The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

A SUBTLE change in political approach is evident in the Administration. There is less boasting, less attempt to blame troubles on previous Democratic regimes. Instead there is restrained emphasis on the positive steps being taken to deter aggression abroad and to counter subversion at home. As one critic puts it, the Eisenhower Administration now is ready to concede that history did not begin on January 20, 1953.

The more moderate approach first became evident in the efforts by Secretary Dulles to soothe the anxieties aroused by his speech on “massive retaliatory power.”It gave rise to the fear that the only war the United States would be prepared to fight was of the all-out variety. Such was the concern, both in foreign capitals and in Congress, that Dulles was forced to explain that his concept does not rule out the possibility of keeping local wars limited.

President Eisenhower’s folksy report to the people in April showed similar moderation. For almost the first time in a televised speech it was possible to believe that the real Eisenhower was speaking. Absent were the polished phrases, the slick advertising agency veneer. Eisenhower spoke in simple homilies, from cued notes, about the fears gripping the country. He made indirect but unmistakable reference to McCarthyism in a plea for perspective On the problem of internal security, praising the work of the FBI in keeping tabs on the “25,000 doctrinal Communists.”

Much the same line was taken by Attorney General Brownell in his follow-up. His balanced and nonpolitical account of the steps taken by the Department of Justice against subversives was in marked contrast to his partisan charges that infuriated the Democrats last fall.

Several reasons may be ascribed for the more mature attitude of the Administration. For one thing, it represents an attempt by Eisenhower, a man of moderation who dislikes flamboyance, to take the play away from McCarthy and Communism by stressing the positive accomplishments of the Administration. The President is aware that if McCarthyism should be the main issue in the fall elections, his own program would be lost.

The Administration needs the help of the Democrats to get any substantial part of its program enacted. The Democrats have shown on several occasions that they really control the Senate. They have remained miffed at Brownell for his slur on former President Truman. They also complain, with considerable justification, that much of the hysteria the President and his associates are now trying to quiet was whipped up in the first place by the exaggerated charges of Administration spokesmen about Communist infiltration and security risks in government.

An example of the Democratic attitude toward Brownell was seen in the House action on the bill to legalize wire tapping in cases involving the national security. The Administration sought approval of a bill which would have permitted the use of wire-tap evidence if the wire tap had been approved by the Attorney General. But the House reversed the field and accepted a Democratic substitute which required that wire taps be approved in each instance by a Federal judge.

In part, the substitute bill represented an attempt to write more safeguards into the use of wire tapping. But in part it also represented a vote against Brownell, who is mistrusted bitterly by such men as Minority Leader Sam Rayburn for the attempts to pin the “treason" label on the Democrats. It is this wound that the Administration is trying to heal.

No place to hide

World alarm over the hydrogen bomb has been accompanied in Washington by a profound reexamination of policy and strategy. One result of these deliberations has been to elevate the position of Civil Defense Administrator Val Peterson, who has had difficulty getting anyone to pay attention to him, to one of tremendous national importance. The advent of weapons which can pulverize a city the size of New York means, among other things, that many civil defense concepts are outmoded and perhaps useless. Bomb shelters, for example, would afford little protection in the area of impact. Yet any plan to evacuate cities upon warning of impending attack would create almost as many problems as it would solve. The traffic jams, as well as the problems of providing food, housing, and medical care for millions of refugees, would be staggering. One alternative to evacuation — dispersal of industry and population— is feasible on a limited scale. But it would take years to achieve and would be fantastically costly if applied wholesale.

The threat is not limited to attack from the air. In some respects authorities are more worried about attacks from enemy submarines. The Soviet Union is known to have a large fleet of late-model submarines. Hence the drastic emphasis being placed by the Navy on submarine detection and antisubmarine warfare. Steps also have been taken by the FBI to alert the public to the possibility that enemy agents may smuggle in small atomic bombs in suitcases.

But any nation launching an H-bomb attack can be sure that its opponent would retaliate sufficiently to devastate its own cities. Inasmuch as Russia is known to have hydrogen weapons of its own, the major deterrent consists, not of superior numbers of weapons, but of the sure knowledge that hydrogen war would be horrible beyond description.

Quite apart from the strategic considerations, the reaction to the Pacific H-bomb tests has brought some soulsearching in Washington. Not much attention is paid the complaints from other countries that the United States should not have opened this Pandora’s box; the feeling is that Russia would have gone ahead with her own H-bomb program irrespective of what this country did. But the advent of the H-bomb has made scientifically practicable the far more deadly cobalt bomb, which would use an H-bomb core with an outer casing of cobalt. Fragments of radioactive cobalt could so poison the atmosphere that, in the estimate of Dr. Leo Szilard, 400 C-bombs could wipe out all life on carth.

