MAP Begins

In Washington last week, after nine months of palaver and planning, the North Atlantic allies signed the Military Assistance Pacts for the defense of Western Europe. A billion dollars in U.S. arms and equipment will soon be moving across the Atlantic. High military missions will be interchanged. This week the Pentagon will name the senior American officers who will supervise the program abroad.

The U.S.'s able, dogged Major General Lyman Lemnitzer had prodded and pushed MAP through Congress and the chancelleries of Europe. He had maneuvered it past an international minefield of patents (each country is now responsible to its citizens for payment of royalties) and a maze of different currencies (the Europeans have agreed to pay the expenses of American missions in local money).

Typical of the hazards was this passage in the U.S.-British agreement: "Fungible materials and minor items of equipment which are, for all practical purposes, fungible, shall be treated as such." Explained a bright young State Department lawyer to baffled Washington newsmen: "That's easy. You put grain into the top of a silo, you take grain out of the bottom of the silo. Grain is grain. What you put in and what you take out is fungible--interchangeable."

MAP's next big hurdle may be Communist strikes and sabotage on Europe's waterfronts when U.S. arms arrive. Lemnitzer sees an advantage for Allied defense in such obstruction. "Then," says he, "will be the easiest time to spot the Communists in any country. Everybody in Europe except the Communists is in favor of this program."

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