(10 of 10)
The First Step. Shaken by Eisenhower's most recent illness, worried by signs of uncertainty and discord among the members, doomsayers were already talking glumly of Paris as a great opportunity lost. In fact, the 15 chiefs of government who will gather round the table in NATO's conference hall next week are most unlikely to create any new political institutions that would set NATO on the road to supranational power. But the summit conference will almost certainly produce a pledge of closer political collaboration; if meticulously honored, it could create a state of mind that would rule out recurrences of the Suez breach. What is at stake is less the immediate problem of the West's defense against all that Sputnik threatens; rather, it is a rallying of the whole non-Communist West, now temporarily demoralized, to meet the Russian challenge.
As Lauris Norstad has observed: "I get my formal directives on a piece of paper which I receive from the NATO Council. But my real directive is the confidence that nations place in this agency." If the Paris meeting can restore and reinvigorate that confidence, the meeting will be well held.
EXPLOSIVE EXPANSION
While most European nations complain that their economies will not support greater military expenditures and talk of reductions, the most significant economic fact about Western Europe is the explosive postwar expansion of its industrial output. By 1956 industrial production of NATO's Western European members showed the following increases over prewar (1937-38) levels:
Britain 50%
France 79%
Germany 112%
Italy 103%
Belgium-Luxemburg 51%
The Netherlands 103%
Norway 114%
Denmark 66%