The View at the Summit

(See Cover)

Next week, in the drafty, shabby-modern building in Paris that is NATO headquarters, the leaders of 15 nations will gather at the call of President Dwight Eisenhower and Britain's Prime Minister Macmillan to examine their alliance and to consider its posture in the face of the gravest threat it has ever confronted. Not since Versailles will so many heads of Western governments have gathered in such portentous conclave.

The military threat posed by Sputnik is immense, immediate and sobering. But in the larger range of history, the graver threat is that the Soviet Union has shown itself capable of briefly surpassing the West at its strongest point--the ability of a free society to outthink and outdo Communism's driven men. This was a challenge to the very basis of the West's civilization itself, and its hope of organizing a peaceful world on the principles it held to be self-evident.

At Paris the leaders will meet amidst a noise of bickering, of suspicion that others are not doing their full share. But the dominant note will be simple and wholesome fear--fear of the enormous, suddenly dramatized power of Soviet Russia, which the Sputniks blazoned across the world's skies. Last week there was growing concern that the U.S., to whom they had looked for comfort and new leadership to meet the Sputniks' challenge, was failing their hopes. Doubts deepened when, with a thunderous rumble, the Vanguard rocket burned on its launching pad at Cape Canaveral and tossed the tiny U.S. satellite, bleating electronically, on the ground. All over Europe the U.S.'s critics snickered, and its friends quailed.

The prime task of next week's summit conference is to overcome this unhappy blend of fear, cynicism and narrow self-interest and to give new vitality and strength to the NATO alliance. No one could plot this new course except statesmen and diplomats. But the man who knows most about the terrain ahead and who must lead NATO along the course the summiteers lay down is a lean, greying figure in U.S. Air Force blue. More than any statesman. General Lauris Norstad, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, knows and deals with the awkward big realities and the small difficulties of the NATO alliance--the insistence on selfish national objectives, the tendency to "let George do it." More than any diplomat, he influences the day-by-day progress of NATO--the integration of armed forces, the creation of a coherent system of logistics and supply, all the niggling but vital details of forging an effective military coalition.

"This meeting is an event of the first order of magnitude," says Norstad. "It may be compared only with the establishment of NATO and the outbreak of the Korean war. It's all very well to make statements of principle, but now we must make a statement of the things we are doing, tangible things."

Assumptions Undermined. When Russia's scientists put their Sputniks into orbit, they undermined at one stroke many of the West's most cherished assumptions about the world balance of power. In immediate military terms. Sputnik made plain that the U.S., the powerhouse of the free world and presumed technological leader of the whole world, was or soon would be within range of Russian ICBMs. It was a threat that, for the time being, the U.S. could not match. This pointed a danger not only at the heart of the U.S. but also, because Europe's security rests on the deterrent effect of U.S. nuclear power, at the heart of all the other NATO nations.

Almost to a man, the leaders of the NATO world offered the same answer to the challenge of Sputnik. "It is mandatory that the North Atlantic community be strengthened," said Canada's Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. "The days of national self-sufficiency have gone, and I hope that we shall lose no time in matching our policies to these facts," declared Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Said Secretary of State John Foster Dulles: "I do not think that [NATO's] existing political-military mechanisms are adequate."

Strain & Dissension. Before the eyes of the world, NATO had developed alarming symptoms of strain and neglect. The death of Stalin in 1953 and the noisy shift of power in the Kremlin diminished the fear of Russian aggression that was the foundation stone of NATO cooperation. The U.S., concerned with the threat of Communist absorption of the ex-colonies that achieved independence after World War II, laid new stress on its alliances in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. In the Suez crisis, the U.S. felt compelled to oppose Britain and France. More recently, France was infuriated by U.S.-British arms deliveries to Tunisia (TIME, Nov. 25), and in Paris last week Premier Felix Gaillard served public notice that henceforth France would, in effect, expect her NATO partners to underwrite French policy in Algeria. Otherwise, demanded Felix Gaillard, "what meaning would the NATO pact have, and how could one escape fears that governments would come to doubt the value of an alliance so limited?"

In London, West Germany's Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano was quarreling with British officialdom. On the verge of a major step-up of their own defense program, the Germans argue that they can no longer afford to contribute $140 million a year to the upkeep of the 65,000 British soldiers and airmen now stationed in Germany. The British, who argue that they are already contributing a disproportionately large share to NATO's defense and the wealthy Germans scandalously little, reacted with a threat to reduce British forces in Germany to 50,000 men. Backing the British, the U.S. sent Bonn its own bill for $77 million to help support the 250,000 U.S. troops in West Germany.

