Where the News Ends:
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Cold War Victory: Soviet Retreat To 1939 Limits, End of Red China DURING RECENT MONTHS, a number of contributors to The New Leader have discussed...
...The prospect of atomic stalemate makes the winning of the cold war more, not less, essential...
...The political activity behind the Iron Curtain carried on by Radio Free Europe, the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, and other such organizations should be stepped up...
...And this is the kind of movement that could not be handled by tossing around nuclear bombs, large or small...
...But active support of all countries willing to resist Chinese Communist imperialism is clearly called for...
...This would be my answer to a recent inquiry in the New Leader letters column as to what is wrong with a neutralized Germany...
...It is amazing naivete to think that the Kremlin would set up a united Germany with free institutions if plans for German rearmament were dropped...
...There is no such imperative simple step in the Far East as the rearming of Germany is in the West...
...This is to win the cold war by political and psychological means...
...The first prerequisite for winning the cold war is the rearmament of the German Federal Republic within the framework of a Western alliance...
...Where else can additional ground strength be found at the present time...
...The ferment let loose in East Germany by the emergence of the Federal Republic as an armed ally of the West would almost certainly spread to the Soviet satellite states...
...There has surely been abundant proof that the Soviet Government cannot be talked out of the Soviet Zone in Germany...
...A neutralized Germany permitted to build up sufficient armed power to defend its neutrality singlehanded would scare the life out of its neighbors, West as well as East, and might endanger its free institutions and its returning economic prosperity by the tremendous militarization effort which would be involved...
...plane over Japanese territory...
...A second precondition of victory is the overthrow of the present Communist regime in China or, at least, its dissociation from its present intimacy with the Kremlin...
...A Germany "neutralized" and disarmed, or allowed only token forces, would be so exposed to Soviet pressure as to be irretrievably lost to the Western camp...
...Difficult...
...A disarmed Germany, from which all foreign troops were withdrawn, could expect no other fate than that of a senior Soviet satellite...
...It is my own belief that there is only one sure alternative to nuclear warfare...
...So long as this situation persists, the part of the world that wants to remain free has two alternatives: to be prepared to defend itself at any cost, or to surrenler...
...What should be the nightmare of American foreign policy is the possibility that a grave imbalance of ground forces will develop in Europe and Asia just at the time when Western public opinion is becoming increasingly averse to the terrible sacrifices and grave risks of atomic war...
...The only satisfactory answer to the German problem is a Germany rearmed within the Atlantic alliance--a formula which is probably militarily more practical than the smaller federation which perished with EDC...
...Statesmen who talk about the desirability of relaxing world tensions often overlook the basic cause of these tensions--the concentration of a third of the world's population and a fifth of its resources under a single dictatorial authority, committed to the indefinite expansion of its power by force and subversion...
...More important, there is a political aspect to German rearmament...
...Yes.Impossible...
...And the growing possibility that a future war would stop short of using the ultimate nuclear weapons makes a maximum buildup of conventional weapons (and soldiers who can use them) imperative...
...The cold war can be considered won, first of all, if and when the Soviet Union withdraws within its boundaries of 1939, boundaries which have often been recognized in Soviet official statements as ethnically just...
...The test of victory is not, of course, that Premier Malenkov should breathe a few sweet nothings into the ear of Ambassador Bohlen --while Soviet fighters shoot down another U.S...
...And if Germany should fall, nothing else on the continent of Europe would be likely to stand...
...Winning the cold war becomes more urgent as the development of Soviet atomic weapons tends to create a stalemate in this field...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Cold War Victory: Soviet Retreat To 1939 Limits, End of Red China DURING RECENT MONTHS, a number of contributors to The New Leader have discussed "Alternatives to the H-Bomb," alternatives to the horrors of war waged with weapons of mass destruction...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 48
