Self-inflicted Wound

People generally mean by propaganda that which influences others but not themselves. Constant emphasis on propaganda thus carries the prideful risk of regarding other people as more gullible than oneself. This little lesson came home to roost last week. For two weeks the U.S. Government had been living uneasily with the prospect that the U.S.S.R. would announce unilateral suspension of nuclear weapons tests. Last week, when Russia did, even Secretary of State John Foster Dulles conceded that Russia had scored "a certain propaganda victory, or at least, a success."

Washington particularly feared a Russian success in the nations of Asia and Africa that sit out the cold war and wish that nobody had any nuclear weapons. And many an Asian raised an expected cheer at Gromyko's announcement. Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, 79-year-old ex-Governor General of India, called the Soviet test suspension "God's Russian miracle--let us hope this noble gesture is contagious." In Burma the New Times hailed it as "a clear moral victory over the U.S."

But what was surprising was not the cheers, but the lack of more of them. In India the Hindustan Times carefully emphasized that Russia was better able than the U.S. to take such a step because the Soviets had just completed an extensive series of tests. In Japan, despite a national obsession with the dangers of fallout, only 40 people bothered to appear when the left-wing Students' Federation (220,000 members) called for a demonstration in front of the U.S. embassy. Even the Egyptian press received the Soviet announcement coolly. Said Cairo's Al Akhbar: "It would appear that the U.S. and British governments look upon the Soviet proposals as a mere means for obtaining people's applause . . ."

A Meal to Digest. Europeans, even when awarding the Russians a victory, for the most part treated the whole subject as a game to be scored. West Germany's Socialists, busy agitating against Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's decision to equip the West German army with atomic weapons, saw the Russian announcement as another defeat for the U.S.'s "unwieldy foreign policy." Some British editorialists were convinced that Russia had outsmarted the West, and that Dulles' statement that the U.S. had considered renouncing tests itself just made matters worse. "A boxer who has just received a crisp and efficient blow on the jaw recovers no points by claiming that he saw it coming." snapped the London Economist.

But even London's left-wing New Statesman spotted the Russian trap: "Very well, says Mr. Khrushchev. I have a heavy meal to digest; let us all stop eating until I am hungry again." And even as the Soviets were congratulating themselves on the effectiveness of their "noble gesture" on British public opinion, the steam was visibly going out of Britain's ban-the-H-bomb movement. The noise made by pacifists and leftists who favor nuclear disarmament for Britain continued; last week nearly 4,000 of them, a ragtag army accompanied by skiffle musicians, set forth from Trafalgar Square in a protest march to the Aldermaston nuclear weapons research center 50 miles from London. But their public impact seemed to be fading.

Said one government official with relief: "As far as we are concerned, the battle for retention of a British H-bomb is over, and those who have argued to keep it have won." Said Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in the House of Commons: "I am as anxious for an advance in disarmament as any other member of this House, but I am anxious that it should be properly negotiated, properly tied up, effective, and without endangering our own security." And though Laborite "Nye" Bevan demanded "more moral courage from the Prime Minister." Labor M.P.s themselves, in a noisy 2 1/2 hour caucus, went on record in favor of Britain's retaining its H-bomb. The Labor Party, though officially for ending H-bomb tests, is not anxious to inherit a half-perfected bomb.

Transparent Paladin. In one respect, the U.S.S.R. could indeed claim a propaganda victory: it had jockeyed the U.S. leaders into premature admission that they had taken a licking. Clearly, the transparent Russian effort to pose as a paladin of nuclear disarmament had not convinced anybody not already convinced. The happy fact was that people seemed to be less easy to delude than Moscow hoped or Washington feared.

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