Disarming Threat to Stability

Nuclear foes would change the course of Europe

It began quietly in 1979, almost as an echo from a bygone generation. Pastors delivered sermons on the virtues of peace. Antiwar groups, some with their roots in the ’50s, passed out petitions and organized small demonstrations. Communist parties drummed up predictable anti-NATO sentiment. But gradually, as anger and fear began to take hold, the movement reached beyond its traditional constituencies, taking on a dimension that surprised even its organizers. Finally, this autumn it reached a crescendo. More than 2 million Western Europeans have demonstrated so far in the streets of the Continent’s major cities—and weekend after weekend the huge parades go on.

It is an astonishing display of concern. The protesters are primarily young, but older people join in as well, swelling the ranks from curb to curb, wall-to-wall humanity stretching as far as the eye can see. Some of the demonstrators wear elaborate costumes, macabre bursts of imagination that pantomime the approach of death. Others carry posters and papier-mâché displays, an explosion of street art mocking the U.S., tearing with outrageous simplicity at the fabric of mutual interest that the U.S. and Western Europe have woven so patiently for 30 years. The signs vilify: “We are not America’s Guinea Pigs,” “Today’s Children are Tomorrow’s Dead,” “Reagan: Your Bomb will not be our Tomb.” The chants taunt: “We don’t want to fight Reagan’s War,” “No Euroshima.”

The demonstrations are mounted by a heterogeneous, loosely linked but powerful coalition that has become a formidable political force in Britain, West Germany, Italy, Belgium and The Netherlands. It threatens, if unchecked, to make NATO a useless concept, to strain beyond tolerance the deep but subtle ties that link America with the continent it has twice fought to defend in this bloody century, and to imperil the very ability of the West to stand, free and united, against the encroachments and designs of the Soviet Union.

The immediate goal of the “peace” movement is to reverse a 1979 NATO decision to deploy a new generation of U.S.-built nuclear missiles in Western Europe starting in late 1983. But some of the movement’s leaders are already arguing that the campaign should not cease until nuclear weapons are banned from the entire Continent, a condition that would leave the Western European countries vulnerable to the overwhelming preponderance of the Soviet Union in conventional arms. The driving force of the movement is a feeling that Europeans have lost control of their future, that they could be incinerated in a war between the superpowers. In West Germany, the starkest of the protest slogans hits closest to the gut of the matter: ICH HABE ANGST (I am afraid). It is a feeling being articulated across Europe by a frightened young generation, and by its elders too.

Against this seething background, the ill-timed and almost casual comments of President Ronald Reagan, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State Alexander Haig about how NATO would use nuclear weapons in Europe, about how a “limited” nuclear war could be fought, were incendiary. Even though the remarks were only restatements of long-held alliance doctrine, they served to persuade more and more Europeans to view the U.S. as a menace to their survival, and, conversely, to give the benefit of the doubt to the Soviet Union’s well-calculated rhetoric of peace. Joseph Luns, NATO’s outspoken Secretary-General, noted the ultimate irony: “There is a greater fear of the weapons NATO is to deploy than of the weapons the U.S.S.R. has already deployed.” Alarmed by the antimissile movement’s challenge to the Western alliance, France’s President François Mitterrand, a firm believer in U.S. defense policies, said during his visit to the U.S. last month: “As soon as possible, the U.S. should take the initiative, catch the ball while it is in the air. If it does not seize this opportunity, European countries will feel compelled to speak up and could be pushed deeper into the psychological and moral crisis we see them in today.”

In his speech last week (see NATION), President Reagan moved to seize the opportunity. In.offering to drop plans to deploy U.S. intermediate-range missiles if the Soviets dismantle theirs, he tried, belatedly and for the first time, to allay Europe’s roiling fears. He also sought to undercut Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev, who had skillfully exploited America’s essential and long-held views on nuclear strategy to portray the Soviet Union as the only superpower devoted to the search for peace (see ESSAY). While Reagan’s proposal was hailed by Europe’s leaders, the reaction of the peace groups was ambivalent. They took credit for forcing the President to act, but claimed he had not gone far enough, and made it clear that they would continue their campaign. eagan displayed an actor’s exquisite sense of timing as he finally decided to step out on the foreign policy stage. Last weekend Brezhnev was due in Bonn for a four-day visit with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who, of all the NATO leaders, has most directly staked his future on the missile issue. West Germany, on NATO’S front line, is crucial to the deployment of the new U.S. weapons.

