The Red Bird

When the bulletin crackled out of Moscow, the public consciousness and the front pages of the U.S. were occupied largely by domestic matters--the closing battles in Congress, the Teamster scandals, inflation. The bulletin: Soviet Russia had fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, said the Kremlin, adding ominously that "the results obtained show that it is possible to direct missiles into any part of the world."

Across the Communist empire the Red propaganda network chattered into action. "Good news has come from the Soviet Union," crowed East Germany's Neues Deutschland. "The most powerful weapon ever developed is in good hands." Communist diplomats haughtily brushed aside the latest Western proposals on disarmament (see FOREIGN NEWS), instead threatened U.S. allies and warned them to abandon U.S. bases. The new missile, said Moscow radio, "is a gigantic step forward that ought to cool off the hotheads."

Two years ago the Soviet announcement might have shocked the U.S. Now it did not. For months U.S. military intelligence had received reports of launchings, from land and sea, of Soviet test missiles. Beyond what the Kremlin announced, the U.S. knew that late last spring the U.S.S.R. had test-fired between four and six long-range ballistic missiles. The U.S. also knew that the big Red bird announced last week had not flown 5,000 miles but 3,500. The Kremlin announcement left unanswered a whole series of important questions: How many years will Russian industry need to make the missile an operational weapon? What kind of warhead has Russian technology produced for the bird? How precise was its aim?

After the first rash of headlines, the U.S.--publicly and officially--took the announcement as it should have been taken: calmly. Old Soldier Dwight Eisenhower took note of the Communists' "boastful statement." NATO's Commanding General Lauris Norstad noted tersely that the Russians had made blackmail threats before, had failed before. "Then," he said, "the alliance was unshaken, even unimpressed. So it will be now."

Much of this confident reaction was based on the status of the U.S.'s own missile program. Last week a second test model of the 5,000-mile ICBM, the Atlas, stood erect and gleaming on its launching pad at sunny Cape Canaveral, Fla., ready to blast off. (The U.S.'s first Atlas, launched last June, was blown up in midair by an electronic signal after a fuel-system failure.) Back of the Atlas several dozen ICBMs are coming out of production plants in the race to possess a whole armory of mass-produced, operational missiles. "We have the highest priority," said Air Force Missileman Major General Ben A. Schriever (TIME, April 1).

In a sense, the announcement served the U.S. well. It was a timely reminder that the cold war goes on and that the U.S. must use its scientific, technological and diplomatic skills wisely and well.

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