Ironies of History

One of the most persistent myths in the current debate is that Washington unilaterally concocted the idea of deploying new missiles in Western Europe and imposed it on unwilling NATO allies. The Soviet Union has skillfully exploited this notion to feed an increasingly vocal West European peace movement. But the idea could not be more wrong. At every step along the way, Europeans have played an important and often decisive role in setting NATO policy on the new missiles. A retrospective look at the key stages in an ironic and frustrating chapter of Atlantic Alliance history:

>In October 1977, in an...