In his Black Forest mountain retreat last week. West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer stared without pleasure at his beloved Rhine, stalked through the forest side by side with his priest son Paul in somber silence. For the first time since he began to vacation at Bühlerhöhe six years ago, its charms failed to soothe the 80-year-old Chancellor's troubled spirits. "He talks of many things," said an intimate. "First he talks of the Radford plan. Then he talks of the weather. Then he talks of the Radford plan. Then he talks about food. Then he talks about the Radford plan."
Konrad Adenauer is a man who feels betrayed. He visited the U.S. last June with what he regarded as a prized gift for his old friend John Foster Dulles: a promise that, despite all the public opposition and the criticism from the Socialists, the Bundestag would soon pass a conscription law. Since West German rearmament has long been a prime goal of U.S. foreign policy. Adenauer made his pledge with happy anticipation, but got in return, say his aides, only a polite smile. Driving away from Dulles' office, Adenauer uneasily told a subordinate: "I have a feeling something may be wrong."
Nuclear Thunderbolt. Not until mid-July, after he had pushed his conscription bill through a reluctant Bundestag, did Adenauer discover how justified his uneasiness was. Then, like a thunderbolt, came press reports that Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had proposed that the U.S. chop its armed forces from 2,800,000 men to 2,000.000 by 1960, in keeping with the development of nuclear weapons. To Germans the so-called Radford plan—and Sir Anthony Eden's prompt hints that Britain, too, planned to "go nuclear"—clearly foreshadowed a reduction in the number of Anglo-American troops stationed in West Germany, possibly even—in the excitable conclusion-jumping of the German press (and the New York Times)—a neo-isolationist U.S. retreat to "Fortress America." Adenauer had argued that conscription was necessary to raise the twelve divisions West Germany had promised NATO. Then Dulles himself conceded in a press conference that, as part of a general shift away from conventional military forces. NATO might no longer need so many German divisions.
"I Am Lost." "This seems to prove that the Socialists may have been right all the time," said Adenauer. "I am lost." He dispatched German Lieut. General Adolf Heusinger, who is in effect the West German Chief of Staff, to the Pentagon to find out exactly what the Radford plan implied. Heusinger returned bearing the news (which Adenauer's Foreign Office should have given him long ago) of a shift of emphasis from conventional military forces to nuclear "firepower" as a primary goal of the Eisenhower Administration. Heusinger also brought U.S. "reassurances" that the Radford plan was not yet policy, and last week both Dulles and Britain's Selwyn Lloyd promised West German Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano that "for the time being" they do not intend to reduce their combat potential in West Germany.