World: NATO: IN THE WAKE OF ILLUSION

When the ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization last met scarcely five months ago, it hardly seemed worth the trip to Iceland. As Secretary-General Manlio Brosio recalled before the ministers gathered last week in NATO's bleak new heaquarters outside Brussels: "Hopes for détente were so high that they tended to put in doubt the very necessity of a common alliance." That was not the mood in Brussels. In the interim between the semiannual sessions, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had shattered all illusions of an imminent accommodation with the Russians. Gone were...