The Europeans who initially urged the U.S. to develop and deploy the new missiles reasoned that they would offset the growing arsenal of intermediate-range Soviet SS-20s while giving the U.S. bargaining strength in any future arms negotiations. Beginning in 1977, Schmidt led the campaign for the Europeans. In so doing, he was trying to ensure that the U.S. would remain faithful to its pledge, made when the alliance was formed in 1949, to defend NATO’s European members (see box).

Schmidt insisted that at least one other continental NATO member accept a share of the 108 Pershing IIs and 464 ground-launched cruise missiles that the U.S. proposed to install. He demanded from the U.S. a commitment to new arms negotiations with the Soviet Union, designed to reduce the number of nuclear weapons within Europe. Once the U.S. agreed to this so-called two-track decision, Italy decided to take 112 cruises and Britain 160. Belgium and The Netherlands assented, but only tentatively, to take 48 each. In both countries, weak governments tried to placate domestic opposition by linking a final decision to progress in arms control.

The West German Chancellor’s endorsement of the 1979 NATO decision has been challenged by the strong, vocal left wing of his own Social Democratic Party. Last month 58 S.P.D. members of the Bundestag signed a declaration supporting an antimissile demonstration that drew 300,000 protesters to Bonn. Schmidt described the defection as a “declaration of war” against his policies; he has threatened to resign if his S.P.D. opponents succeed in garnering a majority of votes against his missile policy at a national party congress. The vote’s outcome is critical, and not just for Schmidt’s career: if the new missiles are not deployed in West Germany, it is unlikely they will ever be installed in any other Western European nation.

While it is too early to say just how much pressure Reagan’s proposal will take off Schmidt at home, it should certainly help convince the Europeans that Washington intends to negotiate seriously when U.S. and Soviet delegations meet in Geneva Nov. 30 to open the new round of arms-reduction talks.

The growth of the antimissile movement tends to obscure the fact that Western Europe as a whole remains committed to NATO and a close association with the U.S. Every survey of public attitudes toward the Western alliance shows solid support, ranging from 57% up, for continued membership in NATO. According to a recent poll in West Germany, 50% of those asked thought cooperation with the U.S. should be “closer,” while a mere 2% favored warmer ties with the Soviet Union. Only 6% wanted a withdrawal from NATO, and 56%—one of the highest scores in three decades—said they “liked” Americans.

But such reassuring noises are misleading. The replies to more precise questions reveal the shocking degree to which the alliance is confronting a potentially disastrous change in public opinion. According to a London Observer poll, 53% of Britons would now like to see the U.S. withdraw its bases from their country. Other surveys show that higher defense spending—which the U.S. has asked of NATO allies—is favored by only one-third of Britons, 15% of West Germans and fewer than 10% of Belgians and Dutch. Opposition to the new U.S. missiles in the countries where deployment is planned ranges from 39% in West Germany (29% favored the missiles, and the remainder were undecided) to 68% in The Netherlands. Most revealing of all: asked if they would prefer to avoid war even if it meant living under a Communist regime, 48% of West Germans responded yes; only 27% preferred to fight.

The massing flock of doves produced by these doubts and fears must not be labeled simplistically. For the most part, the protesters are not “neutralists,” a term that implies abandoning NATO for an uncommitted stance equidistant from the two superpowers. Nor do they all qualify as pacifists, since many favor the defense of their continent with conventional armaments. Only in Britain and The Netherlands do most missile opponents favor unilateral disarmament, a voluntary gesture that assumes, with immense naivete, that the Soviets would be inspired to come forth and do likewise.

As the 300,000 people who marched through Amsterdam last weekend showed dramatically, the movement draws its strength from a broad cross section of society, much as the U.S. anti-Viet Nam protests did: housewives, professionals, academics, clerics and union members. “Today’s situation is probably more serious than the crises and friction we’ve had in the alliance during the past 30 years,” says Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a guest lecturer at the Brookings Institution in Washington and Henry Kissinger’s longtime adviser on Soviet affairs. “You’re not just dealing with differences among governments. You’re dealing with differences that run deeply into the body politic.”

