Crises elsewhere may flourish and then fade, but West Berlin persists as the West's perennial and most exposed pressure point. Isolated 110 miles inside hostile East Germany, militarily indefensible and dependent for econom ic survival on easily sundered access routes, it is the place where the cold war began 21 years ago—and where the Communists refuse to let it die. Last week Berlin was once again the center of an incipient crisis. By a sudden decree, the East German regime of Stalinist Walter Ulbricht barred a large number of West German legislators and all military personnel from traveling by road or rail through East Germany on their way to and from West Berlin.
The action was largely symbolic, since the travelers could fly to West Berlin on Allied civilian airliners, which are not subject to East German control. But the ban was yet another cut at one of West Berlin's most vital assets, its free access—one that the Communists have been whittling away since last March. War of Nerves. Even more important, the East German move touched on the very status of West Berlin. West Germany has always maintained that West Berlin is a part of the Federal Republic, though, of course, under special Allied control. As symbolic support for that claim, the Bonn regime has three times in the past 15 years convened the Federal Assembly in West Berlin to select a President. Next month German legislators will meet again in the former German capital to choose a successor to retiring West German President Heinrich Liibke. Until now, East Germany has maintained that West Berlin was "a separate political entity." But now the East Germans, eager as always to assert their identity as a sovereign and equal German state, claim that West Berlin is on their soil and belongs to them. They thus regard West German political activity in West Berlin as a direct provocation against their own independence.
Meanwhile, the Communists have stepped up the war of nerves, peppering West Berliners with public warnings of harsher measures to come and delivering chilling private threats to political leaders in West Berlin. Against that backdrop of anxiety, Soviet Marshal Ivan Yakubovsky, the commander of the Warsaw Pact, arrived in East Berlin for a conference—held, according to the East German news agency, in a "brotherly fighting spirit"—with military leaders from the other six Warsaw Pact countries. Yakubovsky has a Btfsplkian habit of turning up just before something big happens; he visited Berlin shortly before the Wall went up in 1961, and his tour of East Europe last summer preceded the invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia.
West Berliners feared that his presence this time might foreshadow Warsaw Pact maneuvers in East Germany that could be used as a pretext for closing all ground routes to the city—and perhaps even for sending MIGs to buzz civilian airliners in the air corridors, as the Soviets did in 1965. Those fears were reinforced by Allied intelligence reports that the Soviets and East Germans had begun to move troops into the vicinity of West Berlin's land access routes.