To Hang Together

"Great events are happening," said Winston Churchill, who knows a great event when he sees one. Churchill was talking of last week's decisions in the West's cold war against Communism. The North Atlantic Council in London made a decision that lifted the West's alliance off its neat, stiff treaty paper and pushed it toward organizational reality. The council's communique spoke of "the creation of balanced collective forces in the progressive buildup of the defense of the North Atlantic area . . ."

In simple English, that meant a military division of labor. Instead of all major North Atlantic Treaty nations trying to maintain self-sufficient armies, navies and air forces, each would eventually take on one main defense job for all (see below). The plan was more than an advance toward efficiency: it was an unprecedented step toward military interdependence among the allies which asserted beyond all solemn assurances that they would hang together. Said one U.S. observer: "If you can get the French to rely on the British navy for the defense of their shores, and the British to rely on French infantry to hold a common defense line on the Continent, then you are really getting somewhere."

Taken together with the Atlantic Council's decision to set up a joint cold war high command, and the Schuman proposal to pool French and German heavy industry (TIME, May 22), the new defense plan was the strongest impulse toward real union that the West's heart had felt.

Said Churchill: "Great events are happening and we must not allow the ceaseless clack and clatter which is the characteristic of our age to turn our minds from them. I still hope that the unity now being established among all the Western democracies and Atlantic powers will ward off from us the terror and unspeakable miseries of a third world war."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.