Europe Should Dust Off Multilateral Nuclear Plans

For 75 years, America’s NATO allies have relied on the U.S. nuclear arsenal to provide for the defense of Europe. This was never a terribly logical policy. As Lawrence Freedman, the doyen of British strategic historians, put it in these pages back in 1981, “The United States would be irrational to commit suicide on behalf of Western Europe, but NATO has not found this fact a decisive flaw it its strategy.”

The linchpin of the policy was a firm European belief in the steadfast commitment of Washington to the security of Europe. Today, that no longer holds: As two nuclear experts recently wrote in Foreign Policy, “The credibility of the U.S. nuclear umbrella has now been shattered by Trump.” America First leaves no room for alliance solidarity.

Europe must act in accordance with this reality. Luckily, plans for a European nuclear deterrent exist in the archives, and the European Union would do well to dust them off. The Kennedy administration’s proposal for a Multilateral Force (MLF) offers a workable blueprint for a pan-European nuclear deterrent.

Minus America, Europe finds itself unarmed in a dangerous, nuclear world. The arms control regimes developed during the Cold War have been abrogated by both the United States and Russia. China, never a signatory to the bilateral U.S.-Russia agreements of the Cold War, now seeks to expand and upgrade its own nuclear deterrent. Achieving a trilateral nuclear arms agreement would always have been tough, but without the Cold War agreements in place, the task is nigh impossible. To make matters worse, nuclear proliferation means that there are now nine nuclear powers, and Iran is on the brink of becoming the 10th.

These are powerful incentives for the EU to develop a pan-European nuclear deterrent. Relying on Washington to provide extended nuclear deterrence for Brussels is an increasingly dubious proposition. And in this nuclear world, the actors with seats at the negotiating table to forge new nuclear arms control agreements will need to be nuclear powers themselves. If Europe wants to promote nuclear arms control, it paradoxically needs to go nuclear first.

The French and British nuclear deterrents can offer a stopgap capability, especially if France joins NATO’s nuclear planning group, which it should, but over the long term, a transnational European solution is necessary as neither Paris nor London have enough nuclear weapons to secure all of Europe and neither has tactical nuclear capability, which is a critical component in escalation management. And while the Franco-British deterrent may provide short-term cover, it won’t overcome the reality that has kept NATO alive for 75 years—that a U.S. security guarantee was better than one from France or Britain.

With the credibility of the U.S. guarantee in tatters, European states may wish to revisit their own nuclear capability: As Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in March, “We would be safer if we had our own nuclear arsenal.” But the pursuit of a new nuclear capability by any one state in Europe is likely to trigger a security dilemma for the others—if Germany were to go nuclear, would this reassure Poland, or would it incentivize Warsaw to develop its own capability? Just as the United States used nuclear sharing to manage proliferation in early Cold War Europe, Brussels would do well to manage this situation proactively via a shared European nuclear project. Moreover, the development of a nuclear arsenal is extremely costly and difficult. Coordinating a pan-European deterrent would be more economical, focusing efforts against external threats rather than internal competition.

The solution to these myriad challenges is a collective European finger on a collective European nuclear launch button. The best way to do this would be to dust off early Cold War plans for the MLF.

The MLF was a proposal to create a fleet of surface ships and submarines, crewed by European NATO allies, with the intent of giving those allies multilateral ownership and control in the nuclear defense of Western Europe.

A 1957 Belgian-Dutch report noted concerns in Europe that “the continental members of NATO do not feel adequately protected by strategic nuclear weapons which are not available either to these individual members or to the NATO community.” The Kennedy White House was particularly worried about West German nuclear ambitions and potential Franco-German nuclear cooperation. The nascent Italian nuclear program was also under close U.S. observation. The State Department’s Policy Planning Staff concluded in 1965 that the MLF “could do more to avert the spread of nuclear weapons than a non-proliferation agreement.”

The MLF was to put around 200 missiles under European control, giving the force the capability to destroy between 25 and 100 Soviet cities in countervalue strikes, designed to deter any Soviet first use. The project got so far as deploying a guided missile destroyer, the USS Claude V. Ricketts, with 174 U.S. officers and crew, integrated with crew from NATO allies, including West Germany, Turkey, and Italy. U.S. Navy Secretary Paul Nitze praised the deployment as a success.

But the NATO MLF was hampered by disagreements between Washington and the allies over basing and financing the cost of the program, as well as staunch British opposition to the idea. London preferred instead to maintain its special nuclear relationship with Washington, rather than lose it to some pan-European enterprise. In a world only two decades removed from the end of the war, the idea of a German finger on the button also attracted satirical derision. But although the MLF never fully materialized, the idea at the center of it—shared command and control—is well suited for 21st-century Europe.

Ideally, a European MLF would have at its core an Anglo-French component, as both countries currently field continuous at sea deterrents based on wholly different technologies. Whereas the French deterrent is entirely independent, the British one is not, as it is highly reliant on U.S. technology.

The first step toward a strategic deterrent manifested in a European MLF would be to begin training and integrating European officers and crew into the existing French and British platforms to develop an understanding of nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered submarines. This has the additional benefit of reassuring other European powers as to the Anglo-French commitment to European nuclear deterrence. At the same time, the EU should field special tenders for the development of a European nuclear submarine fleet. France has extensive experience with nuclear submarines, and Germany and Sweden are preeminent producers of conventional submarines. A European consortium with collective funding could develop a new nuclear-powered attack submarine for Europe—one that might eventually be shared with countries such as Australia.

Another, much quicker option is to expand the current British Dreadnought submarine program to Europe (and Australia). The reliance of these submarines on U.S. Trident missiles would require at the very least a redesign of the current “common missile compartment” scheme so that the European boats could perhaps carry French M51 missiles or the design of a new pan-European system so that the European system is completely independent of the United States. For London, there is a real threat of U.S. pushback against U.K. cooperation with the continent—but perhaps that alone should be incentive for Britain to make such a move.

The second order of business would be for the new European Nuclear Weapons Agency to create a tactical nuclear capability. The easiest way to do this would be to adapt the Storm Shadow/SCALP EG and Taurus KEPD 350 cruise missiles to accept a nuclear payload, which would provide Brussels with the necessary incremental, escalatory capability for a convincing deterrent.

For 75 years, nuclear sharing in NATO has provided the United States an ability to manage proliferation and served as a strong tool of alliance management. But the only thing certain with the Trump administration is uncertainty, and Europe must plan accordingly. Although U.S. extended deterrence theoretically still covers NATO allies, European countries would be foolish not to develop a pan-European nuclear alternative.

Doing so manages the security dilemma in Europe, will deter aggression, and will put the EU in a stronger position to push for nuclear arms control agreements. In a best-case scenario, a European nuclear deterrent will strengthen NATO, and in the worst-case scenario, if the United States abandons Europe, the continent will not be defenseless.