'As We Step Back From Danger'

  A great wave of hope has swept through the world since the last public Kennedy-Khrushchev exchange revealed that the Soviet Premier had offered, and the American President accepted, removal of the Russian missile bases from Cuba in exchange for an American promise not to invade the island and to lift the arms blockade. The blockade was in fact suspended last night. A crisis that had brought the two great nuclear powers as close to annihilative war as they had ever been was suddenly-and almost inexplicably-eased. Now, in the President's felicitous phrase, "we step back from danger."

  But danger has not disappeared. The danger of mutual thermonuclear destruction lurks still around us like the encompassing sea. While the exceedingly provocative Russian incursion into the Western Hemisphere has now been turned back-on the assumption that Premier Khrushchev will be as good as his word and remove the soviet missiles from Cuba forthwith-all the other great points of conflict between the free and the Communist worlds remain; not to mention a vast array of smaller but still unanswered questions regarding Cuba itself. Once the missiles are gone, will Castro continue as a Soviet puppet?  Will Cuba continue to serve as the central point of Communist influence in this hemisphere? Will the relationship between Castro and the American republics change? What about his internal position? What about the exiles? In the understandable euphoria that has followed the Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement, it is worth remembering that the Cuban question is still very far from being settled and, in the Latin American context, may still give us much trouble.

  But these problems,  serious as they are, are small compared to the other problems that remain: Berlin, Southeast Asia, nuclear testing, disarmament. In Cuba, the Soviet Union went too far and is-if all present signs are to be believed-in process of gracefully withdrawing. Now that Mr. Khrushchev has stepped back from the danger, it would be worse than folly if he felt the way clear to push ahead on another and even more dangerous front-Berlin for example.

  The worst was averted last weekend; and the world has good cause to rejoice. But if we and the Russians now sink back to the point where we were before the crisis, nothing will have been gained except a breathing spell. Now is the time, as the President said, "to make real progress" in general disarmament, for instance, or in nuclear testing, an area in which even Mr. Khrushchev said the two sides are not far apart. The atmosphere is right-or at least it will be if the missile bases are quickly removed-for a great detente. But we do not even know if the situation within the Kremlin will permit one; and until some further move in that direction is made by the Soviet Premier, we will have to keep our fingers crossed-and our powder dry.