Test of Nerves

Looking up from a week of made-in-Moscow headlines, the U.S., across lunch counters, through stern editorials and in Washington debate, stirred with a sober realization that the nation faces a possibility of war over Berlin. "The countdown has begun," said Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, as he called for national unity. Connecticut Democrat Thomas J. Dodd, touching off a notable Senate debate (see The Congress), warned that the U.S. may be facing "the supreme and ultimate test," and called for a 90-day "program of the utmost urgency." In Topeka, Kans. sometime G.O.P. Presidential Candidate Alf Landon warned: "We have seen so many crises in the past ten years that people find themselves under the spell of the old fable, where the boy cried 'Wolf! Wolf!' too often. But this is it."

"No Negotiation." What touched off the talk of war was Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's joltingly tough speech rejecting Western proposals for a foreign ministers' conference on Berlin, and his calculated insult to Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, in Russia on an official peace-talking visit (see FOREIGN NEWS). In response to Khrushchev's "palpably intransigent attitude," said the

President of the U.S. at his news conference, the U.S. could take only one "logical" stand: "We are not going to give one single inch in the preservation of our rights, and of discharging our responsibilities in this particular region, especially Berlin. There can be no negotiation on this particular point."

With a foreign ministers' conference apparently vetoed, would the U.S. be willing to go to a summit conference to talk with the Russians? Said the President: "I think it would be a very grave mistake . . . unless there was some kind of preparation so that the world could recognize the progress made."

With the nation's chief foreign policy officer on the sidelines--Secretary of State John Foster Dulles conferred in his hospital suite with his top aides and with President Eisenhower, but he left the job of running the State Department to Acting Secretary Christian Herter--State made the same straightforward reply to Khrushchev that it would have made if Dulles had been at his desk. The U.S., said Press Officer Lincoln White, is still awaiting a "reasoned reply" to its note suggesting a foreign ministers' conference. And in a display of calm decision in action, Washington ordered a Navy picket boat off Newfoundland to board and search a Soviet trawler suspected of damaging U.S. transatlantic cables on the ocean floor (see Foreign Relations).

Old, Cold War. Underlying the U.S.'s firmness was a conviction that, however tough he might talk, whatever steeliness he might display in brinkmanship, Nikita Khrushchev would not, at the showdown, risk global war. A war was on, but it was the old war of nerves.

To prevail in that test of nerves, the U.S. had to be willing to run a risk of war. Last week the reality of that risk, already known and accepted by the Administration, hit home generally. There was no sign of flinching, no sign that the U.S. wanted to "give one single inch."

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