Disarming Threat to Stability

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that made the 1979 NATO decision possible by offering its territory to fulfill Chancellor Schmidt's demand that at least one other Continental NATO member volunteer to take the U.S. missiles. "We don't have a problem of neutrality in Italy," explains Piero Bassetti, a leading member of the dominant Christian Democratic Party. "We are a weak nation. We have to stay with the Americans, even when they make mistakes."

Nonetheless, antimissile sentiment began to emerge when the government, led by Republican Prime Minister Spadolini, announced publicly that Italy's contingent of 112 cruise missiles would be based outside the small southern Sicily town of Comiso. Since then, says Marco Fumagalli, 28, a leader of the Communist Youth Federation, the missiles have no longer been a "hypothetical possibility."

Although the Italian press has given the impression that most of the protests are aimed at the U.S., a group of Communist youths stopped last month outside the Soviet embassy in Rome to shout, "Comrade Brezhnev, cannons are useless, revolution is made by the masses!" Many of the placards at Rome's big Oct. 24 rally carried the rhyming couplet, Dalla Sicilia alia Scandinavia, no alia NATO e al patto di Varsavia (From Sicily to Scandinavia, no to NATO and the Warsaw Pact).

France is Europe's odd man out on disarmament. The demonstration in Paris was by far the least impressive of any in the series last month. Only 40,000 marchers turned up, most members of a peace group with close ties to the Communist Party. President Mitterrand's Socialist Party actively opposed the demonstration. France is different because it is not part of NATO's integrated military command, though it remains a NATO member, and thus has not been asked to take any of the new U.S. missiles. More important, France possesses its own nuclear defense, the force de frappe created by President Charles de Gaulle. "If France does not share this feeling [of fear], it is because it has its own nuclear armament," Mitterrand has declared. "We can look after our own defense ourselves."

Mitterrand has made several pro-missile pronouncements calculated to shore up Helmut Schmidt. In addition, continuing a policy begun by former President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, Mitterrand is modernizing France's nuclear forces. Its submarine fleet, which will number seven by 1990, is being equipped with multiple-warhead M-4 missiles, and the 35 Mirage IV strategic bombers will receive new air-to-ground missiles.

The only pacifist organization of any consequence in France is the Mouvement de la Paix, headed by Michel Langignon, 68, an affable grandfather who has been a member of the Communist Party since 1942. The group's only significant achievement is the modest march it organized on Oct. 25 in Paris. On the ground floor of Langignon's offices in a working-class section of Paris is a collection of posters that includes onetime Member Pablo Picasso's sketch of the dove that became the familiar peace emblem. "Picasso said he didn't have enough time to think up a symbol," Langignon recalls. Suddenly French Communist Writer Louis Aragon reached into Picasso's cluttered folder, picked up a lithograph of a pigeon, and said, "Why don't you use this?" Langignon is not, shy