Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
The Wild Talk Since Sputnik By William Henry Chamberlin IT is an old saying that, if speech is silver, silence is golden. During the months since the launching of the first Soviet earth satellite,...
...In two of their finest hours, the British stood alone against what looked like the overwhelming power of Napoleon and Hitler, and with scarcely a peep about the desirability of "coexistence...
...The sensible reaction to the sputniks (with their more ominous implication of progress in the missile field) would have been to congratulate Soviet scientists and settle down to hard work, with a minimum of wailing and breast-beating, to make sure that we were not left behind in any vital modern weapon development...
...And, if we want more recent examples of small peoples which showed themselves big in courage, we need only look back a little over a year—to Hungary and Israel...
...Perhaps they will get their due from Moscow as "progressive capitalists and intellectuals" later...
...The U.S...
...During the months since the launching of the first Soviet earth satellite, we have experienced a flood of speech of much baser metal than silver...
...All sorts of wildly Utopian ideas, bearing no relation to the world in which we live, are having a field day...
...Dulles is talking just as the Kaiser did in 1914, and when one gets swollen with pride one becomes arrogant and truculent and someone will take up the challenge...
...Government should encourage European nations once more to take the initiative in world history, to be the innovators, by unilaterally and immediately disarming...
...I should accept the fact of the Oder-Neisse line as Poland's western border...
...We are urged to meet the Soviet rulers "halfway," although there is no evidence that they have moved by one hair's breadth from their prepared positions...
...This is a "Program for Peace," by Professor C. Wright Mills...
...The U.S...
...In this era when panic and defeatism have unleashed so much loose talk and looser thinking, there are certain models of behavior by other countries in times of crisis which should be commended to the attention of the American people...
...The Government should abandon all military bases and installations outside the continental domain of the United States...
...I should demand of the United States and of the USSR that both NATO and the Warsaw Pact be abandoned and that the armed forces of America be withdrawn from Europe and those of the USSR to behind their own borders...
...Eaton and Professor Mills...
...Still worse has been the Tower of Babel chorus of voices urging America to seek peace at almost any price just when the psychological conditions for tolerable settlement are least favorable, when the Soviet leaders are basking in the sunshine of their sputnik propaganda victory...
...I quote here verbatim a few of his concrete proposals from the Nation of December 7: "Some 20 per cent of the current U.S...
...Meanwhile, the Nation is announcing reprints, at reader request, of what seems to me the silliest outpouring of the post-sputnik silly season...
...Government should at once cease all further production of 'extermination' weapons—all A- and H-bombs and nuclear warheads included...
...military budget—operational and scientific—should be allocated to the economic aid and industrial development of underdeveloped countries, especially to India...
...It seems downright ungrateful that Nikita Khrushchev, who singled out two other Americans and one Canadian for favorable mention in a recent speech, should have ignored Mr...
...Here are two concrete illustrations of these generalizations...
...There had not been sufficient preparation for a successful meeting of this kind, and the talks at Paris brought into the open differences of viewpoint which should first have been thrashed out in private diplomatic talks...
...Our Mr...
...Instead of this, there was a shrill chorus of despair and partisan recrimination, which must have been music to the Kremlin's ears...
...The Soviets were entitled to a propaganda victory with their sputniks...
...but wild, ill-considered talk in this country made the victory more resounding than it need have been...
...Cyrus Eaton, prominent financier and industrialist, recently told a Canadian audience (as quoted in the Nation): "There is more spirit of war in the United States than in any other country in the world—and it's dangerous...
...Two ill-conceived actions which grew out of this excited talk were the incredibly silly ballyhoo of a missile test that flopped and the improvised transformation of a routine NATO Council meeting into a "summit" meeting of Western statesmen...
...Even more dangerous is the tendency to regard a firm stand by the United States for elementary requirements of international security and honor as "rigidity" and "inflexibility...
...This picture of the United States, so pathetically on the perpetual defensive in foreign policy under Truman and under Eisenhower, as puffed up with military arrogance would be funny if there were not evidence that some Americans may be so misguided as to accept it at face value...
Vol. 41 • January 1958 • No. 3
