Nuclear reduction talks suggested

Not since the 1939-45 war, certainly not during Vietnam, has a war, a rumour of war or an imminent war been so exhaustively and exhaustingly covered by the American press. The United States has obviously, during the past seven weeks, been living its own life, though from even the most casual social contacts, a friendly dinner, an office coffee break, a trip to the supermarket, you might never guess it.

Of course, if you went off to certain cities, certain regions that get their livelihood from a single crop, a single industry, the Falklands would be a menacing background noise. For instance, Detroit, the automobile capital of America and for so long the barometer of the American economy, is in a dire way with unemployment almost twice as bad as the national average.

And if you'd been in Waterloo, Iowa, this week, I don't doubt you would have felt you were reading the last and bitter page in a chapter of American history because there, or rather into the neighbouring state of Illinois, in the middle of the last century, there arrived a young man from New England, from Vermont. His name was John Deere. Like every other farmer out on the prairie, he discovered that the iron plough, the plough that every European immigrant was used to, would simply cut through the heavy, matted sod of the land which bakes under a midsummer temperature of 100 degrees and is petrified in winter at 35 degrees below zero. The frustrating thing was that this soil was rich and deep and once it was seeded it was capable of supporting splendid crops.

John Deere invented a plough with a revolving blade and a steel mould board. It cut the sod and turned it over and life on the prairie became not only self-sustaining, but prosperous. The Deere plough was followed by other farming inventions, most famously by the Deere tractor and, for the past 50 years or so, Waterloo, Iowa has been the manufacturing centre of agricultural machinery. Well, last week, the Deere plant closed down. A third of its workforce was laid off and the company is reorganising itself and will start up again, if not with more modest, shall we say with more wary, ambitions.

All I shall say about the Falklands this time is a reminder of a sentence or two I spoke six weeks ago at the end of the first talk I did on this painful subject. There are two possibilities, I remarked, that the White House and the State Department reluctantly keep in mind, especially if it comes to a battle and the British seem to be winning it. One is a hard-pressed Argentina asking for help from its best food customer, the Soviet Union. The other is the possible intervention of Cuba. To put it mildly, neither consequence is one the United States would simply sit back and brood upon.

Well, that sounded rather stark. The feared intervention has not been so direct but we know now that the Russians are scanning the South Atlantic from their new satellite and passing on intelligence to the Argentines. Cuba has offered something ambiguously called 'rescue missions' but what I think few people anticipated is embodied in the reports that help of one sort or another – arms, materiel – is being offered by Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba and even by Chile, which has had its own territorial squabbles with Argentina.

What this looks like at the moment is something few American officials had banked on – a rallying by South and Central America as a whole, a response to the first military move in this century by a European power against this hemisphere. Even if these offers are not followed up, if the mood is there, it presents the United States with a huge new problem in retaining old friendships and repairing new ones with all the countries of Latin America.

Well, several other things have happened that, if there'd been no South Atlantic crisis, would have hogged the headlines. One is President Reagan's offer – at the fiftieth reunion of his old college – to sit down with Mr Brezhnev and work out a formula for the reduction of nuclear weapons and Mr Brezhnev's response to it. Mr Brezhnev, like Barkis, is willing but whereas Mr Reagan wants the meeting to map out the stages of an arms reduction system, Mr Brezhnev, making the most of the widespread nuclear freeze slogan which resounded first through Europe and now through this country, wants to freeze the present strength of both sides and then talk.

All you can say now is that both sides have a genuine desire to reduce strategic, that is long-range, missiles. It is on the balance of medium-range missiles and the unequal capability of their warheads that the argument goes on. The Russians look with alarm on the American capability added to the NATO capability of the submarine fleet. Mr Reagan has been mum about this. He looks with alarm at the Russian superiority in Eastern Europe of land-based missiles and Mr Brezhnev is mum about that. Neither side is willing to accept the judgement of disinterested outsiders, the Institute for Strategic Studies, for instance, that the American and Russian resources are in balance.

Nobody here is making much of Mr Brezhnev's rude remarks to the effect that the Reagan plan is insincere and aimed mainly at lulling the Soviet Union while America goes on building up new and more powerful weapons systems. The Soviet Union is never going to be lulled. And rude remarks about the warmongering United States – 20 years ago it used to be the ruling imperialist cliques – have long ago come to be accepted in Washington as a necessary exercise in speaking for bunkum, as the famous congressman from Buncombe County, North Carolina insisted when he started to speak in Congress and watched the House empty. 'If I can't speak to you, then I will make a speech for Buncombe!'

On this side, what's most noticeable is that Mr Reagan, too, has considerably moderated his speeches for bunkum since he came into the White House, swearing that the Soviet Union was the mortal enemy, not only a chronic liar and a totally untrustworthy signer of treaties it would never observe, but also a regime whose days were numbered.

I wonder if President Reagan ever listens to Radio Moscow which comes in loud and clear on the short wave anywhere in America. I've heard six or seven stories in a row, all offered as the main news stories in, as well as from, America. A black man jailed in a small town here, two Puerto Ricans arrested there, people queueing up for food, a peace rally in a small town, the appeal of three black men on a murder charge denied – all made out to be the great issues of the day. Read these off calmly and not blusteringly with the preface, 'Here is the American news' and you do indeed get the impression of a poverty-stricken, cruel and insensate colonial regime, something on the order of Idi Amin's.

Former presidents simply deplored this stuff. Mr Reagan, evidently, reacted to it as, in truth, 90 Americans in a hundred would if they ever heard it. Well, Mr Reagan, bruised now by a 17-month exposure to the realities of foreign policy, has learned reluctantly to forget it or accept it as one of the awful humdrum facts of life as the Kremlin's perpetual speech on behalf of a thousand Buncombes.

In public now, Mr Reagan is even admitting that the Russians, too, have cause to feel insecure around their vast borders and not to want a nuclear war any more than America does. On the other hand, when Mr Brezhnev talks about his desire for an understanding without delay and without any strings attached, he means, in the peculiar newspeak of the Soviet Union, an understanding in due time with a tangle of strings attached. Still, since both sides are remarkably softening their rhetoric, the chances are that there will be a summit meeting and that at least we shall have a breathing interval in what the director of the American arms control and disarmament agency calls 'this madness'.

On Tuesday last, the Republicans in the Senate did something that nobody could have predicted a year or even six months ago. They abandoned their long campaign to trim the budget by cutting $40 billion from the social security programme. When the programme was proposed in the mid 1930s, it was assailed by the Republicans, then very much in opposition, as a subsidy to slackers, the vanguard of galloping socialism, as an insult to the pride of the American working man. But one American working man in three or four was not working and the other two yearned for some security in their old age. So the programme went through. You paid in a percentage of your earnings and at 65 you received, and receive, a regular cheque from the government.

The proposal to abolish this nearly 50-year-old programme was howled down by the Democrats this time and by thumping majorities in the polls. The Republicans on the Senate committee that considered the proposal voted for it, all except one man, the only man who's up for re-election in November. Senators come up for re-election only once every six years, but the House of Representatives, all 435 members, they sit for only two years and they come up for re-election every even year. They must face the voters in November. They buried the proposal.

So, whatever else is going to be trimmed from the appalling estimate of a $182 billion deficit, the 40 billions for social security benefits will not be it.

This defeat for a party dedicated to trim the whole joint only shows that, today, whichever party is in power, Conservative, Labour, Republican, Democrat, there is an irreducible limit to what you can take away from the old folks at home.

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.