Foreign News: Smoke & No Fire

Military men and politicians had known all along that plans for Western Europe's defense made no sense unless they included a West German army. By last week Winston Churchill, Dean Acheson, U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had publicly indicated that some degree of German rearmament was in the cards. But despite all these wisps of smoke, there was no fire.

The North Atlantic Treaty deputies in London (see above) carefully avoided the subject. The Allied high commissioners in Germany had also kept it off their agenda. Result: when the Big Three Foreign Ministers meet in New York...