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October Rites. The testing time for Western nerves will probably come this fall. Nikita Khrushchev is half expected to make an appearance at the U.N. to plead Moscow's specious case for Allied withdrawal from Berlin. Iron Curtain capitals were buzzing last week with a more intriguing notion. In October, it was said, Khrushchev plans to convene a spectacular peace conference in Moscow, attended by other Communist nations and the usual array of neutrals and non-aligned nations, at which Russia will finally go through the ritual of signing a peace treaty with East Germany.
Since the U.S., Britain and France are unlikely to be lured to the party, such a treaty would be without legal force, but not without peril. It will almost certainly be followed by East Germany's assumption of responsibility for Allied rights in Berlin, which East Berlin's Mayor Friedrich Ebert last week contemptuously called "a fig leaf punched full of holes." Other East German officials bayed in unison that the Berlin question will not be solved until the Allies pull out and allow the Communists to turn it into a "neutral, demilitarized, free city."
The threats have all been made before. But almost no one in the West thinks that the Communists will really make any serious effort to grab the whole salami. For this, as President Kennedy bluntly warned Khrushchev during 1961's Berlin crisis, will bring a nuclear war.
The Communists' ace in the hole is that any real improvement in the situation is entirely up to them—the West can do nothing—and that therefore they also have the power to harass, provoke, tantalize and annoy. And mostly with impunity, or at least without any genuine Western retaliation.
Says a West German official who is a firm friend of the U.S.: "The threat of nuclear war has paralyzed the West. The question is whether we are not on the road to ruin this way. The Wall is wrong —everybody knows it's wrong. The East Germans want to be free—everybody knows they do. And yet Adenauer and Brandt have to tell their own people constantly to keep calm, don't start anything. The outside world says whatever happens don't start a war. and to move an ambulance to Checkpoint Charlie you have to have a meeting of the ambassadorial working group in Washington. We assure the East we won't do anything and as a result they play see-saw on our nerves. We hope for a change in Soviet policy—that's the formula we use to legitimatize our inaction."
Will there ever be a change in Soviet policy? There are those who think that Khrushchev would be delighted to be rid of the whole East German mess; it is costing him dearly in prestige and occupation bills, and bringing him less and less in industrial production. But if Russian troops were removed and East Germany were really turned free, would Ulbricht survive? And would the other satellites stay quiescent?
So Khrushchev must hang on, and the Wall must stay—for the time being. But some time—within a year? within a decade? within a generation?—it must come down. For it is an unnatural, inhuman barrier that, if it is not brought down by reason, will some day provoke men to demolish it by force.