Toward Paris

On State Department calendars one date--December 16--was looming up with the speed of light. On that day Dwight Eisenhower is scheduled to be in Paris for the unprecedented meeting of NATO chiefs of government, an outgrowth of the ringing call for NATO "interdependence" in defense and scientific research, issued by the President and Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan at their meeting last month in Washington. Yet every passing day seemed to bring more complications than solutions; last week State Department technicians were putting in 14-hour days, and Secretary John Foster Dulles' week was a blur of policy sessions, press conferences, meetings with NATO visitors.

High on the list of the U.S.'s Paris aims is a start toward the far-reaching decision to supply NATO partners with intermediate-range ballistic missiles as soon as the U.S. has any to deliver (TIME, Nov. 25). That enormous undertaking is complicated by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which bars the U.S. from turning over nuclear arms to foreign nations in peacetime. At his press conference last week, Dulles confirmed that by present law the U.S. would have to keep nuclear warheads for NATO missiles under its own "technical custody." But the U.S. could deliver missiles without warheads to allies. "In the event of war," said Dulles, the President could, under his war powers, order the warheads turned over to the U.S.'s allies in the conflict.

"The U.S. is not going to force missiles on anybody who doesn't want them," said Dulles, but it is his belief that most want them. Then he added, touching on an area that is bound to require sharper definition in Paris: "There would be a considerable measure of allied participation in the handling of these missiles."

Veto Power? Among Dulles' grittiest pre-Paris problems is France's anger at the U.S. and Britain for sending arms to pro-Western Tunisia a fortnight ago. With French rancor so strong that it threatened to stuff up the atmosphere at the Paris meeting, Foreign Minister Christian Pineau flew to Washington last week and talked over with Dulles ways and means of keeping Western arms delivered to Tunisia from getting into the hands of rebels in neighboring Algeria.

At week's end another NATO foreign minister, West Germany's Heinrich von Brentano, arrived in Washington fresh from Rome to discuss plans for the NATO meeting. With him he brought a German-Italian proposal that NATO members commit themselves to consultation with the other allies before carrying out any major policy decision. Since this seemed to imply a veto power over any U.S. decision to retaliate instantly if attacked, Dulles turned it down, pointed out that the U.S. cannot unconditionally commit itself to advance consultation, thereby curbing presidential power to act quickly in a crisis.

Veto Power? Neither Foreign Minister Pineau nor Foreign Minister Von Brentano got half as much attention from the State Department press corps as Democrat Adlai Stevenson, arriving to take part in preparations for the Paris meetings. Dulles greeted Stevenson warmly in the fifth-floor diplomatic reception room, ushered him into his office for a 90-minute discussion, then gave him the office across the hall, normally occupied by Counselor G. Frederick Reinhardt.

Emerging later before a press-corps multitude, Stevenson quipped: "This is a very big gathering for a very little statement." Then he outlined warily his new role as a symbol of foreign-policy bipartisanship: "I will review and discuss the proposals [for the NATO meetings] and give the Secretary my advice. Those I agree on, I will support as actively as possible. If I disagree, I will say so."

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