What unites Western Europe’s antimissile movements is moral revulsion against “overkill,” the frightening capacity of each superpower to destroy the other many times over, combined with genuine fear of a nuclear war that would leave little more than ashes and radiation where 350 million people now live. Says Mient-Jan Faber, 40, the lanky, jeans-clad leader of the Dutch Inter-Church Peace Council (I.K.V.), which serves as a model to anti-nuclear organizations elsewhere in Western Europe: “Arms control, the step-by-step approach, has not worked. Our overall goal—all nuclear weapons out of Europe—will be a long process, but it can begin here.” Says Volkmar Deile, secretary of Action for Reconciliation, one of West Germany’s most influential peace groups: “Talking to the superpowers about disarmament is like talking to drug dealers about stopping drug deliveries.”

Europe’s grim recollections of the first half of the 20th century help explain the pessimism inherent in such declarations.

“To Europeans, the increase in overkill capacity is an irrational act, an absurdity,” says Fritz Stern, provost and a professor of history at Columbia University.

“They know that we have enough to kill and be killed a hundred times over again. Their historic experience in this century—unlike America’s until Viet Nam—has not been the triumphant use of power but the experience of brute and futile power, blindly spent and blindly worshiped.” Even in France, where pacifist sentiment is far less widespread than in other European countries, 63% of those polled consider a war in Europe “imaginable,” and 30% thought it could occur in the next five years. hese fears have emerged at a particularly crucial moment. For the first time in NATO’S 32-year history, the West harbors serious doubts about its defense capabilities.

Gone is the global U.S. military superiority that could be taken for granted in the ’50s and ’60s. Gone is any certainty in Europe that America’s “nuclear umbrella” guarantees the security of the Continent.

Simultaneously, there is a growing conviction in Europe that U.S. governments, including the Reagan Administration, cannot be trusted to handle the war-or-peace issue. Says George Ball, Under Secretary of State in the Johnson Administration and a leading expert on European affairs: “A lot of young people in Europe are disturbed by the saber rattling they have heard and continue to hear out of Washington. It scares the bejesus out of the Europeans, and they go to the streets, shouting that a bunch of lunatics is running things in Washington. What’s worrisome to me is that for the people in the streets, who often aren’t that numerous, there are enormous numbers at home who feel exactly the same way.”

Europe’s fears are so ripe for exploitation by the Soviets that the Kremlin is naturally suspected of financing some of Western Europe’s peace groups. That belief seemed to be confirmed earlier this month when a minor Soviet diplomat in Copenhagen was expelled by the Danish government after reportedly being caught passing money to peace organizations. But there is no concrete evidence that Moscow has been funding pacifist groups on a large scale, although the Soviets have been engaged in covert activity for so long that they rarely leave traces. Western Europe’s well-organized Communists, however, have given organizational and financial support to pacifists. In France and Italy, the main organizations are virtual subsidiaries of powerful Communist parties. In West Germany, the extraordinary discipline of the Oct. 10 protest in Bonn was in good measure due to the work of the parade’s marshals, many of whom were members of the country’s tiny Communist Party.

The Dutch Inter-Church Peace Council’s early advocacy of unilateral disarmament made it a tempting target for the Dutch Communist Party, which tried covertly to infiltrate local chapters. But in 1978, after delegates from Moscow were dispatched to lead a youth march in Amsterdam against the neutron bomb, the Council rebelled. Since then, the church-sponsored group has deliberately held itself aloof from the Communists, although some cooperation does still exist on the local level. This year the Dutch intelligence agency declared the Council to be free of Communist penetration, and Interior Minister Ed van Thijn told the Dutch parliament that there was “not even a scrap of evidence” for allegations that the council was taking money from the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency.

Without spending a ruble, the Soviets, who have been slow to react in the past to propaganda opportunities, have swiftly and adroitly exploited the European antimissile movement. Seizing upon a series of unfortunate slips of the tongue on the part of the President and other top U.S. Administration officials, Soviet President Brezhnev has, in speeches, interviews and conversations with visiting statesmen, portrayed President Reagan as a warmonger intent on destabilizing the global military balance by trying to achieve nuclear superiority. After a visit to the Kremlin, Michael Foot, leader of Britain’s Labor Party, which favors unilateral nuclear disarmament, reported that “the Soviet Union is sincere in wanting peace and meaningful arms negotiations.” Willy Brandt, the former Chancellor of West Germany, declared after meeting with Brezhnev that the Soviet leader “trembled for world peace.”

