After the Nassau Meeting

...Although it has helped to prevent a catastrophe, it may prove to have opened a period of discord between the allies even more bitter than that which preceded it...

...In may indeed be that Macmillan explored the possibility of such a deal during his disastrous weekend at Rambouillet, and that only de Gaulle's contempt prevented him from offering it in public...

...Yet sooner or later this was bound to come up...

...So far all the proposals for such agreement have come from the Communists and been rejected out of hand by Washington...

...And by concentrating attention on the cost and control of an effective multilateral deterrent, he will compel the allies to face certain disagreeable facts about the economic and political implications of atomic armaments which none of them have thus far cared to examine honestly...

...But since neither the Polaris missiles nor the submarines to carry them will be available for many years, future British governments will have ample opportunity to decide whether the game is worth the candle...

...Indeed, the immediate consequence of the Nassau agreement will be to reduce still further the already faint possibility of agreement on Britain's entry into the Common Market, since de Gaulle may interpret it as a pusillanimous conspiracy by Britain to promote America's aim of undermining France's hopes of nuclear independence...

...will seem even greater than before, and to this extent the chances of a reconciliation between Britain and France will diminish to zero...

...If he did, he would only emphasize France's superior status to Germany within the alliance, and greatly strain the partnership with Bonn which is the basis of his foreign policy...

...Moreover, the Government will have to explain away the awkward fact that when Duncan Sandys was Minister of Defense he rejected the Polaris on the grounds that Russia would be able to detect and destroy the submarines by the time the system was fully operational...

...Moreover, Britain, France and Germany all made major demands of the United States without offering anything in return...

...In the meantime, the alliance as a whole will have to wrestle with the almost insoluble problem of controlling a collective deterrent for which every ally wants to possess both the trigger and the safety catch...

...But every attempt made by the American representatives in Paris to obtain allied consent to the necessary revision of strategy and redistribution of effort met blank opposition from the three major European powers—and each had different reasons...

...For a British supporter of the American alliance, the last month of 1962 brought anxiety, embarrassment and, finally, alarm...

...Greater flexibility on this issue would not only be good in itself, but would also strengthen America's hand in dealing with its allies...

...Since no one argues that a collective allied deterrent is militarily necessary in addition to the American deterrent, it is highly doubtful whether a future British government will feel the cost of such a nuclear force is worthwhile—unless it is genuinely independent of foreign control...

...At the same time, he refused even to hint at increasing Britain's contribution to NATO'S conventional forces...

...But the practical problems are as daunting as ever...

...It is instead an expedient...

...By making the offer he did, President Kennedy has succeeded in assuring that the argument about atomic interdependence takes place in the context of an American proposal which none of the allies except France will reject in principle...

...The British Defense Minister, Peter Thorneycroft, insisted that the U.S...

...In fact, the ambiguities in the Nassau communiqué reveal its function as a lifeboat for Macmillan in facing the immediate storm at Westminster...

...Only the German Government, now that Franz-Josef Strauss is no longer Defense Minister, came near to offering a bargain with the United States: The Germans suggested they produce 12 well-equipped divisions in return for a bigger share in controlling the alliance's nuclear weapons...

...ROUNDING A DANGEROUS CORNER After the Nassau Meeting By Denis Healey London The Nassau agreement between President Kennedy and Prime Minister Macmillan was in many respects confused, ambiguous and self-contradictory...

...For Britain the minimum cost of this contribution to the collective force is likely to be $1.12 billion— a great deal more than Skybolt, even under the conditions offered by Kennedy at Nassau...

...And more than a hundred Conservative MPs were encouraged to sign a motion committing the Government to keep an independent deterrent at all costs...

...British officials at the NATO Council meeting told reporters that Kennedy's decision to cancel production of Skybolt was the worst act of treachery since Judas Iscariot...

...Macmillan inflated Dean Acheson's admittedly ill-timed remarks about Britain's decline as a world power into a major diplomatic incident, though he himself, speaking on television only two months earlier, had informed the British people that "We are nothing without Europe...

...is carrying an unfair share of the moral and material burdens of defending Western Europe...

...In any event, by the time he left for Nassau, the fiasco at Rambouillet and the mounting evidence of his unpopularity at home left Macmillan in as weak a position as any British Prime Minister has ever had to negotiate from...

...Denis Healey, a regular contributor, is Labor party Spokesman for Commonwealth and Colonial Affairs...

...This, of course, is the real question...

...Yet it did represent a step forward in AngloAmerican relations, and it did bring the Western military posture more in line with Western aims in negotiation with the Soviet Union (at least as far as Britain and America are concerned...

...The French representatives continued to demand the three-power political directorate in NATO which their German partners bitterly reject, while maintaining as strongly as ever that France must keep exclusive national control of all its armed forces both in peace and war...

...Meanwhile, in Britain itself the Government was encouraging a wave of anti-Americanism among its own supporters which threatened to deny it all freedom of maneuver when the Nassau Conference took place...

...IT is precisely in such situations that democratic politicians are most liable to dangerous irrationality, and it says much for Kennedy's new maturity that, as in his dealings with Khrushchev over Cuba, he offered Macmillan the opportunity for disguising his capitulation as a reasonable compromise between equals...

...The ministerial meeting of the NATO Council was, to quote the British Statist, "the alliance's most shatteringly unsuccessful conference to date...

...In this hysterical wave of antiAmerican chauvinism, there was a real danger that the Government would retreat further into unreason by offering President de Gaulle assistance in building an Anglo-French deterrent in exchange for his consent to Britain's entry into the Common Market...

...And Kennedy's triumph was to commit the British Government in principle to the creation of a collective NATO deterrent...

...The Prime Minister will be able to claim that the right to withdraw his Polaris submarines from the allied fleet in a situation where "supreme national interests are at stake" leaves Britain with an independent deterrent...

...There is still, however, one enormous gap in America's approach to these problems...

...France is most unlikely to accept the U.S.'s offer so long as de Gaulle is alive, for he will not accept the idea of an integrated atomic force even in principle...

...There is also bound to be a gap of several years between the time when the existing V-bombers become useless and when the Polaris submarines are ready...

...On the other hand, if de Gaulle refuses the offer, Britain's special nuclear relationship with the U.S...

...Most important of all—and this justifies the foggy equivocation of the final communiqué—Nassau has taken the Western alliance round the most dangerous corner it has yet had to tum...

...Thus it would be a mistake to treat the Nassau agreement as a decisive turning point in the development of the alliance...

...True, the Kennedy Administration is at last beginning to inform its own electorate that the U.S...

...Both in the conventional and nuclear weapons fields, the difficulties of allied defense would be much easier to solve in the context of an agreement on arms control between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries...

...should finance an independent British nuclear force which Washington considers politically undesirable and militarily useless—but should deny the same assistance to all its other allies...