Coupling and decoupling

This paper reports on the prospects of coupling and decoupling for extended deterrence. Thirty-eight years after the foundation of NATO, the defence of Western Europe still rests on the proposition that an American president will invite the destruction of US cities and the incineration of 100 million of its citizens to repel a Soviet incursion or resist a Soviet ultimatum in Western Europe. On its face, America's war plan---never denied by any president from Truman to Reagan, or by any Secretary of State from George Marshall to George Shultz---is the first use of nuclear weapons, if necessary, to defend Europe. Thus America threatens to turn local defeat into global holocaust. But under the surface, America's nuclear commitment to Europe is not so sure. The word that encapsulates this problem is coupling. Not the title of an Updike novel or an anthropological treatise by Margaret Mead, coupling is a term of art used by strategic analysts to connote the integrity of the chain of escalation, from conventional war in Europe, to theatre nuclear weapons, to the final use of America's ultimate strategic weapon