A Sudden Buzzing. The Anglo-German quarrel was unhappily symptomatic of a recent Europe-wide tendency to back down on NATO commitments. But for all their poor-mouthing, most of the European members of the alliance had little economic justification for cutting their contributions (see box). Germany is in the midst of a boom that is the wonder of the Western world. Italy is more prosperous than ever before in her history. Britain, despite its recent White Paper assumption that it cannot afford both conventional and nuclear forces, manages to maintain one of the world's highest living standards. Even France, whose government finances are in hopeless confusion, is a rich country, and fundamentally growing richer.

In the light of the Soviet moons, the bickering and niggling of NATO's members boded ill. Clearly, NATO had reached a critical point at which it must begin to evolve into something stronger or face an almost inevitable decay. It was this realization that sent Harold Macmillan flying to Washington two months ago for a dramatic post-Sputnik meeting with Dwight Eisenhower. "The countries of the free world are interdependent," said the Eisenhower-Macmillan communique. "Only in genuine partnership, by combining their resources and sharing tasks in many fields, can progress and safety be found." The whole Atlantic world began to buzz with schemes for unifying political policies, coordinating military forces and pooling scientific knowledge.

But the concept of interdependence is easier to write into a communique than to put into practice, or even to hammer out in detail around a conference table. Proud and ancient nations like to command the means of their own defense; jealousies are hard to still. Interdependence would obviously dictate that France, for instance, give up its expensive project of building atomic weapons and rockets of its own, but France doggedly persists, in the hope of re-establishing its status as a major power alongside the U.S. and Britain.

Philosopher in Uniform. Few men have such high hopes for NATO interdependence, and so much firsthand knowledge of the pitfalls that stand in the way of achieving it, as Lauris Norstad. As the top man in Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, Norstad commands a polyglot, 15-nation force consisting of 5,000 aircraft and about 30 divisions. These are not the total forces that NATO member countries can muster. Total mobilized armed strength of NATO's Western European members alone is 3,500,000 men, 10,000 combat aircraft, and several thousand naval craft, including nine carriers, 21 cruisers, 162 destroyers and 100 submarines. They are the forces assigned by NATO allies to the common European defense.

NATO's divisions range in size from 8,000 to 20,000 men; their equipment varies so widely according to national predilection and military tradition, that standardized small-arms ammunition is virtually the only combat material that all of them have in common. And between SHAPE and its field forces stands a bewildering spider's web of 21 major headquarters. "I could show you a chart of the organization, and you will tell me that the damned thing can't possibly work," says Norstad. Then he adds: "But it works perfectly well."

One reason it does is Norstad himself. Six years of continuous duty with NATO--one of the longest overseas tours ever served by a U.S. officer of his rank--has made Norstad an outstanding specimen of the soldier-statesman. Says J.C.S. Chairman Nathan Twining: "Everything Norstad does in NATO he equates in the political atmosphere. His job is more diplomatic than anything else. Like a doctor, he is rushing around to fix this crisis here, iron out that difficulty there. It's a helluva job, but the guy's got what it takes to do it." Norstad, says one admiring SHAPE colonel, "is not conspicuously American. He never makes a move that, of itself, gives a clue to his nationality."

Not the least of Norstad's assets as SACEUR is his appearance. Quietly proud that none of his clothing sizes have changed since his cadet days, Norstad stands 6 ft. 1 in., weighs 142 Ibs., and with his wavy hair, finely chiseled nostrils and strong, pointed jaw, could almost as well be a product of central casting as of West Point. Early this year when the general rose to speak at a London dinner, one old British civil servant muttered approvingly: "He looks like the North Atlantic alliance."

Into the Stratosphere. The airman who commands SHAPE is a North Atlantic man in ancestry as well as looks. Born 50 years ago in Minneapolis, Lauris Norstad is Swedish on his mother's side, Norwegian on his father's. He grew up in Red Wing, Minn., where his father was pastor of St. Peter's Lutheran Church. Lauris fished the back channels of the Mississippi, fiddled with motors and models, even put together the first radio in Red Wing, and wrote short stories and poems "for my own amazement."

