THE UNITED NATIONS: The Old Songs

Whatever else he might say or do during his U.S. visit. Nikita Khrushchev would never quite undo the damage he did himself at the U.N. last week.

Khrushchev had tipped his hand early in the week by remarking in Washington that he would have important proposals to make at the U.N. on disarmament, “the burning issue of our day.” Out to make their own cases first. U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter and British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd hastened to put before the U.N. General Assembly fresh proposals for “controlling the arms race to prevent it from exploding into nuclear conflict.” But the Western ploy failed—simply because no one had anticipated just how fantastic Khrushchev’s proposals would be.

Nothing but Cops. While 1,200 reporters and cameramen, and delegates of 81 nations,* listened in silence, Khrushchev reviewed the cold war for 45 minutes, showing no real signs of give on anything from West Berlin to Laos. Then he paused dramatically and asked: “What does the Soviet government propose?” An audible rustle of anticipation ran through the hall. “The essence of our proposal,” said Khrushchev, “is that over a period of four years all states should effect complete disarmament, and no longer have any means of waging war. This means that land armies, navies and air forces shall cease to exist; that general staffs and war ministries shall be abolished; that military educational establishments shall be closed.”

He went on in phrases that bore the marks of long polishing in Moscow offices: military bases on foreign soil should be abolished; “all atomic and hydrogen bombs should be destroyed and their further production terminated”; military rockets should be “liquidated” and rockets used only for transportation. Each state would be left with “only strictly limited contingents of police with small arms” for maintaining internal order.

Hints from a Realist. Was there a faintly familiar ring about all this? Khrushchev himself implicitly admitted that he had only refurbished an old Soviet plan for total disarmament that Russia’s late Maxim Litvinoff first proposed in 1927. Ignoring a far more incisive criticism of the Litvinoff plan (see box), Khrushchev claimed that its opponents used to say that Russia put forward such proposals because it was weak; now, “such talk is manifestly preposterous.”

At this point, Khrushchev shifted gears. “We are realists in politics.” he said. Then, all but conceding that his call for complete disarmament was a pure propaganda maneuver without the slightest hope of adoption, he brought forth an alternative scheme: Plan B. From the first words, Plan B sounded familiar, too. It was, in fact, the same Soviet medley of old tunes that had been tootled out at every disarmament meeting since 1955. Items:

¶ An atom-free zone in Central Europe to be accompanied ideally by the simultaneous reduction of conventional forces in the area.

¶ Withdrawal of all foreign troops and liquidation of all foreign bases in Europe west of Russia.

¶ A nonaggression pact between NATO and the Communist Warsaw Treaty states.

¶ An agreement aimed at preventing surprise attacks.

Laughter in the Gallery. The response in the U.N. hall to Khrushchev’s oratorical whopper was stunned silence, broken once or twice by incredulous laughter from the press gallery. And this came close to summarizing unspoken official reaction throughout the West. For diplomatic reasons, no one wanted to come right out and say “nonsense,” but the fact remained that Nikita’s demand for total disarmament was so absurd and impractical as to be insulting. It paid no more than token heed to the all-important Western insistence that any disarmament agreement is meaningless and dangerous without an ironclad control system. It ignored the self-evident fact that no totalitarian government, whether in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East or Asia, would freely consent to dismantle the military forces on which its power rested.

A grandstand play, capitalizing mercilessly on the lurking fear of nuclear holocaust, Khrushchev’s brash maneuver might win him some propaganda advantage with plain people around the world. And some U.S. officials continued to argue that Khrushchev genuinely wants some measure of disarmament, which would permit him to switch military manpower and funds into raising Soviet living standards. But in blasting off so crudely from his U.N. launching pad, Nikita had displayed a brute cynicism that repelled responsible statesmen everywhere. “It sounds so easy,” said an Asian delegate to the U.N. “I think he must take us for morons.”

* Nationalist China boycotted the session.