Disarmament & Brass Tacks

Into John Foster Dulles' fifth-floor office in the State Department, and onto the Dulles carpet, walked Presidential Disarmament Adviser Harold Stassen. Preceding Stassen was a sheaf of crackling cables from U.S. embassies in Western Europe. Stassen, the complaint ran, had pulled a diplomatic blooper, and the European allies were miffed. The blooper: Stassen, after promising Western partners that he would consult with them before making any specific disarmament proposals to the Russians, had launched into private talks with Russia's disarmament representative, Valerian Zorin (architect of the Russian takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948).

In the course of discussing technical questions, Stassen had handed Zorin an informal working paper which detailed a highly tentative U.S. proposal for setting up zones of aerial inspection, one of which included Western Europe. When British and French diplomats--to say nothing of the apprehensive West Germans--heard of this, they were quick to file complaints.

Something Special. Both the President and Dulles were wroth, because in trying to guard against Childe Harold's famous flights of fancy, they had given him specific written instructions on how to proceed. Summoned home, he got no table-pounding from Dulles, but was sharply admonished to obey orders. Moreover he was told pointedly that Veteran State Department Careerman Julius Holmes, onetime second man in the London embassy, would soon join him as an adviser.

Next day John Foster Dulles publicly avowed in his press conference that the U.S. was not playing solo. The disarmament discussions, he said, are not "just between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. And we are not going to throw into the discard the views of our allies merely in the interest of making progress on a bilateral basis with the Soviet Union."

At the same time, the size and shape of the Stassen problem symbolized something special about the U.N.-sponsored disarmament talks now going on in London. Disarmament, as a subject of debate, appears now a little down out of the clouds and more in the realm of political give and take. And in this atmosphere it will have the best chance to date of proving whatever promise it may have. If Western European governments were edgy about Stassen's private meetings with Zorin, they stood firm and tough in the face of Russian-inspired propaganda on the horrors of the H-bomb. The President of the U.S. was hopeful enough about the disarmament talks to make them a major effort of his Administration, and he felt tough enough about them to fight for the biggest peacetime defense budget in U.S. history.

Something New. When he flew back to the talks in London, Harold Stassen found that this hard-bargaining atmosphere had borne some interesting results. From Russia's Zorin came a proposal for a two-to three-year ban on nuclear tests, and, for the first time, an agreement--in principle at least--to the longstanding, unchanging U.S. demands for mutual inspection. During the atomic-test ban, Zorin explained, an international commission would man control posts in the U.S.S.R., Britain, the U.S. and new testing grounds in the Pacific, maintain a constant scientific watch on atom tests, report infractions to the United Nations. The proposal raised as many questions as it answered--did Zorin mean what he said, would inspection stations be permanent or mobile, could they be expanded to include air policing? And, overall, how did all this fit in with Khrushchev's public ridicule of U.S. disarmament proposals to date? Nonetheless the proposal had a certain bargaining ring about it.

The official U.S. position is that it will not budge unless it can get first-step acceptance of a package proposal that includes limitation of nuclear weapons production with effective inspection, some sort of open-skies agreement, and a cutback in conventional arms and manpower. But as a bargaining answer to Zorin, the U.S. could conceivably, as the New York Herald Tribune's Correspondent Marguerite Higgins reported, agree to a ten-month suspension of weapons tests (but not of missile development), since this would not seriously interfere with U.S. or British test plans and would give the Soviets a chance to prove what they mean by inspection.

Many a U.S. hand wringer wailed that Zorin's proposals had given Russia a propaganda victory. But the hand wringers missed a key point: in the ten-year U.S. attempt to get some kind of workable atomic control, the Russians had for the first time been brought down to bargaining level, where their proposals could be measured, not in terms of propaganda, but in terms of workability.

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