NATO: Emergency Call

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From somewhere southeast of Greenland came the crackle of an urgent radio message: "Being fired on by Orange surface raider. Inchcliffe Castle." With that alert from a famed but fictitious merchant vessel,* simulated hell broke loose in the North Atlantic. Out to punish the "aggressors," a six-nation Blue fleet totaling nearly 160 fighting ships began steaming toward Norway. In the Iceland-Faeroes gap, 36 Orange submarines, including the atom-powered 'Nautilus, lay in wait. The U.S. destroyer Charles R. Ware was "sunk"; a "torpedo" slowed down the carrier U.S.S. Intrepid, and H.M.S. Ark Royal had a hot time beating off the assaults of Britain-based Valiant jet bombers. But by early afternoon, Blue carrier planes got through to make dummy atom attacks on Norway's ports, bridges and airfields. Into the midst of this earnest make-believe strayed a Russian trawler-a real one. The Russian, being overtaken, had the right of way and held it, passing diagonally through the entire NATO fleet as the big ships refueled and moved beyond her.

Operation Strike Back is the first of half a dozen ambitious NATO maneuvers to be held in the next few weeks along a 5,000-mile arc stretching from northern Norway to southern Turkey. Operation Deep Water will see some 10,000 U.S. marines make a landing on the famed Gallipoli Peninsula, guarding the Dardanelles at Russia's back doorstep. Operation Counter Punch, in Central Europe, will call into action all NATO's air strength together with the national air-defense systems of Britain, France, Belgium and The Netherlands. All in all, more than 250,000 men, 300 ships and 1,500 aircraft are participating in the biggest maneuvers since World War II. Formidable as these forces sound, they do not satisfy NATO's Supreme Commander, blond, boyish-looking U.S. Air Force General Lauris Norstad. Last week, giving the top military brass of the 15 NATO nations a secret preview of the formal five-year plan that he will submit to NATO's permanent Council next month, Norstad stubbornly reiterated that if it is to be an effective shield against Soviet aggression in Europe NATO must have "about 30 divisions" in the line that runs from the Baltic to the Alps. A vast comedown from the 1952 vision of 97 divisions, Norstad's minimum goal is, even so, out of reach, and threatens to become more so, at a time when most Western nations (including the U.S.) are reducing the number of men under arms. NATO has at its immediate disposal in the central defense line only a bit over 18 divisions, five of them U.S.