World: PREPARING FOR THE UNPREDICTABLE

NO enemy is ever entirely reliable. But since the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. and its Allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have largely operated on the assumption that, in any major clash of wills, the Soviet Union would behave rationally rather than rashly. That comfortable outlook has been severely jarred by the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, as the NATO Council conceded in Brussels last week. NATO's guiding precept from now on, concluded the Council in a position paper, must be the unpredictability of Soviet behavior.

"We really don't know what the Soviet...

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