Dubious poll results

Two simple questions! One, are you in favour of a drug which claims to cure cancer or are you not? Two, if you were a United States senator would you vote for a treaty which limits both American and Soviet nuclear arms or would you vote against it?

I should think that if you put those questions just that way, there'd be a 90 per cent 'yes' answer, since if you voted 'no' you'd seem to be coming out in favour of cancer and nuclear war. There would remain, I hope, ten per cent who would promptly refuse to answer because the catch in the first question is the word 'claims' – claims to cure cancer. Many have been claimed and none so far works. 

And the tricky word in the second question is 'limits' – limits both American and Soviet nuclear arms. That's not a question but a declaration of fact and the truth is that many good men and true, in and out of the United States Senate, have looked into the new SALT treaty and have concluded that it would not limit at all, but provide new production quotas. It would reduce the number of certain missiles that one side or the other could have and increase the number of other weapons. 

But the whole debate on the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty is confused just now, or sidetracked by the hullabaloo over the 3,000-manned combat brigade which the United States believes the Russians have in Cuba. The best intelligence reports put the number of Russian military men at a much higher figure but so far the Russians have stolidly maintained that there's nothing new or threatening about those 3,000, that they are instructors, technicians or such. 

However, the fact that they're there at all has vividly reminded some senators of the so-called 1962 missile crisis, when American reconnaissance planes discovered that the Russians had set up in Cuba launching pads and nuclear missiles and all the paraphernalia for action. There was a dreadful week when President Kennedy called in the perennial Soviet foreign minister, Mr Gromyko, and confronted him with the facts. Mr Gromyko assured President Kennedy that there were no missiles there at all. 

At that time, however, the Russians either didn't believe or didn't want to believe that American reconnaissance planes from over 12 miles up could plainly photograph objects on the ground as tiny as a turtle or a golf ball. But Moscow was caught having to believe it and after the American threat of forcibly turning back any Russian ships that approached Cuba with shipments of arms, a Russian fleet, already on the way, turned back and the missiles were removed. 

Well, that was 17 years ago and since nobody can be elected to the Senate who is not at least 35 years of age, there is not a senator who does not remember the nightmare of that last weekend in October 1962. 

About the presence of Soviet troops in Cuba today, there are two extreme positions. One is that of Andrew Young, the resigned chief American delegate to the United Nations. He says – he said the other evening before a caucus of black congressmen and congressional assistants – 'What's all the fuss about? If 3,000 Russians posed any threat to the United States, the United States could obliterate them in a twinkling or a big bang.' 

The other position is that there are very many more than 3,000 military helpers, technicians, advisers, troops, and that they could well be forming an advanced corps or spearhead for supporting revolutionary movements throughout Central America. 

Now it would be comfortable to say, as sensible commentators tend to, that the truth probably lies in between but that is a statement as dogmatic as any other. The fact is we don't know. If the 3,000 men were what the Russians say they are, certainly, Secretary of State Vance, for one, would not have given weeks of fretful nights and exhausting days trying to get them removed. Mr Carter, in what has now become almost a professional reflex on any big issue, has said, in effect, 'We must not get excited, yet we must be alert. We must be firm, we must not overreact. We are watching the thing closely, we have it under surveillance.' 

Anyway, as far as the Senate's concerned, the Russian troop presence made enough powerful senators come out flatly and say that they will not vote for the second SALT treaty until the Russians do with the troops what they did with the missiles – remove them. 

So, the SALT debate is, or was at this talking, befuddled by another issue, though befuddlement is the last thing it needs, for the arguments both pro and con require a technical knowledge of the damaging or defensive capability of many types of weapons, both singly or in combination, which not one layman in a thousand possesses. So in a way, it's a problem that the ordinary citizen is simply not qualified to pass on, and yet, in a democracy, he's expected to. Since politicians watch the polls like cats watching a mouse hole, the debate, the Senate vote, may well turn on how many millions of people come to accept or reject the word 'limits' in the pollsters question, 'Are you in favour of a treaty which limits nuclear arms?' 