At high school young Norstad edited the student paper, made so many teams and was elected to so many offices that his family teased him "about being president of every organization in school except the girls' athletic association." At West Point, where he "read a helluva lot, which was inconsistent with excellence in studies," Norstad graduated 139th in a class of 241. "His faults," reported the 1930 class yearbook, "are a modesty approaching an inferiority complex and an unappeasable desire for sleep."

In a profession not noted for breadth of reading, Norstad quickly became conspicuous as one airman who read voraciously, ranging from The Federalist to the memoirs of the Aga Khan. In later Washington days, he liked to argue law with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was so impressed that he offered to recommend him for a professorship at Harvard Law School. In fact, soon after his graduation from West Point, Norstad almost decided to leave the service for law. Recalls Norstad: "I'd look at my squadron commander, a major who had been in the service for 15 years, and I'd ask myself: 'How can I do this sort of thing for that long?' "

As it turned out, Larry Norstad never commanded a squadron. In 1936, after four years of flying pursuit planes in Hawaii, he was brought back to the U.S. for staff duty, and by the time the U.S. entered World War II he was assistant chief of staff for Air Intelligence, with a growing service reputation as the headiest young staff officer in the Air Corps. From then on, his rise into the military stratosphere was at missile speed. Tapped by the Air Corps' General "Hap" Arnold ("I need somebody to help me do my thinking"), Norstad became a peripatetic planner. Starting off as air operations officer for General Jimmy Doolittle's Twelfth Air Force in Britain and North Africa, he soon moved up to the same job in the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces. In the last year of the war, while serving simultaneously as Deputy Chief of Air Staff and chief of staff of the Twentieth Air Force, he helped to set up the B-29 raids on Japan, including the A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Too Much, Too Soon. By then, Larry Norstad was a marked man. In 1946 General Dwight Eisenhower insisted on Norstad as War Department director of plans and operations. As such, he was the Army's representative in the dickering that preceded unification of the armed services, and with the late Admiral Forrest Sherman is credited with largely writing the unification act. But the newly independent Air Force, says one of his colleagues, "didn't know what the hell to do with him. He was too young to be Chief of Staff." The solution, finally arrived at in 1950, was to name him commander of the U.S. Air Force in Europe. Six months later, Norstad took on his first NATO assignment : Commander, Allied Air Forces, Central Europe. Last year, after serving as air deputy to SACEUR's Matthew Ridgway and Alfred Gruenther, he succeeded Gruenther as boss of SHAPE.

The Latter-Day Roman. As SACEUR, Norstad is a great contrast to his tireless, hard-driving predecessor. "When General Gruenther wanted to know how many seats there were in an auditorium, everybody trembled; now we just tremble when there is something worth trembling about." The modesty that was one of Norstad's "faults" at West Point is still with him. When he was first elevated to SACEUR, he tried to continue his old practice of slipping into SHAPE unobtrusively by a side door, abandoned it only after his public information officer firmly told him that he must use the front door because "a commander must be seen by his troops." Nor has Norstad's youthful appetite for rest disappeared. Though he and Hawaii-born Isabelle Norstad, slim and chic in her Balmain gowns, cannot escape a hectic official social whirl, Norstad makes a ferocious effort to schedule two or three nights a week at home. He ducks off to Berchtesgaden for a weekend's fishing, plays golf when he has a chance, delights in his hi-fi set (Fairchild amplifier and pickup, Tannoy speaker), which he plays at window-rattling volume. He has given up pipe smoking and drinks sparingly. "You've got to be fit in this business. When the pinch comes, you've got to operate for long periods without sleep, and the peak requirements are usually placed on you when you're at peak fatigue. During the war, I observed that a man who exercised good average judgment 24 hours a day soon established a reputation for brilliance."

But Airman Norstad makes nothing of either time or space in the pursuit of NATO business. "There is a sort of Roman aspect about Norstad," says Andre de Staercke, permanent Belgian representative on the NATO Council. "There are no borders for this man. Any morning he is apt to say: 'We will be in Ankara at 8 o'clock tonight.' " Often such flying trips serve primarily as valuable propaganda for NATO; sometimes they herald a new departure in the defense of Europe. A few months ago in Italy Norstad moved an audience to tears by declaring: "There are few sights more beautiful than a flag in the wind. When I look at the flags of the 15 nations that constitute NATO, I would say, ladies and gentlemen, that you are looking at the hopes of the Western world." Last week, as a consequence of a Norstad visit to Brussels, and The Hague a few days earlier, The Netherlands and Belgium agreed on a plan for close cooperation between their air forces, within the NATO framework.

