The ‘Cosmic Bluff’ Revisited: Extended Nuclear Deterrence in the US–Norway Alliance

ABSTRACT

What is the point of a nuclear umbrella? Conventional wisdom suggests that explicit nuclear security guarantees provide junior allies with credible security, facilitating regional stability and nuclear non-proliferation. Yet this is not the only possible reason to maintain a nuclear umbrella. Reassessing the history and politics of nuclear alignment through a case study of the US–Norway alliance, I find that nuclear umbrellas have endured, and can do so, in cases where both the security patron and client believe the arrangement to lack military credibility.

1. Introduction

What is the point of a nuclear umbrella? The dominant view in security studies suggests that nuclear umbrellas exist to deter adversaries and assure vulnerable allies in the face of military threats. According to the US government, the purpose of the American nuclear umbrella is to satisfy over thirty allies and partners’ ‘need for nuclear deterrence, while enabling them to forego independent nuclear weapons capabilities’.¹ Nuclear umbrellas, in this view, would have little value or staying power ‘if they were not deemed adequately credible’ in a military perspective.² In an anarchic world where self-help reigns, non-nuclear allies are justifiably mistrustful, ‘constantly seeking evidence’ that their patron is in fact prepared to use nuclear weapons on their behalf.³

Against the conventional wisdom laid out above, I contend that nuclear umbrellas can be sustained by political and economic interests independent of military credibility. By extension, I question the claim that as many as thirty states meaningfully ‘rely’ on the US nuclear umbrella for their security; while some of the thirty may indeed see the umbrella as credible and necessary, several others likely view it as either lacking in credibility or as irrelevant to the threats they face – even of their spokespersons would hesitate to say so in public. To develop this argument, I examine in detail the Cold War nuclear relationship of two of NATO’s founding members, the United States and Norway. I maintain that Norway offers a particularly useful case. After all, as one of only two NATO members to share a border with the Soviet Union, Norway should under the conventional wisdom be expected to place a particularly high premium on the military credibility of the US nuclear umbrella. In this sense, Norway offers a ‘crucial’ or ‘most likely’ case for the prevailing theory that non-nuclear allies in difficult security environments crave nuclear protection and will seek remedies should their access to a credible nuclear security guarantee be compromised.⁴

What might sustain a nuclear umbrella if not a demand for credible nuclear defence? Analysing the case of the United States and Norway, I find that policymakers on both ends of the nuclear patron-client relationship can have reasons to commit publicly to a nuclear umbrella even if they do not see it as credible or of direct military utility. First, policy elites in client states share a powerful and often underappreciated interest in displaying loyalty to their patron, doing and saying what they think their ally wants to hear.⁵ Policy elites in client states also often subscribe to norms of intra-alliance solidarity that discourage unilateral rebukes of established policy. In short, junior allies prefer not to rock the alliance boat. Secondly, from the perspective of the patron, the extension of a nuclear umbrella offers a means of spreading what Michael Quinlan called the moral and political ‘burdens of nuclear effort’.⁶ During the Cold War, several US leaders saw it as imperative to secure moral support from the so-called free world, including in their effort to push back against ‘the Soviet campaign to stigmatize and inhibit possible US use of its nuclear weapons capabilities even for self-defense’.⁷ As suggested in the opening paragraph, the extension and maintenance of the US nuclear umbrella has clearly also been motivated and justified by a desire to encourage nuclear non-proliferation. Early on in the Cold War, US leaders also identified a need to secure basing rights abroad for the purposes of nuclear power projection against the Soviet Union. What is more, the putative imperative of providing credible nuclear assurances to upward of thirty sates provides crucial rhetorical ammunition in debates over nuclear modernisation.⁸ The supposed requirements of extended nuclear deterrence (END) and assurance also figure prominently in bureaucratic turf battles and inter-agency competition for funding within the US government and military; virtually all components of the US nuclear arsenal – from ICBMs to sea-based weapons to bombers to tactical nuclear systems – have been justified as uniquely assuring to US allies and partners. Accordingly, official allied acquiescence or support for a nuclear umbrella cannot readily be interpreted as evidence of its credibility. For the influential American Cold War diplomat George Ball, the US nuclear umbrella was nothing but a ‘cosmic bluff’ – and not a particularly good one.⁹

The article proceeds as follows. In the first part, I briefly outline the dominant theoretical account of nuclear umbrellas in existing security studies scholarship. In the second and main part, I interrogate the conventional wisdom through a case study of the nuclear patron–client relationship of the United States and Norway. In the final section, I conclude and reflect on the implications of my admittedly tentative findings for policy. ‘Credibility’, the central concept in the story below, is understood as the quality of ‘being trusted and believed in’.¹⁰ ‘Believability’ and ‘plausibility’ are used interchangeably as synonyms.

2. What Are Nuclear Umbrellas?

The concept of a ‘nuclear umbrella’ is commonly used to describe a security arrangement whereby a nuclear-armed patron pledges some or all of its nuclear forces to the defence of one or more clients, thus ‘extending’ nuclear deterrence to the ally or allies in question.¹¹ Standard usage of the term suggests that a nuclear umbrella ‘differs from an alliance in which some states possess nuclear weapons and others do not’.¹² Indeed, not all US partners or even treaty allies have been offered a pledge of nuclear defence.¹³ As traditionally defined, an alliance involving nuclear and non-nuclear powers can only be described as a nuclear umbrella if the nuclear-armed patron’s resolve to use nuclear weapons on behalf of its ally or allies has been ‘officially declared’.¹⁴ That said, nuclear-armed states are often intentionally vague in their communication about how, when, and for whose benefit they foresee using nuclear arms. While Japan, South Korea, and the members of NATO have received explicit US nuclear security guarantees and are near universally considered to be covered by the American nuclear umbrella, Australia and Taiwan have received less clear-cut guarantees. The remaining 14 states defined under US law as ‘major non-NATO allies’ – Argentina, Bahrain, Brazil, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Tunisia – have either rejected or not received US nuclear guarantees and are thus rarely if ever listed by scholars as nuclear umbrella states. This is not to say, however, that a conflict involving one or more of these states could not conceivably escalate to a point where the United States would seriously consider using nuclear force, and that this fact could have a deterrent effect on potential aggressors.¹⁵ The phenomenon of END could clearly occur in the absence of an ‘officially declared’ nuclear security guarantee. That said, the official declaration of a nuclear umbrella is widely understood as highly consequential and meaningful – as ‘a commitment of considerable magnitude’.¹⁶

