No Arms for Europe

Secretary of State Acheson is pushing hard for an arms program to accompany his North Atlantic Pact. The hearings on the treaty will probably last until mid-May, with the vote on the arms program itself coming up around June. Until then Mr. Acheson should be in for a long fight. We hope he is unsuccessful.

The arms included under the new plan would be lend leased to the North Atlantic Treaty nations, --France, England, and the Benelux countries--and to "associated nations." About half of the equipment would come from U. S. World War II surplus stocks. The material would be tailored for use against a big land invader, specifically Russia, including jet-driven aircraft, modern artillery, and small arms; the countries receiving the material would probably lump their armed services under a single command such as General Montgomery's brand-new "Uniforce," although the U. S. would retain no control as to the material's final disposition or use. The equipment cost one-and-a-half billion dollars.

Three arguments have turned up most frequently in support of the program. A group of high officers, including General Omar N. Bradley, have been supporting it from a military angle, claiming that strengthening the treaty countries would give us European bridgehead in case of war, that "abandosing these countries with a promise of later liberation" is militarily unsound. Bradley and his colleagues believe that the arms aid could enable Western Europe to hold on until the U. S. could "funnel in forces."

The second argument, and the one which Mr. Acheson is emphasizing, is that the aid would promptly lift morale in the countries getting it. Recent events support his theory; when the arms question was first mentioned, representatives of most of the Western European nations enthusiastically applauded the idea, and appeared with polite requests for various amounts of military gear totaling something over three billion dollars. The most frequent supporting line for the program, however, has been that the new lend-lease will tie the North Atlantic Treaty nations into a solid defensive bloc; Walter Bedell Smith summed this up by claiming that "united strength clearly stated to the enemy ... through arms aid... is an antidote to fear."

None of these arguments is particularly impressive. It is very doubtful whether the strongest possible Western European forces could do much to slow down an invasion from the east; even a completely equipped "Uniforce" would be terribly overmatched by whatever the Russians threw against it. The "Bridgehead" concept is getting more and more antiquated as the pace of modern war picks up; military strategists like to think that if we must fight a war, we should be able to pick a better operating area than historically vulnerable Western Europe.

The other two arguments are basically one-sided. Morale may undoubtedly go up in the freshly-armed countries, but morale is a nebulous thing. Arms aid is certainly not the only morale-lifter, even if the recent moves of the U. S. towards committing itself to European military intervention, if only in case of war, have sent hopes climbing in the West. Furthermore, a lot of people think that some of the governments Acheson wants to arm don't warrant this elevated morale--that aid would be channeled into uses (such as the Dutch found for their equipment in Indonesia) which would be very far from the democratic ideals the Pact is supposed to reinforce.

And arms aid now would be a serious shock to direct Russian-American relations, which seem to be picking up slightly. Russia could probably find herself psychologically able to deal with a billion-and-a-half dollars worth of war material when it was controlled by one country 3000 miles, away; when distributed through a disjointed group of very conceivably irresponsible countries, 300 miles distant the guns and planes can be both inflammatory and an efficient block to negotiation. It is pretty shortsighted to entirely rule out possible negotiations designed to case Russian and American tension. If we deposit a huge mass of uncontrolled arms in Europe it would do probably do exactly this.

Until now, European aid has been mostly economic, rather than military; things should remain this way. There is a great, if psychological, difference between guns and steel. There is a difference between the commitment to help nations when they are attacked, and their indiscriminate arming prior to such attack. The only possible justification for a Western European arms aid program might be a military one, and the military argument is invalid. Outside of this, neither the solidarity of the North Atlantic nations nor the general international situation requiring this solidarity warrants such a program.