THE NATION: Cold Thaw

Inevitably, the announcement in Washington and Moscow of an exchange of visits between Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev stirred talk around the world of a deep thaw in the cold war. In the thaw mood, the Communist press suddenly stopped sniping at the U.S., and Premier Khrushchev jovially announced that he would not do any saber-rattling during his visit. In Washington, President Eisenhower made it known that he was planning to meet Khrushchev’s plane when it arrives in mid-September, though Khrushchev is not technically chief of the Soviet state,*and protocol does not demand welcome by the President. Ike also made it known that he was reserving time for a possible Big Four summit meeting in the fall.

The skeptics pointed to the ice-cold fact that the Berlin crisis still lurks unsolved in the background. If Khrushchev brought on the Berlin crisis back in November 1958 to force the West to a summit meeting, his ploy had worked: without yielding the West any concession on Berlin except postponement, he had gained a prize that he may have wanted more than a summit meeting: a Big Two meeting, viewed in Soviet policy as a step toward the basic goal of breaking up the U.S.’s alliances in Europe and Asia.

But in the overall context of the cold war, the U.S. could view the exchange of visits with confidence—confidence in its own economic-technological strength, confidence that the advantages in East-West exchanges lay with the West. With nine satellites put into orbit around the earth, the U.S. had come a long way since the first Soviet Sputniks jolted the nation’s confidence in the fall of 1957. And last week came the news of two more big strides in space-military technology: a 142-lb. paddle-wheel satellite that uses solar energy to power its transmitters and a monitoring system capable of detecting and tracking missile and rocket firings far beyond the range of the keenest-eyed radar (see SCIENCE).

Last week too, the Nixon party returned from behind the Iron Curtain with a big conclusion that helped put the U.S.S.R. and the cold war into clearer focus: the economic gap between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. is still enormous. Because that gap strikes the eye hard, visits to the U.S. by Soviet officials work to the U.S.’s advantage. So can the reciprocal visits by U.S. policymakers, who, as they take the measure of the Soviet Union, can shape policies with more accuracy—and, apparently, with far more confidence that the policies are succeeding.

*Chief of state: Kliment Voroshilov, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.