Shield & Sword. Last spring, in the wake of Britain's decision to cut its armed forces in half by 1962, the Atlantic Council gave Norstad a formidable task: to prepare an estimate of NATO's force requirements for the next five years, taking into account economic and political pressures for demobilization and the changing relationship between conventional and nuclear strength. It is a measure of Norstad's capacity as a planner that although his report was finished two days before the first Sputnik went up, the conclusions that he reached remain valid. Some of his premises: "The Soviets will almost certainly have a strategic ballistic missile in this period." "The Soviets have announced intentions of launching an earth satellite in 1957. Western scientists credit them with this capability."

SHAPE'S commander refused to accept the British argument that nuclear firepower permitted a cut in conventional forces. Instead, he called for a buildup of NATO ground forces in the central sector of Western Europe alone ("the most sensitive and critical line in the world") from the present 18 divisions to about 30. Rejecting the old concept of NATO forces in Europe as a "trip wire" to trigger U.S. nuclear retaliation, Norstad argued: "What we need is a shield--not just a trip wire or burglar alarm, but a shield of some reasonable force. If the Russians meet resistance, they will have to consider the possibility of unleashing the full nuclear deterrent. The enemy must be kept in a position where he has to make The Decision."

Even if Norstad got all the troops he asked for, his international army would still be a pigmy alongside the estimated 130 Russian and 65 satellite divisions in Eastern Europe. This does not alarm NATO planners unduly. "We are not going to fight a war against those divisions," says one NATO planner.

But to help offset numerical inferiority, Norstad proposed what he calls "the concept of graduated readiness." The Norstad plan called for creation of heavily armed "fire brigades" of roughly divisional strength which would be capable of moving swiftly to any part of NATO territory and kept at "120% readiness." Along the Iron Curtain line would be other units in full readiness, airplanes manned, guns loaded, combat tasks assigned. In a second line, farther back, would be divisions capable of going into action in three to four days. Even farther back would be the reserves--divisions that could be ready in 30 days, plus troops committed to NATO but currently on active duty elsewhere, e.g., French forces that have been drawn away from SHAPE for the Algerian war. To ensure that all NATO divisions would be periodically brought up to 100% readiness, the units manning the Iron Curtain line would be rotated regularly.

This was sound but standard military doctrine. What was new was Norstad's proposal for a basic modification of the strategic concept which divides NATO forces into "the shield" (conventional forces in Continental Europe) and "the sword" (U.S. and British nuclear forces based outside Europe). The U.S., argued Norstad, should equip its European NATO allies with short-range and even intermediate-range missiles, train them in the use of such weapons and make nuclear warheads available for quick delivery in case of war. What Norstad was urging, in effect, was that the shield forces be brought to a significant place in NATO's nuclear deterrent power.

Schemes & Dreams. Norstad's report, which went to all NATO members more than two months ago, is the basis of U.S. military proposals for next week's summit conference. With the Sputnik, the establishment of IRBM bases in Europe has taken on an added significance for the U.S., as a necessary counter to the Soviet missile threat to Turkey, Europe and Britain, to say nothing of its ICBM threat to North America. Though final arrangements will be left for later negotiation (since the U.S. does not yet have an operational IRBM), the U.S. will offer missiles to any NATO members that want them, but nuclear warheads for the missiles will be held in U.S. custody "only a few feet" from the launching platforms. The missiles could be armed at the first sign of attack, but the decision to use them would be a matter of mutual agreement. The French or Germans will need U.S. consent to use the warheads, and the U.S. will need French or German consent to use the missiles which carry the warheads.

Though it will be the most dramatic issue discussed at the summit conference, the proposal to establish NATO missile bases represents a relatively simple form of interdependence. Far more complicated are some of the other suggestions now being mulled over in the chancelleries of the NATO nations.

The U.S. will offer (subject to congressional approval) to relax the restrictions of the MacMahon Act in order to share with its NATO partners U.S. know-how in the military uses of atomic energy. It will also propose increased cooperation in scientific education, training and research, with particular emphasis on joint effort in weapons development and manufacture. Likely specific proposals: establishment of a NATO fund for educating budding scientists, establishment of a NATO missiles training and research center, an all-NATO program for exchange of weapons blueprints and designs.

