Assaying the Test Ban
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
PERSPECTIVES Assaying the Test Ban By William Henry Chamberlin The President showed wisdom and discretion in not claiming too much for the treaty banning above-ground nuclear tests....
...General de Gaulle has made clear France's intention to proceed with the build-up of its nuclear force...
...Indeed, it is the treaty's innocuous character which is probably the best guarantee of Senate ratification...
...The treaty itself merely recreates—but now with an exception favorable to the West—the situation which prevailed from October 1, 1958, until September 1, 1961...
...Nor is there any indication that the treaty will prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons...
...The reaction of the uncommitted neutrals to this flagrant breach of a promise was thunderous in its silence...
...Moreover, it does not touch existing nuclear arsenals and it does not involve the frightfully difficult, if not insoluble, problem of establishing an adequate inspection system...
...For years he has tried desperately to paper over this squabble...
...Until the Moscow talks Khrushchev had persistently rejected the idea of a treaty which would not apply to underground explosions, while at the same alternating his position between no inspection or a ridiculously inadequate number of on-site inspections to safeguard against secret underground tests...
...During that time the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain professedly observed a moratorium on nuclear testing while increasingly futile negotiations dragged on in Geneva for a general test-ban treaty to be policed by international teams...
...Red China has poured scorn on it...
...According to Peking, Soviet policy under Khrushchev has become that scurrilous "revisionism" so vehemently denounced by Lenin—at once betraying revolutionary movements and conniving with villainous imperialists...
...Yet, though the test-ban treaty certainly does not change overnight the picture of a world in which peace is maintained by a balance of nuclear terror, it does possess considerable symbolic significance...
...Khrushchev had declared that the Soviet Union would not be the first to break the moratorium...
...The acid test of the seriousness of the Soviet leader's desire for easing relations with the West will be his willingness to make some concessions on the unnatural partition of Germany...
...Khrushchev has renounced the claim that the Soviet Communist Party should play the leading role in the world Communist movement...
...Why has he changed his mind...
...He has made concessions, in public documents, to the Chinese thesis of the righteousness and necessity of "anti-colonial wars.' He has made sorties—West Berlin and Cuba are the most conspicuous examples—in an effort to prove that he is as good at aggression and subversion as the next man...
...The big escape clause in the present treaty is that it is terminable virtually at the will of any signatory...
...The most plausible explanation is the bitter conflict Khrushchev finds himself engaged in with Mao Tse-tung...
...The West should require deeds—not words alone—before accepting smiling Soviet faces around conference tables as the guarantee of a new era...
...Faced with the prospect of a bitter contest for influence in many Communist parties, Khrushchev is naturally anxious to damp down, temporarily at least, the cold war with the West...
...The Chinese Communist polemics have increased in bitterness and violence to the point where the Soviet Union, in the Chinese image, recalls the most violent diatribes of Leon Trotsky against Stalin...
...But all this has been in vain...
...But in September 1961, the world was rocked, at least figuratively, by the huge explosions of a new Soviet series of tests accompanied by the discharge of an unusually large amount of fallout...
...While economic aid to China has been suspended since 1960, and the prospect of China as a nuclear power probably frightens Khrushchev as much as it does the West, the Soviet Premier has only recently given up the attempt to conciliate and appease his suspicious, reproachful former allies in Peking...
...For the United States, this poses both opportunities and dangers...
...A treaty with inspection features would, of course, face a much harder fight in the Senate...
...It is no secret in official Washington that General Maxwell D. Taylor and other Pentagon officials are profoundly disturbed over the tendency of Administration negotiators to whittle down inspection requirements far below what most military experts regard as minimum security requirements...
Vol. 46 • September 1963 • No. 18