Small wonder, then, that so many young people of Europe are beguiled by Soviet soft-sell and turned off by the militant talk of the U.S. An official at the Dutch Foreign Ministry, referring to what he calls the “successor generation,” notes that its members “did not experience war in any form. They take peace as the natural order of things. They resent any sacrifice to maintain peace. They are ignorant of the situation in Communist countries. They don’t go there and they don’t want to know. They believe that all superpowers are alike.” Says Felipe Gonzalez, the leader of Spain’s Socialists: “The youth of Europe did not live through the experience of having the U.S. as a liberator. They are in a debate that began with the Viet Nam War. I think that the U.S. is not sensitive to this change of opinion, one which forgets the role of liberator, the Marshall Plan and so forth.”

Young people are the vanguard of the peace movements: student peace movements, ecology peace movements, trade union peace movements, academic peace movements, “Scientists for Peace” and “Women for Peace.” Unlike some hard-pressed crusaders in the past, the antinuclear protesters are often well financed, receiving funds not only from their adherents but in some cases from local governments. They have their own defense experts who talk knowledgeably about “throw weight” and “counterforce strategy” and, perhaps most important of all, they have a program. They know what they want and they know how to get it.

Nowhere is the diversity of the movement greater than in West Germany, where, at latest count, some 300 peace groups are active. Another 500 West German movements, ranging from Maoists and Trotskyites to groups wanting to change policy in South Africa, have taken up the peace issue as well as continuing to thump for their own causes. West German environmentalists are also finding ways to ride the missile issue. Opponents of the construction of a new runway at the Frankfurt airport that would destroy thousands of trees have gathered fresh support since pointing out, accurately, that the field is used by U.S. Air Force units assigned to NATO. 11 these West German movements began to coalesce last year when environmentalists, youth groups, the tiny Communist Party and elements of the Lutheran Church banded together in Krefeld, a city on the Rhine, to draft a basic manifesto: a document calling upon the Bonn government to withdraw its support for the 1979 decision to deploy the U.S. missiles. By March, the petition had amassed some 200,000 signatures; now the total has reached 1.5 million and is still growing.

The Krefeld Appeal, as it is known, has been followed by a proliferation of antinuclear statements, each with an emphasis to suit a different shade of political opinion.

West Germany is particularly receptive to the pacifists’ arguments. A Soviet attack on Western Europe would run right through West Germany. What is more, the country, only the size of Oregon, is saturated with more nuclear arms per square mile, all U.S.-controlled, than any other nation in the world. As Schmidt pointed out to a group of visiting newspaper editors: “If the state of New York had some 6,000 nuclear weapons on its territory, then I suggest that you Americans would have a highly vocal peace movement as well.”

The Germans’ lingering guilt about their Nazi past has also increased the trend toward pacifism. There is a visceral fear of war and its horrors, both inflicted and experienced. Says Novelist Heinrich Boll, an ardent member of the peace movement: “Grandfathers and grandmothers who remember the devastation of conventional wars have passed their memories on to their grandchildren.”

After World War II, many Germans opposed rearming. It was not until 1960 that the Social Democratic Party, after much soul searching, accepted the 1955 decision to join the NATO alliance. “There have been worse things in Germany than young people demonstrating for peace and disarmament,” Willy Brandt remarked last summer. As Erich Enders, a Munich university student, told TIME Senior Correspondent William Rademaekers: “We have grown up surrounded by reminders of our terrible past, and yet now we are a nation bristling with nuclear weapons over which we have no control. Everyone in Europe wanted a pacifist

Germany. Well, now they have one.”

Since Brandt launched his Ostpolitik (policy looking to the East) in 1970, West Germany has become more closely involved with the U.S.S.R. Says Countess Marion Donhoff, publisher of the liberal Hamburg weekly Die Zeit: “We once again assumed our traditional place in the center of Europe. As a result, Bonn must to a certain extent take into account the reactions of the East.”

