A Whole World Out There

Benoit Hellings, a prominent Green member of the Belgian Federal Parliament. Benoit invited me to speak at the Parliament in 2015.

I just wanted to mention a short news item from Brussels that excited and fascinated me. I think sometimes we imagine that our media sources are bringing us all the news that really matters. But that isn’t quite true. On some topics—especially nuclear weapons, where there is a kind of strict dogma that is constantly being policed to stamp out heresy—we sometimes don’t get a wide array of views or information. Instead we only get the news that fits within the current orthodoxy.
This story that excited me came from a publication called Euractiv, which self-describes as “an independent pan-European media network specialised in EU policies.” I don’t know anything about their editorial stance, but the page I visited had a large ad from Raytheon running down the right side of the page. (“How transatlantic defense cooperation brings safety to an unpredictable world.”)
The article’s headline read “Belgium debates phase-out of US nuclear weapons on its soil.” I hadn’t known that there was any determined opposition to nuclear weapons in Belgium, but it turns out that last week the Belgian Federal Parliament debated a resolution asking for the removal of U.S. nuclear weapons stored on Belgium’s soil. The measure failed 74 to 66, but the switch of just five votes would have reversed the outcome. The measure also called for the Belgian national government to reverse its current position and sign on to the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

Why are U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe?
After World War II the Soviet Union’s ground forces were reduced from 9.8 to 2.4 million men, a reduction that still left the Soviets with the largest land army in the world. (The United States ground forces had only 990,000 men under arms and they were dispersed around the globe.) Fears that disagreements over the shape of postwar Europe might erupt into war led President Eisenhower to face the choice of either calling up millions of American soldiers to guard Europe or find some other means of preventing a Soviet invasion of Europe. Eisenhower decided that the cheapest means of doing this was to deploy relatively small numbers of troops in Europe armed with nuclear weapons.
The rationale for this move was that the Soviets would know that in the event of war in Europe those U.S. troops would inevitably be overrun. But before they were destroyed they would almost certainly use their nuclear weapons against the Soviets. Thus, any war in Europe would quickly become a nuclear war.
The theory of deterrence said that the Soviets, knowing that any invasion of Europe would result in nuclear war, would resist the temptation to try. As the years passed and no war occurred in Europe, the United States increased the number of nuclear weapons there until there were tens of thousands of “tactical” (in other words, short range, battlefield) nuclear weapons in Europe.
In the meantime the British and French also developed small nuclear arsenals of their own.
But—an this is one of the most frequently overlooked facts in the nuclear debate—over time the United States lost faith in the use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield. Eventually President George H.W. Bush ordered the withdrawal from service of all but a handful of tactical weapons in 1991—a move carried out unilaterally without an agreement with the Soviets.
You might think that having decided that battlefield nuclear weapons weren’t all that useful after all, the United States might be willing to remove all its nuclear weapons from Europe. After all, we can just as easily fire a nuclear missile from a submarine in the waters around Europe as use a fighter-bomber to drop a nuclear bomb stored on European soil. But it is almost as if the realization that nuclear weapons have little battlefield utility has led U.S. policymakers to dig in their heels. The policy of keeping U.S. nuclear weapons to “reassure” our allies there has long since become engraved in stone. In 2010, for example, Sec. of State Hillary Clinton declared flatly that “as long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance.”
Despite occasional calls by peace activists or parliamentarians for the U.S. to remove all its nuclear weapons, the United States has insisted that it is vital to keep a small number of tactical nuclear weapons at locations in Europe. Apparently the idea of the “nuclear tripwire” is still considered essential to keeping the Soviets from sweeping across Europe. Although the number is classified, it is generally assumed that the US has about 150 nuclear weapons (probably B-61 bombs) stored in six locations in Europe: Kleine Brogel in Belgium, Büchel in Germany, Aviano and Ghedi-Torre in Italy, Volkel in the Netherlands and Inçirlik in Turkey.

What’s ahead
The Belgian National Assembly is a complicated, unpredictable political body. Belgium is divided into two parts, the northern, Flemish speaking part, and the southern, French speaking Walloons. Both sections have their own assemblies, languages, cultures, and traditions. They also have strong legislative bodies at the local level. And all of these layers of government vie to control policy with the Federal Parliament. Think of the American system of local, state, and national legislative bodies, but with a fourth layer added in between the states and Congress. I’ve spoken at the Federal Parliament as the guest of a prominent Green Party member, where all business must be conducted in two languages simultaneously. It is a system designed to make action of any kind difficult.
However, there is a growing shift in Europe. The efforts of ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) to force banks to divest from nuclear weapons corporations is having a real impact. And public opinion appears to be shifting. There is a very active movement in the Netherlands, where a full dress debate about the issue of nuclear weapons was also recently held in their national assembly.
No NATO ally has ever publicly opposed the United States on the importance of having nuclear weapons in Europe. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the Netherlands, Belgium, or even Germany broke ranks in the next five years. Attitudes toward nuclear weapons are changing in Europe.
All this brought two thoughts to mind. First, there’s a whole world out there that we never hear about. Millions of people who oppose nuclear weapons but who never make it into the pages of the New York Times.
And the second was how long will we wait, how many allies will peel away and leave us, before we decide to reconsider out policies on nuclear weapons?