The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

THE first thing to be said about the 1956 session of Congress is that it will be very difficult to distinguish its activities from the presidential campaign. There will be some on both sides of the party aisle who will try to be statesmen. But for the most part, newspaper readers and radio-TV followers will do well to view rival party programs, congressional voting, and the loud echoes from Capitol Hill as all related to next November’s election.

In some respects, the shape of things to come is reasonably apparent. Democrats will concentrate on what Senate Leader Lyndon Johnson, a wily politician, calls “a program with a heart.”Most of his party will be echoing his line that the Republican opposition “responds a little faster to the fat cats than to the folks.” While Johnson and Speaker Sam Rayburn, who is much closer to being a statesman, do not always see eye to eye, they and their lieutenants agree that the chief appeal of the Democratic Party lies in furthering the belief that it is the party of the masses of voters. And there are plenty of legislative ideas available to demonstrate the point.

The Republicans will sing the song of the middle road, peace and prosperity, and General Eisenhower. Trouble in the Middle East or elsewhere may somewhat mute the line that “everything is booming but the guns.”On the whole, however, the GOP will be paraphrasing the '52 Democratic erv, “You never had it so good; don’t let them take it away.”

The Administration, under pressure from its nervous political chieftains, has given ground on school aid, highway construction, social security extension, and changes in the farm program — but not on Secretary Benson’s flexible supports. Each of these concessions is designed to undercut the Democratic argument by demonstrating that the Republicans are just as much for the masses as anybody else.

By any of the old political rules, a party in power amid such domestic prosperity as the United States is enjoying should not have any anxiety about re-election. But the GOP has been suffering losses ever since it captured the White House and the Congress in 1952. This electoral erosion has it worried. And the signs from the farm areas are the cause of recurrent alarm, if not panic.

In this rather unusual situation, efforts to “do something” for as many voters as possible will be more than routine. Every politician facing the voters would like to have a tax cut to talk about. But the majority of the leaders of both parties know that the world situation is so critical that the United States cannot afford to cut its revenues.

Maneuvering to cut taxes?

As usual, it may be expected that last-minute events abroad will influence the final size of military and foreign aid budgets. And last-minute revenue figures in a year when current tax rates are likely to bring in more than was estimated will play a large part in the maneuvering to cut taxes.

As the year opens, the Democrats would seem to have the tactical advantage on the tax-cut issue — that is, if they can agree. Most of them probably would follow Rayburn’s prescription of doing something for the “little fellow" such as raising the income tax exemption and making it up by removing some “ inequities,” perhaps the dividend allowance or some corporate exemptions. But the conservative Southerners on the Senate Finance Committee thus far have bucked this approach, and their votes were decisive a year ago in killing a Democratic tax-cut bill. A tax cut, therefore, is still uncertain.

Nor should the seeming Democratic agreement on other domestic matters be taken for granted. One issue likely to split the party wide open is the natural gas bill, one of Johnson’s pet measures and already past the House by a hair. A bitter Senate battle is in prospect, with the division across party lines and essentially on a rural versus urban basis. It will not make a happy start for the new year among the Democrats.

Until the President has announced his own intentions, much of the congressional battling will be between parties. But if and when Eisenhower takes himself out, the Republicans are bound to be less amenable to party control from the White House.

Despite the sound and fury, there will be some substantial legislation this year on domestic matters — certainly for farmers, likely for highways, probably for schools, at the least. Barring a crisis, foreign policy will be continued without much alteration.

The not-so-peaceful atom

A decade of East-West arguments, proposals and counterproposals, and more arguments has failed to find a path to agreement, on the atom in its military application. Now that the Russians have finally turned down the Eisenhower “open skies” proposal for mutual aerial inspection and have reverted to bully-boy language, disarmament is on the shelf again.

But even as this discouraging development takes place, a new problem of the atomic age is emerging with little notice. This is the problem of how to control the peaceful use of nuclear energy: specifically, how to make sure that when nations around the world obtain nuclear power stations they will not use them to make nuclear weapons.

The simple indisputable scientific fact is that a nuclear power plant not only can turn out electricity but also will turn out plutonium as a byproduct of the fissionable material fed into it. The line between peaceful and not-so-peaceful uses thus is nonexistent, or very shortly will be, in scientific terms. Estimates vary as to how long it will be before there are nuclear power plants in nations other than the United States, Britain, and Russia, so far the only manufacturers of atomic weapons. But the estimates range from perhaps five years to a decade, with the minimum likely for an industrially skilled nation like West Germany.

