Thaw in the Cold War

...THE SECOND WORLD WAR had hardly ended when the peoples of the world began to accept the inevitability of a third and more horrible war...

...Yet all of them resist a coexistence that would mean the splitting up of the world into protected hunting grounds for the two powers...

...when Nehru and Burma's socialist premier politely refuse to abandon their role of go-between and mediator, they indicate that they are not willing to be dragged into "crusades...

...It is now recognized on both sides that given a relative equality in atomic power between the two blocs, the intermediary powers have again assumed a key role...

...If the threat of war recedes the political economies of Russia and the United States will be seriously affected—the thaw on the international arena is thus likely also to lead to some unfreezing on the domestic scene...

...THE SIMPLISTIC SCHEMES which in the postwar years replaced political thinking will now have to be discarded...

...children of darkness and children of light...

...Confronted by the ideological and material power of America and Russia, the labor movement, as well as leading intellectual spokesmen all over the world, either capitulated to one of the two camps or advanced their own powerlessness as a reason for retreat from politics...

...they all strive for a coexistence based on an unfreezing of present rigidities and a certain amount of "play" for the intermediate nations...

...when England, France and most other Western nations firmly decline the invitation to help in the "unleashing of Chiang Kai-shek...

...Other wars had seemed punctuation points in a continuum of peace, now peace seemed identical with preparation for inevitable war...

...It has become obvious in recent months that the smaller nations are desperately striving to assert their right to be neither "white" nor "black" but simply to remain grey...

...During the next few years we are likely to live in an uneasy political stalemate, which will not eventuate in permanent solutions but is yet likely to lighten the pressure to choose between the two camps...

...THERE IS REASON TO BELIEVE that the year 1955 may mark a turning point or at least a temporary halt in this deadly drift...

...But the point is simply that the smaller nations want by all means to prevent atomic war with its attendant deadly choices...

...Should this atomic nightmare be lifted to some degree, one may expect people in both East and West to begin stretching themselves, yawn and then awaken to the realization that the creative energies of mankind might be utilized for purposes other than the delights of private contentment or the preparation of atomic suicide...

...Any non-conformist action on the domestic scene was immediately accused of endangering national security in the face of overwhelming threat...

...War or threat of war is the health of the totalitarian state...

...But now again, as so often in the past, the military mind seems to have lagged behind the realities of the hour...

...James Reston is possibly quite correct for the immediate future when he argues in The New York Times for May 29 that the peoples of the West will show a continued tendency toward political apathy, a tendency toward pragmatic rather than ideological solutions, a tendency to accept the welfare state and avoid "extremist" thinking...

...All of these nations stand for some form of coexistence, though they interpret coexistence in the most varied ways...

...There seemed to be no hope, and there was none so long as men's minds were chained to the alternatives offered by Russian and American spokesmen...

...In the last five years there has developed, as Walter Lippmann has cogently argued, a steady and deep undertow which has been dragging the non-atomic powers into some kind of middle position between the two superblocs, where they have some hope or chance of not becoming involved in atomic war...

...Since they seem to hold the balance of power and thus have again acquired the ability to make independent moves, the wooing of these powers has assumed an unexpected importance for both Washington and Moscow...

...As the heavy mortgage of impending doom is slowly lifted, it becomes possible again to talk of alternatives in international relations as well as in domestic affairs...

...Men and nations were choosing one or the other of the two sides in the two-power world that was the heritage of their war...

...The Asian and African powers gathered in Bandung were deeply divided along political and ideological lines...

...Till very recently one might have taken this product of the macabre whimsicality of the military mind as an adequate symbol of the main drift in world affairs...

...The spokesmen for "crackpot realism" will say that in the modern world it is not possible to be neutral, that it all depends "which side you are neutral on...

...Only two miles from the center of the explosion a small town had been built with no purpose other than to test the bomb's destructive effects...

