INF Deployment in Western Europe

Abstract

The deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) in Western Europe was a central issue for US policymakers, in US-West European relations, and in US-Soviet relations in the 1980s. The INF issue spans a decade from the first European calls in 1977 for a NATO response to the Soviet deployment of SS-20 missiles targetted on Western Europe to the signing of the INF Treaty by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev at the December 1987 Washington Summit. INF deployment was the most divisive issue in NATO over the past two decades and split the defence consensus which had existed in Europe over those two decades. In the first half of the 1980s, the two major parties in both Britain and the FRG were more seriously opposed over defence issues than they had been at any time since the 1950s. Even more, as David M. Abshire, US Ambassador to NATO from 1983 to 1987, said, it was ‘the final battle of the Cold War’, which ‘was won in 1983, when NATO stayed together on INF deployment’ (Abshire, 1989). The NATO Alliance withstood a major Soviet propaganda campaign which attempted to play on the antinuclear sentiments discussed in Chapter 2 to prevent INF deployment.