Britain will generally follow the U.S. lead, but will place more emphasis on the need for member nations to subordinate their individual foreign policies to NATO interests. The British will also press cautiously for steps toward a program of complete military interdependence under which member nations would cease trying to maintain all-round military forces. Thus Britain would like to concentrate more of its resources on antisubmarine defense, thinks France could better spend its money on plugging one of the many gaps in NATO's conventional defenses than on the wasteful French A-bomb program (TIME, Dec. 9). Britain also wants greater pooling of scientific talent. "The Germans are free to devote 95% of their technological know-how to their export drive while we have 70% of ours tied up on defense work," they complain.

France, which fears an Anglo-U.S. monopoly of nuclear weapons, will demand that control of any missile warheads based on French soil be vested in NATO rather than in the U.S. It is inadmissible, says Premier Gaillard, that some allies "should be a bit more equal than others." What the French most want is a formal reaffirmation that Algeria is included in the NATO area, plus a pledge that no NATO member will take action affecting the interests of another member without prior consultation.

West Germany will support French demands for more European say on the use of U.S.-supplied nuclear weapons, fearing that the U.S. might refuse the use of atomic weapons against a "local" attack on Germany because of the risk of bringing retaliation on the U.S. The Germans are also talking about building an elaborate rocket antiaircraft defense line along its eastern border, want other NATO nations to contribute to its financing on the ground that it will defend the whole NATO area.

Italy, anxious to re-establish Western--particularly Italian--prestige in the Arab world, urged a U.S.-Western European economic development fund for the Middle East (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).

Turkey, which is in dire financial straits, will ask for greater economic cooperation, i.e., aid.

A Question of Purpose. From the moment of its conception, the summit conference was doomed to run afoul of a basic disagreement about the purpose and possibilities of NATO. In the eyes of many Europeans, vocally led by NATO Secretary General Paul Henri Spaak of Belgium, NATO ought to be an almost supranational political organization through which the North Atlantic nations can present a common front to the world--Africa and Asia, as well as Russia. "It is illogical," says Spaak in an implied reproach to the U.S., "to have unified fighting forces without a unified policy."

All this, responds a senior U.S. official, "is the idea of people who are really interested in the integration of Europe and will use any means at hand to further it. I sympathize, but we must be practical." Being practical, to the U.S. way of thinking, means keeping firmly in mind that NATO is first and foremost a military alliance whose reason for existence is to counter the threat of Soviet aggression in Europe. The U.S. regards NATO as the hard core of its system of alliances, is anxious to improve political cooperation among NATO members and, since Suez, has made a renewed effort to do so. (Example: the most recent U.S. disarmament plan, which was checked over step by step with the other NATO members.) But U.S. policymakers do not see any wisdom in alienating the Afro-Asian nations, perhaps to the extent of driving them into the Soviet camp, in order to placate one or another of NATO's European members. Nor do they believe that this is a necessary price to pay for the coordinated defense effort that is NATO's primary avowed purpose.

For all its outcries at unilateral U.S. action, Europe itself is not prepared to practice true political interdependence. Greece will not accept NATO intervention in Cyprus, or France any "meddling" in Algeria. "Premier Gaillard," observed Paris's Le Monde, "wants general coordination of the policies of NATO's 15 members. Or put more exactly, he wants their agreement with French ideas."

The First Step. Shaken by Eisenhower's most recent illness, worried by signs of uncertainty and discord among the members, doomsayers were already talking glumly of Paris as a great opportunity lost. In fact, the 15 chiefs of government who will gather round the table in NATO's conference hall next week are most unlikely to create any new political institutions that would set NATO on the road to supranational power. But the summit conference will almost certainly produce a pledge of closer political collaboration; if meticulously honored, it could create a state of mind that would rule out recurrences of the Suez breach. What is at stake is less the immediate problem of the West's defense against all that Sputnik threatens; rather, it is a rallying of the whole non-Communist West, now temporarily demoralized, to meet the Russian challenge.

As Lauris Norstad has observed: "I get my formal directives on a piece of paper which I receive from the NATO Council. But my real directive is the confidence that nations place in this agency." If the Paris meeting can restore and reinvigorate that confidence, the meeting will be well held.

EXPLOSIVE EXPANSION

While most European nations complain that their economies will not support greater military expenditures and talk of reductions, the most significant economic fact about Western Europe is the explosive postwar expansion of its industrial output. By 1956 industrial production of NATO's Western European members showed the following increases over prewar (1937-38) levels:

Britain 50%

France 79%

Germany 112%

Italy 103%

Belgium-Luxemburg 51%

The Netherlands 103%

Norway 114%

Denmark 66%

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