Word: nato
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Four days before Ike's arrival, as Cabinet members and top military brass of 15 nations descended on Paris, the annual NATO Council meeting had opened. The setting was glossier and glassier than ever before. To replace the sagging "temporary" prefab it has occupied since 1952, NATO now inhabits a six-story, A-shaped (for "Atlantic") building containing $10 million worth of Danish and Belgian furniture, German and Dutch electronics devices, Italian marble, British kitchen equipment, U.S. airconditioning, and (alas) a French telephone system. But as if to prove Parkinson's law of "plans and plants,"* the first...
France Alone. Fifteen months ago, France's De Gaulle opened his demands that NATO have responsibility for coordinating Western policy all around the world. Instead of confining itself to averting Soviet aggression in Europe, he argued, NATO should bind its members to support one another's interests everywhere-and specifically to support France in revolt-torn Algeria. To frame common NATO policy, De Gaulle suggested the formation of a three-power superdirectorate composed of the U.S., Britain and France...
With the outspoken support of the British (who did not want to share a favored position) and the smaller NATO powers (who did not want to be further left out), the U.S. ignored De Gaulle's proposals. Partly to put pressure on Washington, partly because he is convinced that "France must defend itself by itself and in its own fashion," De Gaulle retaliated by striking at the foundation stone of NATO strategic planning: the concept of an integrated, internationally commanded defense force...
...Gaulle began by withdrawing much of his Mediterranean fleet from NATO control. Then he refused NATO permission to stockpile U.S.-controlled atomic weapons in France. And for the past year he has obdurately blocked the plans for integrated air defense of Europe advocated by NATO's European commander, U.S. Air Force General Lauris Norstad...
...NATO's Continental members, France is the only one that has refused Norstad authority to send its planes into immediate action in event of a Soviet attack, the only one that has refused to hook into the Europe-wide air-warning-and-command net that NATO hopes to finish building by 1961. (Given the small size of Western Europe-Paris lies only 350 miles from the Communist frontier of East Germany-this is roughly like refusing to agree to coordinated air defense of Chicago and Minneapolis...