Providing reliable extended nuclear deterrence is widely seen as demanding.¹⁷ The practice of END has sometimes been referred to as ‘inherently incredible’.¹⁸ After all, any use by a nuclear security guarantor such as the United States of nuclear arms against another major nuclear power, be it in Europe or Asia, could ‘invite a response in kind that could kill literally millions of Americans. Allies realize that this would, at the very least, give the President pause’.¹⁹ International relations is a domain where trust is often lacking and individual states must to varying degrees ‘conform to the logic of a competitive, anarchic system of interacting states’.²⁰ In the words of Stephen Walt, the international system incentivises states to pursue strategic independence; ‘states must provide security for themselves because no other agency or actor can be counted on to do so’.²¹ Relying on another state for nuclear protection, in this view, is highly precarious. In the oft-quoted words of Michael Howard, American promises of nuclear protection were demanded by its allies ‘not just in the negative role of a deterrent to Soviet aggression, but in the positive role of a reassurance to the West Europeans; the kind of reassurance a child needs from its parents or an invalid [sic] from his doctors against dangers which, however remote, cannot be entirely discounted.’²² Along similar lines, the so-called Healey theorem – named after former British Defence Secretary Denis Healey and widely invoked as an axiom in security studies – states that it takes only five percent credibility to deter an aggressor but ninety-five percent credibility to reassure clients.²³ It is frequently argued that, among European allies, fears of ‘abandonment’ have tended to far outweigh fears of ‘entrapment’. The assumption, here, is that European leaders have generally been more worried about America abandoning Western Europe to the Soviets than the possibility of Western Europe being dragged into a devastating major power conflict against its leaders’ will.²⁴

The standard response to the credibility problem outlined above has been to argue that sufficient believability can be achieved through the implementation of various credibility-building measures. One such measure has been the pursuit by the patron of options and hardware for ‘limited’ nuclear war. In this view, US END threats would gain in credibility if nuclear war could conceivably be contained regionally, i.e., if the United States could engage in regional nuclear brinksmanship and war without tiggering a full-scale nuclear conflagration.²⁵ Policymakers have also sought to strengthen the plausibility of END threats through public commitments and statements of resolve; joint nuclear consultations, exercises, and planning; and the overseas stationing of troops and hardware in ‘tripwire’ or ‘plate glass’ roles, i.e., units deployed to ensure that any attack against the host state would likely also embroil at least some US forces from the outset, thus diminishing the likelihood of America disentangling itself and standing off. ²⁶ Arguably the most salient credibility-building measure over the years has involved the deployment to client states of US nuclear weapons.²⁷ Tactical nuclear weapons on European soil, so the argument goes, ‘couple’ the strategic nuclear arsenal of the United States to the European theatre, increasing the likelihood of catastrophic escalation should war transpire and, for that very reason, depressing the likelihood of its occurrence in the first place.²⁸

Rooted in the view that nuclear decisions are primarily shaped by objective security circumstances, several scholars have theorised that dents to the credibility of the US nuclear umbrella should prompt client states either to demand enhanced credibility-building measures or, if the threat to credibility is sufficiently grave or if assurances are not forthcoming, pursue independent nuclear weapons capabilities.²⁹ Along these lines, an absence of demand for independent nuclear armament or redoubled assurances is commonly treated as evidence that clients view the END posture as credible and necessary.³⁰ For example, in the words of one commentator, the limited demand for independent nuclear armament among US allies and partners proves that the credibility dilemmas of END ‘appear to be more theoretical than real’.³¹

But how can we know that the states in question would have built independent nuclear arsenals in the absence of the explicit US nuclear security guarantee? The existing literature on alliance nuclear politics suffers from two serious shortcomings. First, much of the literature is founded on an unwarranted theoretical assumption of ‘nuclear desire’ – the idea that all states, fundamentally, crave protection by nuclear means.³² This assumption appears to have invited analysts to interpret a priori an absence of demand for independent nuclear capabilities or enhanced nuclear security guarantees as evidence that the umbrella retains credibility.³³ As Blankenship and Lin-Greenberg point out, ‘existing studies face methodological hurdles in measuring reassurance’ as many analysts unduly ‘infer reassurance through ally behavior rather than directly capturing allies’ perceptions of it.’³⁴ Second, much of the existing literature on alliance nuclear politics is held back by an epistemological overreliance on official statements.³⁵ If it is true that policymakers on both sides of the patron–client relationship can have powerful but hidden interests in upholding a nuclear umbrella arrangement even if they privately believe it to lack military credibility, public statements have limited value as evidence.

3. Norway and the US Nuclear Umbrella

3.1. Norway as a ‘Most Likely’ Case

Bordering the Soviet Union in the Arctic, Norway played a central strategic role during the Cold War. The Soviet Northern Fleet base on the Kola Peninsula, one of Moscow’s most crucial military assets, is located only about 70 miles from the Norwegian border. The base has since the 1960s been home to the bulk of the Soviet Union and then Russia’s ballistic missile submarine fleet and continues to provide Moscow’s only ice-free military port opening directly to the Atlantic. Over the years, Norwegian policymakers have often worried that Moscow might one day decide to bolster its vulnerable Kola base by moving the border south and west into the Norwegian region of Finnmark.³⁶ Ominously from the Norwegian perspective, Moscow’s most recent attack on a Nordic country, the campaign against Finland of 1939–1940, was justified precisely by a supposed need to further secure Leningrad, home of the Soviet Baltic Fleet. According to a joint US Air Force and Navy report published in 1948, Norway’s geostrategic importance in the budding Cold War was such that the country might ‘be termed a gigantic Gibraltar’.³⁷

It has sometimes been argued that Norwegian and NATO planners were relaxed about Norway’s security situation because they believed Sweden served as a buffer.³⁸ This claim is not supported by the archival record. Policymakers in Oslo and at NATO headquarters worried about both direct incursions across the land border and amphibious landings on the Norwegian coast or islands in the Arctic, in particular the Svalbard archipelago.³⁹ According to the strategists Basil Liddell-Hart, there was probably no other part of NATO as vulnerable to a Soviet ‘24-hour pounce’ as Norway.⁴⁰ In the 1950s and 1960s, a number of military practitioners argued that Norway’s thinly populated territory – especially in the region bordering Russia – would be well suited to defensive manoeuvres with tactical nuclear weapons, better suited than virtually any other part of NATO Europe.⁴¹ In a narrow military perspective, Norwegian policymakers could be expected to see nuclear arms as a valuable, ‘great equalizer’ vis-à-vis their militarily superior neighbour.⁴²

Given the requisite political will, Oslo would likely have been materially capable of building an independent nuclear arsenal should it have decided that its outside assurances were not sufficiently robust. Any reluctance to pursue independent nuclear options thus cannot be dismissed as a product of lacking capability; Norway holds considerable economic and natural resources, maintains a reasonably advanced defence industry, and was one of the first countries in the world to operate a nuclear reactor.⁴³ In keeping with the theoretical expectations that predominate in the literature on END and reassurance, several scholars have explicitly argued that Norway’s nuclear restraint was indeed made possible by the receipt of credible nuclear security guarantees from the United States.⁴⁴ However, the scholarship usually cited to substantiate this claim – Astrid Forland’s work on early Norwegian nuclear decision-making – focuses only on the initial phase of the Cold War and does not systematically distinguish between explicit nuclear security guarantees and more general, unspecific defence guarantees.⁴⁵

