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Officially as detached about NATO as ever, the French promised nothing. But Charles de Gaulle was shaken by the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the French have shown some signs of cooperation—where their own interests are clearly at stake. Some French commanders quietly continue to participate in infantry exercises with NATO forces in West Germany. French ships openly joined some 50 other vessels of the U.S., Britain, Italy and Greece in the alliance's "Operation Eden Apple" naval maneuvers in the Mediterranean last week.
The Seismic Quaver. Whatever buildup eventually results, it will only represent progress toward the force levels long ago set out for NATO, and never achieved. The new concerns are not causing any genuine enlargement of the organization's military muscle. A far more difficult task confronting the ministers and the commanders is what to do if the men in Moscow decide to invade yet another socialist country like Rumania or Yugoslavia. The West has a bad conscience about Czechoslovakia, feeling that somehow, somewhere along the line leading to Aug. 21, some pressure might have been exerted to dissuade the Soviets from striking.
NATO's planners have had three months to devise a counter for future Soviet moves, but not all of the thinking was productive. U.S. planners even dusted off an old scheme to fire a controlled nuclear explosion as a warning. Where? Why inside allied territory, of course. Presumably the seismic quaver on Russian monitoring instruments would bring Soviet tanks to a shuddering halt. There were, however, no volunteers for the territory to be used for this backyard bomb. Equally unimpressive was the suggestion to fire a nuclear warning shot at sea, a latter-day version of the old shot-across-the-bow.
Grey Areas. In the end, the ministers could not agree on measures that should be taken if the Soviets decide to invade another country. But in their final communiqué, they issued a double-edged warning that 1) they were "wholly determined to defend the members of the alliance against any armed attack," and 2) "Any Soviet intervention directly or indirectly affecting the situation in Europe or in the Mediterranean would create an international crisis with grave consequences."
Perhaps this was not the unmistakable signal to Moscow requested by British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart, but as diplomatic warnings go, it was strong language. "Foreign ministers are not village idiots," a top U.S. official explained. "They know we're not talking into thin air. What we're saying is watch out."
While the communiqué did not name names, allied diplomats did in background sessions with newsmen. Secretary Rusk declared to the ministers that
Yugoslavia and Austria were clearly related to the security interest of NATO. American officials insisted that this was not a pledge to come to the aid of those two countries or others, like Rumania, in the so-called "grey areas"—the small Communist and neutral states into which the Russians might be tempted to move. But as one American official noted, "The security of NATO is no longer just something that involves the legal boundaries of NATO."