Last week, only two days before Brezhnev’s arrival in Bonn, a West German company signed an agreement with the Soviet Union that cleared the way for the largest East-West trade contract ever concluded: the construction of a $10 billion pipeline to deliver Siberian natural gas to Western Europe. The U.S. had tried, but to no avail, to convince the West Germans that becoming dependent on the Soviets for fuel would make the country too vulnerable to political pressures.

West Germany’s problems are demographic as well as geographic. There are 11.5 million people (nearly 19% of the population) between the ages of 13 and 25, and more than a million will turn 17 some time this year. Once they would have been assured a comfortable future, but the country’s economy is now faltering, and unemployment could reach 2 million by the end of the year. The frustration of young West Germans with their country’s problems somehow finds expression in mass resentment against the Reagan Administration. In September thousands of West Germans marched through West Berlin to protest a visit by Secretary of State Haig, who personified for them U.S. nuclear policy.

The talk of war plays upon the fears of the young. “They feel like passengers in a car racing toward an abyss,” says Horst Eberhard Richter, a professor of psychosomatics at the University of Giessen. “They have a desire to grab the wheel.”

In contrast to the largely Communist-led peace movements in France and Italy, West German pacifism is not closely identified with any political party. Says a Western diplomat in Bonn: “The majority of West German pacifists do not respond to political pressure. They are acting out of conviction. With them, it’s religion.”

Literally. The Lutheran Church has thrown its considerable weight behind the antimissile protest and so, in a more muted fashion, has the Roman Catholic Church. Protests sponsored by churches have played a major role in arousing public opinion. Earlier this month, the Evangelical Synod, which is the governing body of the Lutheran Church, approved a “peace memorandum” that was tougher on the U.S. than on the Soviet Union.

That attitude has profoundly irritated Schmidt. “You can’t make it so easy for yourselves,” he told churchmen during a television dels bate. “You cannot say, when someone else builds up missiles and armaments directed against your town and other towns, ‘I will hold back and God will look after me.’ ”

The peace movement in Britain also is growing at a remarkable pace. On Oct. 24, a crowd of more than 175,000 gathered in London’s Hyde Park to call for the government not only to ban U.S. nuclear weapons but to give up its own, both ideas stoutly resisted by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government.

The key speaker was Labor Party Leader Foot, who was so moved by the size and enthusiasm of the crowd that he spoke twice. His message: “Only by disarmament can we properly protect our people.” The organization behind the huge rally was the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament. Two years ago, the group had 3,000 members; today, counting its affiliates, it has 250,000. C.N.D.’s secretary-general is Monsignor Bruce Kent, 52, a Roman Catholic priest who served in the British army as a tank commander after World War II. The monsignor is a pacifist, but, by his estimate, 80% of the organization he heads is not. Says he:

“Although we are entirely opposed to weapons of mass destruc- tion, I suppose many of my colleagues would support conven tional weapons of one kind or another. No one at C.N.D. is suggesting that any country abandon all military defense.” The C.N.D. wants Britain emptied of nuclear weapons because, says Kent, “we are not prepared to be the first casualties in a war between the superpowers.”

But the C.N.D. is not urging the U.S. to scrap its own nuclear arsenal. “What we are saying to both superpowers,” points out Kent, “is that without any more negotiations you could both cut massively into your nuclear stocks without risk because you both have enough for deterrence.” The national headquarters of C.N.D. is a few cramped offices in London’s seedy Camden Town. Twelve full-time staffers (two of whom are Communists) and 20 volunteers clad in jeans and T shirts stuff envelopes, sort mail and dispatch the leaflets, badges and stickers that have already brought in $200,000 this year.

The floor is stacked with copies of C.N.D.’s magazine, Sanity, whose circulation has increased from 5,000 to 60,000 in a year. Up a flight of stairs, Bruce, as the monsignor is known to his associates, works at an old wooden desk. He is on the phone constantly, helping run up a $2,400 monthly bill as he talks to reporters, accepts speech invitations, consults with labor unions and coordinates activities with peace groups on the Continent. Still, the operation is not as rickety as the surroundings suggest: on the third floor is the computer that stores the names and addresses of members.

