Word: nato
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This week President Eisenhower was back at home, where the U.S. needed the Ike it remembered. The NATO conference itself had imposed new burdens and responsibilities on the U.S., and they ranged from convincing Congress of the Tightness of the new commitments to the all-out production of missiles that are not yet operational. The Soviet peace-propaganda offensive, much in the minds of all NATO statesmen and their constituents, demanded renewed efforts of U.S. diplomacy. The first limited test-firing of the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile was an important step toward regaining free-world confidence in U.S. technical strength...
This was a sound and sober analysis of the results of the NATO meeting (see THE PARIS CONFERENCE). The leaders of NATO had agreed unanimously to arm the Atlantic Alliance with history's most powerful weapons despite the Kremlin's threats that this could bring their extinction; they also had agreed to miss no chance for practical discussion of practical roads to peace. They had worked no miracles, but none had been expected; their mood as they left Paris was well described by Belgium's Paul-Henri Spaak, secretary general of NATO, as one of "cool determination...
...points: 1) an agreement that U.S. intermediate range ballistic missiles will be "put at the disposal of the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe" [i.e., the U.S.'s General Lauris Norstad] with location of missile bases and details of their operation to be worked out later; 2) an agreement that NATO would seek new disarmament discussions with the Soviet Union-preferably in the U.N., but at the foreign minister level if Russia insisted on that procedure...
Between these two major points there was no quid pro quo; the U.S. was not forced to accept negotiation in order to get European acceptance of missiles, nor were the other NATO powers forced to accept missiles to establish the offer of negotiations. Many NATO countries had long been importuning the U.S. to provide them with modern weapons. But U.S. negotiators came to realize, more sharply than before, that the leaders of most NATO nations needed, for political reasons, to couple acceptance of missiles with a reiterated promise that the West is always ready to listen to practical offers...
...held the attention of the world, another broad and basic result of the conference was more or less obscured. In the U.S. proposals around the table at the Palais de Chaillot, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles undertook a whole new program of U.S. commitments to NATO. They promised, in more certain terms than ever before, that the U.S. would come to immediate and full defense of any NATO nation attacked by an enemy; they promised to seek substantial increases in funds for aid, technical assistance and loans to NATO countries; they agreed to push vigorously...