Federal Republic of Germany 689



it would advance the general cause. He repeated his advice to tell the
Germans bluntly what we need. He said that his own Ministry would be
badly handicapped in case of an emergency if the legislation were not
passed because it would mean that the Ministry's civilian employees
could walk off their jobs and there would be no way of enforcing their
return. The same would apply to German employees of the US, British,
and French forces.
    Mr. Kohler said that if the conclusions reached by the quadripartite
contingency planning group could be used as a spur to the Bundestag it
might be helpful since the stated need for the alert legislation would
then come from an Allied group rather than from the German Govern-
ment itself or from just one of the concerned foreign Governments.
    Mr. Merchant added that the failure of the Summit meeting had re-
duced the effectiveness of the "don't rock the boat" argument which
Chancellor Adenauer and others had apparently used against pressing
for alert legislation. Mr. Merchant added that it is much too easy to let
the public think that the nuclear deterrent is the solution to all defense
problems. He said that he was glad to note that the Germans had moved
ahead so impressively toward their MC-70 goals. Mr. Merchant
stressed the importance of adequate conventional armament.

Role of Conventional Weapons
    Minister Strauss said that he felt one of the great problems facing
the Alliance was that there seemed to be no clear concept of what he
called the "graduated deterrent". What he had in mind was the whole
panoply of defensive needs from the infantry brigades to strategic nu-
clear weapons. He said that in some quarters of Germany his emphasis
on the graduated deterrent had been interpreted as a lack of confidence
in the U.S. strategic deterrent. He felt that this attitude was a symptom
of
one of great difficulties that existed and that we would have to get the
public away from the idea that the nuclear weapon is the only one to be
used. He said that he felt that the Soviets are seriously considering the
idea of trying to isolate the level of harassment at which we would use
the strategic weapon. He said he thought that in the period of 1963-65,
they might very well undertake border actions or actions in Berlin
which would be an attempt to probe the kind of weapons response they
would meet. He said that he felt these provocations would be both in
political form and with conventional weapons.
    Minister Strauss said that now that the U.S. is within the range of
the modern weapons, it was no longer in the position it had been in
World War I and World War II when it might as well have been on an-
other planet as far as its vulnerability to the existing weapons of war was
concerned. He said with this new situation there would have to be full-
scale mutual reliability. In other words each country in the Alliance