This came up the other night when two famous pollsters got together to discuss the effect of Mr Carter's sinking popularity on the voters on the leaders of the two parties and on the delegates to next summer's presidential nominating convention. Well, we don't have to go into all that to rescue their main point. 

The big question was not so much how will President Carter react to his vanishing popularity as how true is it that it's vanishing at all? Mr Roper of the reputable Roper poll put it most tellingly when he showed on a screen the results of four separate polls, taken in the spring of this year, about whether or not Mr Carter was doing a good job. Between his poll and, let's call it Poll B, there was an alarming difference of 20 per cent. His poll showed 49 per cent of the people, on the whole, approving of Mr Carter as President Carter. Poll B showed only 29 per cent. 

This absurd discrepancy was explained by the type of question put to the citizen. Poll B asked if you thought Mr Carter was doing an excellent job or merely a good one, a moderately good one or a poor one – 29 per cent thought 'excellent.' All the rest were lumped as unsatisfactory. So, the stunning result was published, barely one American in four approves of the job he's doing. 

Roper's poll, on the other hand, asked if, on the whole, you approved of the way the president was doing his various jobs when you considered foreign policy, inflation, energy and the rest of his domestic policy altogether and there turned out to be 49 per cent who had something good to say for him. The Roper poll, also, was the only one which put a careful – carefully-qualified – question about the SALT treaty. It listed the number of weapons the Americans and Russians would each be allowed to have. It mentioned that there was a great difference of opinion in the Senate, whether the treaty would, or would not limit nuclear production at all and then it said, 'If you were a United States senator, would you vote for it?' Very many less people said 'yes' than they did in another poll registering over 80 per cent in favour, but in response to a question so slapdash, so naive, 'Are you for or against limiting nuclear arms?' Which is about like saying, 'Do you want war or peace with the Russians?' 

This discussion went out over the splendid half-hour that's done on public television five nights a week by the incomparable questioning team of Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer. They take up every issue, not of 'our' day, but of 'that' day and getting the leading authorities on both sides, I mean they get in the designer of the Pennsylvania nuclear plant that went on the blink and the chief consumer opponent of nuclear power. They get in the Israeli ambassador with the chief spokesman of the PLO in the United States and so on. 

Well, this one certainly made me think again about the dependability of the polls, especially about presidential popularity. Mr Roper reminded us that President Nixon was pretty low down in the popularity polls of late 1971. A year later, he managed the biggest landslide victory in American history. About Mr Carter's present moves and manoeuvres to reverse his low standing and achieve the impossible re-election, we'll talk another time. 

The value of this disturbing analysis of the polls was to stress the suggestibility of their language, which often is no fairer than the immortal question, 'When did you stop beating your wife?' What it brought out to me was the growing confusion of another public debate which is beginning to take on the noise, if not the belligerence, of the great Vietnam protest marches of the 1960s. I'm talking about what the political folksingers call 'the nukes' – nuclear power. It's a common place to say today that the Seventies have considerably cooled the propaganda fervour of the Sixties about anything political. But last Sunday, 200,000 people, mostly young, gathered down in Battery Park in New York to stage the biggest anti-nuclear rally there has been in this country and there were a dozen others across the nation. 

This movement, which was once confined to the small consumer groups, has mushroomed into a mass movement since the terrifying accident at the Three Mile nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania and while, originally, the movement appealed for foolproof safety regulations at nuclear plants, it has now developed, or degenerated, into a crusade against any nuclear reactors at all. 'Abandon nuclear power!' is the cry. 

The 200,000 in New York were crooned to with nuke songs and passionately addressed by Jane Fonda, the reliable passionaria of all radical causes. They petitioned President Carter in May and he told them to come back with a plan, for so far they talk only hopefully about alternative sources of power without specifying which sources would replace oil, coal or everything else by which America avoids grinding to a halt. 

Meanwhile, the government and the nuclear industry and the Senate and the state of Pennsylvania and a consumer group and a group of independent scientists have six separate investigating teams investigating on mock-ups of the Three Mile plant, what happened there and why? 

When the passionate ones come through with a careful and practical plan to replace nuclear energy once and for all, we shall certainly bless them first and talk about them afterwards.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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