...Thus it is precisely those who possess no atomic weapons, those who would be powerless should atomic war break out, who are now in a position of strength...

...The absence of any political force in America which would have exerted pressure on the administration to reverse its bellicose stance in foreign affairs allowed the State Department to maintain its inept and inflexible policies to the point where last year t96 it seemed that only a miracle could prevent the world from being plunged into atomic war over Dienbienphu or the Formosa straits...

...war or threat of war is the very lifeblood of the permanent war economy...

...When Tito resists the blandishments of the Russians again to align himself on the side of Moscow...

...when Japan artfully dodges Washington's appeals to accelerate its armaments and instead establishes diplomatic and trade relations with the Russian bloc...

...The overwhelming impact of this sentiment in the world has in recent months forced the policy makers in Washington and Moscow to reverse their lines (though other influences were undoubtedly also present...

...As the polarization of the world proceeded and as the spectre of total war fought to total annihilation seemed ever more real, the combined pressures of anxiety and fear resulted in widening patterns of conformity within all the nations of the world...

...The reversal of these trends in the last few months is thus to be accounted for, at least in large part, by developments in those areas of the world not totally committed to the guidance of either Washington or Moscow...

...The events of the last months, from Bandung to Vienna, from Belgrade to Geneva, all seem to point in one direction: the trend toward a total polarization of the nations is coming to an end and new semi-independent, semi-autonomous power centers are emerging...

...By a curious turn of the screw those nations which until recently seemed negligible quantities in the struggle for the world have again assumed strength simply because they are uncommitted...

...Eur ope, once the center of western culture, had become a Balkanized peninsula along the Euro-Asian rimland, a semi-colony, a population to be fought over and administered...

...In such a climate new alternatives may again become possible, both internationally and domestically...

...They know that whosoever might be the victor, they will be among the victims...

...Just as the violet pillar of dust rose in the Nevada desert, one began to observe a number of indications that the frozen world of Doomsday Drive showed signs of breaking up, that a thaw had set in...

...But what Reston is unable to see is that the public listlessness which he correctly observes is precisely a reflex of the realities of the age of the H-bomb...

...Its street sign, instead of reading Main Street, read Doomsday Drive...

...It was a forced choice, an acceptance of raw alternatives...

...In the next few years traditional diplomacy with its give and take, its accommodations and mutual adjustments, is likely to replace the atmosphere of "crusading" compulsiveness...

...The impossibility of any dissenting political force in the totalitarian Soviet Union seemed last year to indicate that after the struggle between the opposing power cliques had been temporarily settled Russia was ready again to resume an expansionist drive which would inevitably result in world war...

...With the increasing polarization of the world into two overwhelmingly powerful superblocs and with the development of means of destruction capable of annihilating a large part of the race, it seemed as if all mankind was engaged in a suicidal race along Doomsday Drive...

...And yet they were able to express a yearning which in recent years has found little official expression: the yearning to live in a peaceful world, the yearning to be left alone...

...and it is perfectly true that should atomic war break out most if not all the nations will be dragged into it...

...Asia had likewise become a political vacuum between the power centers of Washington and Moscow...

...Two months ago the largest atomic bomb yet tested in the Nevada desert brought sudden sunrise to cities 300 miles away...

...It is no longer possible naively to align the world into countries which are "for us" and "against us...

...The populations remained passive and acquiescent, lacking awareness of alternatives, while the statesmen, either from design or stupidity, accelerated the drift toward world suicide...

...Despite conflicts among themselves, they are linked by a community of sentiment and outlook in at least one respect: they refuse to travel along Doomsday Drive...

...The Bandung conference therefore seems of great symbolic—though of little immediate practical—import...

...they ranged from powers tied to the Russian bloc to countries such as the Philippines which have never been known to depart from the line laid down by the Department of State...

...And as the conditions of living under a permanent war economy grew more normal, the possibilities of independent political action for nations as well as for classes and individuals were increasingly surrendered...