An End to Surprises

The London disarmament talks may prove in the end to be a dumb show, because agreement was never possible, and by one side never intended. But if the Russians are serious or even curious about disarmament, the Western allies gave them their chance last week to talk specifics.

The four-power "working paper" presented in person by John Foster Dulles, far from being just another facile essay in the propaganda of cold war, represented an imaginative and intricate effort to formulate--under the common theme of safeguarding against surprise attack--a program taking careful account of all the multiplicity of national interests of the U.S. and its allies, and of the Soviet Union too.

It was the kind of lawyer's undertaking at which Dulles excels. Pulling together 15 nations, varying in size and strategic viewpoint from the U.S. to Luxembourg, was in itself a formidable achievement. So many inquiring cables and so many meetings were necessary that while all this went on U.S. Delegate Harold E. Stassen was reduced to postponing London sessions from day to day, simply because the West had not yet agreed on what to say to the Russians. Finally President Eisenhower had sent Dulles flying to London.

Best Hope of Peace. For four days Dulles met with Britain's Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, France's Foreign Minister Christian Pineau, and his own representatives from NATO capitals (he had already talked with Canada's new Prime Minister Diefenbaker--TIME, Aug. 5). In the forefront of Dulles' thinking, as he doodled, argued and explained in the musty committee chambers of Lancaster House, was this line of reasoning: 1) no nation that keenly feels itself in danger of attack is likely to reduce its arms; 2) with modern weapons of war, foreshortening time and space, the element of surprise has far greater weight than ever before in military calculation, and a big part of the fear of attack is the fear of surprise; therefore, 3) the best hope for peace and for reducing the burden of armaments lies in eliminating or diminishing the danger of surprise attack.

Other men sitting round the Lancaster House table with Dulles accepted the equation, but had their reservations. Western Europeans feared that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. might compromise on a European zone alone. In the process Germany might be left divided, a large part of the continent might conceivably be turned into a neutralized zone crisscrossed by international inspection teams, the countries themselves forced to submerge their strategic and political identities in a buffer zone between the two superpowers.

To still such anxieties, U.S. diplomats drew up other inspection zones of U.S. and Russian lands in the Arctic, and Dulles won European support by making inspection of European zones conditional upon Russian agreement to inspection elsewhere. Dulles made these proposals:

P: All the continental U.S., Alaska and the Aleutians, Canada, and the U.S.S.R. "will be open to inspection." If the Soviet Union turns down this broad proposal, the four powers "with the consent of Denmark and Norway" propose an Arctic zone containing everything within the Arctic Circle except Finland and Sweden, plus those parts of Alaska, Kamchatka south of the Arctic Circle, and all the Aleutian and Kurile Islands.

P: If, and only if, the Soviet Union accepts either of these zones, the four powers (U.S., Great Britain, Canada and France) "subject to the indispensable consent of the countries concerned, and to any mutually agreed exceptions" (e.g., Switzerland might want to stay out), propose the inspection of all Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals and south to the 40th parallel. This zone would leave out the Soviet's new Siberian factories and Western bases in North Africa, Saudi Arabia, Sicily, Spain and Greece. If the Soviet rejected this, then "a more limited zone of inspection in Europe could be discussed," so long as it "would include a significant part of the territory of the Soviet Union."

Flight Patterns. To carry out the Open Skies scheme, the West does not envision inspection planes flying wherever the air crew feels like going. They would keep to prearranged flight patterns, carrying observers not only from the country being inspected but from third and fourth powers as well. First landing at predesignated border airports to be inspected themselves for bombs, etc.. the inspection aircraft would take photos for an international control board, whose experts would then evaluate and interpret the pictures.

Supplementing such air surveillance would be ground inspection teams at "principal ports, railway junctions, main highways and important airfields,'' and some of their members would be empowered to enter plants engaged in the vast and complicated business of producing fissionable materials (France's Jules Moch estimates that there are only 100 such plants in the world). They would keep track of every ounce produced.

Reassurance in Berlin. Last week's proposals made the heart of the West's disarmament plan. Yet, strictly speaking, the inspection plan is only the first phase of a program leading to 1) the ending of nuclear arms production, and 2) the reduction of armed forces. Last week the U.S., Britain and France made a significant gesture to help Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's chances in next month's West German elections. They joined in a declaration with the Germans in Berlin to the effect that German reunification still has high priority (even if little likelihood). A German political agreement would be made ''interdependent" with agreement on the second phase of disarmament.

After Dulles wound up his London presentation last week, Russia's Valerian Zorin replied that he would study the plan carefully, then reiterated the old Soviet cry: immediate suspension of bomb tests without other conditions.

"About as good as we expected, not as bad as we feared," said the State Department. In other words, Zorin gave a tentative but perhaps not a final no. The West was not asking for a fast answer.

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