Walking on Eggs

Army Maj. Arthur D. Nicholson Jr. is dead at age 37, the first known casualty of a high-risk game that East and West have played in high-powered cars along the highways and among the forests of Germany since the end of World War II. Nothing could illuminate the true nature of the balance of terror in the world today like the muted response of Washington to the outrage.

Nicholson’s killer is a Soviet soldier. Given the reclusive nature of Soviet society, this is all that the world is likely ever to know about him, except that he is (or was) trigger-happy.

The major was part of a small team of U.S. officers, stationed in Potsdam, whose job is to prowl the roads of East Germany with high-powered cameras, watching for changes in troop dispositions or artillery placements--”intelligence-gathering,” as distinguished from spying. The Soviets have a team in Frankfurt, prowling the roads of West Germany, looking for similar things. Both teams are holdovers from the 1940s, when teams provided liaison among the Soviets, Americans, British and French forces. When postwar turned to Cold War, both sides found the intelligence provided by the outposts too valuable to give up. The teams stayed on.

In a world wound up as tightly as this one, a few hours’ advance notice of tank movements in East Germany seemed well worth the risks that the unarmed American teams took on their drives into the East German countryside.

In America’s Wild West a shooting like that would be cause for saddling up and riding to the next ranch to take revenge. The world was not wound up so tightly then. The West did not need that few hours’ advance notice so badly.

In 1985 East and West both moved to fence the incident in so that it did not grow into something even uglier than a single tragic murder. Charges and countercharges were exchanged through diplomatic channels. But President Reagan stopped short of saying, as one Washington official did, that the incident proved that Soviets shoot first and ask questions later. He said that it demonstrated the urgency of the need for a summit meeting. He is right. This does not mean that Nicholson is any less a hero than any American who died at Iwo Jima or Bull Run or Da Nang. But the world does not saddle up and go off to take revenge these days. In 1985, with 20,000 nuclear warheads pointed in all directions, the world walks on eggs.