I’ve noted that Europeans get nervous about America’s defense role in Europe—regardless of what it is at the moment.1 Yet Americans should appreciate the difficult position Europeans find themselves in a nuclear-armed world. Let’s review Europe’s Cold War nuclear nightmare. It’s been a long time since I really had to think about this. Let’s see how much I remember.
I think America has value for America as a shield—as I discussed here—and as a power projection platform for key regions of Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
Europe can certainly do more for their own defense to hold that shield and lily pad. But they also know that they potentially face a difficult dilemma when the two outside powers with security interests in Europe have a lot of nuclear weapons.
The problem was most acute in the Cold War when the USSR’s best forces were poised on the Elbe River not far from the Rhine. Reach that objective and NATO would essentially be broken.
The issue was that America wanted Europeans to do more to defend NATO from a conventional Soviet invasion. Europe understood the need for that to avoid yet another destructive general war across Europe. Yet Europeans knew that if America was confident Europeans could hold the front, America might stay out of another conventional war as it did from 1914-1916 and 1939-1941, roughly.
So the Europeans had a difficult balancing act of having enough conventional military power to make the Soviets unsure of whether they could overrun NATO; and not having enough to make the Americans unsure if the Europeans could hold the line.
Another feature in the calculations was that each side in NATO had lots of tactical nukes in addition to the strategic nukes. This added a whole new level of potential destruction. If NATO ground defenses were insufficient, NATO might have to use tactical nukes to hold off the conventional threats. Worse, nobody was really sure if the Soviets would try to win a war with conventional arms or whether they would incorporate nukes into their initial invasion plan.
Either way, Europeans faced the possibility that World War I or II levels of destruction in a conventional war would be the best-case scenario if war erupted. And the problem with tactical nukes was that America and the Soviets both had an incentive to restrict a nuclear war to European territory so each superpower’s homeland remained intact. And for Europeans, where the perhaps Hiroshima-size nuclear warheads are detonating, what looks like a “tactical” or even “theater” nuclear war from Moscow or Washington, D.C. will look an awful lot like strategic nuclear warfare.
Remember, too, that for America, Europe is an objective not only a shield and power projection asset. Europe is also an objective because if a hostile power gains control of Europe and organizes its demographic, scientific, industrial, and military potential for use against America, America is in a world of hurt trying to hold the Atlantic from bases in the Western Hemisphere. So for America, the destruction of allied Europe isn’t the worst-case scenario. Cold logic that says it is better to destroy Taiwan rather than let China capture it applies to Europe, too.
Hence the British and—especially—French nuclear deterrents (because the latter was outside of NATO’s military command structure). If tactical nukes started going off inside Europe, the Europeans wanted to be able to hit Moscow and Leningrad. Ideally the Soviets would back off from using nukes in the first place. But it wasn’t simple.
While European capitals would be at risk from that kind of nuclear escalation, the Europeans knew that the Soviets might think having America escape unscathed while Europe and the USSR were devastated was not the best strategy. So once Soviet territory was hit, the Soviets might escalate to hitting America, too.
For America, that kind of theater nuclear war which could risk strategic war was fatally dangerous. America could get drawn into in a nuclear war from the decisions of Europeans and the Soviets, with no American say in the matter.
The solution was American theater nuclear weapons in Europe. Land-based cruise missiles and Pershing medium-range ballistic missiles were put into Europe. Lots of European public protests erupted. I recall that the Soviets had a hand in covertly encouraging the protests.
From America’s point of view, the ability of America to start a theater nuclear war by striking targets in the USSR could deter the Soviets from using nukes while thinking it could be restricted to Europe. The Soviets had to consider that first use of nukes in Europe risked easily escalating to general nuclear war without any fire break inside Europe.
Yet the notion that America could initiate a theater nuclear war that might simply reach deep into the Warsaw Pact, thus keeping a nuclear war “regional” was worrisome to Europeans, too. If the ability to expand a nuclear war into the Soviet Union wasn’t just a European decision, who knows what the Americans might do in the high-stakes environment of a Soviet invasion of NATO? And where might it escalate?
So Europeans worried America might not risk nuclear war to save Europe and that America might risk nuclear war to save Europe.2
This more complicated calculus for survival with multiple paths to nuclear war on European soil (whether restricted to Europe or strategic engulfing America and the USSR, too) encouraged the Europeans to strengthen their conventional forces so that at least America wouldn’t fear that in order to avoid battlefield defeat in Europe that it had to escalate to tactical nukes—and the dragons lurking beyond the edges of that nuclear battlefield map.
Of course, then we’re back to the Soviets deciding whether they need nukes to defeat NATO’s conventional forces.
Whew. Is it (surface of the sun level) hot in here, or just me?
Is it any wonder Europeans appear extra cautious on matters of great power war? And that having their own nukes is still an issue in Europe so that their fate isn’t solely decided by what outside nuclear-armed powers do?
But who is willing to pay for more than a minimal deterrence force to match America’s and Russia’s (hmmm) far larger warhead counts?
Americans should at least have an appreciation of the nuclear pucker factor that Europeans face without being in total control of the sparks that could lead to their destruction. Mind you, America has to care more about America. I’m not saying we should endorse Europe’s hope to prevent war by being able to drag America into the CEP. But understand this pants-filling part of Europeans caring about Europe more than America does.
Of course, this nuclear-level equation goes out the window if the hostile power that takes over Europe rises from within, like the European Union to name one possibility.
NOTE: I made the image with the Substack capability.
And really, Europeans should understand America’s view that Russia is far enough east now to justify much lower American defense expenditures to protect Europe. After all, even as Russia wages war on Ukraine for four years, “old” NATO can’t seem to rouse itself to seriously re-arm, clearly thinking of that as a “new” NATO problem for now. If old NATO can view new NATO as a buffer, why can’t America see all of NATO as a buffer?
I’m getting dizzy with the “But you’d know I’d think that way and so you’ll do X instead of Y, meaning that I should actually do Z” type of convoluted and endless calculation. Which may be why nuclear deterrence has so far worked to prevent war between nuclear powers.