Bohl and Cheney assess the impact of the Yugoslavia war. Bohl emphasizes that lack of the EC consensus on fundamental security issues in contrast to its ability to regulate questions of trade and finance. He argues that this could do massive harm to the European integration project in general. Moreover, Bohl and Cheney discuss German domestic problems with NATO out-of-area missions.

Nonproliferation talks entered their decisive phase after the submission of a joint U.S.-Soviet draft to the ENDC on February 21, 1967. One week later, High-Commissioner of the French Commissariat à l’énergie atomique, Francis Perrin, assessed France’s options. It was not “by accident,” he noted, the original five UN Security Council permanent members—the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union, and China—were in line for nuclear-club membership: “…they are the same profound reasons, of a geographical, demographic or other nature, which led to the choice [in 1945] … of the countries with special responsibilities in the maintenance of world peace.” After noting how advances in “India, Israel, Japan, Sweden, and also West Germany” portended the further spread of nuclear weapons—and acknowledging France had itself sought help with its weapon program—Perrin pondered whether proliferation might hasten nuclear disarmament by convincing the superpowers of its merits. In the end, however, fear of a “large and hostile” nuclear-armed PRC made him pessimistic. While he did not advise signing the NPT, it would be “very important” for France to affirm publicly, if unilaterally, “its constant policy since 1958 … not to cede any atomic weapon or any atomic explosive device to a country which does not possess it, and not to help any such country to manufacture them.” He dismissed internal opposition toward the NPT as defensive—"an a posteriori justification of the French decision to constitute an atomic armament." More significant was the likelihood West Germany would gain its own atomic arsenal, jeopardizing France’s “dominant political position among the Europe of the Six” members of the European Communities and reviving Cold War tensions in Europe. He finished with an eye-opening analysis of how the Kosygin proposal for nuclear-weapon states to extend negative security guarantees to non-nuclear-weapon states’ signatory to the NPT would not impede the use of French nuclear armaments against a West German blitzkrieg backed by the United States.

Kohl and Mitterrand debate essential issues of European security and the emergence of potential new security structures after the end of the Cold War such as a European pillar of NATO and the French-German brigade as the nucleus of a European security and defense policy.

Kohl and Mitterrand confer on NATO, European security and the idea of establishing a common security and defense policy under the roof of the European Community.

On July 2, 1957, US senator John F. Kennedy made his perhaps best-known senatorial speech—on Algeria.

Home to about 8 million Muslims, 1.2 million European settlers, and 130,000 Jews, it was from October 1954 embroiled in what France dubbed “events”—domestic events, to be precise. Virtually all settlers and most metropolitan French saw Algeria as an indivisible part of France. Algeria had been integrated into metropolitan administrative structures in 1847, towards the end of a structurally if not intentionally genocidal pacification campaign; Algeria’s population dropped by half between 1830, when France invaded, and the early 1870s. Eighty years and many political turns later (see e.g. Messali Hadj’s 1927 speech in this collection), in 1954, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) launched a war for independence. Kennedy did not quite see eye to eye with the FLN.

As Kennedy's speech shows, he did not want France entirely out of North Africa. However, he had criticized French action already in early 1950s Indochina. And in 1957 he met with Abdelkader Chanderli (1915-1993), an unaccredited representative of the FLN at the United Nations in New York and in Washington, DC, and a linchpin of the FLN’s successful international offensive described in Matthew Connelly’s A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002). Thus, Kennedy supported the FLN’s demand for independence, which explains its very positive reaction to his speech.

And thus, unlike the 1952-1960 Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) that officially backed the views of NATO ally France and kept delivering arms, the Democratic senator diagnosed a “war” by “Western imperialism” that, together with if different from “Soviet imperialism,” is “the great enemy of … the most powerful single force in the world today: ... man's eternal desire to be free and independent.” (In fact, Kennedy’s speech on the Algerian example of Western imperialism was the first of two, the second concerning the Polish example of Sovietimperialism. On another, domestic note, to support African Algeria’s independence was an attempt to woe civil-rights-movement-era African Americans without enraging white voters.) To be sure, Kennedy saw France as an ally, too. But France’s war was tainting Washington too much, which helped Moscow. In Kennedy’s eyes, to support the US Cold War against the Soviet Union meant granting Algeria independence. The official French line was the exact opposite: only continued French presence in Algeria could keep Moscow and its Egyptian puppet, President Gamal Abdel Nasser, from controlling the Mediterranean and encroaching on Africa.

Report by CSMD on prospective configuration of Europe's Nine autonomous nuclear force. Includes discussion of NATO burden-sharing, comparison of US and European nuclear forces and costs. Annexes: A: French Military Balance 1972; B: French nuclear forces; C: Military Budget 1972; D: European Community nuclear forces.

This correspondence between the Ministry of Defense and embassies in Washington and London discusses the current state of NATO's (nuclear strategy) and the different views held by France, Great Britain, Germany and United States.

Minister Granelli writes to Andreotti to express his concerns over the French and German hastiness in coming to an agreement over EUREKA. Granelli lists minimum conditions that need to be met to ensure launching the project without running the risk of negative political and economic consequences.

This summary from the final preparatory meeting describes the differences in opinion between France and Germany on the one hand and Italy on the other in reference to EUREKA. It also lists the key points for the upcoming ministerial conference in Hannover.

Report from the Italian permanent representative to NATO, Tornetta, from the CSCE meeting in Madrid discusses the French proposal for a Conference on Disarmament (CDE) in Europe, and the negative impact of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on the international climate, even giving rise to disagreement among NATO members.