U.S. to ask NATO to play global role

WASHINGTON -- The United States seeks to use the weekend NATO summit to elicit a commitment from alliance members to be prepared to engage in future conflicts outside their region, U.S. officials said.

Summit leaders will discuss an American initiative that will allow NATO to respond to threats of nuclear weapons or nonconventional terrorism from countries outside Europe or the United States, officials said. The initiative will develop joint logistics and improve interoperability command, control and communiciations facilities and develop detection of chemical and biological weapons.

"Those are problems outside the area of the NATO countries themselves," U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Internal Security Affairs Franklin Kramer said. "Those are problems where there will have to be attacks with precision guided munitions where the effort might have to be sustained and where there can be issues of survivability."

U.S. officials have warned that without implementation of these plans alliance members will be unable to fight alongside each other.

Kramer told a Pentagon news conference on Tuesday that alliance members will discuss the U.S. Defense Capabilities initiative, presented by Defense Secretary William Cohen in June and discussed informally in NATO in September. Kramer said the U.S. initiative seeks to focus on future threats to the alliance as well as the sort of missions it might conduct in the next few years.

NATO, Kramer said, might be called on to respond to terrorist attacks throughout the world. He envisioned a scenario where local authorities would provide the initial response followed by NATO forces.

"The approach is to have these initiatives give the alliance real world capabilities to, in fact, respond to problems of the future," Kramer said. "These would be the kinds of capabilities that would support the strategic concept. The focus is on what we're actually going to do and what we'll have the forces be ready to do."

At a separate briefing, Cohen said NATO views biological, chemical and nuclear weapons as a major threat and plans to establish a center for members to share intelligence.

"We will be sharing intelligence with all of our NATO allies," Cohen said, "so that we can, indeed, come to grips with the challenge and develop policies and tactics that will protect our population against weapons of mass destruction being used against them."