The President's Speech

The President's foreign policy speeches are nearly always impressive, although they frequently leave listeners wondering if, after all, a rhetoric demanding sacrifice in the face of endless struggle is entirely congenial to values outside the cold war. Yet last night, explaining why it is that the U.S. has decided to resume atmospheric nuclear tests, Mr. Kennedy abandoned much of his customary, suspect, rhetoric. Addressing the substantive parts of his argument to a relatively small, relatively sophisticated, and passionately concerned section of the populace, he constructed a detailed and closely reasoned justification for testing that can scarcely fail to be extra-ordinarily persuasive.

He was persuasive, above all, because he implicitly acknowledged that the decision had not followed inevitably from the Soviet tests in September; his case was that only now had the National Security Council at last decided that there was no other choice. Over and over, Mr. Kennedy emphasized that his reasons for resumption were almost purely military; neither for political gain nor as a psychological gesture is Christmas Island to grow mushrooms. The September series has supplied the Soviet Union with sufficient data so that further Russian tests may conceivably develop operationally effective new weapons. Kennedy released previously undisclosed information that the U.S. needs atmospheric tests primarily to construct an anti-missile screen capable of dealing with such weapons.

The nuclear game obviously remains what it always has been: complex, paradoxical, and fundamentally absurd. If there lies a persuasive characteristic in the President's speech beyond the tightness of his logic, it is an air of genuineness in his statement that he is tired of the game. His talk of tests stayed clear of the rhetoric of struggle largely because he would very much prefer that the struggle be carried on without nuclear weapons. When the U.S. proposes a test ban treaty at the 18-nation disarmament conference next month, Kennedy promised that its demands will be realizable and sensible.

Mr. Kennedy refuses to believe that the U.S. can afford another uninspected moratorium; he says that moratoria are too dangerous, and that scientists simply cannot be expected constantly to prepare tests that may never take place. His tone inclines one to believe him.

Yet curious as it seems, the President is something of an optimist. For he correctly supposes that he has presented a good case for the idea that the Russians alone now interfere with a test ban. He has proposed that they too tire of a nuclear cold war, and in his reasons for testing in the atmosphere he has managed to create a real chance for useful negotiation.