Against the Odds

At the Big Four conference in Geneva last July, Dwight Eisenhower impressed the world with the passionate sincerity of his will for peace. Russian obduracy and the passage of time have dimmed in the public mind the hope for disarmament raised at Geneva by Ike's dramatic aerial inspection proposal, but Ike himself has never lost the sense of urgency that he then showed. Ever since, he has pressured his staff to "get something started on disarmament in as many ways as possible," and in recent weeks he has worked late into the evenings, studying staff papers on disarmament and discussing their proposals with top aides.

Last week, at the U.N. Disarmament Subcommittee meeting in London, chief U.S. Delegate Harold Stassen revealed to the delegates from Russia, France, Great Britain and Canada some of the results of Ike's evening work.

Most dramatic: a proposal that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. each designate within their borders a 20,000-30,000 sq.mi. area that would be open to inspection teams from the other country. In these areas, which would have no atomic installation but would have at least one port, one airfield, one railway terminal and some military forces, the inspection teams would be free to carry out aerial photography, watch all traffic and check on military installations. This plan, according to the U.S. theory, would be a quick means of getting disarmament started and of establishing mutual trust. It would also provide a kind of laboratory for the development of disarmament control techniques.

Besides this amended, small-scale version of Ike's original aerial inspection plan, Stassen had two other proposals. The U.S.:

P:Is prepared to reduce its armed forces to 2,500,000 men and scale down conventional arms and military expenditures proportionately if the Soviet Union will do likewise. (This would mean demobilization of about 400,000 U.S. servicemen and about 1,500,000 Soviet servicemen.)

P:Is also prepared to exchange technical missions, whose job it would be to work out practical methods for detecting and controlling armaments.

The U.S. proposals were far less ambitious than the main business before the conference--an Anglo-French general disarmament plan intended to lead in three slow stages from what the British call "the grey world of today" to a "white" world of mutual trust, in which all nuclear weapons would be banned. Precisely because they were more limited, however, the U.S. proposals had a far better chance of acceptance than the Anglo-French plan. The odds against even the U.S. proposals were high, for, as one conferee noted, if the Russians agreed to let foreign observers nose around the U.S.S.R., it would be "a break with their past more startling than the smashing of the Stalin myth." This was a fact of which Dwight Eisenhower and his Administration were well aware, but they were also aware that, in the search for disarmament and a stable peace, long shots are the only bets that can be made.

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