The Berlin Crisis Intensifies

Abstract

This crisis over Berlin sparked Norstad to consider how best to coordinate NATO plans and policy in a situation in which the “rights” were non-NATO in origin, even though the “responsibilities” had become SACEUR’s. As recalled in the previous chapter, the three “Occupying Powers” — the US, the UK, and France — were still in Berlin by right of conquest. The other member-states of NATO had no direct involvement in the evolution of the status of Berlin stemming from the Yalta Declaration to its de facto partitioning.² Consequently, in February 1959 Norstad directed the establishment at Headquarters USEUCOM of a “small concealed US only group as nucleus for any tripartite staff he might have to form.”³

The Berlin Crisis was in fact one of the most important episodes in the history of great power politics in the nuclear age.¹