Susan Colbourn's "Euromissiles"

Susan Colbourn is a diplomatic and international historian interested in questions of security and strategy since 1945. She specializes in transatlantic relations, European security, and the history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Colbourn is associate director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies, based at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, and a senior fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book,  Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO, and reported the following:

Flip to page 99 of Euromissiles and we’re right in the thick of NATO’s 1979 deliberations about whether to deploy new nuclear missiles to Western Europe. Helmut Schmidt’s government wants to ensure that the West Germans are not alone in hosting any new nuclear missiles and, surveying the political realities of alliance politics, the Carter administration realizes that, whether they like or not, the United States is the only country powerful enough to exert sufficient leadership within NATO. “We,” as one administration official, Jim Rentschler, put it, “have never been able to fix with any precision (or safety!) the point where our European allies could effectively float the load.”

Look at that – the test holds up! Page 99 highlights two of the book’s central themes: (1) how anxieties about West German power and influence shaped NATO’s policies, particularly its nuclear strategy and (2) the critical role that the United States – and US leadership – played within the Atlantic alliance.

These two appear time and again in Euromissiles as I follow the rise and fall of the arms race over theater nuclear forces in Cold War Europe. The debates over theater nuclear forces – the so-called Euromissiles – exposed tensions and contradictions within NATO as an alliance, many of which dated back to its founding in 1949. Two of those critical structural dilemmas were the page 99 pair: the difficulties created by an alliance of notional equals dependent on one power, the United States, for the bulk of its security, and the problems of crafting a strategy that kept West German power in check without making West Germans feel as though they were second-class citizens. NATO’s leaders confronted other structural challenges, to be sure, such as making the case for a strategy that kept the peace by threatening unimaginable destruction with nuclear weapons. At various points over the decades, thinking through these dilemmas forced allied leaders and allied citizens alike to question the wisdom of their alliance and wonder whether there were better ways to secure the peace in a world with nuclear weapons.

Visit Susan Colbourn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue