The Atlantic alliance has rarely manifested a marked proclivity towards sacrificing the dynamics of internal debate for the cosmetic satisfaction of unblemished cohesion, yet the current crisis in the Western camp, which in scope as well as intensity threatens both the conceptual and structural underpinnings of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato), has persuaded many observers that this time the wolf is real. A decade after the Year of Europe pitted the United States against its European allies on issues touching political, economic, and defence policy, the Year of the Missiles involves questions which go to the heart of Western security in the wake of the collapse of detente and the atmospherics of a new cold war between the superpowers. The matters at issue are not fundamentally new, but they have been exacerbated by the United States administration's overriding commitment to rebuild and reassert American power, and by its vocal concern with the Soviet threat. The modernization of nato's intermediaterange nuclear forces (inf), the first of which are scheduled to be deployed at the end of 1983 in several European countries, has become a focus of Soviet propaganda, a test of alliance solidarity, and a matter of acute domestic political concern in virtually every nato member-state.