Nearly forty years have passed since Europe was embroiled in mass protests as millions took to the streets to demand an end to the deployment of nuclear missiles. Organizers of these protests despaired of the nuclear-armed stand-off between the Soviet Union and the United States, opposed the development and proliferation of all nuclear weapons, and were aghast at NATO war planning that could make central Europe a nuclear battleground.

Susan Colbourn’s new book, Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons that Nearly Destroyed NATO, is an insightful account of how political leaders, parliaments, and the people of Europe came to grips with the terrible realities of nuclear arsenals on their own soil—and set the stage for an unprecedented treaty that banned intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF). This is a “transatlantic history of Euromissiles from the arms race’s origin in the early 1960s to the final days of the Cold War” in Europe.

It’s an account of decisions fraught with tension and risk to produce, deploy, and then destroy an entire class of nuclear weapons. Colbourn writes with clarity and capably disentangles and presents the “diplomatic, political, social and cultural” history of the Euromissiles (the Soviet SS-20 and the US Pershing II and Gryphon cruise missile) and their impact on the NATO alliance.

Colbourn is Associate Director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. A diplomatic historian, Colburn brings to her work extensive and welcome research that draws heavily not only on archival materials in American holdings, but also those held by NATO and western European nations, including those of West Germany. Colbourn acknowledges that the United States exerted an oversized influence on NATO, but “the premium placed on cohesion gave each member a voice.” Euromissiles recalls these European voices with quotes from memoranda, letters, reminisces, and official correspondence that are part of a smoothly flowing narrative.

European Confidence and Deterrence

The member nations of NATO have long been bound in a mutual alliance that relies for its defense on the conventional forces of member states and the nuclear capabilities of Great Britain, France, and especially the United States. The US strategic triad of manned bombers, submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles was first built during the Cold War and purposefully deployed as a very visible and formidable deterrent to Soviet aggression. Implicit in that deployment was a recognition of what Colbourn calls a “balance of imbalances” wherein “the Soviet Union’s conventional superiority was offset by overwhelming US nuclear superiority and the promise that this deterrent would be extended to cover Western Europe.”

Euromissiles describes how that precarious balance began to tip as the Soviet Union developed its intercontinental ballistic missile forces and grew its military capabilities. Colbourn claims the rapid Soviet build-up of its nuclear and conventional forces in the 1960s resulted in a superpower stalemate of sorts even as US planners moved away from the strategy of massive nuclear retaliation that assuredly would have resulted in an equally devastating attack on the American homeland. Colbourn’s well-documented account notes that planners abandoned the massive nuclear strike as the sole response to Soviet aggression to embrace a broader range of options to fight on European soil: diplomacy, measured use of conventional forces, overwhelming use of conventional forces, and the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

The broader implications of that strategy shook the confidence of NATO and European leaders and led to “an erosion of faith in the promise and protection afforded by extended deterrence” of the US nuclear umbrella over Western Europe.

Few in the capitals of Europe believed that leaders in Washington would defend their territory as if it were the US heartland. The United States’ attempts to introduce a new strategy, known as flexible response, only amplified this crisis of confidence. Critics of this new US approach concentrated their fire on the strategy’s potential to, in what became popular alliance jargon, “decouple” the defense of Europe from that of North America. If a war in Europe would not automatically escalate to an all-out strategic conflict between the superpowers, then the Soviet Union might come to the conclusion that such a war could be fought—and won.

Colbourn argues that the strategy left several issues unresolved. Proponents argued flexibility would prevent the Soviets from predicting NATO’s response and thus introduce uncertainty into Moscow’s risk calculations. In the absence of certainty, the NATO allies were left to wonder how long Washington was prepared to wait to respond to aggression and at what cost to the people of Western Europe. If Soviet planners were confronted by any ambiguity in the strategy “the allies remained divided over where, how and why they might use” battlefield, short range, intermediate range, or intercontinental nuclear weapons.

Détente and Indecision

The uneasy status quo between the superpowers was maintained by an arms race neither Moscow nor Washington could sustain. European nations had struggled to fund and field conventional forces as they rebuilt economies ravaged by war and later grappled with the growing costs of public demand for social welfare services. Colbourn makes a cogent case that “NATO’s defense arrangements were increasingly untenable, with the financial burdens too high to shoulder,” even as “political opponents made much of the other uses to which those funds could be put.” The burden fell most heavily on the United States to continue to upgrade its conventional forces, maintain troops and installations in Europe and further abroad, fight a war in Vietnam, and keep its strategic triad in constant readiness.

The Nixon Administration engaged the Soviets with the hope that détente would open the way to meaningful changes in the security landscape. Colbourn describes how preliminary discussions that shaped the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) excluded forward-based nuclear systems from the talks and postponed meaningful strategic arms negotiations to a later date. The inevitable result was “a formal endorsement of parity” between the superpowers that only limited anti-ballistic missiles as “SALT I stabilized the strategic situation to the detriment of Europe.” Absent from this agreement were any restrictions on theater-based nuclear forces in Europe, any limits on nuclear force modernizations, or any attempt at mutual and balanced conventional force reductions.

The author asserts that the first SALT agreement, then, left open the way for both Moscow and Washington to upgrade their European arsenals. The Soviets replaced aging, vulnerable SS-3 and SS-4 theater nuclear missiles with a new INF weapon, the SS-20 mobile missile, solid-fueled for launch in minutes, with a range (4,700 miles) that allowed it to strike every capital in Europe, and (in later models) three independently targetable nuclear warheads. In Washington, the Carter Administration planned to upgrade its forward deployed forces with an enhanced radiation warhead on short-range tactical missiles and nuclear artillery in Central Europe.

