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University Daily Kansan Monday, Sept. 30, 1963
U.S.—Soviet Space Pact Talks Return
By Donald H. May United Press International
The United States is now conducting a deep probe of Soviet ideas on space and the moon.
The reasons behind it are as much political as scientific. They have as much to do with the cold war on the ground as with mysteries of the sky.
President Kennedy's proposal in a United Nations speech Sept. 20 for broader U.S.-Soviet space cooperation, perhaps even including a joint expedition to the moon, has caused a week of repercussions in Washington.
SPACE OFFICIALS have charged they were not consulted before Kennedy spoke. Congressmen have asked whether Kennedy was abandoning the moon race with Russia. Newsmen have been asking officials: Did he mean it?
Much of the week's confusion is cleared away if Kennedy's proposal is viewed as his own advisers view it—as one more part of overall U.S. foreign policy regarding Russia.
This policy, spelled out by Kennedy in an address at American University in Washington June 10, is to seek out all possible areas of "common interest" with Russia, to seek cooperative agreements as long as they do not reduce U.S. security, and in this way to try to negotiate away some of the basic roots of the cold war.
The policy has been pressed on nuclear testing, disarmament, Berlin, Asia, trade, the "hot line" with the Kremlin and various exchange programs. In all these the effort is to encourage any movement by Russia away from the traditional self-imposed isolation dramatized so eloquently by the Iron Curtain.
SECRETARY OF STATE Dean Rusk and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara both have spoken of signs of a possible historic "evolution" in Russia in this direction.
Launching Americans and Russians together to the moon, or joining capsules and rockets, appear to most officials to be out of the question until the very last stages of any such "evolution."
Such cooperation would mean opening Russian military bases to the United States. This country has tried to keep its space program as separate as possible from the military. But almost everything involved in the Soviet space program — rockets, launch sites, tracking stations, communications, telemetry and radar — are military systems.
But in a way that has fascinated U.S. diplomats as well as scientists, the two countries have been cautiously feeling their ways toward more limited forms of space cooperation.
Until two years ago the Soviets showed no interest in proposals made through private U.S. scientists for space cooperation.The United States, meanwhile, went ahead with space agreements with many other countries.
THE FIRST APPARENT change in the Soviet attitude came Feb. 21, 1962, the day after Lt. Col. John H. Glenn's three-orbit flight. Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev wired President Kennedy offering congratulations and adding unexpectedly: "If our countries pooled their efforts . . . to master the universe, this would be very beneficial."
Kennedy seized upon this vague overture. He shot back a wire the same day saying he would write Khrushchev later suggesting some "concrete proposals."
On March 7, 1962, Kennedy wrote the Soviet Premier proposing five limited areas of space cooperation, which did not involve unveiling of soviet secrecy. He offered to discuss "broader cooperation" later.
Of the race to the moon, Kennedy then said: "The tasks are so challenging, the costs so great, and the risks to the brave men who engage in space exploration so grave that we must in all conscience try every possibility of sharing these tasks and costs and of minimizing these risks."
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