The second major British peace figure is E.P. Thompson, 57, the spokesman for European Nuclear Disarmament, an 18-member committee of intellectuals and activists who have similar goals to the C.N.D. In a pamphlet titled “Protest and Survive,” Thompson argues that the deployment of new missiles in Western Europe is part of a plot to protect the U.S. from nuclear war at Europe’s expense. America’s NATO allies would be obliterated, he writes, although immense damage would also be inflicted upon Russia west of the Urals. The deployment of 160 cruise missiles in Britain, Thompson adds, is thus so frightening to the Soviets that they might actually invite a pre-emptive strike.

Italy’s interest in the antimis-Isile movement was late to develop.

The main force behind the “Movement for Peace and Disarmament,” which brought more than 200,000 protesters into the streets of Rome last month, was the Italian Communist Party.

“Without their decision, such a large demonstration would not have taken place,” says Columnist Arrigo Levi. In fact, it was Italy that made the 1979 NATO decision possible by offering its territory to fulfill Chancellor Schmidt’s demand that at least one other Continental NATO member volunteer to take the U.S. missiles. “We don’t have a problem of neutrality in Italy,” explains Piero Bassetti, a leading member of the dominant Christian Democratic Party. “We are a weak nation. We have to stay with the Americans, even when they make mistakes.”

Nonetheless, antimissile sentiment began to emerge when the government, led by Republican Prime Minister Spadolini, announced publicly that Italy’s contingent of 112 cruise missiles would be based outside the small southern Sicily town of Comiso. Since then, says Marco Fumagalli, 28, a leader of the Communist Youth Federation, the missiles have no longer been a “hypothetical possibility.”

Although the Italian press has given the impression that most of the protests are aimed at the U.S., a group of Communist youths stopped last month outside the Soviet embassy in Rome to shout, “Comrade Brezhnev, cannons are useless, revolution is made by the masses!” Many of the placards at Rome’s big Oct. 24 rally carried the rhyming couplet, Dalla Sicilia alia Scandinavia, no alia NATO e al patto di Varsavia (From Sicily to Scandinavia, no to NATO and the Warsaw Pact).

France is Europe’s odd man out on disarmament. The demonstration in Paris was by far the least impressive of any in the series last month. Only 40,000 marchers turned up, most members of a peace group with close ties to the Communist Party. President Mitterrand’s Socialist Party actively opposed the demonstration. France is different because it is not part of NATO’s integrated military command, though it remains a NATO member, and thus has not been asked to take any of the new U.S. missiles. More important, France possesses its own nuclear defense, the force de frappe created by President Charles de Gaulle. “If France does not share this feeling [of fear], it is because it has its own nuclear armament,” Mitterrand has declared. “We can look after our own defense ourselves.”

Mitterrand has made several pro-missile pronouncements calculated to shore up Helmut Schmidt. In addition, continuing a policy begun by former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, Mitterrand is modernizing France’s nuclear forces. Its submarine fleet, which will number seven by 1990, is being equipped with multiple-warhead M-4 missiles, and the 35 Mirage IV strategic bombers will receive new air-to-ground missiles.

The only pacifist organization of any consequence in France is the Mouvement de la Paix, headed by Michel Langignon, 68, an affable grandfather who has been a member of the Communist Party since 1942. The group’s only significant achievement is the modest march it organized on Oct. 25 in Paris. On the ground floor of Langignon’s offices in a working-class section of Paris is a collection of posters that includes onetime Member Pablo Picasso’s sketch of the dove that became the familiar peace emblem. “Picasso said he didn’t have enough time to think up a symbol,” Langignon recalls. Suddenly French Communist Writer Louis Aragon reached into Picasso’s cluttered folder, picked up a lithograph of a pigeon, and said, “Why don’t you use this?” Langignon is not, shy about his movement’s link to the Communist Party. “We have never tried to hide it,” he says.

Of all the demonstrations for disarmament, perhaps the least expected was the one that suddenly boiled up in Spain on Nov. 15, when 400,000 people gathered in a vast, dusty, open space at the University of Madrid. What made the demonstration all the more remarkable was that Spain, which will soon apply for NATO membership, has made it clear that it will not allow U.S. nuclear weapons to be stationed on its territory. But a wide variety of political parties and pressure groups, rang ing from the Communists to parent-teacher organizations, joined in a loose federation to organize the spectacular meeting on the theme of “Peace, Disarmament and Liberty.” The main speaker was Socialist Leader Gonzalez, whose party calls for a national referendum on the question of Spain’s joining NATO. Gonzalez criticized both superpowers equally on the issue of disarmament. Said he: “It is the same to us whether the missiles come from the East or from the West.”

