Word: newe
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...thing you ever saw in your life." So indeed was last week's meeting of the North Atlantic Alliance, at which members made one of the most crucial decisions in the organization's 31-year history: to modernize its Western European nuclear strike force with a new generation of intermediate-range missiles aimed directly at the Soviet Union. With that, the major NATO powers, led by the U.S., claimed a victory, but they had to admit it had been too close for comfort. Three of the smaller members-The Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark-expressed a variety of objections...
...against its allies, TASS declared that the plan was "dangerous to the cause of peace and to international detente." NATO planners paid little attention, convinced as they are that the present strategic balance in Europe favors the Warsaw Pact to a greater extent than ever before. They believe the new Western missiles will significantly strengthen the alliance and will, at the least, give it an important new bargaining chip in any fu ture arms negotiations with the Soviets...
Specifically, the plan reinforces NATO's defenses with 108 new Pershing II missiles and 464 ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) starting in 1983. Both are extremely accurate. The Pershing II, to be placed in West Germany alone, is a mobile missile with a range of about 1,000 miles (vs. 450 miles for the Pershing 1 A, which the new weapons will replace). The GLCM (or "glickum," in Pentagon jargon), to be deployed in Britain, West Germany and Italy, and later, perhaps, in Belgium and The Netherlands, is a dry-land version of the U.S. Navy's Tomahawk...
...broader sense, the new missiles are designed to fill a political as well as a strategic gap in the Western deterrent by warning Moscow that it could not escape unscathed from nuclear threats aimed at dominating Western Europe. In 1977, both Britain and West Germany called Washington's attention to the fact that the alliance, if it should suddenly become the target of a Soviet attack in Europe, could easily find itself in a nuclear dilemma: its response might be either too modest (perhaps with the use of battlefield nuclear artillery) or too devastating (an intercontinental ballistic missile strike...
During the six-hour session, the West Germans were openly impatient with the Dutch and the Belgians on the missile question. Said Bonn's Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher: "We Germans realize you have political difficulties. But two out of three of the new rockets will be based on our territory." He called on the organization to make "a clear-cut decision for the sake of the alliance...