The Challenge for NATO

Four hours of work spread over two days will not move the leaders of the 16 nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization much closer to peace of mind in Europe.

But they might be able to start sketching out a strategy for continuing peace if they could get just a glimmer of agreement on where the “new thinking” of the Soviet Union is going and how NATO should respond to it.

The NATO summit meeting that begins today in Brussels is the first in six years. It certainly has one of the most difficult agendas since NATO was founded nearly 40 years ago to react as a unit to any attack on non-communist Europe. Almost from the first, NATO doctrine called for meeting any Soviet attack with nuclear weapons if Soviet forces were to break through Western European lines.

Now President Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev have agreed to break up all of their nuclear missiles with ranges of 300 to 3,000 miles. And Europe seems nervous about being shorn of medium-range American missiles that were deployed during 1979, even though the change means that Europe itself will be in the cross-hairs of far fewer Soviet missiles.

There are other undercurrents within NATO that make it hard for leaders of individual nations to know what to do next. The United States thinks, for example, that NATO’s first step now that the medium-range missiles are on their way out is to modernize short-range missiles not covered by the Reagan-Gorbachev agreement.

That might mean, for example, extending the range of older Lance nuclear missiles from 100 miles to 300 miles and trying to make them more accurate. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher supports improving the breed of nuclear missiles based in West Germany.

But NATO also needs to ask itself what kinds of targets it has in mind for short-range missiles. They cannot reach behind the front lines of Eastern Europe and shell concentrations of tanks and transportation centers as medium-range missiles could have done. Their crews could not spot targets at an extended range, and if the missiles are to be used to fire point-blank at targets, they don’t need the extra range.

The mission might better be performed by aircraft firing cruise missiles at targets from well behind the lines. If indeed such a mission is needed at all. Negotiators in Vienna still are trying to find a formula under which NATO and Warsaw Pact tanks, troops and tactical aircraft could be reduced to a point at which a successful attack would be out of the question and never would be attempted.

The West Germans figured out long ago that any nuclear missiles fired in or at Western Europe would probably land somewhere in Germany. That makes Gorbachev’s offer to move on to a treaty wiping out short-range missiles attractive to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. It was at least attractive enough for Kohl to ask the United States not to press modernization until an overall NATO strategy was worked out. Washington has agreed.

The Brussels meeting was Thatcher’s idea. She said some weeks ago that she wanted NATO to get together before Reagan signed any more nuclear-arms-control treaties to talk about where the alliance was going.

The first Western leader to say anything nice about Gorbachev, Thatcher said after their first meeting that the general secretary was a man with whom she could do business. In recent weeks she has been saying that “the nicer the Russians get, the more dangerous they are.” That is a good place for the leaders of the NATO nations to start. As a concept, they cannot go any further on a general strategy unless they accept the general premise of Thatcher’s assessment or reject it.