Mendes himself explained the failure of the EDC thus: ‘In the EDC there was too much integration and too little England.’
The Europeans and their American ally were back where they had begun. But the circumstances were now very different. The Korean War was over, Stalin was dead, NATO was a fixture on the international scene. The French had successfully postponed the problem of European defense for a while but they could not put it off much longer. Within a few weeks of the National Assembly vote on the EDC the Western Allied powers—the US, Britain and France—met twice, at hastily convened conferences in London and Paris. At the initiative of the British foreign secretary Anthony Eden a set of proposals[83]—the so-called London Agreements—was rapidly approved which, when finalized in the subsequent Paris Treaties, were to form the basis of European defense policy for the next half century.
To overcome the problem of ‘too little England’, Eden offered to commit British forces (four divisions) to a permanent presence in continental Europe (for the first time since the Middle Ages). The Brussels Treaty of 1948 would be extended into a Western European Union (WEU), and Germany and Italy would join it (even though the 1948 Treaty, as we saw, was drawn up for the explicit purpose of mutual protection
When these treaties were ratified and went into effect, the German occupation statute would lapse and in all but name the Western Allies would have made formal peace with their erstwhile enemy. Allied troops would remain in the Federal Republic to guard against German recidivism, but as part of a European presence and by mutual agreement. The French were by no means unanimous in welcoming these new plans, but having shot down their own alternative proposals they were ill-placed to protest, even though West Germany achieved more generous terms under the 1954 Treaties than it would have got from the Pleven Plan. Not for the first time in international disputes over Germany, France was its own worst enemy. Understandably, French support for the Paris Treaties was more than a little ambivalent. When the National Assembly voted to ratify them, on December 30th 1954, they passed by 287-260, a majority of just 27 votes.
If the French were hesitant, the Russians were distinctly displeased. On May 15th 1955, ten days after the formal incorporation of West Germany into NATO and the abolition of the Allied High Commission in the Federal Republic, the Soviet Union announced the formation of its Warsaw Pact. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and the Soviet Union formed an alliance of ‘friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance’ under a unified command. Moscow abrogated its wartime treaties of alliance with Britain and France and, accepting the inevitable, asserted the full sovereignty of the East German Democratic Republic and incorporated it into the Warsaw Pact. The German Question had not exactly been answered; but with both parts fully integrated into their respective international alliances it would now be set aside for a while, its place to be taken in due course by the still unresolved dilemma of the divided former capital, Berlin.
Now that the immediate future of Germany had been resolved, both sides hastened to address secondary conflicts and tensions. The new men in the Kremlin, Nikita Khrushchev in particular, took seriously their own agenda for ‘peaceful coexistence’ in Europe and shared the American desire to minimize the risk of future confrontations. The day after the Warsaw Pact was announced, the four occupying powers signed the Austrian State Treaty. Austria was to be independent and neutral, attached neither to NATO nor the Warsaw Pact and free to choose its own path.[85] All four armies of occupation were to withdraw— though the Soviet Union, which had already extracted about $100 million from its Zone of Occupation in eastern Austria, secured a final pound of flesh in the form of an obligation on Austria to ‘buy out’ Soviet economic interests in the country’s eastern sector for a further $150 million.
Meanwhile, just to the south, Yugoslavia and Italy had agreed to end their standoff over Trieste. In an agreement brokered by the Americans and the British in October 1954, the city of Trieste would remain with Italy while its surrounding hinterland, overwhelmingly populated by Slovenes, would revert to Yugoslavia. The Trieste accords, like so much else in these years, were facilitated by the understanding that they would be regarded as ‘provisional’: in the words of the Italian ambassador to the US, Alberto Tarchiani, the agreement on Trieste ‘had merely a resemblance of being provisional while in reality it was final’.
