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West Berliners today seem confident that they can sit out any Soviet squeeze. The population (2,200,000) is stable. Bank deposits and industrial production are climbing. The people boast that, despite the Wall, they live in West Germany's "biggest industrial city," produce one of every three dresses and cigarettes used in West Germany—and, they add solemnly, "every other light bulb."
The city's remoteness from West Germany does not disturb them; Berliners have always called themselves "island dwellers." But it deeply worries Allied commanders.
Militarily, West Berlin's position deep inside Communist territory is hideously vulnerable. The western sector is 140 miles from the nearest Allied bases in West Germany; hence the U.S. preoccupation with access rights, both on land and in the air. In a test of strength with East Germany alone, the three Western powers' 11,000 man Berlin garrison would be outnumbered by Ulbricht's 24,500 armed forces and paramilitary police. They would also have to reckon immediately with the three Soviet divisions that are in and around the city. But, as General Maxwell Taylor, soon to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has pointed out, the likelihood of direct Soviet attack on West Berlin is extremely remote. What the West does face, he predicted, is a continuous barrage of "ambiguous challenges about which we might be uncertain."
Salami Slicing. Many statesmen also are less worried at the prospect of outright conflict than by the systematic program to freeze the Allies out of the city by peaceful means. West German officials, in particular, argue that the U.S. too readily accedes to Moscow's systematic slicing away at its rights—"salami tactics," as diplomats call it. In fact, when Washington determinedly resists Russian pressure to revise or eliminate its rights, as it did last February in riding out Soviet harassment in the Berlin air corridors, Moscow usually backs down.
Few Berliners think that the Wall will fall in their lifetime. Many realists feel that it is possible at least to allay the tensions it breeds. One way of easing misery would be to establish an international commission to repatriate divided families; as it becomes more and more hazardous to escape from East Germany, Ulbricht's regime might welcome the measure of respectability to be derived from reuniting hardship cases—even though the traffic would be overwhelmingly one way.
As an ever present reminder of their country's partition, the Wall does, after all, subtly keep alive Germans' hopes of reunification. That, admittedly, is a remote prospect—but. say optimists, "What goes up must come down." There are, of course, the fatalists who suggest that Ulbricht's Wall will probably last as long as Hadrian's (1,835 years and going strong)—if only because, as one old Bonn hand put it last week, ''No democratic government could ever ask its people to try and tear that thing down."