Slopping the armaments race

With such cataclysmic weapons in the picture both in this country and in the Soviet Union, the moral problem has become indistinguishable from the practical problem. The question is how to stop the race before the world itself is destroyed. There is widespread, if neurotic, feeling in other countries — because of the peculiar combination of secrecy and publicity on the Pacific H-bomb tests — that the United States is in large part responsible for pushing the world to the brink

Chairman Lewis L. Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission did his best to emphasize that the United States had not acted irresponsibly in the Pacific tests. Despite the misfortune of the Japanese fishermen and the contamination of their haul, Strauss pointed out that safety precautions had been announced, that there was no general poisoning of fish, and that the explosion was not out of control

Nevertheless, the damage was done. In Asia, particularly, there is a lingering belief that the United States used the atom bomb against Japan instead of Nazi Germany for reasons of racial prejudice. The belief has been fanned assiduously by the Communists, and the mishap in the Pacific was a windfall to Soviet propaganda. Strauss himself agreed privately with criticisms that the Administration had badly underestimated the political and psychological effects of the tests.

Strauss and security

Strauss is often regarded, because of his previous record as a member of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1946 to 1950, as a champion of secrecy and censorship. The 58-yearold Strauss, a onetime secretary to Herbert Hoover during the World War I relief operation, was a partner in the investment banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company before donning a rear admiral’s uniform in the Second World War. In his previous service on the AEC he was noted for two things: his advocacy of the H-bomb project and his opposition to the export of radioisotopes to other countries for medical purposes. A witty and urbane conversationalist, Strauss always steers the talk away from atomic energy matters

Yet he asserts that he has done more to expand public information about atomic energy than his predecessors, and the record bears him out. Last fall he discovered a provision in the McMahon Act whereby more nonmilitary information could be exchanged with Britain and Canada, and he was instrumental in pressing on Congress the revision of the law to make possible the exchange of information with our allies about the tactical use and effects of atomic weapons.

Strauss remains acutely conscious of security considerations. It was he who made the initial determination that the record of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the nuclear physicist, necessitated a review. Some critics saw in this reopening of the case after previous clearances an attempt by the Administration to buy off Senator McCarthy. There were widespread reports as long as a year ago that McCarthy intended to exploit the Oppenheimer case.

Yet there is little disposition in the Administration to credit McCarthy’s innuendoes about “traitors” delaying the H-bomb. The delay was about four months, not the eighteen McCarthy alleged. A substantial number of reputable scientists, among them Dr. James B. Conant, opposed the H-bomb “crash” program in the fall of 1949 out of fear that it would divert fissionable materials and engineering talent from the A-bomb and would waste precious time if it were a fizzle.

A majority of the Atomic Energy Commission opposed the project, as did the present chairman of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Representative W. Sterling Cole. Most members of the Congressional committee, however, disagreed with the scientists and the AEC. and Senator Brien McMahon and Representative Carl T. Durham took the matter to President Truman. With the support of Dean Acheson and Louis Johnson, Truman on January 31, 1950, ordered the commission to proceed with the H-bomb.

Progressive disarmament?

This is now history, but the problem of H-bomb control is very much in the present. It is plain that this country cannot now hope to obtain approval of the Baruch Plan for international ownership of fissionable materials. But neither can the free world accept the Soviet proposal for the outlawing of only atomic weapons. This would leave Europe, for example, at the mercy of superior Soviet manpower and conventional weapons.

The United States and its allies have gone too far with the “New Look” — which is not to be confused with massive retaliation — to turn back. The essential meaning of the New Look is that the country is relying heavily on atomic artillery and tactical atomic weapons to save manpower and increase the versatility of the armed forces.

Hence there is recognition that control efforts will have to be directed toward progressive disarmament in all weapons, conventional as well as nuclear, with the possible outlawing of certain specific types. The problem is at once military and diplomatic and moral. A powerful international program of atomic energy for peaceful purposes might be the irresistible magnet that would reverse the trend.

Mood of the Capital

The Administration has vacillated between an unreal optimism about the war in Indochina and near-panic over the course of battle. Secretary Dulles’s efforts to promote a tennation Southeast Asia security pact were both an attempt to talk tough before the Geneva Conference and an attempt to clothe in collective responsibility actions he thought might be necessary. The tough talk also was directed at preventing undue concessions by France at Geneva.

Dulles handled the question of recognition of Communist China with great skill in his appearances before Congress. He soothed fears that China might be recognized as part of a deal over Korea and Indochina, but at the same time he left the door to eventual recognition distinctly open. Dulles believes that the threat of expanded war is what brought the truce in Korea. He sought to apply the same stratagem to the Indochina war.

“Who lost China?” was a powerful political accusation which the Administration understandably is anxious to forestall in Indochina. The risk in the Administration’s plans lies in the possibility that the Communists will conclude that the countermeasures are flimsy and will decide to call our bluff.