramme; and the need to win the West Germans away from the embrace of General de Gaulle. As far as the first of these is concerned, it is baffling that Washington is so convinced that the Germans will choose to follow behind the French eight or ten years later. On the French timetable, they could not be expected to explode a device before 1968, have an atomic bomb before 1970 and produce a thermonuclear device before 1974 or 1975. And meanwhile, they would be defying the Americans who alone could defend them. The Germans are not such wild men; both sides of the Bundestag are anxious only that the North Atlantic alliance should remain totally commit- ted to their security. The threat of a nuclear Ger- many has not come from them. It has grown of its own accord in fertile State Department imaginations.
But what of the Gaullist menace? Is it not the British, the Americans ask, who have been urging the United States to take a new initiative to pre- vent a narrow inward-looking Europe? What better way to isolate the little Europeans than by heading them off on the key issue, nuclear weapons? What better way to bring Britain into Europe than by building this force on the British, Germans, Italians and Benelux countries? The Government is gravely handicapped in taking a view on this by the fact that it has no coherent European policy. Like the American administra- tion, it had come to believe that the best future for the alliance was the creation of a European great power and this still lingers on in its assump- tions. It seems to have thought out no alternative to a continuing pursuit of an independent European giant, and has apparently persuaded itself that only one elderly man stands in the way of this great enterprise. If this is still its out- look, there is not much to be said against the mixed-manned force. It is the beginning of a local European nuclear defence under American patronage: and to complete the second pillar to the alliance the British Government could be expected to join the Germans in seeking an end to the American veto.
The truth is, however, that what the British. Germans and Italians really want is continuing American leadership in Western Europe. They are more interested in a share in American plan- ning and targeting than they are in a new European force. The Germans in this case could be offered a place in the command at Omaha as a right arising from their conventional efforts, which are badly needed, rather than for token nuclear efforts.
All this could be clearly argued by Mr. Mac- millan if he realised that what is needed and wanted is not a European great power but an Atlantic Commonwealth with an ample place for the great nations of Western Europe. If General de Gaulle taught the British and American Governments on January 14 that there is no alternative to continuing American leader- ship of the free world, including Europe, he will have saved the West from a dangerous division. If the lesson has been learned, it should lead not to a mixed-manned force but to the sort of special German-American relationship in Washington and in Omaha which the British have built up over the years. NATO should be strengthened by the commitment of the real long-range weapons which defend Europe, the new Minuteman rocket force, not by a force which no one is likely to make part of serious military plans. The problem is that some people fear that the American force which exists for their defence might not be available in a crisis, By committing Bomber Command to NATO, the Government has perhaps indirectly shown the Americans the way they must go to keep the alliance content with their leadership.
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