THE WEEK

It seems as though you can’t have a private family argument any more. Since the first of the year our three military services, Army and Navy and Air Force, have been at each other hammer-and-tongs over who has the best ballistic missile. Names like “Thor,” “Atlas,” “Nike,” “Bomarc,” “Jupiter” have been passed back and forth like—well, like missiles. And now who should jump in but the Soviet Air Force, with a long article in its official magazine, Soviet Aviation, claiming that our Army’s Nike, with which our cities and defense establishments are being so expensively fenced, is no good. Too slow, too short-range, too easy to disorient, say the Red experts, and to prove it they give page after page of analysis, measurements and performance records. Well, that ought to settle the argument. The Army probably never permitted the Navy or the Air Force to have a look at its plans, so that their criticisms were largely uninformed. But does anyone doubt that the Soviet judgment was based on anything less than a meticulous observation of Nike’s blueprints?

The Reverend A. J. Muste, chairman of the newly formed American Forum for Socialist Education, (national review, May 25, p. 490) has condemned a questionnaire sent out by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee as “evil,” a resort to “methods characteristic of totalitarian regimes,” “unconstitutional” and “profoundly un-American.” The questionnaire asked “to what extent” Albert Blumberg (national legislative chairman of the Communist Party until convicted under the Smith Act in 1956) was a “moving factor” in establishing the Forum, what dealings Mr. Muste had had with “other representatives of the Communist Party, U.S.A. with relation to the Forum,” whether each committeeman of the Forum had an equal vote? Mr. Muste refused to answer such totalitarian inquiries. Mr. Muste does not explain how it comes about that his conscience, which has such delicate scruples about collaboration with a committee of our duly elected national legislature, feels no qualm over collaboration with comrades of the butchers of Hungarian students and workers.

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It seems as though you can’t have a private family argument any more. Since the first of the year our three military services, Army and Navy and Air Force, have been at each other hammer-and-tongs over who has the best ballistic missile. Names like “Thor,” “Atlas,” “Nike,” “Bomarc,” “Jupiter” have been passed back and forth like—well, like missiles. And now who should jump in but the Soviet Air Force, with a long article in its official magazine, Soviet Aviation, claiming that our Army’s Nike, with which our cities and defense establishments are being so expensively fenced, is no good. Too slow, too short-range, too easy to disorient, say the Red experts, and to prove it they give page after page of analysis, measurements and performance records. Well, that ought to settle the argument. The Army probably never permitted the Navy or the Air Force to have a look at its plans, so that their criticisms were largely uninformed. But does anyone doubt that the Soviet judgment was based on anything less than a meticulous observation of Nike’s blueprints?

The Reverend A. J. Muste, chairman of the newly formed American Forum for Socialist Education, (national review, May 25, p. 490) has condemned a questionnaire sent out by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee as “evil,” a resort to “methods characteristic of totalitarian regimes,” “unconstitutional” and “profoundly un-American.” The questionnaire asked “to what extent” Albert Blumberg (national legislative chairman of the Communist Party until convicted under the Smith Act in 1956) was a “moving factor” in establishing the Forum, what dealings Mr. Muste had had with “other representatives of the Communist Party, U.S.A. with relation to the Forum,” whether each committeeman of the Forum had an equal vote? Mr. Muste refused to answer such totalitarian inquiries. Mr. Muste does not explain how it comes about that his conscience, which has such delicate scruples about collaboration with a committee of our duly elected national legislature, feels no qualm over collaboration with comrades of the butchers of Hungarian students and workers.