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NATO and Nuclear WeaponsNATO Summit, Bucharest, 2 - 4 April 2008NATO Heads of State and Government met in Bucharest against a backdrop of strained relations between the US and Russia, particularly concerning missile defence and the siting of US missile defence bases in Poland and the Czech Republic. NATO also faces increasingly difficult conditions in Afghanistan.
Read Martin Butcher's blog on the Summit at: http://natobucharest.blogspot.com/ Background InformationNATO Official Pages NATO Review Special Issue on Bucharest Summit Audio File of NATO Spokesman James Appathurai on Bucharest Summit NATO Bucharest Summit Web Page NATO Member States United States Press Briefing by US National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley NATO on the Way to Bucharest 2008, Richard G. Olson, Deputy U.S. Permanent
Representative to NATO US Mission to NATO Web Page, Various Bucharest Articles Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing on NATO Italy Interview with Ambassador Stefanini Non-Governmental Reports The Heritage Foundation Center for Strategic and International Studies http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_pubs/ France and NATO from Centre for European Reform Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World (Report by five senior
retired NATO commanders) The CATO Institute Congressional Research Service Royal United Services Institute Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Foreign Policy in Focus The Brookings Institution
NATO Foreign Ministers' Meeting, December 2007
Earlier NATO Documents
Riga Summit, November 28 - 29 2006NATO's Riga summit was held from November 28 - 29, 2006, and attempted to focus on the rather loose concept of NATO transformation. Martin Butcher attended the summit on behalf of the Acronym Institute. Read his reports below.
Updates from the Summit
Background Documents and AnalysisThis Riga summit was orginally intended to conclude the business of transformation, but will now be supplemented by a summit in 2008 at venue yet to be made public. The transformation agenda is controversial, and this debate is likely to continue for some time. NATO held its last summit in Istanbul in June 2004. The summit was dominated by divisions over Iraq, with the US and Britain pushing for a greater NATO commitment to Iraq, whilst France refused to back plans to train Iraqi forces inside Iraq. These debates have largely subsided, but there is a feeling in many countries that the invasion of Iraq, and subsequent occupation, has meant that the mission led by NATO in Afghanistan has not received either the resources or political priority necessary for it to succeed. 2006 has seen the unprecedented spectacle of a Secretary-General of NATO being forced to beg publicly for troop contributions to strengthen the NATO presence in Afghanistan. Despite the end of the Cold War the US continues to deploy nuclear weapons in six European countries under the auspices of NATO, including in the UK at RAF Lakenheath. The UK's Trident nuclear system is also assigned to NATO, as is a portion of the US Trident force. NATO's current Strategic Concept dates from the Washington DC summit of 1999. It maintains territorial defence of the NATO member states in Europe as the core purpose of the Alliance, and continues to describe nuclear weapons as providing the "supreme guarantee" of Alliance security. While some academics, and even national governments, have given some thought to the need for a rewrite of the Strategic Concept to reflect the transformation agenda, there is absolutely no consensus amongst the allies as to the nature of a possible new Strategic Concept – and very strong differences about the continuing role of nuclear weapons in NATO. The last exercise in which the potential use of nuclear weapons was mooted, CMX 2002, collapsed in failure as many nations refused to contemplate the possibility of such use, even in an exercise in which the scenario posited the imminent use of chemical and biological weapons against a NATO nation. NATO Nuclear Policy
Official Documents
Istanbul Summit
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