Word: rapacki
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Western Big Three. Russia is not fundamentally interested in "relaxation of tensions," in the Rapacki disengagement plan, a "thinning out" of Soviet and U.S. troops in Central Europe, or any other ingenious schemes for an overall settlement of the German problem. What Khrushchev is determined to do, beyond all else, is t01) end Berlin's status as an outpost of Western power, and 2) oblige the West to accept, openly or implicitly, the permanence of the East German Communist state. To force the West's hand, Khrushchev denies that the Western powers any longer possess World...
Back in Washington, Mikoyan was greeted by still more Americans certain he had peace proposals packed away in his portfolio. Lunching on steak with members of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mikoyan waxed expansive on the Rapacki plan for neutralizing Germany, suggested that Russian and Western troops each withdraw 500 miles from Berlin. Such a retreat, leaving the Russians comfortably on their own soil, the U.S. uncomfortably somewhere west of Paris, had twice before been urged by the Russians, twice before been rejected by the West. Nonetheless, Minnesota Democrat Hubert Humphrey, who had met Mikoyan during his headlined Kremlin...
Discussing European problems further, Finletter commented that the U.S. should "listen much more sympathetically than we have to proposals such as the Rapacki Plan." He supported the Polish program of setting up an "atom-weapon-free zone on either side of the dividing line in Europe," as this would not reduce Western military strength relative to the Soviets and would ease Russian worries about missile sites close to their territory...
Apart from the Eden Plan, no one has yet suggested a disengagement proposal that would not gravely endanger the military security of the Western nations. Communist Rapacki's projected nuclear freeze would seriously weaken NATO's ability to defend itself against Russia's vastly larger conventional forces, and would constitute a major victory for Moscow. Any plan that entails German withdrawal from NATO would probably lead to complete U.S. military withdrawal from Europe, since no Western European country save West Germany can be expected to play host to more than 175,000 U.S. soldiers...
...Victims of Rapacki fever assume that the West should show itself ready to make painful sacrifices, as if a German settlement and some form of disengagement would actually "relieve tensions." But against the nebulous idea that a vacuum or a buffer contributes to peace, Britain's Selwyn Lloyd argued cogently last week: "It may well be that the world is a very much safer place if in critical areas there is a direct confrontation of the major parties and not an area of uncertainty...