3.2. Norway’s Nuclear Policy Takes Form, 1949–1965

In what follows, I discuss Norway’s fit with the conventional wisdom using archival material from the Norwegian Parliamentary Archive, the Norwegian National Archive, the NATO archive, and the Foreign Relations of the United States series. When using this material, I maintain that it is crucial to distinguish not only between private and public statements, but also to differentiate whether utterances are offered ‘in’ or ‘against’ interests. While utterances in support of established practice or political interests should be read as evidentiary less valuable statements ‘in interest’, utterances that contradict prevailing policies, interests, and alignments should be understood as evidentiary more valuable ‘declarations against interest’. Since people can be generally presumed not to want to lie in order to create problems for themselves or the institutions they represent, declarations against interest are widely considered of greater value as evidence than statements that align with the interlocutor’s interests. Jefferson provides the following example: ‘If X says: “I owe Y $500”, the fact of indebtedness is a fact against pecuniary interest; so is the statement itself. X would hardly make such a statement knowing it to be false’.⁴⁶

The Atlantic alliance initially eschewed a nuclear strategy; neither the Washington Treaty, which formalised the alliance, nor NATO’s first two strategic concepts, mentioned nuclear or atomic arms explicitly.⁴⁷ What Marc Trachtenberg describes as the ‘nuclearization of NATO’ occurred over the course of the mid-1950s, with the adoption by NATO of the Eisenhower administration’s ‘massive retaliation’ strategy in December 1954 as a key moment.⁴⁸ The strategy, MC-48, was centred on the idea that the United States would respond ‘immediately’ to Soviet aggression with a ‘devastating counter-attack employing atomic weapons’.⁴⁹ With this, the United States’ commitment to defend Europe with nuclear weapons became explicit, and the NATO nuclear umbrella was ‘officially declared’.

The United States’ promotion of the massive retaliation doctrine owed in part to a desire to cut costs – the Eisenhower administration’s ‘new look’ policy aimed to reduce US military expenditures and involvement overseas – whilst at the same time preserving US power and leadership of the so-called free world.⁵⁰ The Eisenhower administration was also eager to secure basing rights abroad – the US military needed, so the president, ‘to be able to hit the Soviets, if necessary, from any point on the compass’ – and to embed nuclear deterrence in Atlantic strategic culture.⁵¹ President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had grown wary that a ‘taboo’ was forming to impede the potential use by the United States of atomic weapons. As detailed by Nina Tannenwald, the budding emergence of anti-nuclear norms was seen by many US officials as a significant problem.⁵² Since ‘in the present state of world opinion we could not use an a-bomb, we should make every effort now to dissipate this feeling’, Dulles argued in a special meeting of the US National Security Council in early 1953.⁵³ But how? The Planning Board of the US National Security Council was duly called on to develop proposals for how US freedom of nuclear manoeuvre might be maintained. It finished its work in May 1953, and recommended the adoption of a ‘policy of candor’ vis-à-vis both the American public and US allies. To avoid nuclear weapons becoming stigmatised, the United States ‘should give its major allies a sense of shared responsibility through an increase in their understanding of the political and military implications of atomic weapons’.⁵⁴ This desire to foster allied buy-in formed part of the background for the adoption by NATO of MC-48 in December 1954.

In discussions about how the allies might be persuaded to accept the massive retaliation doctrine, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Davis maintained that the challenge at hand was partly ‘how best and most tactfully to inoculate our NATO friends with the idea of the atomic weapon concept’.⁵⁵ For US Army General Alfred Gruenther, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe at the time, MC-48 offered a means of institutionalising wider support for US policy, counteracting Soviet efforts to delegitimise American nuclear strategy. Getting the Europeans to sign up to massive retaliation was ‘about as good an answer as you can get’ to the Soviet charge that US nuclear policy was wicked, he suggested.⁵⁶ More generally, it was crucial for the United States ‘to have aligned on its side in the world struggle’.⁵⁷ This involved both determined diplomatic work to prevent divisions within ‘the free world’, sensitivity to the extent of ‘moral support for US action’ in allied media, and a general expectation of allied loyalty on the world stage.⁵⁸

While American officials invariably refrained from openly questioning US resolve to implement the massive retaliation doctrine in practice, the strategy soon came under heavy criticism from outsiders, including strategists with close links to the US military and government. The criticism intensified when by the second half of the 1950s the Soviet Union had acquired a significant number of long-range nuclear bombers.⁵⁹ RAND strategist Bernard Brodie contended it was ‘a little bizarre’ that the massive retaliation doctrine should be launched in 1954, mere months after the Soviet Union exploded its first thermonuclear device. ‘The time seemed more suitable for an era of massive-retaliation philosophy to be drawing to a close, not to be having its dawn.’⁶⁰ For Brodie, massive retaliation was a sham – an unpersuasive attempt by a state that had been unwilling to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-armed opponents in Korea to convince the world that that it would be willing to use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union in Europe.⁶¹ That said, like Eisenhower, Brodie was sceptical that restraint could be counted upon should a major war between the superpowers first break out. Once the first nuclear bombs hit their targets, both parties would be incentivised to seek damage limitation by annihilating their enemy as quickly as possible.

In a 1957 book based on consultations with key members of the US national security establishment, Henry Kissinger suggested that the threat of vicarious nuclear warfighting had lost credibility and did ‘not represent a strategic option for our allies’.⁶² For Kissinger, deterrent threats ‘need not be absolutely credible’ to have an effect. But the threat to engage in all-out nuclear war on behalf of states on the other side of the world defied reasonable plausibility.⁶³ A few years later, the same man asserted that the requirements for tight command and control of nuclear weapons – a precondition for US presidential sole authority over the launch of nuclear arms – ‘are to some degree inconsistent with a coalition of sovereign states. The enormous risks of nuclear warfare affect the credibility of traditional pledges of mutual assistance’.⁶⁴ For Kissinger, the lesson was clear. The United States should seek to deter the Soviet Union and its allies through local deployments of nuclear and conventional forces. By his estimation, ‘all Soviet and Chinese aggressive moves have occurred in areas where our commitment of resources was small or non-existent’.⁶⁵

According to the conventional understanding of END laid out above, the serious misgivings about the credibility of US nuclear war plans voiced by government-adjacent strategists such as Kaufmann, Brodie, and Kissinger should be alarm bells in allied capitols across the Atlantic. And, indeed, they were. Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy – which was abridged and translated by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and circulated to members of the foreign policy elite in Norway – became the subject of debate and concern in Oslo, including in closed sessions of the Norwegian Parliament’s select committee on foreign affairs and constitutional matters.⁶⁶ Finn Moe, the committee leader, asked rhetorically: ‘Will the American president sell fifty American cities for Western Europe? Or, to be quite clear, would America risk strategic nuclear war to save Northern Norway?’⁶⁷ While Moe did believe nuclear weapons to ‘have a deterrent effect’ on a wider, global level, he thought Norway would need its own nuclear weapons, or at least US nuclear weapons stationed on its soil, for nuclear deterrence to offer a credible solution for the defence of Norway specifically. On balance, however, he thought Oslo would be better off choosing an entirely different, non-nuclear path, as Norway would not be able to keep up in an arms race anyway.⁶⁸

