WESTERN EUROPE: Time of Decision

"History has flung down a challenge to us—perhaps she will do so only once." So spoke Konrad Adenauer, himself a maker of history, as one day last week he challenged the German Bundestag to ratify the Paris accords. The grim-faced old German titan was opening the last and fateful round in the three-year-old battle to rearm West Germany within the Atlantic alliance. On both sides of the Rhine, and of the Iron Curtain, too, all men knew that this time history required that the fight be fought to a finish.

The Soviet Union...

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