FYI, Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, the new volume that I edited with NPEC executive director Henry Sokolski, has made available online the following, very-difficult-to-find essay:
Albert Wohlstetter, “Nuclear Sharing: NATO and the N+1 Country,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 39, No. 3 (April 1961), pp. 355-387.
In the time since I re-booted Albert Wohlstetter Dot Com in January 2008, many online visitors have come to the website looking for the text of “Nuclear Sharing.” In this seminal 1961 Foreign Affairs article, Albert made the case against (a) the Multilateral Force (MLF), a controversial Kennedy Administration proposal (inherited from the Eisenhower State Department) to create a nuclear-armed force jointly controlled and operated by NATO member states, and against (b) calls to directly share nuclear weapons with Western European allies.
Wohlstetter’s reasoning was that such forms of nuclear sharing would not only worsen the danger of worldwide diffusion of nuclear weapons, but also — and this point struck many in the 1960s (and may strike some today) as counter-intuitive — considerably weaken the bonds of the Western European-American alliance.
More to follow on the Wohlstetters’ work on stemming nuclear proliferation. In the meantime, I’m glad that Nuclear Heuristics is able to give folks access to this and other key Wohlstetter works.
