"Critical Issue"

"The White House seems to have dismissed the Russian offer out of hand, but the world and the American people expect sober consideration from our leaders." So spoke Candidate Adlai Stevenson one day last week after he had learned that the President had rejected a letter from Russia's Premier Bulganin backing Adlai's campaign proposals to stop H-bomb tests.

Next day Stevenson read the text of Bulganin's letter and the President's sizzling reply (TIME, Oct. 29), and he decided that Bulganin was too close to his coattails for comfort. "I share fully President Eisenhower's resentment at the manner and timing of Premier Bulganin's interference in the political affairs of the U.S.," he said, in a second statement. "This is not the first time the Russian leaders have said things related to our presidential election. Mr. Bulganin himself expressed the hope some time ago that Mr. Eisenhower, would run for reelection, and then, more recently, other Russian leaders have said they favored Eisenhower for President."

Course of Wisdom. With such bewildering international counterpoint, the argument over the testing of thermonuclear weapons soared to a crescendo with the 1956 campaign. The headlines had barely caught up with Adlai before the White House was back with the promised Government report, in which the President reiterated that the course of wisdom was to negotiate a foolproof disarmament agreement with the Russians before throwing away the U.S. nuclear lead. "One truth must never be lost from sight," Ike wrote. "It is this: the critical issue is not a matter of testing nuclear weapons--but of preventing their use in nuclear war."

Moving on point by point to the specifics of Adlai Stevenson's campaign argument, the President:

P: Assured the U.S. that the current rate of fallout of radioactive strontium 90, "by the most sober and responsible scientific judgment," does not imperil the health of humanity.

P: Pointed out that strontium 90 derives not from the testing of big H-bombs alone--which Stevenson would stop--but from any process of nuclear fission. "Thus the idea that we can 'stop sending this dangerous material into the air,' by concentrating upon small fission weapons, is based upon apparent unawareness of facts."

P: Explained that it was not always possible, Stevenson to the contrary, to detect thermonuclear tests in Russia. "We believe that we have detected practically all such tests to date. It is however impossible ... to have positive assurance . . . except in the case of the largest weapons."

P: Contradicted Stevenson's statement that the U.S. could always start up H-bomb tests again, if necessary, "within not more than eight weeks"; it takes the U.S. "a year or more to organize and effect such tests as those conducted at our proving ground in the Pacific Ocean"; under Stevenson's cease-test provisions "we could find our present commanding lead . . . erased or even reversed."

In the past two years of his Administration, said the President, the U.S. has proposed and the Russians have rejected no fewer than 14 new plans to break the disarmament deadlock and to work out a foolproof agreement. Under such circumstances the U.S. has no alternative but to keep up its guard. "The power of these weapons to deter aggression and to guard world peace could be lost if we failed to hold our superiority."

"This Is Madness!" Adlai Stevenson was not impressed. In his speech in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden he called again for an agreement with Russia to end H-bomb tests, added afterward that 270 scientists support his position. He quoted Pope Pius XII on the fearful prospects of nuclear war ("a pall of death over pulverized ruins covering countless victims with limbs burned, twisted and scattered while others groan in their death agony").* Said Adlai: "Our arsenal of hydrogen bombs and other weapons is enough to deface the earth. Our stockpile continues to grow . . ."

The way to peace, he added in Rock Island, Ill., "is not to stubbornly insist as Eisenhower does that our security lies in the deterrent effect of our lead in nuclear weapons." After all, the Russians had caught up with the U.S. on A-bombs, and "they'll do it again" on H-bombs. "What does Mr. Eisenhower propose then? That we go ahead with the development of the cobalt bomb to try to gain another advantage--or a force that can shake the earth off its axis?

"But this is madness--this policy of trying to preserve peace by a preponderance of terror. And what is it going to do to mankind in the process--bone cancer, deformed children, sterility?" Instead, Stevenson said, the way to peace lies amid the faith, confidence and rising standards of living of the have-not peoples, "the millions of people who tremble on the sidelines of this mad arms race in helpless terror and expanding hunger."

Yet the best reply to Stevenson's rootless eloquence was not the presidential report or the imprecations of Republican orators. It was an equally eloquent passage from a speech made four years ago: "Until it [the atomic bomb] is subjected to a safe international control, we have no choice but to insure our atomic superiority . . . We can never yield on the objective of securing a foolproof system of international inspection and control. And we can never confuse negotiation with appeasement."

The place: Hartford, Connecticut; the date: Sept. 18, 1952; the speaker, Adlai Stevenson.

* But left unmentioned the Pope's insistence that an enforceable international agreement on disarmament must be part of a "sum total" agreement to stop "experimentation."

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