緊張緩和（デタント）とヨーロッパ
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概要
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In June 1963, President Kennedy made an historic speech to the public, in which he advocated détente talks with the Soviet Union in order to avoid the nightmare of nuclear war caused by the Cuban missile crisis. Though his idea was to promote humanity and to end the Cold War, the European NATO allies could not accept his idealistic perspective without reservations.Under U.S. pressure to strengthen conventional forces to follow its new strategy, flexible response, the European allies thought that, taking into account the imbalance of conventional forces between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the U.S. nuclear arms control policy would weaken European security ties with the U.S., and might make a Soviet invasion ofWestern Europe more probable. For the allies, nuclear arms control between the superpowers was inextricably linked with the control of conventional forces in Europe.In December 1967, NATO adopted the Harmel Report, formally integrating détente within its security policy. In June 1968, NATO announced the so-called Reykjavik Signal to address an appeal for conventional arms reduction in Central Europe that became the foundation of the later Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) talks.On the other hand, the Soviet Union also needed détente in Europe. In December 1966, the Soviet Union adopted a new military doctrine in order to deal with the threat of China, which had criticized the Soviet Union as a revisionist. The Soviet Union later proposed a security conference to European countries including the U.S., which became known as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), in order to avoid simultaneous military operations on two fronts.Both sets of détente talks began separately in 1973. But they soon faced stalemate because the Warsaw Pact continued to reject the conditions that NATO set out for the MBFR talks, and NATO countries, especially the U.S., condemned the Eastern countries for violating human rights at the CSCE.It was not until the mid-1980s that the détente talks got back on track when both President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev urged détente talks in a different form, namely the Conference on Confidence- and Security-Building Measures and Disarmament in Europe (CDE). In an atmosphere of cooperation, when the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty was signed by countries of both blocs in November 1990, the danger of large-scale assaults and surprise attacks in Europe was removed. In retrospect, it may be safe to say that the peace and stability of contemporary Europe depends much more on the fruits of détente talks than the end of the Cold War.