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than a million people. Today it holds nearly 5 million. Most of that increase is accounted for by the flood of refugees from the mainland, which surged through despite the barbed wire and border guards put in place to halt it.
    In my office is a lacquer painting given to Mrs. Nixon when she visited a refugee camp in South Vietnam in 1956. It serves as a constant reminder to me that when Vietnam was partitioned in 1954 nearly a million people fled from North to South.
    I spent Christmas Day 1956 at a refugee camp in Austria, near the bridge at Andau. There I talked with some of those who had escaped from Hungary in the wake of that country’s brief rebellion, as Soviet tanks were crushing resistance in the streets of Budapest. Their tales of escape were harrowing. Their courage was a tribute to the human spirit, and a measure of the cruelty that triumphed.
    In divided Germany the Berlin Wall stands as what West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher has called “a monument to slavery.” Before the Wall, undivided Berlin was an accessible island of freedom in a sea of tyranny. It was an abomination to the communists because it represented choice. Before the Wall was built in 1961, over 3 million people took advantage of that choice, and fled communist rule: five hundred people a day for fifteen years.
    Closed borders, barbed wire, walls, guards with orders to shoot on sight any attempting to flee—these are the mark of communist control and the symbols of Soviet advance.
    The hundreds of thousands of Jews waiting to get out of the Soviet Union have engaged the world’s sympathy. But they are not alone. It is not just anti-Semitism that causes the Soviet government to limit Jewish emigration. If free emigration were allowed, millions of Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and others would leave also.
    It is a mark of our times that when one or two persons defect from the West to the East, that is big news. But when thousands flee communist rule, that is merely a statistic. Yet the human tragedy behind such statistics is one of the central dramas of the twentieth century, and the assault on human liberties these statistics represent is one of the defining characteristics of World War III.
Resources: The Weak Link
    To the Soviets, anyone who stands in the way of their supremacy—of their hegemony—is an adversary. The Soviet Union’s ultimate target in World War III is its chief rival, the United States. Its intermediate targets are Western Europe andJapan. Its immediate targets are those vulnerable and unstable areas of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, in which, at relatively little risk and cost, it can gain strategic advantages and place itself increasingly in position to control the world’s resources and lifelines.
    Stalin highlighted the vulnerability of the West to resource interdiction back in 1921. “If Europe and America may be called the front,” he said, “the non-sovereign nations and colonies, with their raw materials, fuel, food, and vast stores of human material, should be regarded as the rear, the reserve of imperialism. In order to win a war one must not only triumph at the front but also revolutionize the enemy’s rear, his reserves.” More recently, Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev confided to Somalian President Siad Barre, then an ally of the U.S.S.R., that “Our aim is to gain control of the two great treasure houses on which the West depends—the energy treasure house of the Persian Gulf and the mineral treasure house of central and southern Africa.”
    While the United States is partially dependent on imported oil and strategic minerals, Europe and Japan are absolutely dependent on overseas sources. Half of our oil is imported, but Europe imports 85 percent and Japan 100 percent. As for minerals, Western Europe imports 80 percent and Japan 95 percent. Minor interruptions of imports that would cause inconvenience and annoyance