Rocket Rattling

It was getting harder and harder to keep score on how many times Nikita Khrushchev had rattled his war rockets. One Kremlinologist got the count up to nearly 150 times in the past five years--and that was before last week's big flurry. Cock-a-hoop over his cosmonauts, a little miffed perhaps that the rest of the world was not giving him what he regarded as his due, and possibly feeling a little frustrated over the West's stubborn resistance on Berlin. Nikita Khrushchev was in a real rocket-banging tantrum.

"Hundreds of millions of people will perish" in a new war. he proclaimed early in the week, almost incoherent with excitement, as he waved his arms at a "friendship" rally in the Kremlin for Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, visiting boss of Red Rumania. "There will be no open cities, no front, no rear, if nuclear bombs are unleashed." Khrushchev brutally promised to send rockets raining on Italy's orange groves if war came; he had also included Britain in his target area, and now, to the mocking laughter of the satellite sycophants around him, said, "As you know, the roar of the British lion does not terrify anyone anymore." To the Greek ambassador in Moscow, Nikita declared, "My military people would have no mercy on the olive orchards of Greece or even the Acropolis!'' To accomplish his task, he boasted at another party (the welcome down celebration for Soviet Cosmonaut Major Gherman Titov) that Russian scientists now knew how to make an H-bomb equal to 100 million tons of TNT, seven times bigger than any U.S. nuclear device ever exploded.*

Be Reasonable. These strident remarks, which made the world's headlines, were mostly passed on the vodka circuit, in those little diplomatic huddles that are the Soviet equivalent of Meet the Press. Many of the remarks were more muted by the time they were printed in Pravda. What Khrushchev wanted to convey to his own people was delivered earlier in a formal nationwide radio and television address, scrupulously similar in staging, and even in tone, to the previous week's "fireside chat'' by President John Kennedy. Natty in silk tie and bemedaled grey striped suit, Russia's boss put in a few ugly growls, but carefully framed them in peaceful phrases. "Life demands that statesmen . . . should not only say reasonable things, but also should not permit themselves in politics to cross the line when the voice of reason falls silent and a blind and dangerous game with the destinies of peoples begins . . ." pleaded Khrushchev, almost as if he could not understand what the world was squabbling about. "Let us honestly meet at a round-table conference," he urged. "Let us not create a war psychosis."

After all, who started all the Berlin trouble anyway? he asked with the cool aplomb of a circus shell-game proprietor. Certainly not the Soviet Union, he answered himself. "A military hysteria is now being drummed up in the United States," he said. "Comrades, it must be said frankly that the Western powers are pushing the world to a dangerous divide, and the threat of an armed attack on socialist states cannot be excluded." Khrushchev hastily repeated his assurance that Russia means no harm in Berlin with its proposed East German peace treaty. "We do not intend to infringe upon any lawful interests of the Western powers," he said. "Barring of access, blockade of West Berlin is entirely out of the question."

Clear Intent. But what "lawful interests" of the West was Khrushchev ready to acknowledge? He has often asserted that the very presence in Berlin of U.S., British and French troops is illegal; East Germany's Red Puppet Walter Ulbricht, who would get control of Berlin's access routes after any peace treaty, has vowed to stop the exodus of refugees running out to West Germany and clamp down on the city's economy.

Beneath all his bluster, Khrushchev--in his talk with his own people--spoke only vaguely of the possibility that "perhaps subsequently" he would have to move up Soviet troops, and if so, it would "perhaps be necessary to call up a part of the reservists." He sounded almost defensive in justifying his proclaimed need for a unilateral peace treaty with his East Germans. "If we renounced the conclusion of a peace treaty," he said, after having vowed to sign it, Western powers "would regard this as a strategic break-through and would widen the range of their demands at once."

*But apparently still have trouble producing a decent ballpoint pen. Signing autographed menus for guests, Nikita was handed a Russian pen that failed at the crucial moment. Pulling out his own, Khrushchev said grinning, "Mine writes. It is American. You have to recognize when a thing is well made."

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