NATO: Tidying the War Room

Apologists for NATO are wont to find proof of the Alliance’s vitality in the quantity of discord it can contain without actually flying apart. By that negative measure, NATO was positively brimming with health as its defense ministers met in Paris last week. They came armed with bulging portfolios of grievances—and never opened them.

British Defense Minister Denis Healey, for example, would dearly like to withdraw one-fifth of Britain’s 53,000-man Army of the Rhine. Nearly everyone was mad at France for its recent announcement that it will not participate in next year’s “Fallex” exercise to test the Alliance’s communications. NATO’s burning issue remains the quest for some form of nuclear sharing, whether Britain’s ANF proposal, the U.S.-German MLF scheme or De Gaulle’s NON! Above all, NATO is exercised over De Gaulle’s threat to pull France out of the Alliance entirely in 1969, when the treaty expires. But not one of these nettlesome issues was directly discussed in Paris. The outcome: a “harmonious meeting.”

There was some tidying of the war room. Created in 1949 as a bulwark against a Russian ground invasion of Western Europe, NATO for most of its existence has been unrealistically committed to the goal of 30 divisions in Europe backed up by stockpiled supplies sufficient to support them through 90 days of combat. At slightly more than 26 divisions today, NATO is the closest it has ever come to that goal. For the first time, the ministers openly admitted what most Europeans had privately felt for some time—that, as one diplomat put it, “the idea of a full-scale conventional war has gone out the window. A war would never last more than three days without nuclear weapons being used.” NATO’s force goals are to be reappraised accordingly.

Denying rumors from Germany that the U.S. was considering withdrawal of its nuclear weapons from Europe, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara asserted: “In 1961 I reported that there were literally thousands of warheads on European soil. They have continued to increase, and twelve months from today the number will be 100% higher than in 1961.” McNamara proposed the creation of a defense ministers’ committee to set up an improved consultation procedure on the use of nuclear weapons—in effect, a “hotline” network to replace the present dangerously slow diplomatic channels. The members would presumably be the U.S., Britain, West Germany—and France, if De Gaulle could be persuaded to participate. The proposal was clearly aimed at encouraging just that, and the French promised noncommittally to study the idea.