NATO, Britain, France and the FRG: Nuclear Strategies and Forces for Europe, 1949-2000

Heuser, B. (1997) NATO, Britain, France and the FRG: Nuclear Strategies and Forces for Europe, 1949-2000. Macmillan and St Martin's Press, Basingstoke and New York, pp256. ISBN 0312174985

Abstract/Summary

This is vol. I of my two-volume study of the nuclear strategies/strategy preferences of NATO collectively, and individually of Britain, France, and West Germany in the Cold War. It shows that NATO strategy was a fragile compromise, and that these three countries, all within range of Soviet medium/intermediate range nuclear missiles and thus with less geostrategic difference than in previous military threat contexts, had wildly divergent strategies/preferences which cannot be explained merely by geography. It raises the question of what made them so different, addressed in Volume II "Nuclear Mentalities" (q.v.)