NATO: Off Collision Course

It began as a tale of two deadlines. By far the more important was set by Charles de Gaulle, who had stipulated that the Six must achieve a joint grain price by Dec. 15—or else France might pull out of the Common Market. At Brussels last week, his deadline was met to the day, and while this was a victory for De Gaulle, it was also a major victory for Europe (see following story). The other deadline had been set against De Gaulle’s opposition by the U.S., which had insisted that by year’s end, or early next year at the latest, some kind of multilateral nuclear force must be established, possibly even if the U.S. and West Germany had to go it alone. At last week’s NATO ministerial meeting in Paris, the U.S. elaborately backed away from the deadline, decided to let Britain, Germany and the rest of the Europeans try to work out for themselves a compromise on some sort of joint force.

This, too, was a victory for De Gaulle—and one which the U.S. had set up for him, because for months the State Department had kept overselling MLF and talking as if the fate of the world depended on it.

After the meeting, the U.S. line was that MLF had been “neither advanced nor retarded.” That was nonsense. It had indeed been retarded and, to all intents and purposes, sunk in its original form. The fact became clear when Secretary of State Dean Rusk was still arguing the MLF case in Paris while in Washington President Johnson casually remarked that the U.S. was “not committed” and would consider “modifications.” The Europeans regarded this as the year’s most spectacular rug-pulling operation. But it was also a sound decision not to wreck the Western Alliance by trying to force through a scheme hardly anybody really wanted, and as a result the U.S. and France were talking to each other again.

Lorelei Umbrella. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara started off in NATO’s huge conference room, nicknamed the Cathedral, by once again trying to answer the basic Gaullist suspicion that the U.S. might not defend Europe. In case of an all-out war, said McNamara, the alternative of “Europe or the U.S.” did not exist in Washington planning. In nuclear terms, an attack on Western Europe would be an attack on the U.S. As proof, McNamara pointed out that the U.S. has placed in NATO more than 800 ICBMs, more than 300 Polaris missiles and hundreds of bombers. The aggregate yield of nukes stored in Germany alone, McNamara added, is more than 5,000 times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb.

In a sense, this made it all the plainer that no additional nuclear gimmicks were needed. But while the Paris delegates continued to discuss MLF and the British proposals for an Atlantic nuclear force (see Great Britain), still another little atomic plan was disclosed that made MLF seem positively brilliant by comparison. It was a West German army proposal to create a “nuclear mine belt” along the West German border fronting East Germany. The buried mines would presumably annihilate an invader without forcing him into a nuclear counterstrike be cause they would not explode on his own but only on West German territory. It was hard to see how this would serve to heighten West Germany’s sense of security, since it assumed that the invader would arrive only on land. But both the U.S. and France professed interest, and in fact similar devices are said to be under installation around, of all places, the Lorelei rocks on the Rhine, presumably to flood the Rhine valley to slow an attacker.

Slapped Hard. It was just about the only subject on which anyone gave a hearing to the Germans, who turned out to be the real losers at Paris. Foreign Minister Gerhard Schröder was being more American than the Americans and was still defending MLF when the U.S. had already begun to move away. For his pains, Schröder was slapped down hard by the French, who refused to sign even an innocuous communiqué proposing new approaches to Moscow for a possible German settlement.

In two separate talks with Dean Rusk, De Gaulle again explained his vision of a United States of Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, with Western Europe serving as a magnet to the rest of the now largely Communist continent. If Western Europe is too closely linked to the U.S. and locked in a tight Atlantic world, argued De Gaulle, it would be unable to serve this centripetal function, since countries such as Rumania, already showing signs of loosening their ties to Moscow, are simply not part of the Atlantic world. It was perhaps the most cogent argument yet offered against the “Atlantic Community” concept.

A Member of the Club. In their at tempts to describe the improved atmosphere between the U.S. and France, the American officials in Paris only succeeded in demonstrating De Gaulle’s diplomatic success. U.S. sources who a week before Paris had talked tough came away taking strange comfort in the fact that they had not been “hacked up.” The U.S. hailed as a welcome sign of French conciliation the fact that McNamara and French Defense Minister Pierre Messmer had discussed plans for coordinating targeting when the French force de frappe bomber fleet comes into being next year.

It almost sounded as if the U.S. were happy that De Gaulle had deigned to recognize the American nuclear deterrent. In fact, of course, it was the U.S. that had finally recognized France’s. For if the French force merits joint targeting with the U.S., it cannot be quite the impotent force de farce that American officials have scornfully tried to make it out to be. De Gaulle in reality has at last been recognized as a member of the nuclear club. In the past, whenever the U.S. talked nonproliferation, it meant to exclude France from having a separate deterrent; last week nonproliferation suddenly seemed to mean joining with De Gaulle in keeping the bomb from other nations.

When sounded out about a meeting with Johnson, De Gaulle made it plain that the week had given him no inferiority complexes. Johnson was welcome in Paris, he indicated, provided that he came to Europe to see De Gaulle—and nobody else.