Ike's Dramatic Offer & How It Came About

TRADING SECRETS

IN half a dozen simple sentences, unrehearsed and devoid of speechwriters' polish, the President of the U.S. raised the conference from the legalese in which it was beginning to flounder, and seized the world's imagination with a rough-hewn plan to free mankind of the fear of surprise attack.

The core of his plan was a one-two challenge to the Russians. He proposed that:

P:The U.S. and Russia "give to each other a complete blueprint of our military establishments, from beginning to end, from one end of our countries to the other."

P:"Next, to provide within our countries facilities for aerial photography to the other country--we to provide you the facilities for aerial reconnaissance, where you can make all the pictures you choose and take them to your own country to study, you to provide exactly the same facilities for us, and we to make these examinations." The ifs and buts would have to wait; the details could be picked over later. What matters, said Ike, is that Russia and the U.S., with their "new and terrible weapons," could in this simple manner "convince the world that we are providing, as between ourselves, against the possibility of great surprise attack, thus lessening danger and relaxing tension."

Top Secret. It was one of those grandly simple concepts that are the stuff of history. It was also the conference's best-kept secret. At the risk of ruffling allied feelings, not even Eden and Faure had been consulted in advance. They were as surprised as the Russians and the rest of the world.

In Washington many members of Ike's own Cabinet had not been told. Defense Secretary Wilson was aware of the general outlines, but new Army Secretary Brucker admitted that it was news to him. Key members of Congress got a top-secret dispatch containing an outline of the proposal only a few hours before the President delivered it. It was handed to them personally by an Assistant Secretary of State.

The plan got its start a year ago among a group of young Air Force officers, who were bemoaning the thinness of U.S. intelligence about Russia. The airmen did not know it, but their idea soon traveled up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Eisenhower's adopting it, and forming it into a specific proposal, was a secret he shared with barely half a dozen men.

The final "I-dotting and T-crossing," said one of them, was done on the shores of Lake Geneva, with two Eisenhower military colleagues: NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. General Alfred M. Gruenther, and Chairman of the J.C.S., Admiral Arthur Radford.

Act of Faith. In itself, the idea of inspection by aerial reconnaissance was far from new. Back in 1946, when the U.S. put forward the Baruch plan for international control of atomic energy, a U.N. commission said: "Aerial surveys are essential." The U.S. pressed the idea in 1947, after the U.N. suggested "spot aerial surveys over areas not exceeding 5% of the territory of each nation." On both occasions the Russians said no. Later, when Dean Acheson proposed in a more general way a Western plan for worldwide "disclosure and verification" of all armed forces and weapons, Andrei Vishinsky, in one of the classic diplomatic blunders of the cold war, said the idea was so funny that he "could not sleep because I kept laughing." The tenor of the cold-war debate since then has been to accentuate the negative and to elaborate the safeguards in all discussions with the Russians. Ike proposed to leapfrog the legalese in favor of a simple act of faith.

Close Watch. If accepted, Ike's plan could lead to Russian airmen taking off from U.S. bases to survey the nation's strategic targets, the Hanford, Los Alamos and Oak Ridge atomic energy plants, the airdromes of the Strategic Air Command, the great manufacturing complexes of Detroit, Cleveland and the Atlantic seaboard. The Communists are already in a good position to know a lot about U.S. defenses from what they can read in the free press, and from what their agents can smell out. Still there is much more the Russians could learn, studying their own reconnaissance reports, aerial photographs and radar studies.

Initially, the advantage of mutual inspection would be with the U.S. SAC airmen, now locked out of the Russian police state, would be able to chart the strategic mysteries of Soviet Asia. They have long been seeking authorization to have a go at it. One expert estimates that 34 B-475 could do a full mapping job of the U.S.S.R. in less than a year at an approximate cost of $15 million. Assuming Eisenhower means continuous reconnaissance, SAC could simultaneously keep Russia's principal bases under surveillance. High-flying patrols of both sides could spot every landing and take-off of potentially hostile aircraft, or guided missiles.

Problems & Possibilities. Experience in Korea and Indo-China has taught Americans how the Communists can interpret treaty obligations to suit themselves. They can create difficulty about when planes are available; they can keep crucial items off the blueprints by declaring them nonmilitary. Binding the Russians to a foolproof inspection agreement could become as involved as the treaty negotiations at Panmunjom.

Given these difficulties, which to many seemed insuperable, some observers concluded that the President's offer was an astute propaganda move, designed to seize the initiative for peace and put the Russians on the spot. Asked whether he thought the Kremlin would accept, one top U.S. official, left behind in Washington, said: "Of course not." Yet if the Eisenhower proposal was first-rate propaganda (as indeed it was), it was because he meant it--believed it feasible; was willing to go through with it. Ike's paramount object was to test, by deeds not words, the Kremlin's new professions of a desire to outlaw war. Before the eyes of the world, he solemnly challenged the Russians to lay aside propaganda, join him in searching for peace under a specific, sensemaking plan. The conference ended without a single Russian leader answering it, either by accepting, rejecting, or laughing it away.

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