Haakon Lie – party secretary of the then-dominant Labour Party from 1945 to 1969 and one of Norway’s most influential politicians of the post-War period – became convinced in the 1950s that the Soviet Union’s development of long-range nuclear forces undercut the credibility of the American extended nuclear deterrent. Lie’s favoured solution to the problem was the one indirectly proposed by Kissinger, namely the local deployment to Northern Norway of nuclear arms.⁶⁹ By his own recounting, Lie had memorised by heart whole sections of Kissinger’s writing on nuclear strategy.⁷⁰ Halvard Lange, Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Labour Party for most of the period between 1946 and 1965, maintained broadly similar views to Lie. While in 1950 he saw the United States’ implicit threat to use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union as credible and stabilising – stating in a closed select committee meeting that the US predominance in nuclear weapons appeared to him responsible for the Soviet Union’s relative restraint after the Second World War – half a decade later he espoused the view that a credible defence posture for Norway necessitated both strong conventional forces and tactical nuclear arms.⁷¹ In Lange’s formulation, informed by analyses from NATO headquarters, instant Norwegian access to tactical nuclear weapons had become ‘decisive’ for a credible nuclear deterrence posture.⁷² Any deployment of nuclear weapons would in this view have to be based in Northern Norway, as the distances involved meant that stockpiling further south or abroad would defeat the entire point, namely to mitigate against a rapid Soviet invasion and fait accompli.⁷³

Lange, Lie, and other civilian policymakers in favour of the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Norway were strongly supported by Norwegian and NATO defence planners. As the historian Rolf Tamnes puts it, uncertainty had arisen over ‘whether the major Alliance partners would really risk nuclear holocaust for the sake of these relatively unimportant areas [on NATO’s periphery]’.⁷⁴ Many experts believed that Norwegian forces would stand little chance of stopping an invading Soviet army without ‘immediate access’ to tactical nuclear weapons stationed in relatively close proximity to the border. Expressing firm belief in the manageability of nuclear war, the Norwegian Defence Staff suggested in a 1960 white paper that ‘controlled use’ of tactical nuclear weapons on Norwegian soil would make it possible ‘to take due care of both the civilian population and the safety of our own forces’.⁷⁵ As a result of pressure from the military, Norway soon acquired nuclear-capable Honest John artillery rockets through the US Mutual Defense Assistance Program for deployment in Northern Norway.⁷⁶ Andreas Andersen, a close confidante of the prime minister, formally serving as Director General for Preparedness and Security Policy at the Prime Minister’s Office between 1953 and 1973, became convinced after conversations with leading Norwegian officers that the military had pushed for the acquisition of Honest John as a means of pressuring the civilian leaders to acquire a nuclear capability. After all, the artillery rockets in question would be far less effective without the nuclear warheads they were designed to deliver. ‘If you have the collar, you’ll get the cow’, was Andersen’s summary of the military leaders’ logic.⁷⁷

The head of the Norwegian government, however, was not convinced that it would be a good idea for Norway to acquire or host nuclear weapons. Einar Gerhardsen, Prime Minister of Norway for most of the period between 1945 and 1965, was deeply sceptical of threat-based security strategies, always insisting that security policy was broader than military or defence policy. In this view, security policy included defence matters but was not reducible to them; security policy involved diplomacy, regional cooperation, and conflict prevention as well as the honing of military capabilities and alliances.⁷⁸ It is possible, in this view, to see Norwegian security policy, defence policy, and NATO policy as three overlapping but distinct categories. While the former concerned Norway’s territorial integrity, political independence, and welfare, the second concerned military and intelligence matters, and the third Norway’s position in the Western alliance.

In 1949, just prior to joining NATO, the Norwegian government had issued a declaration, clearly addressed to Moscow, stating that Norway would not permit the establishment of permanent foreign bases on its territory. Finnmark, the region bordering Russia, was practically demilitarised and closed off for NATO without any demand for a quid pro quo from the Kremlin. For the Norwegian government, these limitations on NATO’s presence in Norway constituted both an important marker of sovereignty vis-à-vis the United States and a means of convincing the Kremlin that Norway would not allow its territory to become a bridgehead for NATO incursions against the Soviet Union. The restrains were entirely self-imposed, however, and could be reversed should the government so decide.

For Gerhardsen’s strategy to work, it was crucial that native Norwegian personnel could fulfil core security functions in the High North; a Western military vacuum in the region would likely have incentivised the United States or Britain to increase their presence in the area. And while the speed of the buildup was not as quick as many wanted, the government began already in the early-to-mid 1950s to ramp up Norway’s conventional capability in Northern Norway.⁷⁹ Contrary to the claim that a monolithic bloc of Europeans resisted reliance on conventional forces, favouring instead reliance on nuclear deterrence, Norway – one of only two NATO members that actually bordered the Soviet Union – vocally backed increased reliance on conventional forces already in the mid-1950s.⁸⁰ Norway’s defence expenditures rose sharply over the course of the five-year period from 1949 to 1954, from 2.7 to 5.0 percent of a rapidly growing GDP.⁸¹ This fact squares poorly with the notion that entry into NATO offered cheap security through straightforward, credible security guarantees.

In December 1957, a few months after the so-called Sputnik shock, Gerhardsen and other allied heads of government convened at NATO headquarters in Paris. In line with Kissinger’s plea for a ‘commitment of resources’ to vulnerable areas to make the nuclear umbrella credible, the United States had offered to station nuclear weapons and intermediate-range missiles under dual-key arrangements on its allies’ respective territories. However, earlier that year, Gerhardsen’s Labour had at its party conference adopted a motion that ‘[n]uclear weapons should not be placed on Norwegian territory’.⁸² The grassroots of the labour movement harboured deep scepticism towards nuclear armament.⁸³ Accordingly, at the summit in Paris, Gerhardsen rejected the US deployment offer and urged his colleagues to engage the Soviet Union in arms control negotiations. Concluding his statement, Gerhardsen told his colleagues that, ‘on the question of disarmament, as with other vital questions, it is important that we emphasise our willingness to solve disputes between East and West through negotiations. We still stand by the proposals [for disarmament] adopted by the United Nations’.⁸⁴ In the very first session of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, the organisation had advocated ‘the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction’.⁸⁵

By the second half of the 1950s, there was widespread agreement in the foreign policy establishments of both Norway and the United States that the nuclear umbrella had lost credibility. Yet, contrary to the notion that non-nuclear allies worry obsessively about the robustness of their nuclear protection, the reaction of the Norwegian government to this acknowledgement was neither to pursue independent nuclear capabilities nor more credible guarantees.⁸⁶ Instead, Norway sought to manage its relationship with the Soviet Union through diplomatic reassurance combined with conventional armaments and NATO alignment. That said, in a compromise with the military and Haakon Lie’s wing of the party, Gerhardsen and his restraint wing acquiesced in the late 1950s to secret preparations to receive American nuclear weapons in times of crisis.⁸⁷ Nevertheless, there was a clear sense that the pro-nuclear camp had lost the debate, as it was widely acknowledged that any nuclear defence of Northern Norway could only really be credible if tactical nuclear weapons were deployed there in peacetime, i.e. in advance of a hypothetical ‘Finnmark grab’. As discussed above, the distances involved meant that it would take a long time to deploy nuclear weapons from abroad once a crisis had begun. The threat Norwegian planners were most worried about was a rapid conventional attack.