The United Nations this fall voted to set up an International Atomic Energy Agency to further peaceful uses. During the debate very little was said about the not-so-peaceful problem. Russia’s V. V. Kuznetsov came as close as anyone to reality when he told the U.N. that the production of atomic energy for peaceful purposes resulted in by-products which could be put to military use. The Kremlin’s answer to the problem was to demand that the U.N. atomic agency should be linked to the Security Council where the big power veto could be applied.

Control through the back door

But others who have been trying to face up to the problem believe that there may be better solutions. Specifically, they believe that because there is a common Russian-American (and British) interest in not allowing the fragmentation of nuclear power, in the absolute sense, there is a chance for agreement to use the new U.N. agency for inspection and control.

Why not, they ask, build up inspection and control services as nuclear power grows — starting from scratch in both cases? The advantages would be obvious. The world would have some sense of security that nuclear power plants would not become sources of nuclear weapons materials. Many nations now without nuclear weapons and impatient at the Western demand for strict controls before agreement on a disarmament plan would learn firsthand of the importance of control. Inspection and control techniques could be tested and perfected as the problem of inspection and control increases in the power field. Perhaps in time the world would have enough faith in such a system to force the large nations to apply it to the central question itself.

In effect, this amounts to going around to the back door since the front door has been slammed. But for any such idea to be effective, some major decisions will first have to be made. The new U.N. agency will have to go into the international business of owning and controlling fissionable material contributed to it. (The United States, Britain, and Russia all have now promised such contributions.)

Secondly, no nation alone can be allowed to produce fissionable material other than the Big Three, and probably Canada. Here the problem, and it is an immediate problem, centers in Western Europe where for months experts from West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg have been discussing it. Europe wants nuclear-generated electricity. Belgium already has ordered its first small power plant. Some high officials in Bonn see in nuclear power a new third dimension for Germany’s rise to the status of a major power once more. The French, despite recurrent governmental crises, are making progress in the field.

European atomic authority

Jean Monnet and his fellow “Europeans” see in Euratom, as they call the idea of a Western European atomic authority, a new step towards integration. The nationalists and a good many businessmen would prefer national industries; hence they look sourly at more international controls.

Those who fear a resurgent Germany, and they are still legion, fear West Germany might easily slip across the line from producing nuclear power to producing nuclear weapons.

Secretary Dulles has tried to give the Euratom idea a push; but having been burned on the ill-fated European Defense Community, he wants to avoid a second defeat. Thus far there has been little recognition at the Capitol of the dangerous aspects of nuclear power plants scattered around the world.

Everybody is for peaceful use of atomic energy; everybody applauded the President’s original proposal at the U.N. for an international pool. But most of the American effort has been on the negative side thus far. One incident will illuminate the ramifications.

The United States offered last September to help set up a nuclear research center in Asia for the Colombo Plan nations, to give a research reactor (which produces no bomb material) at once, and to give a small power reactor at some indefinite date. Thereupon the Administration was rent by an argument over where the center should be. Under Secretary of State Herbert Hoover, Jr., and AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss decided on Manila for one reason: it is behind the American military perimeter in the Pacific; hence a power reactor could be protected militarily.

Assistant Secretary of State George Allen and others who deal with Asia wanted the center in Ceylon to emphasize that the United States is just as willing to help nations which do not belong to alliances with us as nations which do. However independent the Philippines are in fact, much of Asia considers them an American dependency. But such a center in Ceylon with American aid would have been a bold stroke for the United States. In the end, security won out, and Manila will get the center.

A dozen nations from both East and West are meeting in Washington to agree on a final draft of the new U.N. atomic agency statute. If they take into account both the perils and the opportunities inherent in nuclear power, perhaps a new avenue to the nuclear control problem will be opened.

Mood of the Capital

The central question in Washington is, of course, Will the President run again? Every conversation in the Senate lobby, on the House floor, at the Press Club bar inevitably gets around to that question.

There is substantial evidence that the President, in the long quiet hours of pondering his future, has reached two conclusions— that Adlai Stevenson will be the Democratic nominee and that no other Republican is in sight who can beat Stevenson. But this only heightens the uncertainty. And the Gallup Poll showing the President running almost exactly the same distance ahead of Stevenson as before his heart attack adds to the pressure that he run again.

Despite the Republican hope that the President would say yes, a good many politicians have felt for weeks that the President has decided not to run and wants Vice President Nixon as his successor. There is no question in Washington, even though a lot of visitors seemed to be amazed at the idea, that Eisenhower has the highest admiration for Nixon. He has said so many times, both publicly and privately. At the President’s own insistence, Nixon is better trained than any Vice President in history in the technicalities of the Presidency.

But if the President has decided that Nixon cannot win, the question remains: Will Eisenhower run? In all the long history of Presidents making up their minds on a second term, no incident has approached this winter’s uncertainty.