The strength of the END Appeal. The strength of the European Nuclear Disarmament Appeal of 1980 was that it provided at the same time a concrete antinuclear proposal (on the euromissiles) and a valid expression of the European Zeitgeist. So it is today: we must give, in one and the same statement, 1) a practically feasible antinuclear proposal; perhaps a European "freeze" proposal? ; 2) a vision of a possible other EU from the Atlantic to th Urals.

The people who wrote the END Appeal were courageous and open-minded enough to envisage a Europe beyond the Cold War. Who the hell believed, in 1980, that the Cold War was about to end? Well, E.P.Thompson and Co.  evidently did, or at least, they invested all their intelligence and all their energy in that possibility.  So they were scorned, ridiculed, declared mad, rockers of the boat, dangerous, agents of the CIA or the KGB etc.

That is were we also stand today. Who the hell believes that the "war on terror" is about to end, and the world political constellation is about to change profoundly - although we should have learned from the great changes and transformations taking place during our life-time?

In the face of the nuclear madmen of the West and of the East, who are now repeating their insane doctrines of pre-emptive nuclear strikes, we will declare that the EU must set an example of mental sanity and freeze any further development of its "force de frappe"...and the national nukes, and that lunatic missile shield ..  and that criminalization and abolition of the WMD must be a key feature of the Constitution of the European Union.

Network-Centric. At the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, "Network-Centric Warfare" has become one of the buzzwords of the military. This reflects the profound implications of the digitalization of information and the internet for all human activities, warfare and military strategy included. We start from the double hypothesis that a) the existing military doctrines (in particular, the doctrines on WMD) are obsolete (because they are "Weapon-Centric" instead of Network-Centric), and b) through European Nuclear Disarmament (END) and the building of a common Network-Centric strategy, the peoples of Europe have a chance to form a real political and military union as envisaged by Altiero Spinelli, 1907-1986,  a historical founder of the EU.


Sarkozy and the Gaullist Bomb. History sometimes tends to forgive a folly of a statesman at the very moment when the mistake becomes evident to most people.  That may also be the case with de Gaulle and the atomic arms of France. That France developed a nuclear weapon - the  Gaullist Bomb - was a terrible  mistake whereby France, too, "parvenait à son dernier degré de sauvagerie" (Camus, 1945).

However, at a certain distance in time (the first French test explosions occurred in Algeria and in French Polynesia in the 1960s)  it is  easier to understand why de Gaulle, driven by his patriotic motives  could make such a gross  strategic miscalculation.  De Gaulle became, in a sense,  a victim of his own militant career.

It is, however,  totally inadmissible that Sarkozy should continue on the same mistaken nuclear road in our new and inedited situation at the beginning of the 21st century. Compared to his great although erroneous predecessor Sarkozy only looks like a cretin and a clown.