The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

THE old argument whether men make history or history makes men is illuminated once again in the discussion here and abroad about the exchange of visits by President Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Khrushchev. Marxists are convinced that economics governs history, but Americans reject this dialectical materialism. Economics is indeed important, we say, but man has a choice, though sometimes limited, and a nation can be the master of its fate if it has the will and wise leaders.

Probably Khrushchev and his Kremlin associates view the visits as demonstrating the truth of Marx’s analysis of history. For it is undeniable, though the Administration does not like to concede it, that Khrushchev got his way by his use of the Berlin crisis as a lever against Eisenhower. Khrushchev has been aiming for the last two years, at least, at a Big Two meeting with the President. We did not know the exact circumstances which led him to create the Berlin issue last November, but there is little doubt about the basis of this challenge to the West.

Louis J. Halle, a former member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, recently stated: “In the politics of power, an international arrangement is legitimate only as long as it accurately reflects the relative power of the participants. When the power relationship changes, then the arrangement itself must be correspondingly changed. Our continued presence in Berlin is no longer legitimate and acceptable to Moscow because it no longer reflects the realities of power as Moscow estimates them. Legal agreements have nothing to do with the matter. In Moscow’s eyes we should now acknowledge the power realities by getting out of Berlin.”

If one understands this view of Soviet thinking, then it is not at all difficult to understand why Khrushchev kept Foreign Minister Gromyko sitting on a block of ice all through the ten weeks of the Geneva ministers’ conference. Under Soviet reasoning, the West would have to yield in the end because the power realities have shifted. In the end the West did yield, not on Berlin itself, but by agreeing to Khrushchev’s demand for a BigTwo meeting with Eisenhower. It did so because this was the only way, in Washington’s view, to keep the Berlin issue from erupting into possible war.

Both the President and the Premier have disclaimed any idea that they will be negotiating during their exchange of visits. Both have taken the public precaution to consult their allies in advance. But Khrushchev will not be satisfied until he gets his way in Berlin. He may not expect to get it while he is in the United States; Communist doctrine is not hidebound by a time schedule in the sense that Hitler was in his day. But it is hidebound in its belief in the inevitable.

The balance of terror

Vice President Nixon returned from his own trip to the Soviet Union with a conviction that one thing is paramount: to persuade Khrushchev and his associates that the United States has the military power and productivity to defeat any Soviet aggressive move and the will and determination to use that strength. This is a conviction long held by many Soviet experts in Washington. The real problem is not just to demonstrate our current strength but to keep that strength developing in a way comparable to the Russian power, so that the balance of terror is maintained.

It will be necessary to persuade Khrushchev that the United Stales has the will and determination to which Nixon refers. There is not only a doctrinaire Communist belief that capitalism inevitably must decay but a companion belief that the mass of the people will not in the long run support a capitalist government. Khrushchev already knows that the United States is not collapsing as fast as Marx might have expected, but he doubtless believes that unemployment, strikes, poverty are all symptoms of an eventual collapse. His problem is to time his own pressures on the United States to coincide with the downward curve of American power which he expects. Our problem is to convince Khrushchev to slow down his time schedule.

Khrushchev’s tactic

Khrushchev’s tactic is to say over and over, as he has long been saying, that the West must accept the realities and abide by what he calls the status quo. If only we do this, he says, we can have peaceful coexistence for the indefinite future. Implicit in this line is the appeal to one of the great American illusions: the belief in settlements with the Soviets. Americans tend to have the baseballgame philosophy — they want to go home to dinner knowing what was the final score. Unhappily, the East-West game is not that precise.

There has been much speculation but no real evidence about what Khrushchev really wants to talk about with the President, be it in bilateral conversations in Washington or Moscow or at a Summit conference. Two subjects are most likely: a lessening of tensions through American acceptance of the status quo, and some disarmament agreement which would permit the Kremlin to put more resources into its economic plans to catch up with and surpass the United States. In terms of the Soviet national interest as Khrushchev sees it, both aims are the same — to hasten the day when Russia is the world’s number-one power, and thereby the day when Communism will dominate the world, probably without a nuclear war.

Both of these issues are difficult to resolve. The President is determined to stand fast in Berlin, though the American proposals at Geneva showed that his “ we don’t budge an inch” posture in that beleaguered city is subject to some modification. Nixon’s warm public reception in Poland has doubled the resolve of the Administration to do nothing which would accept as final today’s satellite status for eastern Europe, though “ liberation” in the 1952-Republican-platform sense long ago disappeared from the Washington scene.

It is not impossible, if Khrushchev does find the United States to be more determined than he expected, that the Kremlin will agree to let the present situation in West Berlin continue more or less indefinitely, or at least until the “realities of power as Moscow estimates them” have changed even further in Moscow’s favor.

