The Mutual Defence Assistance Programme: Reconstruction and Rearmament

Once the North Atlantic Treaty had been signed the United States Government had to decide how far it should go in realising the political commitment to its European partners implicit in the Treaty. It had undertaken, in Article 3, to exercise continuous self-help and mutual aid and to develop the individual and collective capacity of the North Atlantic Treaty states to resist armed attack. The key question in the Spring of 1949 was to what extent, if any, this tied the US to a programme of military assistance to Europe.