Not By Accident

Like an Olympic hammer thrower gathering momentum for a major effort, the West last week swung slowly through the first motions of response to the Soviet challenge on Berlin.

In Washington, London, Paris and Bonn, Western diplomats worked painstakingly over the wording of separate but cautiously coordinated memorandums that will answer Premier Nikita Khrushchev's demand for a German peace treaty by year's end. Weighing each word with infinite care, Washington labored long on its own answer. President Kennedy rejected the State Department's first draft; in lengthy sessions with his ranking experts--Military Adviser Maxwell Taylor, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Berlin Task Force Chief Dean Acheson--he mulled over several more drafts, penciled in much of the language of the final version himself.

After last-minute coordination with NATO, the four memorandums will be delivered to Moscow this week. Differing only in nuance, they all tell the same story: the West is willing to negotiate on Germany as a whole--but the presence of U.S., British and French groups in West Berlin is simply not negotiable. Denying Khrushchev's claim that now is the time to sign a German peace treaty, the Western answers argue that no treaty is possible until the completion of negotiations on German reunification. To the chief Soviet threat--a separate peace treaty with East Germany, which would force Berlin-bound Allied convoys to deal with the Volkspolizei of belligerent Puppet Chief of State Walter Ulbricht--the West will firmly answer that it will accept no curbs on the indisputable Allied right of free access to Berlin.

Special Area. Since they will offer neither new arguments nor new facts, the four memorandums represent only a tentative response to the latest and most worrisome of Soviet bullyboy operations. If Khrushchev persists in his determination to drag West Berlin behind the Iron Curtain, the ultimate answer, the U.S. has already hinted, could be nuclear war. Yet for the peace-minded free world, war would be a ruinous solution to a problem that could have been so easily resolved in September 1944.

In that month, representatives of the U.S., Britain and Russia sat down in London to carve Germany into postwar occupation zones, agreed to a "special Berlin area," which would be jointly administered by the Allies deep within the Soviet zone. Since the occupation zones were expected to be temporary--and since the West had not yet learned to doubt Soviet promises--the Allies failed to insist on written guarantees for access to the city through the surrounding Russian zone. By March 1945, the Allied armies under General Eisenhower were near enough to Berlin to seize the city for the West, and Winston Churchill, suspecting future trouble, urged Ike to take the devastated capital. But the Supreme Allied Commander refused. "May I point out that Berlin itself is no longer a particularly important objective," he wrote. And he left Berlin to the Russian divisions advancing from the East, while his own troops scattered across the north German lowlands and south to the forests of Bavaria to crush the remains of the Wehrmacht.

Militarily, Ike's decision was perfectly reasonable; he could hardly be blamed for failing to foresee the political consequences that would plague him later when he became President. The Russians, violating their pledge to help reunify Germany and hold democratic elections, made trouble in Berlin from the start, finally brought all road, barge and rail traffic to a halt in the summer of 1948. A remarkable, eleven-month Allied airlift broke the blockade--but strengthened Soviet determination to swallow Berlin, which had become a "bone in the Soviet throat." In 1958 Khrushchev demanded that the West remove its 11,000 troops, permit Berlin to become a "free city." (Moscow, of course, was to have a loud, obstructive voice in supervising the new neutrality.) But Ike warned that interference in Berlin could mean war, and Khrushchev said no more.

Siren Talk. When Khrushchev reopened the Berlin issue five weeks ago, at Vienna, some observers cried "old stuff." But there was one big difference: a truculent tone that said: "This time something's got to be done." So far, John Kennedy has been as firm as Ike in turning thumbs down on the Soviet demands. But a few less-thoughtful U.S. spokesmen have seemed receptive to the siren talk of "negotiation."

What is there to negotiate? As long as Germany is divided, the West is legally entitled to station troops in West Berlin (even as Soviet troops remain in the city's

Eastern sector). The Big Three pact setting up the "Berlin area" was endorsed by the Yalta and Potsdam agreements and has the force of international law. Although the West still has no treaty providing for access to Berlin, Soviet leaders have time and again made written promises that there would be no hindrance to traffic on the three air routes, four highways, four railroads and two canals that link the dty to the Western world.

Even more seductive to some has been Khrushchev's bland proposal to make Berlin a free city. Plausible as the idea might seem, it presents almost insuperable problems. The fact is that West Berlin, is a land, or a state, of West Germany, using West German currency, stamps and legal codes. West Berlin pays nominal taxes to the Bonn government and, in return, has received about $3 billion in West German grants since 1950--and almost a billion in U.S. development funds. Lacking any resources but its own labor and managerial skills, Berlin has become the leading manufacturing city in West Germany. Forcibly freed from its West German -ties, and from the subsidies and tax benefits that keep it alive, the city might ultimately collapse--which is what Khrushchev would hope to achieve with his free-city proposals.

Act of Will. Thanks to the experience of the 1948 airlift, both Berlin and the West are far 'better equipped to face any new Soviet (or East German) blockade. The city's government has stockpiled more than a year's worth of food, fuel and clothing, has recently stepped up the gathering of emergency supplies. The U.S. Air Force, which once saved Berlin with slow-moving EUR-475 and EUR-545, now has five to seven times the airlift capacity of a decade ago, with its swift C-13O turboprops and slow but massive (56,000-lb. capacity) EUR-1245. During bad weather, nearby Soviet transmitters might try to jam the radar landing facilities at Berlin's famed Tempelhof Airport, but the annoyance would not be significant, and U.S. antijamming equipment might make it all but unnoticeable.

At week's end President Kennedy flew back to Hyannisport. On the sun-drenched Kennedy patio and aboard the presidential cruiser Marlin, he conferred with Secretaries Rusk and McNamara and his brand-new military adviser. Maxwell Taylor (see following story). Berlin and Germany occupied their thoughts as they would for some time to come. Khrushchev was busy, too. Over the weekend he called for a summit conference to sign a German peace treaty, and announced 30% increase in Russia's defense spending this year.

In the continuing talk and tension, there was some comfort. Berlin has become the most discussed and best advertised crisis since World War II. Its dangers are painfully clear, and if another war begins in Germany, it will begin as an act of human will, or lack of it--but not by accident.

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