Word: nato
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...West German withdrawal from NATO and East German withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. ("A most unequal bargain," says British Laborite Nye Bevan...
...More ambitious than Rapacki, British Labor Party Leader Hugh Gaitskell calls for the reunification of Germany by free elections and the evacuation of Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary by all foreign troops. To take his buffer zone completely out of the cold war, Gaitskell would have West Germany leave NATO and East Germany leave the Warsaw Pact; the frontiers of all the buffer zone nations would then be guaranteed by Britain, France, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R...
...exception to this rule is the formula advanced by Sir Anthony Eden at Geneva in 1955, and revived in the House of Commons last week by Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd. Its basic provisions: Germany should be reunited by free elections and allowed to determine its own foreign policy (the NATO treaty does not commit a reunified Germany to membership). If united Germany chose to join NATO, the West would not move troops into what is now East Germany (which would bring NATO some 200 miles closer to Moscow), but would leave that area as a buffer zone...
Apart from the Eden Plan, no one has yet suggested a disengagement proposal that would not gravely endanger the military security of the Western nations. Communist Rapacki's projected nuclear freeze would seriously weaken NATO's ability to defend itself against Russia's vastly larger conventional forces, and would constitute a major victory for Moscow. Any plan that entails German withdrawal from NATO would probably lead to complete U.S. military withdrawal from Europe, since no Western European country save West Germany can be expected to play host to more than 175,000 U.S. soldiers...
...same time, confederation would probably allay some of the clamor in West Germany for reunification, thereby lessen the strain on West German loyalty to NATO. West Germans might feel that, without any Russians in the act, they could get along with and even prevail over East German Communists. But the contrary would be true: confederation would give the Soviet puppet government of East Germany a voice, however small, in the common affairs of Germany, and that voice would not long be reticent...