Nuclear disarmament?

Disarmament discussions, at least as old as the League of Nations era, have been carried on in the nuclear age with considerable seriousness since the spring of 1955. There have been across-theboard attempts, and there have been efforts to negotiate piece by piece — notably the nuclear test ban discussions. The complexities are immense, with the only certain factor being that scientific changes in the weapons field constantly run ahead of the statesmen’s efforts to cope with them.

The two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, share a common interest in blunting or eliminating the ability of each other to strike a devastating nuclear blow. They also share a common interest in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to smaller nations, whose use of them might somehow involve the big powers against their wills and bring on a war by mistake.

The possibility of war by miscalculation has been a major argument in Washington, at least, for a nuclear test ban, since testing is vital to the development of a nuclear arsenal for any new nuclear power which enters the field on its own, as in the case of France. But America’s allies, chiefly those in NATO, have time and again vetoed any exclusively nuclear curb, on the grounds that to remove any substantial part of the West’s nuclear deterrence would be to lay western Europe open to the massive Red army with its much larger manpower and modernized conventional weapons. Thus, the disarmament road is likely to remain long and rocky.

It is probable, in the view of Washington observers, that any general agreement would have to follow, not precede, a nuclear test agreement.

There has been considerable progress toward agreement in the many months of talks with the Russians at Geneva since the President announced his one-year moratorium on tests, which began last October 31. As the Geneva talks between the Americans, Russians, and British have approached the possibility of agreement, however, opposition to a total ban has mounted in Washington. This is true both with the Eisenhower Administration and among the powerful members of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy. The Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission, although formally backing the Eisenhower proposals at Geneva, have in fact been undercutting the total ban idea with some powerful lobbying.

For a long time the anti-ban argument centered on the thesis that it would halt the development of small nuclear weapons, which alone could be a match for Russian military manpower in less than all-out wars, and of so-called “clean” bombs in the larger ranges as well. In addition, the anti-ban group has charged that the Russians could hide their tests deep underground and thereby gain in nuclear development at our expense. Nonetheless, the President has kept alive the Geneva negotiations, if only because of the worry over radioactive fall-out.

New data on the clean bomb

Recently a new element was introduced in the argument. The Washington Post reported that there is now being discussed a radically new type of atomic weapon, a bomb which would produce as much mankilling radiation as a large-megaton hydrogen weapon, yet have the destructive blast of a small weapon and the radioactive fall-out of an even smaller one. Work on this weapon, under the project names of Dove and Starling, is being carried out at the University of California’s Radiation Laboratory at Livermore. The head man there is Edward Teller, the nuclear scientist who has been most vocal against a test ban and who is the leading proponent of the clean bombs.

If the theory involved proves correct, the new bomb will deliver a lethal dose of radiation to a distance of one mile (about the range of the 20-kiloton Hiroshima atomic bomb), yet produce far less damage and only about one thousandth of the total fall-out. The small fall-out is due to a fission-type trigger, reportedly only one tenth of one per cent of the total size of the bomb, compared to about 5 per cent in the case of a hydrogen bomb.

The point here, aside from what could be an important weapon in both strategic and tactical terms, is that tests of such weapons would be more easily concealed. Naturally, it is assumed that the Russians are capable of the same approach as is involved in the Dove and Starlingprojects.

Whether or not these projects materialize, they are illustrative of the way in which science keeps the politicians off balance. The United States has tried at the Geneva test ban talks to get the Russians to consider new data developed from the American series of underground tests held last year in Nevada. The Soviet response has been to refuse on dual grounds: that the new data was put forward only to wreck the test ban talks, and that even if the data is meaningful in terms of the inspection and control problem, as the United States claims, it can be considered by the control organization after it is set up by an East-West agreement.

The yeast of change

A word should be said about the possible gains of the United States and the West should the Khrushchev and Eisenhower visits bring a new modus vivendi. Part of the price, perhaps the main price Khrushchev has had to pay for the Nixon and Eisenhower visits was a considerable raising of the Iron Curtain. It is a risky thing for the Kremlin to permit a flow of American attitudes and ideas into the information-hungry Soviet mind. It may be true that public opinion in Russia has little influence on the Kremlin. But what Dulles used to term “ the yeast of change” is certainly at work in the Soviet Union, and public opinion cannot be totally ignored. Soviet public opinion seems clearly opposed to foreign adventures by the Red army, adventures which become less convincing the more Soviet citizens hear of the other side of the East-West issues, regardless of the degree of their own belief in Communism.

Change is afoot all over the world. Much of the American problem is that the Administration, and its predecessor as well, has not sufficiently recognized this. The Eisenhower - Khrushchev talks represent an encouraging effort to cope with some of the changes, and therefore the outcome could be critical for world peace.