The Game

Disarmament is impossible in the foreseeable future. Everyone knows this except a few sentimentalists. Yet West, East and neutrals continue the solemn game of pretending that some sort of disarmament deal can be reached. The harm of the game, to the West, is that it fosters illusions. The advantage is that more and more it shows up the Russians as phony champions of peace.

With only a few days to go before the U.S. launches its nuclear test series at Christmas Island, the Russians at Geneva last week continued the game by trying every conceivable stalling tactic to postpone the tests. At the 17-nation disarmament parley, Chief Soviet Delegate Valerian Zorin insisted that the U.S. delay at least until after Easter. U.S. Delegate Arthur Dean recalled that the Russian had already violated one moratorium with their huge tests last fall. Said he: "We will not be burned twice by the same fire."

Useless Compromise. Moscow could still stop the Pacific blasts with a stroke of the pen--by signing a test-ban treaty with adequate inspection guarantees against cheating. Time and again the Russians have refused to do so. Nevertheless, the eight "middlemen" at the conference (Brazil, Burma, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Mexico, Nigeria and Sweden) also played the game by weighing in with a "compromise" plan of their own that would leave it up to individual countries to "invite" foreign inspectors to investigate suspicious explosions. It was a system tailor-made for nuclear cheating. Zorin and the Communists liked it; Dean and the West most emphatically did not.

The West last week made the most massive and earnest move yet when Delegate Dean laid before the conference the U.S.'s exhaustive blueprint for what the experts call 'G.&C."--general and complete disarmament. Months in the making, the plan was just what President Kennedy called it: "The most comprehensive and specific series of proposals the U.S. or any other country has ever made on disarmament."

Goldwater's Case. It envisages three stages of phased arms reduction, eventually eliminating national armies altogether.The first two stages would last three years each; no time limit was set for the third and last stage. There is specific provision for inspection and control to prevent cheating, but to minimize Russia's fear of "spies" in the guise of inspectors, the plan introduces the new concept of zonal inspection, or sampling (TIME, March 23), to check treaty compliance on a random basis. Successive stages of the plan would be supervised by a U.N. disarmament organization (ultimately responsible to the Security Council). Eventually a U.N. "peace force" would wield all military power in the world except for minor law-enforcement units that each nation needs to maintain internal order.

The plan will obviously remain wildly Utopian as long as the U.N. and the world remain divided. Senator Barry Goldwater expressed misgivings: "I suggest that the American people would rise up in indignant protest if we were to open our defense installations to inspection by United Nations teams, and eventually turn over our security to a U.N. peace force."

But such criticism missed the point. Impressive for its care, patience and technical ingenuity, the U.S. plan is part of the game--an effective counter to Khrushchev's own sweeping (but phony) disarmament proposals. If a miracle happens and the Russians accept the U.S. plan, there are still enough safeguards in it to protect U.S. sovereignty and security.

The miracle, of course, is not happening. At Geneva, Russia's Zorin sneered: "We have heard all this before. It is directed against us."

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