Word: flanks
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...excruciatingly uncertain until the very last minute. Nearly every member-413 out of 435-turned up to cast a vote on President Carter's request to end the 42 month-old U.S. embargo on arms for Turkey. The ban had infuriated the Turks and weakened the southern flank of NATO. Whether or not Carter would succeed in persuading Congress to lift the embargo was seen as a major test for his Administration...
Soviet forces frequently impinge on Norway, which constitutes the northern flank of NATO and is a key Western listening post for monitoring Russian military intentions. About three times a month, Soviet reconnaissance planes take aim at Norway's Finnmark province, which abuts Russia's Kola Peninsula with its strategic naval bases and 900,000-member complement of Communist ground and air forces. The spy planes turn back only when challenged by NATO interceptors. At least twice a year, large-scale Soviet naval exercises are held off the Norwegian coast. Soviet submarines, based at Murmansk, glide into Norway's deep fjords...
While the Western leaders easily reached agreement on the defense program, they sidestepped another serious problem: the hostility between NATO members Greece and Turkey over Cyprus. One senior diplomat called the schism "a serious menace to NATO'S eastern flank, perhaps even to the alliance's future. It is a terrible wound." Making it even worse, in NATO'S eyes, is Congress's 1974 embargo on U.S. arms shipments to Turkey, which used weapons provided by the U.S. in Cyprus...
...summit-conference dinner in the White House Rose Garden last week (see NATION). Indeed, there are problems, and none is more immediately troublesome to NATO strategists than the four-year-old rift between Ecevit's own country and neighboring Greece. Reflecting the ragged edge of the alliance's southeastern flank, NATO forces recently completed a maneuver code-named Dawn Patrol. Both Greek and Turkish warships participated?but never in the same waters...
...U.S.S.R. State Department Sinologists believe that Peking regards Washington as having been weak in responding to Soviet gains in Africa; the Chinese surely see events in Afghanistan, where a closet Communist regime seized power last month, as another Soviet success. And this is on China's own western flank. Peking is also thought to feel that Carter has been too eager to accommodate the Russians in the slow-moving SALT talks and to abandon or defer development of modern weapons such as the B-1 bomber and the neutron warhead...