By 1961, the policy of restraint had largely won the internal debate in Oslo. From then on, Norway would cease participation in nuclear war exercises – Norway had taken part in so-called SNOWCAT exercises (support of nuclear operations with conventional air tactics) in the late 1950s – and most of the secret operational preparations to receive US nuclear weapons in a crisis were physically reversed.⁸⁸ The nuclear-capable Nike air defence and Honest John rocket artillery systems Norway had acquired in the second half of the 1950s were withdrawn from service in 1965 without nuclear warheads ever having been acquired. The pro-nuclear camp’s consolation was that the written formalisation of Norway’s decision to foreswear nuclear weapons, codified in a 1961 white paper, specified that Norwegian restraint was voluntary and open to change should geopolitical tensions increase.⁸⁹ For some, the possibility of changing tack and accepting US nuclear deployments in the future provided a source of bargaining leverage vis-à-vis Moscow.⁹⁰ As a weapon to deter and defend against a sudden Soviet attack, however, the nuclear option was for all intents and purposes dead.⁹¹ This was manifestly the result of deliberate choices. Informed by NATO analyses, the Norwegian defence establishment had arrived at a shared understanding of what a credible nuclear deterrence strategy for Norway would look like – local deployments to Northern Norway of tactical nuclear weapons available for immediate use by Norwegian forces. It was with open eyes, and on the basis of a broader analysis of Norwegian security, that the government opted to go down a different path.

In the early 1960s, the Norwegian government spoke out strongly against the proposed creation of a nuclear force under joint NATO command (MLF), an initiative disparagingly described by Gerhardsen as an attempt at converting NATO as such into a ‘nuclear power’.⁹² The MLF proposal was widely viewed as an effort at enhancing the credibility of the nuclear umbrella and increasing allied involvement in nuclear planning.⁹³ At a meeting in Washington DC, then US Secretary of State Dean Rusk had apparently communicated to Norwegian policymakers that the United States would not use nuclear weapons to defend Northern Norway. Nevertheless, Norwegian elites remained opposed not only to credibility-building measures on Norwegian soil, but also to the further nuclearisation of the Atlantic alliance. The declassified minutes from a closed 1963 meeting of the Norwegian parliament’s select committee on foreign policy reveal that the Labour government was considering vetoing the MLF proposal should it be put to a vote at the North Atlantic Council. Foreign Minister Halvard Lange, whose position on nuclear affairs had shifted as the restraint camp won the internal debate in Oslo, asserted that ‘we do not wish to become a quasi-nuclear power’.⁹⁴

Norwegian policymakers occasionally felt obliged to vote against the United States at the UN, including by supporting resolutions calling for an end to nuclear testing. Visibly opposing US interest was, however, almost universally viewed as regrettable.⁹⁵ The United States was Norway’s most crucial ally, and there was broad agreement that Norway should do its outmost to abjure actions that might dampen US leaders’ willingness to come to Norway’s aid in the event of a crisis. Policymakers were rightly convinced that US leaders wanted Norway to support the United States diplomatically, including in the realm of nuclear policy. In fact, Norwegian support was arguably judged as particularly valuable. A US National Security Council report finalised in the spring of 1960 established that, ‘because the Scandinavian countries enjoy considerable prestige in the international community, their support of US policy is valuable in international organizations and for general propaganda purposes’.⁹⁶

While the Norwegian foreign policy elite appears in the 1950s and 1960s to have been sceptical of the nuclear guarantee, they were certainly hopeful that, in the event of Soviet aggression against Norway or Norwegian interests, the United States and other allies would aid Oslo conventionally. This hope was couched in a conviction that it was in the United States’ national interest not only to keep its treaty commitments but also to retain Norway as a partner in the Cold War struggle; in the words of the Norwegian Conservative Party luminary Carl Joachim Hambro, American military aid was offered ‘not for the sake of our blue eyes’ but because Europe ‘was a part of America’s front’ in the struggle against the Soviet Union.⁹⁷

Commenting directly on Secretary Rusk’s reported warning that the US would not use nuclear weapons in response to a limited attack against Norway – an apparent refutation of the official NATO strategy of massive retaliation – Finn Moe maintained in a closed session of the select committee on foreign affairs that the alleged American reluctance to use nuclear weapons in defence of Northern Norway was a good thing given the devastation a nuclear exchange would wreak. In his view, Rusk’s warning ‘could hardly have surprised anyone even a little’.⁹⁸ Commenting on the credibility of the NATO security guarantee in the same closed session, then Defence Minister Gudmund Harlem maintained that, in his estimation, Norway’s security hinged on Norway’s ability to prevent a rapid Soviet fait accompli through conventional means. A Norwegian ability to hold on for some time meant that the Soviets could not eliminate the risk of allied support and subsequent escalation. The Norwegian Defence Minister’s view as of 1963 was thus firmly at odds with the established NATO doctrine of relying on an ‘immediate’ counter-attack employing atomic weapons – a strategy that was formally in place until 1967.⁹⁹ For Harlem, to the extent that nuclear weapons played a role in Norway’s defence, it was by presenting the Soviets with a general risk of escalation independent of formal NATO doctrine or the explicit nuclear umbrella.¹⁰⁰ Halvard Lange, still Foreign Minister, suggested in 1963 that while nuclear aid was not something that could be counted upon, he felt confident that conventional military support would be forthcoming. Others, however, including Andreas Andersen, were sceptical even of the conventional guarantee.¹⁰¹

John Lyng, who served as Prime Minister of Norway for the Conservative Party for a short period in 1963 and then as Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1965 and 1970, writes in his memoirs that he sympathised with de Gaulle’s infamous statements about the incredibility of the US nuclear umbrella. He therefore would have supported the local deployment of nuclear weapons to Northern Norway. However, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 had in Lyng’s view made it impossible to change Norway’s policy of restraint. ‘Our local defence thus still had to be based on our own forces’.¹⁰² Along similar lines, a NATO study published in 1971, the so-called NORCAN study (named after its co-chairs Norway and Canada), highlighted the implausibility of using nuclear weapons in Northern Norway due to a deliberate lack of operational preparedness on the Norwegian side.¹⁰³ Writing a few years earlier, the former French general and NATO ambassador André Beaufre had maintained that the nuclear umbrella rested on ‘the credibility of a threat which everyone knows to have become unreal’.¹⁰⁴ Leading Norwegian commentators from across the political spectrum made similar claims in print.¹⁰⁵