The accords over Austria, Yugoslavia and Italy were made possible by a new mood of ‘detente’ in European affairs, symbolized by the July 1955 Summit Meetingat Geneva (the first since Potsdam) and the admission of sixteen new member states to the United Nations, breaking a ten-year East-West deadlock. Beyond the atmospherics of friendly exchanges between Eisenhower, Khrushchev and Eden, the most important issue resolved at Geneva was the fate of some 10,000 German prisoners of war still in Soviet hands. In return for Adenauer’s visit to Moscow in September 1955 and the establishment of diplomatic relations, the Soviet leaders consented to the return of these men: 9,626 of them were released that same year, and the remainder by the end of January 1956. Meanwhile Germany’s small western neighbors also achieved some degree of closure with Bonn. The Danes reached agreement on minor border issues and compensation for German war crimes in 1955, the Belgians a year later (the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, however, did not come to an agreement with the Germans until 1959, and the Dutch only in 1960). Without anyone actually saying so, the book was closing on the crimes and punishments of the European war and its aftermath.
These reassuring developments were unfolding against the backdrop of a major international arms race. This paradox—that a peaceful European settlement was taking shape even as the two Great Powers of the day were arming themselves to the hilt and preparing for the eventuality of a thermonuclear war—was not so bizarre as it might appear. The growing emphasis in US and Soviet strategic thinking on nuclear weapons, and the intercontinental missiles with which to deliver them, released European states from the need to compete in an arena where they could not hope to match the resources of the superpowers, even though central Europe remained the most likely terrain over which any future war might be fought. For this reason, the Cold War in Western Europe was experienced quite differently in these years from the way it was felt in the United States, or indeed in the USSR.
The United States’ nuclear arsenal had grown rapidly through the 1950s. From 9 in 1946, 50 in 1948 and 170 at the beginning of the decade, the stockpile of nuclear weapons at the disposal of the US armed forces had reached 841 by 1952 before expanding to around 2,000 by the time of Germany’s entry into NATO (it would reach 28,000 on the eve of the Cuban crisis seven years later). To deliver these bombs the US Air Force had a fleet of forward-based B-29 bombers that grew from around 50 at the onset of the 1948 Berlin blockade to well over 1,000 five years later; the first intercontinental B-52 bombers entered service in June 1955. Given the Soviet Union’s overwhelming advantage in manpower and conventional weapons in Europe, these airborne nuclear weapons were inevitably to become central to Washington’s strategy, especially following President Truman’s secret order of March 10th 1950 to accelerate development of a hydrogen bomb.
Truman’s decision was prompted by the Soviet Union’s successful test in August 1949 of a Soviet atomic bomb. The gap between American and Soviet nuclear capability was shrinking: the first successful US thermonuclear test was carried out on the Pacific atoll of Elugelab on November 1st 1952; the first such Soviet test, at Semipalatinsk, was announced just ten months later, on August 12th 1953. American battlefield nuclear weapons first began arriving in West Germany the following month; the next January Dulles announced Eisenhower’s ‘New Look’ policy. NATO was to be ‘nuclearised’: the threat to use tactical nuclear weapons on the European battlefield was to become part of the Alliance’s defense strategy. In order for the Soviet Union to believe that the West might really fire them, the distinction between nuclear and conventional arms was to be abolished. As Dulles explained to a NATO Council meeting in April 1954: ‘The US considers that the ability to use atomic weapons is essential for the defense of the NATO area in the face of the present threat. In short, such weapons must now be treated as in fact having become conventional.’
The coincidence of NATO’s nuclearization with the stabilization of the Continent was no accident. From the Soviet point of view as well, conventional warfare in central and Western Europe was of diminishing strategic interest. Moscow too was stockpiling nuclear weapons—starting with just 5 in 1950 it had built some 1,700 by the end of the decade. But the chief Soviet emphasis was on developing the means to deliver them not on the European battlefield but across oceans, to compensate for American plans to base nuclear weapons in Germany, just a few hundred miles from Russia itself.
The notorious ‘missile gap’ of which John F. Kennedy spoke when campaigning for the US presidency in
