H-Diplo Article Review 922- Freeman on Gala

H-Diplo H-Diplo Article Review 922- Freeman on Gala. “‘The Essential Weaknesses of the December 1979 “Agreement”’: The White House and the Implementing of the Dual-Track Decision.”

Discussion published by George Fujii on Wednesday, January 29, 2020

H-Diplo Article Review 922

29 January 2020

Marilena Gala. “‘The Essential Weaknesses of the December 1979 “Agreement”’: The White House and the Implementing of the Dual-Track Decision.” Cold War History 19:1 (2019): 21-38. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2018.1462339. https://hdiplo.org/to/AR922 Article Review Editors: Diane Labrosse and Seth Offenbach | Production Editor: George Fujii

Review by Stephanie Freeman, Mississippi State University

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty met its demise in August 2019, but scholarship on the Euromissile Crisis continues to be vibrant and thought-provoking. The Crisis began in the mid-1970s, as the Soviets modernized and expanded their theater nuclear forces aimed at Western Europe.[1] On 12 December 1979, NATO foreign and defense ministers responded with the dual-track decision. The first track of the decision consisted of a proposed modernization of NATO’s long-range theater nuclear forces through the deployment of 108 U.S. Pershing II missiles and 464 U.S. ground- launched cruise missiles in Belgium, Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. A simultaneous offer of U.S.-Soviet arms control negotiations on both sides’ theater nuclear forces constituted the second track of the decision. Massive demonstrations against the proposed INF deployments took place across Western Europe during the early 1980s.

In this article, Marilena Gala examines the Ronald Reagan administration’s implementation of the NATO dual-track decision between 1981 and 1983. Gala is particularly interested in NATO allies’ influence on Reagan’s INF policy. She credits West European officials with pressuring the staunch Cold Warrior Reagan to begin INF negotiations with the Soviets in November 1981. In these negotiations, U.S. officials proposed the zero option, which called for a ban on land-based INF missiles. Under this proposal, the United States would cancel its planned INF deployments in exchange for the Soviet Union’s agreement to dismantle its existing INF missiles and refrain from deploying any additional land-based INF in the future. Gala argues that the Reagan administration offered the zero option in an attempt to win West European support for its INF policy. It hoped that the zero option would curb the growing anti-nuclear sentiment in Western Europe, which threatened NATO governments’ support for INF modernization.

According to Gala, West European influence on the Reagan administration’s INF policy continued

Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Article Review 922- Freeman on Gala. “‘The Essential Weaknesses of the December 1979 “Agreement”’: The White House and the Implementing of the Dual-Track Decision.”. H-Diplo. 01-29-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/5761470/h-diplo-article-review-922-freeman-gala%C2%A0-%E2%80%9C%E2%80%9 8-essential-weaknesses Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Diplo after the start of INF negotiations. As U.S. and Soviet negotiators failed to make progress in the talks, West Europeans and their leaders came to believe that the Reagan administration was not genuinely trying to reach an agreement. By early 1983, the Reagan administration recognized that it needed to act in order to maintain West European support for its implementation of the dual-track decision. Reagan decided to heed the calls of allied governments to offer an interim proposal, which would reduce U.S. and Soviet land-based INF to equal levels above zero. The U.S. interim proposal helped maintain the support of NATO governments for both tracks of the dual-track decision. In the absence of an INF agreement, U.S. INF deployments began on schedule in late 1983.

Gala marshals an impressive array of American, British, French, and German primary sources to make the case that West Europeans had an important influence on the Reagan administration’s pursuit of INF negotiations. This article is a model of international history, as Gala draws on material from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the Archives Nationales in France, and the Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland volumes. Gala’s effective use of primary sources is matched by her command of the secondary literature on the 1979 NATO dual-track decision and the Euromissile Crisis in the 1980s.

By highlighting the influence of NATO allies on the Reagan administration’s INF arms control policy, Gala offers a broader interpretation of the role of West European governments in the Euromissile Crisis in the 1980s. Recent scholarship has examined the political debates over U.S. INF deployments that took place in Western Europe during the early 1980s.[2] Yet Gala’s work shows that Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Italy were not only debating whether to accept their allotted share of U.S. INF missiles under the dual-track decision, they were also actively and successfully pressuring the United States to pursue serious INF negotiations with the Soviet Union.

The West Europeans, however, receive too much credit for Reagan’s adoption of the zero option in November 1981. Reagan was concerned that West European anti-nuclear sentiment would prompt West European governments to reject U.S. INF missiles, which he viewed as an important incentive to motivate the Soviets to negotiate arms reduction. Yet Reagan was also drawn to the zero option’s promise of eliminating an entire category of nuclear missiles. In a National Security Council meeting on 12 November 1981, Reagan expressed his hope that a zero agreement on INF would be the gateway to significant arms reduction agreements on other categories of nuclear weapons. Unlike his advisers, Reagan also argued that the Soviets might actually agree to the zero option.[3] Gala acknowledges that the zero option resonated with Reagan’s “deep conviction that the security and well-being of the United States and the rest of the world could not continue to rely on the danger of nuclear annihilation” (31). Yet the article does not discuss Reagan as an advocate of nuclear disarmament and thus does not fully consider the influence of his anti-nuclear views on his INF policy.

Nevertheless, Gala’s article shines an important light on the influence of West Europeans on the Reagan administration’s pursuit of INF negotiations. This article will be of interest to scholars who study the history of U.S. foreign relations in the 1980s, NATO, and nuclear arms control.

Stephanie Freeman is Assistant Professor of History at Mississippi State University. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines nuclear abolitionists’ role in ending the Cold War. She is the author of “The Making of an Accidental Crisis: The United States and the NATO Dual- Track Decision of 1979,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 25:2 (June 2014): 331-355.

Notes

[1] In 1981, the Reagan administration began referring to theater nuclear forces as intermediate- range nuclear forces (INF).

[2] See, for example, Giles Scott-Smith, “The Netherlands between East and West: Dutch Politics, Dual Track, and Cruise Missiles,” in Leopoldo Nuti, Frédéric Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey, and Bernd Rother, eds., The Euromissile Crisis and the End of the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2015), 251-268; Leopoldo Nuti, “The Nuclear Debate in Italian Politics in the Late 1970s and the Early 1980s,” inThe Euromissile Crisis and the End of the Cold War, 231-250; Frédéric Bozo, “France, the Euromissiles, and the End of the Cold War,” inThe Euromissile Crisis and the End of the Cold War, 196-212.

[3] Minutes of National Security Council Meeting, 12 November 1981, p. 4, 7, folder “NSC 00025 12 Nov 1981 [Theater Nuclear Forces, NATO, Strategic Forces],” Box 3, Executive Secretariat, NSC: Meeting Files, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.