Sta,-Mr Callaghan clearly has no more chance of persuading the
West German government to meet the foreign exchange cost of BAOR than had any of his predecessors. The reason is plain: since we are treaty-bound to keep 55,000 uniformed men in Germany, we have nothing to bargain with.
No doubt it is unfair that our struggle for solvency should be made more difficult because of the acci- dents of history and geography, so that manning the cold war front along the Elbe obliges us to contribute to the comfortable earnings of a richer state, but Bonn is unlikely to be moved by such considerations.
This dilemma coincides with two others: the dis- array in NATO caused by the French defection, and the disposal of Britain's independent nuclear deter- rent. All have their bearing on the German question, and the danger is that all will be resolved in ways likely to encourage the demand for nuclear weapons independently in German hands.
Could we not resolve the last and partly resolve the other two by proposing not an ANF, but an Anglo-German Nuclear Force?-which might later be broadened to take in other states. We should be exchanging shared control of the deterrent and a longer-term commitment to legitimate German aspir- ations, for the containment of German nationalism and, it is to be hoped, an enduring understanding to support the £.
Implicit in the idea is some degree of political association, since ultimate control over nuclear weapons must be in the hands of an individual, not a committee: a president not a permanent inter- national conference. This need not by any means in- volve combined political institutions of universal competence. If we are to make any real progress in the unification of Europe we have to adjust old ideas of sovereignty, especially the notion of in- divisible powers. If we do not, either there will be no unification, or the surrender of important govern- ment powers to a new breed of international bureau- crats, ultimately responsible to nobody in particular.
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