3.3. Enduring Restraint, 1966–1991

Norwegian policymakers remained sceptical when in the second half of the 1960s the MLF proposal was dropped in favour of a more modest nuclear consultation arrangement. For the US government, a central motivation to increase allied nuclear consultations was to embed nuclear weapons further in Western strategic culture and persuade allies ‘to recognise nuclear weapons as an integral part of the arsenal of the Free World’.¹⁰⁶ The Norwegian government initially declined to participate in the nuclear consultation arrangement, in part due to concerns about how involvement would be perceived by the broadly anti-nuclear Norwegian public. However, when it became clear that Norway might be the only country bar France to decline membership, the position was reversed. When Norway eventually decided to join, though, it was on the premise that the group would offer a forum for coordination on arms control, in particular the ongoing negotiation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The records of the closed select committee session which discussed membership of the group suggest that Norwegian policymakers saw accession as an opportunity to put pressure on West Germany to join the NPT and, in so doing, do the US State Department a favour.¹⁰⁷

Other European states went down very different paths to the one chosen by Norway. At the peak in the early 1970s, the United States deployed more than 7,000 nuclear warheads to European countries. More than 4,000 of those were stationed in West Germany alone. Many were of the supposedly usable kind – nuclear mines and artillery shells – placed close to the border with East Germany. Should Warsaw Pact forces attack West Germany, the question might not be whether the US president would be resolved to authorise the use of nuclear weapons, as the official doctrine stipulated, but rather how or whether nuclear escalation could be stopped at all. It has been argued that it was precisely the susceptibility to rapid escalation and loss of centralised control that made END ‘credible’ on NATO’s central front.¹⁰⁸ In this view, the American nuclear presence in Central Europe amounted in practice to what Paul Bracken has described as a ‘regional doomsday machine’.¹⁰⁹

The construction of a ‘regional doomsday machine’ in Central Europe lessened the credibility problem in the case of Bonn and other European powers in Central and Southern Europe. Yet the political challenge that underlay it remained – particularly once permissive action links (PALs) were installed on warheads in the second half of the 1960s to mitigate against accidents and to give Washington greater control over launch decisions. In a closed meeting of the National Security Council in 1969, President Richard Nixon maintained that the ‘flexible response’ doctrine that officially replaced the massive retaliation doctrine in 1967 was ‘baloney’ and that, with respect to Western Europe, the ‘[n]uclear umbrella [is] no longer there. Our bargaining position has shifted. We must face facts’.¹¹⁰ In another closed meeting, Nixon described the nuclear umbrella as ‘a lot of crap’. We ‘[d]on’t have it’.¹¹¹ Kissinger, then US National Security Advisor, privately told staff in 1973 that the United States and NATO found itself in a new situation ‘where the other side has thousands of [nuclear] weapons’. The enduring lack of a strategy for limited war, he argued, ‘paralyzes us’.¹¹² Yet, likely betting that a public retraction or questioning of the nuclear umbrella would not only further undermine its credibility but also undercut US leadership within the Western alliance, Nixon and Kissinger refrained whilst in office from voicing such criticisms in public.

However, several US policymakers out of office did not shy away from openly making their concerns known.¹¹³ In a 1979 meeting of American and European defence experts in Brussels, Henry Kissinger – at that time an analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies – confessed that, as a US diplomat, he had often ‘sat around the NATO council table in Brussels and elsewhere and uttered the magic words’ about America’s resolve to use nuclear weapons on behalf of its allies. But the pledge of vicarious nuclear warfighting ‘cannot be true’, he went on.

[W]e must face the fact that it is absurd to base the strategy of the West on the credibility of the threat of mutual suicide. Therefore, I would say – which I might not say in office – the European allies should not keep asking us to multiply strategic assurances that we cannot possibly mean, or, if we do mean, we would not want to execute, because if we execute we risk the destruction of civilization.¹¹⁴

Gregory F. Treverton, who handled the European file for the National Security Council in the mid-1970s, believed that the significance of Kissinger’s words ‘was hardly the newness of the thought – it has been in the back of the mind of everyone on both sides of the Atlantic who thought about the issue for a decade – but was, rather, the political fact of the emperor’s aide saying the emperor had no clothes’.¹¹⁵

In 1983, former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara seconded Kissinger’s appeal and asserted that the nuclear security guarantee defied believability. ‘One cannot build a credible deterrent on an incredible action’, he contended in Foreign Affairs, suggesting that successive US presidents had in practice been committed to a no-first use policy.¹¹⁶ McNamara’s misgivings were echoed by several experts and former policymakers.¹¹⁷ As indicated above, George Ball argued in the New York Review of Books that NATO’s END strategy was ‘founded on illusion’, a ‘cosmic bluff’. In his view, the Soviets knew very well that ‘should our bluff be called, […] the president would face two unacceptable options. He could either precipitate mutual catastrophe or capitulate’. For obvious reasons, ‘no president would be likely to adopt the disastrous first option’.¹¹⁸

As discussed above, the wave of warnings about the lacking credibility of the US nuclear umbrella from leading American voices should under dominant theoretical assumptions have been alarm bells to governments in Europe, not least the one in Oslo. Nevertheless, the policy of restraint was upheld in a bid to keep tensions with Moscow at a manageable level. This continued to be the case even in the early to mid-1980s, when US policymakers publicly sowed doubts about the reality of the umbrella even whilst in office.¹¹⁹ The Reagan administration’s 1988 commission on integrated long-term strategy concluded that US END threats had ‘serious limitations’, especially on NATO’s peripheries where the tripwire was thin. Norway and Turkey were explicitly singled out:

At best, it [END] is useful only in dealing with those extreme contingencies [such as major attack on the central front]. An excessive focus on these contingencies diverts planners from trying to deal with many important and far more plausible situations in which threats of nuclear annihilation would not be credible.

Apocalyptic showdowns between the United States and the Soviet Union are certainly conceivable in the nuclear age, but they are much less probable than other forms of conflict. […] They [defence planners] have overemphasized war on Europe’s central front, where the threat to use nuclear weapons might be more credible, and neglected planning for the possibility of Soviet assaults on the flanks, in Norway or Turkey.¹²⁰

Despite the warnings, successive Norwegian governments made no demands for strengthened nuclear guarantees or the implementation of credibility-building measures. On the contrary, Norwegian policymakers continued to uphold the no-foreign-bases policy. The central reason, which remained the same in public and private, was a prudential calculation that nuclear and allied deployments could exacerbate the security dilemma vis-à-vis Moscow, ultimately leaving Norway less secure. A background factor was a moral resistance to nuclear weapons and war from important sectors of the Norwegian society, in particular the labour movement and religious communities. Thus, what the authors of the 1988 report of the commission on integrated long-term strategy described as ‘neglect’ was the result of a deliberate Norwegian policy of keeping nuclear weapons at arm’s length.

