NATO or Disengagement

Huffing indignantly and pounding his bell for order, Bundestag President Eugen Gerstenmaier shouted: "I have received a telegram from a radio listener. It said, 'Stop this horrible spectacle.' " The horrible spectacle was last week's bitter foreign-policy debate.

When Chancellor Konrad Adenauer flew back from a Riviera vacation fortnight ago, he found that the feverish "Battle Against Atomic Death" had infected even his own ranks. Several leading Christian Democrats, including Foreign Policy Expert Kurt Georg Kiesinger, had been dreaming up all sorts of disengagement schemes, and the party leaders had decided to postpone the debate a week in the hope that Moscow would be mollified into making some kind of concession on German reunification. Der Alte testily ordered the debate back on schedule. To one colleague's disengagement pitch, the Chancellor snapped impatiently: "I'm interested in NATO, NATO and NATO."

Pale and frozen-faced, he solemnly told the Bundestag that the time for discussion with Moscow of German reunification had not yet come. Germany's best hope for security, he said, lies in NATO, and he called upon the country to shoulder its share of the burden of the alliance. Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss, just back from Washington with a preliminary U.S. agreement to provide Germany with up to seven U.S. destroyers and an indeterminate number of Matador missiles, was more blunt. "Do you want German soldiers," he asked, "to face a potential aggressor with weapons a thousand times less powerful?"

Emotionally, Socialist Fritz Erler charged that Strauss sounded just like Joseph Goebbels when he called on Germany to prepare for total war. "The government," shrilled Socialist Helene Wessel as the Christian Democrats hooted and hissed, "has more faith in the atomic bomb than in God."

"I was born in Leipzig," cried Free Democrat Wolfgang Doering. "Are you prepared to take upon yourself the political responsibility that in case of need German troops fire on, say Leipzig?" From the government benches, Christian Democrats erupted with howls of "Pfui!" The Socialists howled back: "Yes or no?"

In the resulting uproar President Gerstenmaier suspended the debate to allow inflamed tempers to cool. But the anti-atom neutralists would need more than time to find an answer to Defense Minister Strauss's unanswerable question: "Why are atomic weapons harmless in the hands of the Russians, and dangerous in the hands of the Germans?"

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