Nation: The Neutron Bomb Furor

• Share

A mishandled power play produces international confusion

"What is going on?" asked a bewildered official in the West German Chancellery last week. "Has Jimmy Carter decided or hasn't he?" Sighed a high-ranking West German diplomat: "Carter's unpredictability makes any thing possible." In Paris, the left-leaning daily Le Monde observed in an editorial: "Rarely has American confusion and emptiness been so deep." At NATO headquarters in Brussels officials shook their heads incredulously and hoped that the President would explain his seeming reversal of U.S. policy.

There was similar consternation in Washington, from the Pentagon and State Department to Capitol Hill. "Another in a long line of Carter mistakes," declared Senate Republican Leader Howard Baker Jr. of Tennessee. Said Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, a friend of Carter's and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee: "I'm dismayed and puzzled. I don't understand. They're not on a very clear course."

This transatlantic furor was set off last week by an incorrect front page report in the New York Times that Jimmy Carter had decided against production of the neutron bomb. For months U.S. diplomats had been trying to win NATO nations' support for the bomb on the ground that its lethal radiation would offset the Soviet Union's 3-to-l superiority in tanks in Central Europe. Now Carter seemed to have changed his mind despite the recommendations of his chief advisers on defense and diplomacy. All week long U.S. officials kept denying the Times report, insisting that it was all a misunderstanding, that no firm decision had been made.

On Friday, finally, after a NATO Council meeting in Brussels, Carter publicly announced that he was not scrapping the bomb—but not putting it into production either. Instead, he postponed his final decision on full-scale production. At the very least, the President was keeping open his options while determining not only what effect the deployment of the bomb would have but also what the Soviets might give up in exchange for cancellation of the weapon. Nonetheless, the uproar, and Jimmy Carter's response to it, raised unsettling questions about the way he makes important decisions and conducts foreign policy. Conceded Defense Secretary Harold Brown: "We could have handled it better."