Foreign News: BEWARE THE BAN

Is it not at least possible that the men who arrested the leaders of the Hungarian revolution while negotiating an armistice with them and who executed them despite a promise of safe conduct are now seeking to apply these same methods to weaken the cohesion of the free world and then to destroy its members piecemeal?

HARVARD University's tough— minded political scientist and military theorist (Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy), Henry A. Kissinger, raises that question in the current issue of Foreign Affairs as he goes on to raise another: Even though Russian and Western scientists agree that detection of nuclear-test violations is possible, has the U.S. really thought through the implications of the nuclear-test ban that it proposes to offer to Russia at a conference this month?

Kissinger thinks not. He argues that a rush to ban nuclear testing would:

∙Be dangerous for the free world for the simple reason that the West has based its defense on nuclear weapons: "Nowhere in the Western world are there sufficient conventional forces to resist the Soviet preponderance in conventional strength . . . Nothing now stands in the way of Soviet domination of Eurasia save the Soviet reluctance to pay the price of a nuclear war."

∙Be a prelude to a Communist-inspired campaign to prohibit nuclear weapons altogether because "the Soviet Union has systematically sought to paralyze the West's will" to use those weapons. "In the present state of Western defenses, such a prohibition is tantamount to unilateral disarmament."

∙Make it harder for the U.S. to get on with the task of arming its NATO allies with nuclear weapons; without nuclear weapons of its own, a Europe totally dependent for its safety on U.S. retaliatory power "will find it impossible to resist the increasingly bold Soviet threats of nuclear warfare."

∙Tend to freeze nuclear-weapons technology at the big-warhead stage, keep the U.S. from developing compact, versatile, low-fallout nuclear weapons. To provide a range of choices in between "suicide or surrender," argues Kissinger, the free world urgently needs, along with more conventional forces, a wide spectrum of low-fallout, tactical nuclear weapons.

Kissinger concedes that, despite the perils of a nuclear-test ban, the U.S. has to bow to the Communist-cultivated worldwide fear of fallout. But instead of a ban on tests, he proposes a restriction on fallout. The West and the Soviet bloc could agree to equal fallout quotas. These quotas could gradually shrink to zero within a specified time, say two years. After that, until a general disarmament program came into effect, nations would be free to go on conducting tests, e.g., underground or in outer space, as long as there was no detectable fallout. Such an agreement—unlike an agreement to end all tests—would be easy to enforce, since radioactive fallout can be readily detected.

If such a plan proved workable, says Kissinger, it might be possible to go on to further disarmament measures. But Soviet leaders, he adds, will never accept genuine disarmament as long as Western irresolution leads them to hope that they can "undermine the will to resist aggression with the only effective weapon now at our disposal."