Ola Proposals Get a Respectlul New Hearing

THE 15 NATO powers are in Paris to meet one logical, overriding need: to preserve the deterrent military-political power that has kept the cold war cold, built a military foundation for West European prosperity. The new threat: Sputnik and the Soviet experimental intercontinental ballistic missile. The new military response: deployment of intermediate-range ballistic missiles in closeup NATO bases around the Russian heartland.

The Soviet .Union's Marshal Bulganin fired off his 15-page let's-be-reasonable letters to the NATO leaders last week (see FOREIGN NEWS) to meet another logical, overriding need: to head off any new NATO sense of urgency, stall the new IRBM, and sow new uncertainties among NATO nations. But one of the Kremlin's greatest current assets in its campaign was not of the Kremlin's fabrication. It was the re-emergence of the free world's own "soft line," dimmed after Hungary, dimmed again after the Soviets walked out on last summer's prolonged, painstaking disarmament talks. Once more it is echoing influentially around the world, from Washington editorialists to London Laborites to Nehru and Co. in New Delhi, and it is being heard with widespread respect, especially in continental Europe and Great Britain. According to the line, the new threat to peace lies in the proposed NATO missile buildup. The soft-line positive formula for Western survival: military neutralization of West Germany and the satellites as a first step toward the military neutralization of Europe.

Ability to Destroy. The line's most scholarly and most influential advocate is George Frost Kennan, 53, longtime student of the Soviet Union, top Truman State Department policy planner, author of the postwar containment policy, onetime Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1952), and currently a visiting professor at Oxford University.

The continued division of Europe into heavily armed NATO and Communist sectors, said Kennan in the Reith Lectures on the BBC in London, will eventually make war inevitable. "I am not particularly concerned to learn whether our Soviet friends could, if they wished, destroy us. seven times over or only four times; nor do I think that the answer to this danger lies in the indefinite multiplication of our own present ability to do fearful injury to them. Our problem is no longer to prevent people from acquiring the ability to destroy us; it is too late for that. Our problem is to see that they do not have the will or incentive to do it."

While Kennan thinks that a summit conference would be worthless (TIME, Dec. 2), he believes that Western nations should begin to negotiate, at an ambassadorial level, some sort of deal in which the Soviets would pull their military forces out of the satellites in return for the neutralization and reunification of Germany.

"It is plain," he argues, "that there can be no Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe unless this entire area can be removed as an object of military rivalry of the great powers . . . Finally, the question is not just whether Moscow 'wants' German unification. It is a question of whether Moscow can afford to stand in the way if there were a possibility of a general evacuation of Europe."

And Konrad Adenauer's German Federal Republic should not be too dogmatic about terms for the new, neutralized reunified Germany. "Nothing could be more foolish on the West German side than to let vindictiveness, intolerance or political passion block the road. The long period of Communist rule in Eastern Germany will have left strong marks on the structure of life there . . . There is no reason why many of them should not be taken account of, as facts, in any future settlement."

The Hopeful Alternative. "Let us ask ourselves in all seriousness how much worth saving is going to be saved if war now rages for a third time in a half-century over the face of Europe? . . . There is a further contingent danger and a very imminent one as things now stand; and this is that atomic weapons, strategic or tactical or both, may be placed in the arsenals of our continental allies as well. I cannot overemphasize the fatefulness of such a step. I do not see how it could fail to produce a serious increase in the existing military tension in Europe. It would be bound to raise a grave problem for the Russians in respect of their own military dispositions . . . Any Russian withdrawal from Central and Eastern Europe may become unthinkable once and for all ...

"Is there, then, any reasonably hopeful alternative? . . . It is, again, the possibility of separating geographically the forces of the great nuclear powers, of excluding them as direct factors in the future development of political relationships on the Continent."

The Spreading Unease. From New York to Norway, the soft line--though not always as soft as Kennan's--broke out anew last week from influential people. Among them:

Aneurin Bevan, most likely Foreign Secretary in any future British Labor government: "I agree with Mr. Kennan because I have said it often before. If Germany is to regain her unity by agreement with the Soviet Union, then she must be ready to pay her price--neutralization."

David K. E. Bruce, U.S. Ambassador to West Germany (in what the State Department quickly called "a personal view"): There ought to be new moves toward disarmament, with powers other than the U.S. and Russia breaking the deadlock, because the situation is so dangerous that the West can no longer rely on "muddling through."

Lester Pearson, Canadian ex-External Affairs chief and Nobel Peace Prizewinner: "No progress will be made if one side merely shouts 'coexistence' . . . while the other replies 'no appeasement' . . . Our policy and diplomacy is becoming as rigid and defensive as the trench warfare of 40 years ago . . ." There ought to be "frank, serious and complete exchanges of views--especially between Moscow and Washington--through diplomatic and political channels."

The Enduring Necessity. In a sense, the compromise line constitutes its own argument for a continued hard line based upon a realistic assessment of what is weakness and what is strength. Item: the Soviet satellite countries, as a present element of Soviet weakness, are an element of NATO strength. Item: Germany, no bauble to be traded off by somebody else's ambassadors, is now the most promising evolving element of the total NATO power. Item: disarmament talks, when conducted with excess optimism (e.g., the 1957 discussions), can create the complacent type of climate in which Soviet geopoliticians and missilemen are likely to forge ahead. Basically, the soft line is based on the proposition that further armament and continued tension will speedily become intolerable--for the West--and that compromise must be achieved no matter what the cost. Furthermore, in the view of some soft-line advocates, Russia is ahead politically and militarily anyhow, so it is time to make a deal.

Hard-line advocates make no such assumptions, argue that there is no more hope for a self-executing set of agreements with Russia now than there was after Hungary or after last summer's disarmament talks. Therefore the only alternative is heightened military-political strength; the other alternative--a deal--as things now stand, is utterly unacceptable.

In this spirit the U.S.'s four-star General Lauris Norstad, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, read an editorial to his staff one day last week from London's Daily Telegraph. It read: "Each European country has more to gain by augmenting America's retaliatory strength than it has to lose by becoming in the event of war a certain target for Russian assault . . . We must do everything necessary . . ."

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