Following Kissinger’s remarks in Brussels in 1979, a major conservative newspaper in Norway, Morgenbladet, invited what it described as the country’s ‘two foremost policymakers in the field of security’ to comment: Johan Jørgen Holst, a former Hudson Institute analyst and current Labour Party Deputy Minister of Defence, and Paul Thyness, a former senior official at the Foreign Ministry and leading Conservative member of the select committee on foreign affairs. In the interview, the two were in perfect agreement that Kissinger’s statement should not be taken seriously. While Holst dismissed the statement as ‘over-dramatisation’, Thyness suggested that Kissinger ‘could no longer be seen as a serious foreign policy analyst’.¹²¹ In less public arenas, however, both expressed very different views. In a closed session of the select committee on foreign affairs, Thyness alluded that Kissinger’s remarks were not only quite serious, but probably representative of the real attitude in certain quarters of the alliance. To help remedy the situation, he proposed that Norway should support the modernisation of NATO’s intermediate-range nuclear forces. This was to be done not primarily for the benefit of Norway, which in Thyness’ words, ‘stood outside the nuclear game’, but to avoid ending up in a ‘fairly difficult position’ vis-à-vis those invested in it.¹²² In other words, Norway should support INF modernisation to avoid grating powerful allies – partners the Norwegian government hoped would aid Norway conventionally in the event of conflict. Holst, for his part, repeatedly expressed serious doubts about the credibility of the threat to use nuclear weapons in defence of Northern Norway in later academic work.¹²³

In the early 1980s, influential Norwegian policymakers began advocating for the establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Nordic region. Holst, who was hardly a radical or anti-NATO, argued that, all else equal, the establishment of a zone would not have major implications for Norwegian defence policy. Echoing Ball, Holst described the threat to use nuclear weapons to stop a Soviet conventional attack as a ‘cosmic bluff’ which ‘was hardly persuasive either to potential adversaries, protectors, or the party to be protected’.¹²⁴ That said, Holst maintained that Norway might be argued to enjoy some minimal benefits of extended nuclear deterrence through the fact of its alliance with the United States. However, any such deterrent effect owed not to the official nuclear umbrella or doctrine but the undeniable possibility that conventional allied support might conceivably spur escalation and, ultimately, nuclear war. This, of course, was an effect of the alliance relationship as such and, by extension, independent of any nuclear-weapon-free zone or explicit nuclear umbrella.

The Labour Party’s advocacy for a Nordic nuclear-weapon-free zone was staunchly opposed by other NATO members, in particular the US government. Relaying reactions to the zone proposal from NATO allies at a closed session of the select committee on foreign affairs, then Foreign Minister Knut Frydenlund explained that ‘the strongest opposition’ had been voiced by the American Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, who had ‘warned’ that the establishment of a zone could not only ‘have negative impacts on the upcoming negotiations with the Soviet Union about nuclear weapons in Europe’ but also ‘would have implications for the United States’ aid to the defence of Norway’.¹²⁵ The threat to curtail military support clearly made a major impression on both the government and select committee, and the zone-idea was not pressed further. In the words of Torstein Eckhoff, a Norwegian civil servant and renowned professor of law, ‘[t]he American warning scared the Norwegian government out of taking any step that could annoy its powerful ally’.¹²⁶ The onset of promising US-Soviet arms control talks a few years later lessened the pressure for a zone from the grassroots of the labour movement.

Throughout the 1980s, influential Norwegian observers, including both civilian experts and retired generals, continued to express major scepticism about the credibility of the US nuclear umbrella over Norway. And contrary to the expectation that non-nuclear allies are needy and beggarly, constantly worrying about the believability of their patron’s extended nuclear deterrent threats, Norwegian commentators’ lack of faith in the credibility of the umbrella did not translate either into demands for independent nuclear capabilities or strengthened US nuclear guarantees or credibility-building measures.¹²⁷ On the contrary, central contributors to the debate argued that Norway should distance itself from NATO’s nuclear mission even further.¹²⁸ Sverre Lodgaard, a researcher and member of the Norwegian government’s Council on Arms Control and Disarmament, recalled in 1980 General de Gaulle’s aphorism about the unlikelihood that a US president would be prepared to trade Chicago for Paris, and averred that it was ‘illusory’ to believe that the United States would use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union in the defence of Western Europe.¹²⁹ But nuclear defence did not make much sense in any case, Lodgaard suggested, either morally or strategically. Consequently, Norway should formally ‘opt out of the alliance’s nuclear strategy’.¹³⁰ Retired Norwegian General Arne Haugan, who had served as commander of the forces in Northern Norway, wrote in 1981 that he had ‘no belief’ that nuclear weapons would be used in the event of war.¹³¹ The first use of nuclear weapons by the United States in Europe was a threat ‘anyone’ could understand had no basis in reality, he believed. Retaliatory use might be somewhat less implausible, but why would the conventionally superior Soviet Union use nuclear weapons first, he asked rhetorically.¹³² Around the same time, Knut Frydenlund, Foreign Minister of Norway over three periods in the 1970s and 1980s, argued that even the use of smaller, tactical nuclear weapons did not seem credible as long as ‘the opposing party had just as many if not more of the same weapons’. The US nuclear security guarantee, Frydenlund professed, was the ‘Maginot line of our time’.¹³³ (The Maginot-metaphor had been used about NATO’s nuclear strategy in Europe also in a closed session of the select committee on foreign affairs by the committee’s then chairman, Finn Moe, in 1957.)¹³⁴ Jens Evensen, a former government minister and a prominent voice in the Labour Party, drew the same conclusion, arguing that the United States, when push came to shove, would probably ‘shy away from triggering the ultimate sanction of the balance of terror – the sanction of self-destruction’.¹³⁵ For Evensen, who later served as a judge at the International Court of Justice, nuclear weapons were fundamentally immoral instruments of statecraft. Notice that the various statements listed above can be viewed as ‘declarations against interest’ in the sense that it would have been politically and personally more opportune for the individuals in question to avoid the topic or to simply follow the NATO line. Suggesting that the umbrella lacked credibility risked negative reactions from NATO and would appear to invite a commitment to fundamentally change policy, be it to formally opt out of the umbrella or to seek independent nuclear capabilities or enhanced nuclear guarantees.

While many in the Norwegian foreign policy and defence establishment clearly had serious misgivings about nuclear policy – either because they believed the defence posture in Northern Norway lacked credibility or because they opposed nuclear weapons altogether – the majority saw conventional military cooperation with Britain and the United States, as well as access to military foreign aid, as enormously important. For Thorvald Stoltenberg, who served in roles as minister of defence and foreign affairs in the period between 1979 and 1993, Oslo’s dependence on allied military support in the event of a crisis meant that political solidarity with the United States and NATO would in many cases constitute the single most important concern ‘for any Norwegian foreign minister’.¹³⁶ Further, under the Mutual Defense Assistance Program and, from 1961 onward, the Military Assistance Program, Norway received thousands of American tanks and artillery pieces, hundreds of aircraft and helicopters, and dozens of naval vessels free of charge.¹³⁷ An abrupt withdrawal of such aid, for example as a form of punishment for a perceived lack of loyalty, would have added enormously to Norwegian defence expenditure, undermining other government spending priorities. There can be little doubt that this had a chilling effect on any desires to voice criticism of basic US policy in public. In a private note written in 1975, Andreas Andersen asserts that, from Labour’s perspective, the primary purpose of NATO was to reduce defence expenditures. In his words, Norwegian politicians had ‘been willing to buy military foreign aid with significant political concessions’.¹³⁸ While official military aid dried up in the 1970s, NATO became increasingly important as a common market that allowed members of the alliance to offset the rising unit-cost of arms and military equipment by specialising in certain areas.¹³⁹ Several of Norway’s most successful defence exports, notably the Penguin anti-ship missile, were developed with US assistance. The United States and other NATO members remain key suppliers and buyers for the Norwegian defence industry, one of the world’s largest as measured by revenue per capita.

