Leading from Strength

With that age-old feminine talent for ferreting out secrets, mothers, wives and girl friends orbiting around the U.S. Missile Test Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla. got the word one day last week that it was testing time for another big one. All week explosions had been going off all over the world--the U.S. A-bomb tests in Nevada, the British H-bomb tests on Christmas Island in the Pacific--and Cape Canaveral was about to put on the most up-to-date performance of them all. Would it be the first test of the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile? Or one of the little ones? Near Cocoa, Cocoa Beach, Melbourne and Rockledge, the lady watchers came out on the public beaches munching picnic lunches, and casually waited for the answer.

Only Jupiter. At 1:07 Friday afternoon a pure-white missile, its bottom spitting flame, soared into the blue sky. "Well, I'll tell you," one woman said disappointedly, "that wasn't the big one. I'm sure of that." She was right; it was only the Army's Jupiter, designed to carry a nuclear warhead a mere 1,500 miles.

Just as casual, just as relaxed, was U.S. Diplomat Harold Stassen as he strode around London and Paris last week. His job was to negotiate some sort of agreement with the Russians on disarmament, so that A-bombs, H-bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles in Florida might some day become less necessary. Europe's headlines followed him about in friendly fashion ("OUTLOOK--PEACEFUL"). Even his colleagues in Washington--long put out because of his passion for headlines-- were now looking upon him with a less jaundiced eye. Harold Stassen was keeping a tight lip and competently going about negotiations as delicate as any in U.S. history: to see whether the Russians are indeed willing to take a concrete, self-enforcing first step toward the reduction of arms.

Only Trust. Amid all the casualness and general relaxation there were still some notable dangers abroad. One was that a new deal on disarmament might set a trend toward coexistence in Europe, i.e., accepting the division of Germany and the Russian conquest of the satellites as "a finality." Another danger was that Britain's decision to sell strategic goods to Red China might set a trend toward co-existence in Asia, i.e., recognition and respectability for Red China, a thought that the State Department speedily squashed (see below). But looming over the dangers was the fact that in the area of disarmament the Western world trusted the President of the U.S. not to get bogged down in Communist traps, and Eisenhower seemed to be justifying that trust.

The best way the U.S. can negotiate with the Russians is from strength, he told congressional leaders one day last week, adding flatly that this is therefore the worst possible time to cut the defense budget.

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