Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
- 3. Evolution of the Treaty Organization
- a. NATO Develops Rapidly
NATO rapidly acquired institutions.[1] The treaty entered into force in August, 1949. By September, a Military Committee, a Standing Group, and the Regional Planning Groups had been created. By November a Financial and Economic Board and a Military Production and Supply Board had been set up. By December agreement had been reached on a strategic concept for the integrated defense of the NATO area. A year later a centralized command and control structure was formulated, becoming operational as SHAPE on 2 April 1951, with headquarters in the old Hotel Astoria, in Paris. Spurred on by the events occurring in Korea, NATO was further simplified and streamlined in the Ottawa meeting of September 1951, where a Temporary Council Committee chaired by W. Averell Harriman was set up. This became a permanent council, in March, 1952, a month after the accession of Greece and Turkey to the pact.39 In the wake of a major setback when the French Assembly refused to ratify the European Defense Community (EDC) proposal in August, 1954, the Paris Agreements were pushed through in October, providing for the accession of West Germany to NATO, and the establishment of a combined field command.[2] Early in 1956 the NATO Council appointed a Committee of Three Ministers (Martino of Italy, Lange of Norway, and Pearson of Canada) to study ways that further cooperation could be achieved within NATO. The report of this Committee was approved by the Council on 14 December, 1956. Consultation within NATO was to become "an integral part of the making of national policy."40 The meeting of 16–19 December 1957 of the NATO Council included the heads of government, with Eisenhower and Macmillan. This meeting symbolized the significance which all the NATO countries attached to the pact — and it was this sense of meaningfulness, commonality, and necessity, more than the terms of the North Atlantic Treaty, that accounted for the rapid organizational growth.
- b. SEATO Unstructured by U.S. Preference
The Manila Conference eventuated in a pact termed the "Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty and Protocol Thereto, September 8, 1954"; the treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 82 to 1, and entered into force on February 19, 1955.41 The history of the development of SEATO thereafter is quite different from NATO's, since the initial policy of the U.S. was to discourage, rather than to assist, the evolution of a permanent structure. SEATO military staff
- ↑ Appendix B, Organizational Charts
- ↑ In the same month — October, 1954 — the Warsaw Pact came into being.
