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CRS-7
effectively been removed."3 But NATO documents indicated that these weapons
would still play an important political role in NATO's strategy by ensuring
"uncertainty in the mind of any potential aggressor about the nature of the Allies'
response to military aggression.4
Force Structure. Throughout the Cold War, the United States often altered
the size and structure of its nonstrategic nuclear forces in response to changing
capabilities and changing threat assessments. These weapons were deployed at U.S.
bases in Asia, and at bases on the territories of several of the NATO allies,
contributing to NATO's sense of shared responsibility for the weapons. The United
States began to reduce these forces in the late 1970s, with the numbers of operational
nonstrategic nuclear warheads declining from more than 7,000 in the mid-1970s to
below 6,000 in the 1980s, to fewer than 1,000 by the middle of the 1990s.' These
reductions occurred, for the most part, because U.S. and NATO officials believed
they could maintain deterrence with fewer, but more modern, weapons. For example,
when the NATO allies agreed in 1970 that the United States should deploy new
intermediate range nuclear weapons in Europe, they decided to remove 1,000 older
nuclear weapons from Europe. And in 1983, in the Montebello Decision, when the
NATO defense ministers approved additional weapons modernization plans, they
also called for a further reduction of 1,400 nonstrategic nuclear weapons.6
These modernization programs continued through the 1980s. In his 1988
Annual Report to Congress, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger noted that the
United States was completing the deployment of Pershing II intermediate-range
ballistic missiles and ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe; modernizing two
types of nuclear artillery shells; upgrading the Lance short-range ballistic missile;
continuing production of the nuclear-armed version of the Tomahawk sea-launches
cruise missile; and developing a new nuclear depth/strike bomb for U.S. naval
forces.7 However, by the end of that decade, as the Warsaw Pact dissolved, the
United States had canceled or scaled back all planned modernization programs. In
1987, it also signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which
eliminated all U.S. and Soviet ground-launched shorter and intermediate-range
ballistic and cruise missiles.'
3 North Atlantic Treaty Organization, "The Alliance's Strategic Concept," NATO Office of
Information and Press, Brussels, Belgium, 1991, para. 8.4 Ibid, para. 55.
5 Toward a Nuclear Peace: The Future of Nuclear Weapons in U.S. Foreign and Defense
Policy, Report of the CSIS Nuclear Strategy Study Group, Center for Strategic and
International Studies, 1993. p. 27.
6 The text of the Montebello decision can be found in Larson, Jeffrey A. and Kurt J.
Klingenberger, editors. Controlling Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons. Obstacles and
Opportunities, United States Air Force, Institute for National Security Studies, July 2001.
pp. 265-266.
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Annual Report to the Congress, Fiscal Year
1988, January 1987, pp. 217-218.
8 For a description of the terms and implications of this Treaty see, Arms Control and
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Woolf, Amy F. Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons, report, September 9, 2004; Washington D.C.. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metacrs6104/m1/10/: accessed May 21, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.