ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to establish the key areas in which European exchanges and cooperation must be reinforced or initiated. Throughout the debates of 1985 on the implications of President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative and on the future of French nuclear deterrence, the entire problem of the security of the European continent has once again been posed. Three basic elements of the nuclear calculus should be constantly remembered in assessing the future of European deterrence. First, the old modes of evaluating the forces, borrowed from classic military history, are of no value in nuclear strategy. Second, the nature of alliances has changed profoundly, as Henry Kissinger noted in his first publications. Third, there is the importance of crisis management. The use of space for peaceful and military ends is already a fact and the Strategic Defense Initiative motivates us to measure its medium- and long-term implications.
