Question from the Sahara

Tremors echoed in Washington this week from an atomic explosion atop a steel-lattice tower in the faraway Sahara Desert. France became the fourth nation in history to explode a nuclear device (see FOREIGN NEWS). France would not, for some years to come, achieve a militarily significant nuclear capability without U.S. help, but her determination to be a nuclear power at whatever cost raised, or complicated, some touchy problems for U.S. policy. Foremost among them: When and how--if at all--should the U.S. arm its NATO allies with nuclear weapons?

President Eisenhower brought up the subject at his press conference fortnight ago when he went beyond his staff's advice to advocate a change in the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which forbids transfer of nuclear weapons to any ally in peacetime. U.S. allies, said he, should be treated "as partners," and not as "junior members of a firm who are to be seen and not heard. So I would think that it would be better for the U.S. to make our law more liberal." The U.S. is not likely to get a change in the law in an election year, will do its best to meet the realities of allies' defense demands (see Defense) by stretching the legal interpretation of custody to mere electronic control over missile firing. But, as the Sahara explosion made clear, this expedient does not measure up to the big fact of the next era of weaponry, when technologically advanced nations can and probably will create their nuclear forces if the U.S. does not show a way to avoid needless duplication of expense and effort.

One suggested answer is to give NATO allies "nuclear sovereignty," i.e., to trust them with full control of atomic weapons. The case for nuclear sovereignty rests largely on the argument that if the U.S.S.R. came to doubt that NATO would respond to an attack upon a single member, the nuclear power of the individual member would provide an independent deterrent--filling in the gap of uncertainty. One obvious danger: the independent armed nuclear ally might fire off a rocket in the heat of passion and involve the world in atomic war.

A strong alternative: rest nuclear sovereignty not in individual nations but in the NATO command. This would satisfy the strong national pressure to get defenses out from under direct control of the U.S. It would enable the NATO command to assign each nation to the development of particular nuclear weapons that fit each role in the overall NATO defense picture--e.g., France might specialize in tactical airborne nuclear weapons, West Germany in field weapons.

And if nuclear disarmament were ever achieved, NATO control would make disarmament that much easier to bring about.

The question is as tough a nut as has been put before the U.S. in the history of the anti-Communist alliance. But it is a question that cannot for long be put off, as France's General de Gaulle has made clear with a bang.

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