Taking stock in 2011, former US policymakers George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn conceded that US END threats had never been particularly credible or, reading between the lines, sincere. Deterrence, they argued, had been useful only in preventing major attacks against the US homeland:

US defense leaders made serious efforts to give the president more flexible options for nuclear use short of global annihilation. They never solved the problem […].

As a result, nuclear deterrence was useful in preventing only the most catastrophic scenarios that would have threatened our survival.¹⁴⁰

In a similar stock-taking exercise, Norwegian General and later Chief of Defence Sverre Diesen expressed in 2000 serious scepticism about the credibility of the putative strategic nuclear umbrella over Norway. The use of tactical nuclear weapons in defence of Norway had also been rendered implausible as soon as the Soviet Union also acquired such weapons, he thought.¹⁴¹ In his view, nuclear weapons were primarily ‘political bargaining chips and status symbols’ and had no value except perhaps as ‘weapons of last resort’ for the nuclear-armed states themselves.¹⁴²

4. Conclusion

The evidence presented in this article suggests that key players in the American and Norwegian foreign policy establishments have not seen the putative US nuclear umbrella over Norway as particularly credible since the early 1950s. And yet, contrary to the dominant theoretical expectation in the literature on END and allied reassurance, Norwegian policymakers resisted effectively all efforts at redressing this situation, opting instead for conventional means and support. Admittedly, certain influential Norwegian policymakers thought Norway benefitted from a basic nuclear deterrent effect flowing from the fundamental fact that conventional allied support could conceivably foster major escalation down the line. However, this effect was a product of conventional cooperation and the North Atlantic Treaty, not the officially declared nuclear umbrella.

Why, then, given the Norwegian public’s opposition to nuclear weapons, did Norwegian policy elites nevertheless continue to officially support the US nuclear umbrella?¹⁴³ At NATO summits in 1957, 1967, 1991, 1999, 2010, and 2022, Norwegian governments endorsed NATO strategic concepts that described nuclear weapons and END as credible and vital. For some, continued official support for the umbrella may have reflected a desire to retain a possible minimal deterrent effect vis-à-vis third parties. Borrowing the terminology of the Healey theorem, both patron and client may prefer a credibility of 1 percent to a credibility of 0. It has also been argued that subscription to the basic tenets of US foreign policy functions as a precondition for professional efficacy and recognition within the transatlantic national security community.¹⁴⁴ It is also clear that many Norwegian policymakers have seen value in the imperative of alliance solidarity and cohesion for its own sake.

More broadly, representatives of junior allies such as Norway share an interest in not rocking the alliance boat. After all, even if many Norwegian policymakers in the field of foreign affairs and defence have not seen the nuclear umbrella as particularly credible or useful, most have been extremely interested in securing US and NATO conventional support – both during peacetime and in the event of a crisis. Norwegian policymakers have thus sought to eschew actions that might reduce US and other aligned policymakers’ willingness to aid Norway conventionally.¹⁴⁵ In the provocative words of Tormod Heier, a leading Norwegian defence expert, client states such as Norway have an interest in showing ‘obedience and loyalty’ to their patron.¹⁴⁶ Loyalty, in turn, is seen as a key to unlocking several concrete benefits. First, loyalty is understood as an important means to maintaining rapport and effective lines of communication with the patron.¹⁴⁷ Second, loyalty can be associated with material benefits, including in the form of arms transfers or assistance in the construction of military infrastructure.¹⁴⁸

The patron state, and sub-state groups and individuals within it, can also derive important benefits from upholding a nuclear umbrella even in the absence of credibility. First and perhaps most importantly, END arrangements help diffuse the reputational burden associated with the retention, rebuilding, and prepared use of contested weapons.¹⁴⁹ Second, the supposed requirements of maintaining a nuclear umbrella over thirty allies and partners clearly provides an important rhetorical asset in debates over US nuclear force sizing and declaratory policy. For those involved in the nuclear defence enterprise, END offers a justification for ambitious spending and procurement programmes.¹⁵⁰ Third, conceding that the umbrella lacks credibility vis-à-vis one client state could potentially be perceived as a threat to the credibility of the umbrella vis-à-vis others, including states that are believed, correctly or not, to have staked their non-proliferation behaviour on the extended nuclear deterrent’s credibility. Fourth, on the symbolic plain, the notion of protection by means of the ‘absolute weapon’ conforms with discourses of international leadership and responsibility.¹⁵¹ According to Jeremy Shapiro, formerly a senior official at the US State Department, the ‘psychic benefits’ of alliance leadership are considerable. ‘Everybody pays attention to you, everybody shows deference to you, you get to sit at the front of every table.’¹⁵²

The case discussed in this article is hardly representative of the full selection of US allies and partners. Some US allies, including South Korea and Germany, have clearly maintained a far greater, and likely more sincere, interest in being protected by nuclear means. That said, Norway is a small state in a threatening neighbourhood, and could, under prevailing theoretical assumptions, be expected to place a high premium on nuclear defence. For that reason, the Norwegian case casts doubt on the conventional wisdom on nuclear umbrellas and END. At the very least, the Norwegian case problematises the common claim that a monolithic bloc of European states resisted reliance on conventional forces during the early Cold War, insisting instead on nuclear deterrence.

The policy implications that flow from the conclusions above are considerable. In particular, it appears that European states’ demand for specifically nuclear guarantees may have been exaggerated, though Russia’s nuclear sabre-rattling in the context of the war in Ukraine might plausibly change established views.¹⁵³ More generally, the conclusions presented here invite a broader re-examination of the politics of END (as distinct from the policy of END). Such a research agenda would dovetail with recent survey work on END which suggests that highly credible nuclear security guarantees do not necessarily foster reassurance but may instead generate a sense of heightened risk.¹⁵⁴ Nuclear umbrellas and extended nuclear deterrence are central concepts in the international security literature and deserve critical examination and scrutiny.

Biography

Kjølv Egeland is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Nuclear Knowledges Programme at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po in Paris. His previous work on nuclear politics has appeared in International Affairs, Contemporary Security Policy, International Relations, Survival, and Diplomacy & Statecraft.

Funding Statement

This article was made possible by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 759707).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest are reported by the authors(s).