A Time of Danger

Somewhere out of the desolate steppes of the Soviet Union a giant rocket roared off into space last week, putting the second Soviet satellite, which carried an experimental dog named Little Curly, into orbit more than 1,000 miles above earth. Sputnik II weighed 1,120.8 Ibs., six times the weight of Sputnik I, heavier than many types of nuclear warheads. The Soviet rocket generated a total thrust more than enough to power an atomic bomb to the moon (see SCIENCE), more than enough to power a missile around the earth. "The unfathomed natural processes going on in the cosmos," Moscow radio proclaimed, "will now become more understandable to man."

Within the crenelated Kremlin walls, a different drama had been enacted. There the Red Army's Marshal Georgy K. Zhukov, Hero of the Soviet Union, Defense Minister, the man who used the weight of the army to keep Nikita S. Khrushchev in power last summer, was stripped of his jobs and brainwashed (see FOREIGN NEWS). Khrushchev, clearly the dictator, master of what he could see, menaced by what he could not see, drank a champagne toast. "In life," he said, "one cell must die and another take its place. But life goes on."

In such an apocalyptic week Communism's new coalition of dazzling technology and cutthroat politics represented an epochal threat to the free world. After 40 years of Bolshevism, the operative words were still Lenin's "kto kovo?", meaning who shall eliminate whom.

In a sense, the U.S.'s good hope in the U.S.'s bad week was still that the internal pressures gnawing at Communism might yet give Dictator Khrushchev his share of trouble. But the U.S., repository of the free world's power as well as the free world's hope, cannot afford to stake the future upon the enemy's convulsions. The U.S. needs to reawaken to the whole sense of the struggle. Specifically, it needs to re-gear and speed its missile program, and to reshape its alliances with a far greater sense of urgency than Washington has thus far displayed.

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