Foreign Affairs

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 18 October 1961.

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Photo of Mr Denis Healey Mr Denis Healey , Leeds East 12:00, 18 October 1961

I think that most of us would prefer to regard it as a sign of immaturity inappropriate in the leader of a great Power and particularly unbecoming in the leader of a Power which claims to be in the forefront of the struggle for world peace. I hope and believe that the Soviet Government will grow out of it in time; but the physical explosion in the atmosphere of twenty large atomic weapons during the last few weeks and the threat now to explode in the atmosphere a bomb with an explosive power of 50 megatons is something far more difficult to forgive.

Quite apart from the setback to all our hopes of disarmament, quite apart from the evidence of duplicity in negotiation, to which the Foreign Secretary referred yesterday, evidence which is bound to influence future talks with the Soviet Government on any issue, Soviet behaviour in these matters during the past few weeks has involved a direct and physical danger to everyone on this planet. The total fall-out from the bombs already exploded by the Soviet Government since they broke off the test talks is already greater than the fall-out from all previous tests carried out by Britain, Russia and America before the balks began. We have been told that certain laboratories in some parts of the world have found that radioactivity has increased 1,000 times since this series of tests began, and we are now told by Chair- man Khrushchev that this radioactivity is to be increased at least by half as much again with the explosion of the 50 megaton bomb.

I ask Mr. Khrushchev to remember that, after this next bomb is exploded, babies will suffer not just in America and Britain but they will suffer in India, in Japan, in Ghana, in China and in the Soviet Union itself. As President Kennedy said yesterday, there can be no military justification whatever for the physical testing of such a weapon in the atmosphere. If Mr. Khrushchev believes that there is any political benefit to be gained from such a test, he is making a ghastly miscalculation. I hope that, in the next week or so, the rest of the world will unite in protest against the decision and will persuade Mr. Khrushchev to change his mind.

In the same speech yesterday, Mr. Khrushchev made some remarks about the Berlin crisis which offer us increased hope of a settlement. He said clearly, as he has hinted several times in recent weeks, that he would not inevitably sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany by the end of the year. Yesterday's debate showed wide agreement on both sides of the House on the general lines which a negotiated settlement of the Berlin crisis might follow. As my right hon. Friend gave utterance to his own thoughts on the subject, I could not help feeling that there was a great deal of agreement on the other side of the House, perhaps also on the Front Bench.

The general shape of an agreement which now, I think, is increasingly accepted as feasible in this country and in the United States is that the West's main aim in negotiations must be to achieve greater security of access to West Berlin than it has possessed during the past fifteen years and that, in return for this improvement in the Western situation, the West must be prepared to recognise the present frontier between East Germany and Poland on the Oder-Neisse line and must move some way at least towards de facto recognition of the East German Government.

For myself, I very heartily welcome the degree of agreement which now exists in the West on negotiations which would broadly cover these matters, and I do not criticise the Government at all for their reticence on details. Obviously, it will be a very difficult and delicate matter to negotiate a concrete agreement along these lines and to balance a given degree of security for Western access to Berlin against a given degree of recognition by the West of the East German Government. But during yesterday's debate I felt that in some parts of the House there was not sufficient recognition that, although a settlement of the Berlin crisis along these line would represent a great improvement in the existing situation, it would still leave the situation in Berlin and Central Europe highly unsatisfactory.

In the first place, so long as West Berlin remains, as we believe it must, an island of freedom inside a Communist State, and so long as the area where this anomaly exists remains a major battlefield in the cold war, any settlement we reach on the Berlin situation by itself is bound to be unstable. The Western position is bound to remain vulnerable. There will be the danger of new crises any time the Soviet Government care to manufacture them, the danger that the Soviet Government may be tempted once again, as they have so often been in the past, to exploit the vulnerability of the Western position in Berlin. This, however, ever, is not the only reason why a settlement along these lines restricted to the Berlin problem itself is not likely to be fully satisfactory.

It has now become clear, since details of American and British thinking on the Berlin crisis have leaked out, that the sort of concessions which the West envisages in order to reach such a settlement will come as a tremendous shock to public opinion in West Germany—public opinion which has been nourished for years on illusions about the Central European situation deliberately fostered by its own Government and by allied Governments.