What if Europe’s doves succeed in blocking deployment of the new Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe? That outcome would, of course, be an immense victory for the Soviets, who would have achieved one of their main diplomatic objectives without making a single concession at the arms negotiations that are about to begin. Moscow would vigorously and artfully exploit so blatant an example of U.S. weakness and Alliance disarray. But in the short run, Europe’s security would not be directly threatened. “It is not as if we were starting from zero,” says Martin Hillenbrand, director-general of the Paris-based Atlantic Institute for International Affairs and a former U.S. Ambassador to West Germany. “The U.S. has 6,000 tactical nuclear weapons in [Western Europe], and the French and British have their nuclear forces.” The rejected systems could be replaced by cruise missiles carried by U.S. planes and submarines based in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.

European rejection of the missiles would also break a crucial link in the complex chain of defenses that constitutes the West’s deterrent against Armageddon. The Soviet Union would have the edge in most categories of armament, nuclear as well as conventional, deployed between the Atlantic and the Urals. At a tune when Pentagon specialists worry that the nation’s own land-based nuclear weapons within the continental U.S. have become vulnerable, the growing military imbalance, while pleasing current pacifist sentiment, might revive a longstanding European fear: that the U.S., for all its vows, would not stand by its allies in the event of a Soviet conventional arms attack in Europe. Nor is there any guarantee that a reversal of the decision to deploy new missiles would satisfy Europe’s antinuclear movement. On the contrary, emboldened activists would most likely seize upon their victory to demand, as British and Dutch unilateralists already have, the total denuclearization of Western Europe, even in the absence of any Soviet reciprocity.

If this attempt were to succeed, the American public, and Congress, would probably be so angered that they would start a movement to bring U.S. forces home. That idea has already come up under much less provocative circumstances: in 1971, Mike Mansfield, then a Senator from Montana, proposed a measure, which came to be known as the “Mansfield amendment,” to reduce the number of U.S. forces in Europe unless Europe spent more on its own defense. The amendment was twice defeated, and as yet there is no talk of it in Congress. “I don’t think we’ll have a fortress America,” says former Kissinger Aide Sonnenfeldt. State Department officials express another worry: that the European peace movement could spill over to the U.S.

The first signs that this might happen appeared on Veterans Day, when activists conducted antinuclear teach-ins on 148 campuses around the country.

The obvious hazard of the peace movement is that its success could bring upon Europe the very cataclysm it seeks to avoid. Unilateral disarmament could make war more likely, not less.

Says Britain’s Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington:

“The Soviet Union, now or at some time in the future, under tomorrow’s leaders if not today’s, might reckon that it could afford to threaten nuclear attack on Western Europe without risking retaliation against Soviet territory.” Hugh Henning, director of the British Atlantic Committee, warns that the weakening of NATO could lead to “miscalculation, which is the greatest danger of all. The Russians would say, ‘Ah, the Americans don’t mind about Norway, they have withdrawn. We will therefore put some muscle on them and get some warm-water ports.’ The Americans will then say, ‘Hey, we do mind.’ Then we will get bullets fired. The cause of both world wars was miscalculation by the aggressor.”

If the U.S. withdrew its troops from the Continent, observe some analysts who have been looking worriedly ahead, Europeans might suddenly realize that the U.S. has protected them not only from the Soviet Union but from themselves. Says Gregory Flynn of the Atlantic Institute: “You wouldn’t have a pacifist or a neutralist Europe. You’d have an unstable Europe. It would be the 1930s all over again, and all that meant in terms of economic nationalism.” The Continent’s chessboard would be open to dozens of political variations, ranging from neutralism to something potentially as destabilizing as the reunification of Germany. That prospect would surely alarm not only European nations but the Soviet Union.

