New Variations on Old Themes
1 w h e n one reads today about the crises and problems facing NATO, it is worth realizing that they are essentially new variations on very old themes. Indeed, when one looks back at the thirty years of NATO, one finds barely a moment when the Alliance was not said to be in a crisis-and very often it was. The Alliance began at the time of the first Berlin crisis, and its signature came shortly before the end of the Soviet blockade, in spring, 1949. As soon as the ink was dry on the treaty’s paper, a battle began over German rearmament, and intensified after what was seen as the Soviet offensive in Korea. That battle lasted several years. As soon as a formula had been found for rearming the West Germans, the Suez crisis racked the Alliance; and as soon as that episode had been liquidated, Mr. Khrushchev began to bang shoes, threaten to bury us, and provoke another set of Berlin crises. That in turn led to another protracted intra-Alliance dispute over the famous-or infamousMulti-Lateral Force (MLF), which fostered not only discord among the allies but also an intellectual civil war among the academic members of the U.S. strategic community. That crisis more or less coincided with another long battle over General de Gaulle’s idiosyncracies and his decision to withdraw France from the military organization of the Alliance. The latest shock was the crisis of 1973-74 over the Middle East and the oil embargo. Even the present dilemmas pale by comparison. On the other hand, during the few periods that did not have any major crisis, the Europeans usually charged that they were being neglected by the Americans. That was the case during the exceptional period from 1969-the year of de Gaulle’s disappearance from the political scene-to Mr. Kissinger’s bizarre desire to christen 1973 the Year of the Continent, thus mixing the categories of time and space. (There was, during those quiet years, a crisis that agitated American-European relations, but not in NATO itself: the monetary crisis that began when President Nixon and Secretary of the Treasury Connally put an end to the convertibility of the dollar.)
The Reagan Administration, the Soviet Union and Nuclear Arms: Hopes and Fears
The Reagan Administration has met with widely differing hopes and fears with regard to its nuclear policy. Many people in the Western world, especially in the United States, have hoped for a radical shift in what has been perceived as unilateral American restraint in the 70's. Others have feared that the Adminstration's hawkish rhetoric has foreshadowed a dangerous escalating arms race between the superpowers. The Adminstration's nuclear weapons policy is considered in terms of its 'essentialist' view of the Soviet Union as an adversary, and the substance of this view is elaborated. Its consequences are assessed and the probabilistic character of any assessment is stressed. Possible consequences are evaluated by focusing on the tenability of an American 'Grand Strategy', the 'convergence' between American and Soviet nuclear doctrines; the restraints on such a policy resulting from domestic American politics and the long-term consequences for the Atlantic Alliance are suggested. The close relationship between domestic American politics and American nuclear policy is stressed. It is emphasized that any deterministic assertions as to an automatic action-reaction phenomenon between the doctrines of the superpowers has to be considered with scepticism.
Enumeration of total coliforms, fecal coliforms, and Escherichia coli in foods by hydrophobic grid membrane filter: supplementary report.
Raw, comminuted poultry meat was used to determine the specificity of the media and incubation conditions used in the hydrophobic grid membrane filter method. Confirmation rates for target colonies were 100% for total coliforms, 98% for fecal coliforms, and 97-99% for Escherichia coli. The results of total coliform enumeration in 30 pasteurized milk samples by both the hydrophobic grid membrane filter method and AOAC method 46.013-46.016 are also reported.