Neutron bomb backlash

Today if you were going – and you were allowed – to visit the President of the United States, you would drive along the coast road about a hundred miles north of Los Angeles and then start climbing 3,000 feet up into the Santa Ynez Mountains, a western link in the Coast Range. It's very beautiful and lonely country. President Reagan has his ranch there and when he was asked the other day what he thought the place would cost now that he's made it the western base of the White House, he said, 'It's beyond price, you can't sell heaven'.

More than any president since Eisenhower, he's decided on frequent vacations, maybe as many as five or six a year. Thinking back to two or three presidents I could name who sweated from dawn to midnight in the White House eleven or more months a year without getting a firmer grasp on their many problems than Eisenhower did, I must say that Mr Reagan's decision is not likely to make him lazier or more out of touch.

Anyway, no president can ever take a holiday for more than an hour or two wherever he is, but what his present working holiday has done is to offer a field day to the cartoonists who can now picture him as an urban cowboy, as Wyatt Earp or Wild Bill Hickok, solving everything from crime in the cities to the neutron bomb, with a gun in his holster and a giant stride down a western street at high noon.

The reality is quite different. No matter what costume he cares to wear, any place the president lands and stays for more than a night or two, all the telephones have their discs replaced with white ones saying White House. Computers and teletype machines are installed, along with a working staff of several score. The hotline to Moscow is operative at once and so is the line to the little red box, as it used to be called, which is fixed in every bomber out of Omaha, fitted out as a miniature strategic war centre, every bomber that patrols the northern approaches to the Baring Strait and which is the president's immediate pipeline to the bomber pilots and a war alert. The little red box, need I say, is the locked and coded telephone that everybody hopes will never be used.

Well, this week the president called to California Mr Haig, the secretary of state, Mr Weinberger, the secretary of defence and a host of their subordinates to a conference on a matter, THE matter, which will go on stirring up more debate and protest among the peoples of Europe than anything that has come up since he went into the White House.

A quite new and widespread epidemic of controversy to be followed, no doubt, by mass parades, has been triggered by the president's announcement to do what Mr Carter first said he'd do and then he wouldn't and he didn't. Namely, to order the assembling and stockpiling in the United States of the neutron weapon. It's unfortunate but inevitable, I suppose, that it's been popularly – or unpopularly – called the neutron bomb.

It is a tactical field weapon of limited range but very high-density radiation which can be used close by friendly troops. The main about it, the main reason why Mr Reagan has decided to go ahead with it, is that its spray can penetrate the armour-plating of a tank and immobilise the crews inside. It's intended by Mr Reagan as the best available weapon against a large-scale Soviet invasion of Western Europe – an invasion with conventional weapons – since, at present, we have nothing to offset the Soviet superiority in tanks over NATO's forces of four to one.

Now the proponents of the neutron weapon say it would, more than anything, deter any Soviet threat of an invasion by land. The opponents say that it might bait the Russians and would dangerously implant the idea that you can have a small, controlled nuclear war.

The president's decision was made only after a tense argument between Secretary Haig, who was against the neutron order, and Secretary Weinberger, who was for it. Europeans – in fact, foreigners of any continent – naturally assume that Mr Haig, as secretary of state, is in charge of foreign policy, though the president of course always makes the final decision. When Mr, formerly general, Haig was confirmed by the Senate and moved into his office, he said explicitly that he was the president's vicar on American foreign policy but like several predecessors, he's been frustrated if not bedevilled by the holder of what historically is a comparatively new post, that of the secretary of defence.

Why did Secretary Haig flash a red light and urge the president not to order the neutron bomb now? Mr Haig is not against the weapon itself but, I suspect, that if he could speak out in public, he might say Amen to the New York Times's editorial judgement that the decision to deploy the neutron bomb at some time was correct, but the timing of its announcement was disastrous.