In a chapter aptly titled “Fiasco,” Colbourn explains how Carter, intent on securing European support for the new warhead, went to NATO allies in 1977 and “pressed for a strong commitment to deploy the enhanced radiation warhead, hoping that the Europeans would share the political costs” to field the neutron bomb. News of a new weapon that “would destroy people, not property,” ignited a political firestorm in both Europe and the United States.

With the president adamant that European attitudes mattered, the Soviets and their allies, whether the intelligence agencies of the Warsaw Pact or a motley crew of front groups, saw leverage. Public opinion across Western Europe could be used to constrain US policy . . . or dramatically increase the costs of building a new nuclear weapon.

The Warsaw Pact’s influence operations mixed with genuine homegrown fears about the neutron bomb . . . Front organizations like the World Peace Council . . . called for a week of action . . . filled with anti-nuclear demonstrations across Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

Adverse media coverage and public pressure on the leaders of the alliance nations were enormous and telling. Carter failed to secure commitments from the NATO allies— especially West Germany where most of the new weapons would have been deployed—and deferred any decision on the fate of the new weapon for nearly a year, and later canceled future production plans.

The administration, according to Colbourn’s account, was left reeling and attempted to salvage something from the debacle by proposing a bilateral arms control offer that would link the neutron bomb and the SS-20. In effect, the deal would package a decision to deploy the enhanced radiation warhead with an offer to cancel those same deployments for a reduction in the existing SS-20s. Colburn identifies Carter’s approach as the first use of a dual-track strategy that would later figure prominently in American approaches to arms control.

Moscow relished the American about-face and “the seeming ease with which the Soviet Union could manage public opinion” and “turn citizens in the West against their governments—and against NATO.” It was a lesson that would serve Moscow well.

Opposition and Negotiation

Euromissiles vividly describes (and illustrates with photographs) how “antinuclear activism took the European continent by storm in the early 1980s,” not as a single monolithic peace movement but as, in fact, a “sprawling and amorphous” campaign of dissent from “unruly electorates who took to the streets in record numbers” counted in the millions. West Germans opposed to the deployment of intermediate-range Pershing II missiles in the Federal Republic found common cause with Europeans who opposed the deployment of nuclear-armed cruise missiles (Gryphons) in Belgium, Britain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, and with anti-imperialists, anti-Americans, Communists, Catholic and Quaker peace activists, and Women for Life on Earth (who chained themselves to the gates of a Royal Air Force Base).

The debate in the early 1980s fixated on NATO’s Dual Track Decision and its paired program of deployments and negotiations. Opponents questioned nearly all of its—and NATO’s—core principles: the wisdom of relying on the United States for protection, the severity of the Soviet threat, and the logic and morality of nuclear deterrence. Left unchecked, this dissent threatened to destroy the Atlantic alliance.

In Colbourn’s assessment, the protests were a manifestation of the structural tension woven into the fabric of an alliance of democratic nations, where even decisions made at the highest levels of the allied governments could be undone at the ballot box or reversed in the face of public outrage. In 1983, the NATO fabric was durable enough to survive massive anti-nuclear protests. The allies cobbled together enough election victories to provide support for the initial deployments of the Pershing II and cruise missiles in Britain, Germany, and Italy.

As Colbourn recounts, those initial deployments gave credibility to Ronald Reagan’s commitment to renew arms control talks and negotiate from a position of new strength. Even before the deployment of the missiles in Europe, Reagan proposed a zero option—zero SS-20s for zero-deployed Pershings and Gryphons in NATO nations. It was a reprise of the much-maligned Carter’s dual track to deploy and negotiate which now succeeded in opening the way for a new round of superpower negotiations.

That said, Colbourn claims the alliance did not succeed on the strength of its dual-track policy. Instead, Colbourn ascribes the success of the dual track and the unprecedented bilateral INF treaty that followed in its wake in 1987, to a Soviet Premier. With the most controversial historical assessment Colbourn has made in Euromissiles, the author claims “what ensured NATO’s survival was not the strength of the alliance’s policies; it was the boldness of Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision and sweeping program of reforms.”

This is a claim without merit. The author even undercuts it by stating “the terms of the INF treaty indicated that Gorbachev was . . . willing to make a deal on asymmetrical terms that benefitted the United States.” This is tacit recognition that it was not a bold, but a weakened Gorbachev who found himself facing Reagan who negotiated from a position of growing military and economic strength. The Soviets destroyed 1,846 weapons; the Americans scrapped 846 and ended plans for further deployments. The destruction of the intermediate-range nuclear weapons, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and the erosion of Soviet conventional forces, all signaled to the Western allies that there was no longer a need for a flexible response that included tactical nuclear weapons.

Moreover, NATO’s survival was never threatened as the author has claimed. Colbourn, despite worthwhile insights offered in the pages of Euromissiles, wholly fails to make the case that intermediate nuclear forces were “the nuclear weapons that nearly destroyed NATO.” Colbourn’s research clearly shows instead how the leaders of the Alliance and heads of state committed—over decades—to a process of continued engagement, dialog, and compromise. In fact, Colbourn’s account demonstrates that despite strains in the alliance, NATO showed remarkable staying power even in the face of political opposition and public protest.

In the end, NATO emerged from its Euromissile crisis with the promise from leaders of the alliance that nuclear weapons would only be used as a last resort. The solidarity of the alliance was sustained, and its nuclear deterrent was retained. Today, when the war in Europe is marked by the dizzying pace of new weapons committed to battle, and the lurking threat of further Russian escalation, even with tactical nuclear strikes, this book is a timely and relevant account of the value of diplomacy and of arms control negotiations—and of the enduring value of the transatlantic defensive alliance in NATO.