Conventional Arms Control And East-West Security
This big, important book is a genuine East-West joint venture with its clutch of authors including two who subsequently joined President Bush's National Security Council staff and four who came to form part of the Soviet arms control negotiating teams. The book concentrates on military aspects of arms control, ranging from doctrine to verification, but it sets them in their broader context: conventional arms control cannot be separated from nuclear issues. More important, its ultimate subject is intensely political, nothing less than the future of the two Germanies and the shape of Europe.
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IT is hardly too much to say that the future not only of NATO but of the Atlantic Community as a whole depends today on the ability of Western statesmanship to find a politically acceptable and militarily sensible solution to the problem of how to give all the NATO allies a share in a common responsibility for defense of the West in the nuclear age. This is not merely a question of satisfying the amour propre of General de Gaulle; nor of whether or not a future government in Bonn will remain satisfied with the present limited status of Germany in the nuclear field-a question on which some divergence of views in Washington and London is relevant but not critical. It is a problem simple in conception but infinitely complex in definition, which has been stated succinctly by M. Jean Monnet. ". . . the United States," he said in New York on January 23, "must realize that the claims of Europe to share common responsibility and authority for decision on defense, including nuclear weapons, is natural, since any decision involves the very existence of the European peoples. On the other hand .. . Europeans must understand that the nuclear terror is indivisible and that they too must shoulder an adequate share of the common defense."
IF we look back at the year 1962 to see how it affected relations between the Atlantic powers, we find emphasis on a search for ways to put into more effective practice the spirit of partnership called for by President Kennedy in his speech of July 4. In this search, the obstacle over which both statesmen and writers have stumbled has nearly always been connected with nuclear problems and specifically with the sharing of responsibilities for the control and use of nuclear weapons.

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