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Under the grey, wintry skies of Paris. the foreign and defense ministers of the world's greatest politico-military alliance gather this week. At NATO's annual meeting, the agenda, as always, is simple: the defense of Europe. But this year there is a mood that old assumptions are outdated, old battle doctrines need revision, old relationships have shifted.
The urgency of fear that forged NATO's first army has long vanished; so has the invulnerability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent that so long buttressed NATO's troops from afar.
Within Europe itself, NATO's policymakers confront a historic new fact that would have seemed incredible at NATO's birth in 1949. Only 15 years after Hitler's death, a new German army has taken its place as the pivot of Western defense in Europe. With half a million French troops tied down in Algeria, the Germans are already the strongest European force on the Continent. In two or three years time, the West German Bundeswehr will match if not surpass in might all the other NATO armies in Europe combined, including the powerful U.S. Seventh Army.
Nuclear NATO. Only five years ago, the new German Bundeswehr accepted its first recruits. Today the Bundeswehr has some 280,000 men, and by the end of next year will be at a planned strength of 340,000. Eleven of the army's projected twelve divisions have been activated, and the twelfth will be next month. Seven have already been committed to NATO, and the rest will be next year.
The big question at NATO's Paris meeting—nuclear arms—is also at heart a German question. France's President Charles de Gaulle raised the whole subject by insisting on creating his own independent nuclear striking force. What if
West Germany raised the issue too? To head off such a rivalry, General Lauris Norstad, NATO's supreme commander in Europe, has proposed that the alliance should have its own nuclear force.
There are signs that President-elect Kennedy is thinking along Norstad's lines. In a book review written for the Satur day Re-view last September, Kennedy declared, "We must think through afresh the military mission of NATO." In the book before him, British Military Expert B. H. Liddell Hart argued that European nations perhaps should abandon atomic weapons and concentrate on conventional forces, leaving the U.S. the task of deterring Soviet atomic strength. Kennedy was convinced that European nations would likely prefer another solution: "Our partners may wish to create a NATO deterrent, supplementary to our own, under a NATO nuclear treaty." That is Norstad's pitch.
NATO would then become the world's fifth power. Inevitably that means giving nuclear weapons to Germany, the new NATO power in Europe. With the memory of the Nazi armies so fresh in the minds of many Europeans, this is no easy decision. Properly enough, the man who will argue Germany's case in Paris this week will be the man who has created West Germany's new army, Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss.