Difficult Partner

France is not really herself unless in the front rank.

--Charles de Gaulle, Memoirs

"Blackmail," cried Washington's U.S. Senator Henry Jackson. "Nuclear blackmail," said London's News Chronicle. Across the Atlantic world, statesmen sighed and prepared to man their battle stations. France's Charles de Gaulle was demanding a place in the front rank again.

The latest scuffle was touched off by youthful-looking U.S. General Lauris Norstad, 52, NATO commander in Europe, whom Old Soldier de Gaulle treats as a subaltern. De Gaulle has vastly complicated Norstad's--and NATO's--existence by 1) refusing to accept launching pads for U.S. intermediate-range missiles in France, 2) failing to integrate France's strategic air defense into an overall NATO system, 3) denouncing an agreement that obligated France to put a third of its Mediterranean fleet under NATO command in event of war.

Norstad was now upset by another De Gaulle strategy--his refusal to permit stockpiling of U.S. nuclear bombs in France unless the French government has control of them. Pointedly, Norstad let it be known that he was thinking of transferring nine squadrons of U.S. F-100 and F-1O1 fighter-bombers out of France.

Double Veto. De Gaulle was obviously trying to prod the U.S. out of its longstanding refusal to share nuclear secrets with France--a refusal that has unquestionably hampered French scientists in their effort to devise their own Abomb. In London, where 650 leading citizens of 14 NATO countries assembled in an Atlantic Congress to mull over the state of the alliance, French General Marcel Carpentier grumbled: "Britain and America have secrets and can use them as they wish. It is because of this double veto that France has decided to build its own Continental deterrent."

De Gaulle's argument has more to it than his mystic yearning for national grandeur. He believes that the Anglo-American nuclear domination of NATO is inducing in Western Europeans a "suicidal" lack of interest in their own defense. Convinced that "French soldiers fight best under the French flag," De Gaulle also opposes the present concept of "integrated" NATO forces, prefers a World War II-style "cooperative alliance," and asks what would become of Western European nations without nuclear weapons if the day came when it did not serve U.S. and British interests to use the nuclear deterrent in local defense of Europe.

Unanswered Mail. The U.S. position is that Congress has authorized the U.S. Government by law to share nuclear secrets only with allies that have already shown the ability to make nuclear weapons on their own, to wit, Britain. In French eyes, this is an explanation but not an answer: Why not change the law?

De Gaulle's complaint goes deeper: his aides carefully reminded foreign newsmen last week that the general has not yet received a satisfactory answer to the private letters (TIME, Nov. 10) in which he urged Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Macmillan to admit France alongside Britain and the U.S. in a tripartite NATO "political directorate." It is an old French grievance that the U.S. grants full international partnership to Britain, yet treats France as a junior member of the firm, on a par with West Germany or Italy. Fact is, insists De Gaulle, that France, unlike the Germans or Italians, has "world responsibilities," and unless the U.S. and Britain agree to coordinate their strategy outside Europe (most specifically in Algeria), the alliance is not a genuine one.

Washington's answer is that 1) there is no special U.S.-British partnership, and 2) France cannot get into it. It hopes not to antagonize De Gaulle but to counter his demands with sweetly reasonable explanations of the impossibility of complying with them. Those who dealt with the general in World War II know that such tactics have never before persuaded De Gaulle to abandon what he considers legitimate national goals.

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