The Beeper's Message

As Sputnik whirled serenely overhead, a startled world looked at Russia with new respect.

Part of the reaction was based on the presumption that if the Soviets could launch Sputnik, they had an intercontinental missile, or at least were ahead in the development of one. That presumption was far from an established fact. "Five hundred and sixty miles is only the distance from Bonn to Vienna," growled West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. "It does not prove they can fire anything parallel to the earth over a distance of many thousand miles." And even if Sputnik did imply Russian possession of an early version of an ICBM, the balance of atomic superiority still lay with the U.S. "The threat of devastation still hangs heavy over the Soviet head, derived from the ring of bomber bases. We know nothing to suggest that Sputnik or anything like it can stop such potential destruction," said a British foreign-policymaker.

Thanks to those bases and to a superior nuclear arsenal, the U.S. has always before been in a position to inflict what NATO's General Lauris Norstad once called "absolute" destruction on Russia. This capacity--the ability to smash Russia from close up and hence to destroy her more thoroughly than she could hope to destroy the U.S.--has been the ultimate deterrent to Russian military adventures. If the day of an ICBM standoff and of equal capacity for destruction is now dawning, new force will be given to Stalin's dictum to Roosevelt at Yalta: "Neither of us wants war, but our strength is that you fear it more." Protected--at least in their own mind--by the umbrella of U.S. fear, the Soviets might well succumb to the temptation to test American resolution with brushfire wars against the weaker, and more vulnerable outposts of the free world.

That Left-Out Feeling. Even if the Russians should resist this temptation, the prospect of a U.S.-Soviet ICBM standoff gave Europeans a nervous, left-out feeling. "The two big boys," said an official of West Germany's Defense Ministry, "must in the very nature of the situation lift their eyes and look straight across at one another, not noticing the in-betweens like ourselves so much. The arrival of long-range rockets implies the devaluation of American bases abroad and hence the downgrading of places like Germany. As a concomitant, one must assume less interest in such suddenly smaller problems as German reunification."

What was immediate and sure was the beeper's psychological impact. In many quarters U.S. discomfiture was greeted with open glee. RUSSIANS RIP AMERICAN FACE, headlined Bangkok's Sathiraphab, and in Beirut a university professor said wryly of his Arab students: "You would have thought they launched it themselves." But nowhere was the beeper's impact so ominous as in the neutral nations of Afro-Asia, where hundreds of millions of uncommitted minds waver between East and West. Its message, said the London Economist last week, was a simple one: "We Russians, a backward people ourselves less than a lifetime ago, can now do even more spectacular things than the rich and pompous West--thanks to Communism." Nothing could have struck more dramatically at the U.S.'s proud claim of technological and productive superiority for a free economic society. "I always thought America and Russia were equal in strength." mused one Indonesian. "Now it seems that the Russians are stronger."

Missing Pots. More sober comment came from such thoughtful Europeans as Thierry Maulnier. who wrote in Le Figaro: "The Russian people can ... see in the sky a brilliant star which carries above the world the light of Soviet power, thanks to millions of pots and shoes lacking." And France's Combat pointedly declared: "We ourselves would like it if the Russians would put some of their pride into the evolution of a better world --an end to the world of concentration camps."

Though this was true and reasonable, it did not alter the overriding fact that among the world's uncommitted nations, the Russians had scored heavily. How long that advantage lasted depended on how quickly the West could rally its wits, energy and resourcefulness to produce an effective counter to that whizzing thing up in the sky.

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