Abstract
The contribution of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to Western defence can be measured in many ways. The most simple, and therefore the most frequently applied measure, is defence spending. The NATO allies gave this standard political salience by deciding in 1978 that each NATO country should seek to increase defence spending by 3 per cent in real terms each year. This has become the standard employed by many Members of the US Congress to assess how the cost of defence efforts is being shared with allies of the United States. More complex assessments make an effort to look at ‘output’ measures — what the Federal Republic gets for the Deutschmarks it spends. The US Congress now requires the Department of Defence each year to report on West German and other allied defence efforts using a great variety of ‘input’ and ‘output’ measures.
These are the author’s views. They are not necessarily those of the Congressional Research Service or the Library of Congress.
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Notes
For an excellent overview of some of the early arms control proposals, see Michael Mandelbaum, The Nuclear Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
See US Department of State, Documents on Germany, 1944–1985 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1985).
A detailed discussion of the Western European Union appears in Hans Speier, German Rearmament and Atomic War (New York: Evanston, Row, Peterson, 1957).
Michael Palmer, John Lambert et al., European Unity (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968).
Peter V. Curl, Documents on American Foreign Relations 1954 (New York: Harper & Row, 1955).
See Sir Nicholas Henderson, The Birth of NATO (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983).
James L. Richardson, Germany and the Atlantic Alliance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 24–5.
Norman A. Graebner, ‘The United States and NATO, 1953–69’, in Lawrence S. Kaplan and Robert W. Clawson (eds), NATO after Thirty Years (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1981), p. 41.
US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Arms Control and Disarmament Agreements, ‘Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons’ (Washington, DC: ACDA, 1982), pp. 82–98.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization, ‘The Future Tasks of the Alliance’, North Atlantic Treaty Organization: Facts and Figures (Brussels: NATO Information Center, 1984), pp. 289–91.
Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), pp. 258–60.
Helmut Schmidt, ‘The 1977 Alastair Buchan Memorial Lecture’, Survival, January–February 1978, p. 4.
For a detailed German discussion of MBFR, see Reinhard Mutz (ed.), Die Wiener Verhandlungen ueber Truppenreduzierungen in Mitteleuropa (MBFR) (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1983).
See also Jonathan Dean, Watershed in Europe (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1987).
See Eastern proposals especially in the initial stages of the talks, Douglas F. Garthoff, ‘The Soviet Military and Arms Control’, Survival, June 1977: pp. 242–50.
John G. Keliher, The Negotiations on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions — The Search for Arms Control in Central Europe (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980).
For a more detailed discussion on both MBFR and the Conventional Stability Talks, see Jonathan Dean, Watershed in Europe: Dismantling the East-West Military Confrontation (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1987).
Ernst F. Jung, ‘Conventional Arms Control in Europe in Light of the MBFR Experience’, Aussenpolitik, German Foreign Affairs Review, vol. 39, no. 2, 1988, pp. 166–7.
See the debate over first nuclear use in McGeorge Bundy et al., ‘Nuclear Weapons and the Atlantic Alliance’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 60, no. 4, Spring 1982, pp. 753–68.
Karl Kaiser et al., ‘Nuclear Weapons and the Preservation of Peace: A German Response to No First Use’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 60, no. 5, Summer 1982, pp. 1157–70.
see Catherine McArdle Kelleher, Germany and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975).
For a discussion of the ERW debate, see Lothar Ruehl, ‘Die Nichtentscheidung ueber die “Neutronenwaffe”. Ein Beispiel verfehlter Buendnispolitik’, Europa-Archiv, no. 5, 10 March 1979, pp. 137–50.
Gale A. Mattox, ‘The German Media and US Foreign and Defense Policy: The Strategic Defense Initiative’, Germany and the United States (Stuttgart: in L. Amlinger (ed.), Academic Publishing House, 1987), pp. 23–53.
An excellent review of the range of concepts is found in the chapter by Jonathan Dean in this volume. See also Albrecht A. C. von Mueller, ‘Conventional Stability in Europe: Outlines of the Military Hardware for a Second Detente’, Max Planck Society, Starnberg 1987.
The possible outline of an agreement on conventional stability is offered by CDU Member of the Parliament Volker Ruhe, ‘Als Ziel ein Europa mit weniger Panzern’, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, 22 September 1988, p. 13.
Robert J. McCartney, ‘Bonn’s Defense Minister Cautious on Arms Talks’, Washington Post, 17 June 1988, p. A19.
Also Jim Hoagland, ‘Rhetoric from Bonn. Why is the German foreign minister saying nice things about the Soviets?’ Washington Post, 18 August 1988, p. A23.
For more on this changing role see Barry M. Blechman and Cathleen Fisher (eds), The Silent Partner: West Germany and Arms Control (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1988).
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© 1990 Stephen F. Szabo
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Sloan, S.R. (1990). Perspectives on the German Contribution to Western Defence. In: Szabo, S.F. (eds) The Bundeswehr and Western Security. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11032-2_4
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