Mapmakers’ Puzzle: Where to Draw the Line? : Borders: National Geographic decides to print an atlas showing a united Germany but holds off on altering Mideast boundaries.

The National Geographic Society printed pages of a new world atlas that shows East and West Germany united, but delayed printing the Middle East map because of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

R. R. Donnelly & Sons in Willard, Ohio, printed 240,000 pages containing the map of a unified Germany that will be in the sixth edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World even though the unification is incomplete.

The new 410-page atlas will be available in November.

“We’ve had to look into our crystal ball and see that the unification of Germany is inevitable,” said John Garver, National Geographic’s chief mapmaker. “However, it was not without much hand-wringing and deliberation that we decided to change the world before it actually happened.”

Both Bonn and Berlin will be shown as the capitals, and only the West German flag will be shown. Germany also will be unified on 21 other maps, such as regional, political and world maps, Garver said.

Germany will be surrounded with a green border and the red line that has separated East and West Germany in previous editions of the atlas will be gone.

Meanwhile, Garver ordered the map of the Middle East to be printed last--probably in two weeks--because of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

“We’re going to hold that until the latest we possibly can,” he said.

Garver said there was little chance Kuwait would be eliminated from the map.

Unless something else significant occurs, he said, the Middle East map will contain the following notation: “On Aug. 2, 1990, Iraqi military forces invaded Kuwait.”

The atlas also dropped the letters “S.S.R.,” which stands for Soviet Socialist Republic, from Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia and other Soviet republics except for Russia because of independence movements there.