NATO: Article V and Collective Defense Page: 4 of 6
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defeat a Soviet attack and avoid the calamity of a nuclear conflict. In 1978, for example,
the alliance agreed upon a non-binding pledge to increase defense spending by 3% a year
in order to strengthen conventional forces; this commitment was only irregularly met by
the allies. Several factors contributed to the Europeans' failure to strengthen their
conventional forces: the presence of significant political groupings that viewed increased
defense expenditures as provocative in an already tense international atmosphere; economic
strictures; and the stationing, by 1980, of over 300,000 U.S. forces that carried a significant
part of the burden. Conventional forces were expensive to maintain, and nuclear forces
were relatively inexpensive. Both France and Britain had nuclear arsenals, which their
political leaders believed contributed to deterrence.
Some observers continue to believe that "flexible response" was essentially a myth.
In the view of one prominent analyst, "the attempt to deter conventional aggression in
Europe with a nuclear arsenal controlled by a non-European power [the United States] that
is itself subject to nuclear retaliation has never appeared to be an example of political or
military rationality."5 Nonetheless, in the view of many strategists, the U.S. threat to use
nuclear weapons served to create sufficient doubt in the minds of Soviet leaders to deter
an attack. The United States deployed some of its nuclear weapons in forward areas, such
as West German territory, to signal the Warsaw Pact that they might be used early in a
conflict. The presence of significant U.S. conventional forces was itself a component of
the philosophy of deterrence: Washington, in this view, would never allow U.S. troops to
be overrun, and would ultimately defend them with nuclear systems, if the need arose.
U.S. nuclear systems in Europe were a step on the ladder of flexible response.
Strategically, the United States and its allies sought to enhance the link between U.S. forces
in Europe and the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal with the 1979 alliance decision to base U.S.
intermediate nuclear forces (INF) in Europe. The forward deployment in Germany (and
elsewhere) of these mobile and highly accurate missiles was meant to signal Moscow -- and
reassure the allies -- that these systems, controlled by the United States, could be employed
to defeat a Soviet invasion.
Doubts over the U.S. commitment to Article V endured throughout the Cold War.
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), proposed in 1984, provoked criticism that the Reagan
Administration wished to create a system that could shield the United States, but not its
allies, against nuclear attack. In the language of the era, Europeans viewed SDI as
"decoupling" the link between the United States and western Europe. Reagan Administration
officials countered that SDI, by protecting the United States from nuclear attack, made easier
any necessary decision in a conflict to use nuclear systems against the Soviets.
Article V After the Cold War
The collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the current disarray of the Russian military have
eliminated any significant threat to western Europe and the United States. NATO has
developed "new missions" relating to crisis management. Virtually all U.S. nuclear systems
have been removed from Europe; only a few hundred nuclear gravity bombs, of limited
military utility, remain. Official NATO doctrine does not describe Russia as an enemy,
nuclear systems are no longer targeted on Russia, and nuclear weapons are now for use
'Lawrence Freedman, "NATO Myths," in George Thibault (ed.), The Art and Practice of Military
Strategy. Washington, NDU Press, 1984. p. 692.
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NATO: Article V and Collective Defense, report, July 17, 1997; Washington D.C.. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc808167/m1/4/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.