96. Letter From the Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Finletter) to Secretary of State Rusk1
Dear Dean:
I paid a farewell call on Couve this morning and it lasted much longer than I had anticipated. I have already reported by telegram on Couve’s views about the Select Committee.2
Couve roamed over a great many subjects.
[Page 232]He asked what I thought was the basic difficulty between France and the United States. I said it was lack of communication. I said that the reserved and austere attitude of the General made it extremely difficult if not impossible to have full and frank interchanges of views. We then agreed that there were certain basic differences between France and the United States despite the overall, and we both hoped overriding, considerations of respect of the two countries for each other and the real liking between them. Couve acknowledged that it was extremely difficult to have the kind of full and free interchange with the General which was necessary. In this connection, however, Couve was distinctly negative on the idea of a meeting between the President and De Gaulle, implying his doubt that there could be any useful communication between the two men.
Then coming down to the immediate issues, he said that the basic one was the nuclear issue. He said that the General had chosen the nuclear issue as the point on which to differ basically with NATO and that there was no possibility of a solution to this difference in points of view.
He said that the problem centered on Germany. He said the United States believed that by the MLF device or something like it Germany’s ambitions for nuclear arms would be controlled. He said France did not agree with that. France was more on the side of the Russians in that argument. France believed that once the Germans got an undivided joint interest in nuclear weapons, that would be only the first step toward the building of a German force de frappe. I replied that the most likely way of getting a German force de frappe was to deny her any joint and indivisible interest in nuclear arms, in which event as a matter of national pride she would be compelled to go out and get them on her own somehow.
Continuing on this question, Couve volunteered that France did not intend to agree to any European nuclear force, jointly and severally owned, with Germany in it. France was logical, and if she did not think it would work in the Atlantic she did not think it would work in Europe.
I then said what are you going to do about the German ambitions for nuclear weapons? Do you really think that Germany will continue to be the only country in the world which has relinquished its right to have such weapons? He said he thought that they would have to be obliged to accept this.
He then continued that he felt the future lay in an arrangement between France and the UK which would set up a joint nuclear force. I asked him what he meant by that and he said he meant joint arrangements to consider strategy and possibly some joint institutions of two national forces de frappe: one British and one French.
He said that he did recognize that there was the danger of a Rapallo deal by the Germans with the Russians. On the other hand, he was not [Page 233] badly worried about it because he felt that the Russians were never going to let any Germany, unified or not, have atomic weapons and that therefore we need not worry at all about a true Rapallo which would put an atomic Germany on the side of the Russians.
I said wouldn’t this leave things in a rather unsolved state? And wasn’t it possible that a Germany denied by its Atlantic Allies and denied by its European Allies the right to have atomic weapons might become a very difficult customer to deal with? He said that he recognized this but there were certain questions which were insoluble.
With best regards.
Sincerely,
- Source: Department of State, Central Files, DEF 4 NATO. Secret; Exdis.↩
- See footnote 2, Document 94.↩