Well, the answer to the question of why a red light from Haig, a green light from Weinberger, lies in the contrasting backgrounds of the two men. Mr Weinberger has long been a friend of Mr Reagan. He's been an able administrator of American domestic policy, notably in health, education and welfare, but if he has any deep or extensive knowledge of international affairs, it must be a private hobby.

Secretary Haig, on the other hand, spent all of the 1970s working as a presidential adviser on national security and foreign policy, mainly, we should not forget, he was for much of that decade, the supreme commander of NATO, based in Europe and more aware than any other living American – more than most Europeans for that matter – of the political tensions of the European allies and their misgivings about the defence of Europe. Mr Haig must have guessed, before any of the president's advisers, at the uproar that the neutron order would provoke in Europe at a time when even the most reliable allies – Britain, West Germany, Italy – are having acute problems with their opposition parties about foreign policy in general and nuclear policy in Europe in particular.

However right or wrong was the president's decision, I think it's fair to say that the sudden stress on the neutron weapon is unfortunate if for no other reason than that it... it masks the main argument between the Americans and the Russians about the legitimacy of the American plan to start planting basing missiles (108 Pershing 2s and 464 cruise missiles) on European soil in 1983. This was not an American decision. It was voted by the NATO powers in 1979.

What the neutron weapon order has done is to galvanise the Europeans' opposition to having nuclear weapons of any sort on their own soil and, I hope President Reagan in his heaven on top of the Santa Ynez Mountains is being well informed, that opposition is formidable. We get the impression from the papers and from television that the opponents are mostly young and hoarse-throated pacifists waving banners with horrendous devices. That's because they make better television pictures than, say, the Dutch Interchurch Peace Council meeting in private or the staff of the Belgian Catholic Pax Christi movement distributing pamphlets through the mails.

In Norway and Denmark, it's not only the half-million members of the Women For Peace crusade, but the governments themselves who believe that an armoury of conventional weapons is enough and that the whole of Scandinavia should be declared a nuclear-free zone, though if nuclear weapons went off in Europe, I doubt that the Norwegians and the Danes would have more luck than King Canute in forbidding the tidal wave of radiation to stay away from their doors.

So, to a great variety of Europeans, the neutron order seems to confirm their view of an American president hell-bent on piling up a new array of nuclear weapons in Europe, even though the neutron weapon would be held in the United States for emergency use in case of a Russian move across Western Europe. And this fire-eating picture has been a godsend to the Russians who've gone all out in their press and radio broadcasts abroad to reinforce the image of Wyatt Earp Reagan and they've managed to convey to millions of foreigners that they are the chief compassionate sponsors of the 1981 so-called March for Peace which tramped the 750 miles between Copenhagen and Paris as a solemn reminder of the atomising of Hiroshima.

And to aggravate this irritation with the United States, Secretary of Defense Weinberger disclosed a plan to scatter the American-based MX missiles not in shelters on American soil, but in airplanes flying hither and yon. He thought of this in response to the strong reaction of Americans who might be all for a strong nuclear defence at home, but not near my town. Imagine then, the added resentment of the European nuclear opponents when they heard that while the Americans want to base missiles on the soil of Europe, they would prefer not to do the same at home.

Well this embarrassing – to put it mildly – contradiction struck Americans too, in the Pentagon, in the State Department and in Congress and the domestic opposition to the injunction 'Do what I say, not what I do', is already powerful enough to have made the plan odious. Secretary Haig, by the way, is absolutely against the idea as militarily unsound, as well as a crude affront to the NATO allies.

Now, what is the main point about the 1983 plan to begin, then, basing American missiles in Europe which I said the fuss over the neutron order has masked and dangerously masked?

It is the simple, stark fact that when the Russians say, 'Let us freeze all nuclear weaponry in Europe' and receive loud hosannas from various armies of nuclear opponents, they naturally fail to mention that they have 660 missiles of their own already based in their Europe, while NATO has none.

Their appeal is that of Goliath, saying, 'If your David will only lay down his stone, then I will lay down my club and devote myself to bodybuilding competitions and we will all live in peace'.

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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