If the fragmentation destroyed NATO, the U.S. could work out bilateral defense agreements with individual nations. Under those circumstances, it would be more difficult for Europe to adopt an effective and independent line in foreign policy, as it has on the Middle East, and to exercise the kind of united power it wielded in recent months to persuade President Reagan to take a serious interest in arms negotiations.

The vacuum left by a U.S. military withdrawal could be filled only if Europe decided to take its defense into its own hands. But in the absence of any strong political entity—the ten-nation European Community certainly does not qualify—that is not even remotely foreseeable.

Without the U.S., NATO would be totally outnumbered by the Soviet bloc in military power. The Alliance’s combined armed forces would total 2.9 million men compared with the Soviet bloc’s 4.7 million. The imbalance in armament would be even worse: 776 combat aircraft to 2,150; 14,053 tanks to 26,300.

With the exception of France, no Western European country has shown the willingness to spend what it takes to develop a credible military force. “The Europeans made a conscious decision not to emphasize conventional arms buildups way back in the 1950s,” says a U.S. diplomat. “They opted for the American nuclear umbrella instead. If they want that umbrella to be folded up, they presumably know the consequences and accept them. We can’t graft backbone.”

If Europe’s defenses are weakened, the Soviet Union would not automatically make any military move. It might not have to. Says a top NATO analyst: “There need not be a Soviet invasion. The Soviets simply won’t take Europe seriously. They will use it as a supply depot for technology.”

The diplomats’ term for this fate is “Finlandization,” a reference to the policy of accommodation with Moscow that Finland, which shares a 788-mile border with the U.S.S.R., has perforce adopted since the end of World War II (see following story). In essence, Europe would check with the giant looming over its

Eastern shoulder before making major political or economic decisions. As one French businessman puts it: “The Soviet Ambassador would be the most powerful man in Paris—and in every other European capital.”

To those who argue that such accommodation is preferable to nuclear annihilation, Lord Carrington offers the solid answer: “This is highly misleading, because there is in fact a third alternative. It is the one that Western Europe has pursued successfully for half a lifetime: to prevent war and remain free.”

Though the major NATO governments oppose the antimissile movement, they are not blameless. “We believe the Europeans are too timid in dealing with paci fist sentiment,” says a Pentagon official. “They see no political rewards for themselves in speaking out on nuclear weapons policy and tend to back away from the debate. These governments have to do it for themselves.” Says Christoph Bertram, director of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies: “There are a lot of people in West Germany today who would accept a reasonable explanation of why the government believes [defense] is so important. The people are confused and frightened, and the current level of debate makes it worse.”

Declares NATO Secretary-General Luns: “It is high time to shake their complacency, and I recommend doing so rather rudely.

They must be told that freedom’s blessing demands a price. They must be told that no matter how large that price might be, it is nothing compared to the price that would have to be paid to regain those blessings should they ever be lost.” Indeed, although the U.S. and Europe are interdependent, Europe needs the U.S. militarily more than the U.S. needs Europe. Fortress America is an unattractive thought, but at least thinkable. Fortress Europe is unthinkable.

But if European public opinion needs a clearer explanation of why, 36 years after the end of World War II, its defense is still linked to U.S. nuclear power, Americans need to be reminded that there is no alternative to their special relationship with Europe. It is understandable that if the Continent decided to disarm, some might think the U.S. would do well to abandon Europe, along with the pride and eccentric nationalism that plunged the world into two global wars. If Europe chose to “opt out,” the argument would run, let it. But the wars actually demonstrated that the Old World remains vital for the defense of the New. The bonds of history and culture—and economic self-interest—remain tight. Neither Western Europe nor the U.S. could prosper without the $114 billion in trade that crosses the Atlantic annually.

The massive demonstrations that surged through the streets of London, Bonn, Brussels, Amsterdam, Rome, Madrid and Paris reflect not only an honest concern about the dangers of nuclear arms but a basic misunderstanding and mistrust of U.S. plans and motives. Although he was too slow to act, President Reagan’s proposal on nuclear disarmament should begin to relieve the fears of many Europeans. The issue of nuclear disarmament, in all of its many variations, has clearly shown the need for more wisdom on the part of the Americans, and more resolve on the part of the Europeans, to preserve the alliance that is so vital to the freedom of the West.

—By Henry Muller.

Reported by Mary Cronin/London and Roland Flamini/Bonn