Document 4: Extract from Eisenhower-Spaak meeting, October 4, 1960.
Source: SS/ITM/5/NATO(6)[1959-1960]/DDEL; FRUS 1958-60, vol. 7, part 1, p.p. 638-642 for the sanitized version.

What is of greatest interest here is the passage, sanitized out of the version in FRUS, where Eisenhower states unambiguously that SACEUR would have the authority to order the NATO nuclear force into action. This passage was considered too sensitive for inclusion in FRUS even in the early 1990s, but it had been released when another copy of the document in a different file was declassified in 1979. This sort of thing is not uncommon; the report of Norstad's September 9, 1960, meeting with Adenauer in that same file, declassified in 1978, does not have a single deletion, but the version of the same document released in 1992 from the Norstad Papers, box 90, is very heavily sanitized. On the one hand, this reflects the arbitrariness of the declassification process, and also the fact that in government--especially in the U.S. government--the left hand often doesn't know what the right hand is doing; but it also means that it is possible, through extensive archival research, to come across documents that enable one to identify biases that are still at work in determining what gets released. As usual, the passage in red is the section deleted in FRUS.