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.)
Crisis or Consensus? Public Opinion and National Security in Western Europe
When the NATO Alliance celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 1979, few would have predicted that the very existence of the Alliance would soon be in doubt. Most commentaries stressed the theme of continuity in the Alliance, a continuity that rested on a firm basis of common interest in security, economic, and political affairs. In addition, the mutual interests of the Western nations were reinforced by a stable East-West power structure that rendered alternative security arrangements infeasible, unpopular or both.1
Technology Creep and the Arms Race: ICBM Problem a Sleeper.
In three articles, Science will discuss how the creep of technology affects the arms race. The first two articles will deal with the most important current example: first, how ICBM modernization is giving both sides a destabilizing, first-strike capability, and second, how arms control seems to be dealing inadequately with this pressing problem. The third article will describe other cases of incremental technical improvements affecting arms control, such as antisatellite research and ballistic missile defense research, which are bringing both sides closer to the antiballistic missile capability they forswore in a 1972 treaty.