The Euromissile Crisis and the End of the Cold War ed. by Leopoldo Nuti, et al. (review)

The Euromissile Crisis and the End of the Cold War is the product of a 2009 conference at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at which historians examined “the nuclear era’s first actual disarmament treaty.” Two questions guided their inquiries. Did the US and the Soviet Union deliberately seek a stalemate over nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles in Europe? And did the Euromissile crisis help bring the Cold War to a peaceful end? The volume has four parts — an introduction and overview, five chapters on the Eastern Bloc, eight on the Western, and five on relevant social, cultural, and intellectual trends. Domestic and transnational influences can feel at times disconnected from power politics as a result. While the 1980s peace movement did not drive policy, the European Left’s success against the neutron bomb — an enhanced radiation weapon designed to kill people and spare everything else — did embolden the Soviets and chasten Western governments. Otherwise exemplary chapters by Kristina Spohr on West Germany, Frédéric Bozo on France, Kristan Stoddart on Britain, Helge Danielsen on Norway, and Leopoldo Nuti on Italy would have benefited from closer dialogue with those of Maria Eleonora Guasconi, Holger Nehring, and Bernd Rother on European public opinion, the German peace movement, and European social democratic parties, respectively.

David Holloway’s introductory overview pinpoints why the Euromissiles were so disruptive. European leaders athwart the Iron Curtain faced quickstrike missiles whose greater stealth and accuracy enhanced their ability to knock them out; Gorbachev accordingly likened such first-strike weapons as the Pershing II to “a pistol [pointed] at our head” (88). The power to decapitate the other side together with the arrival of US-Soviet nuclear parity and both sides’ mounting investments in strategic missile defenses raised fears of a surprise nuclear attack to levels not seen since the 1950s. Holloway makes the case for miscalculation, quoting long-serving Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko’s lament that “the cart — the SS-20 missiles — was put before the horse — big policy in [our] relations with the USA and Western Europe” (12). Why did the Soviets proceed anyway? The military wanted systems not limited by the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (salt) that would weaken US security assurances to Western Europe. What they got instead was a “test of wills” (19). West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt forcefully decried the SS-20s in 1977 at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London; his lecture launched a two-year debate within nato about how to respond. In the end, the Atlantic alliance adopted a dual-track policy: its members would pursue negotiations even as they prepared to deploy their own missile batteries.

As chapters by William Burr and Kristina Spohr illustrate, earlier debates had already exposed worrying trends of European insecurity and US-West German ties. Under President Gerald Ford, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld embraced British and German calls to augment nuclear forces in the US theatre with cruise missiles and neutron bombs, but when Jimmy Carter defeated Ford in the 1976 election, Carter swept the sinister neutron bomb into the dustbin, much to Schmidt’s chagrin.

Chapters on Soviet military and intelligence by Jonathan Haslam and Dmitry Adamsky build on Holloway’s. Haslam exposes how the Soviet Communist Party under an ailing Leonid Brezhnev let its fixation on American strategic forces blind it to the ramifications of deploying the SS-20s. Unfortunately Haslam’s reliance on former Soviet officials’ testimonials lends the narrative an air of post facto axe-grinding. Adamsky’s argument, that it was “thanks to (v)rian” — the infamous Soviet espionage effort to collect military data in the United States — “that Moscow did not go nuclear in 1983” (49), meanwhile begs the question as to whether the communist superpower contemplated a preemptive strike during nato’s Operation Able Archer in 1983...