If you want to understand West Berlin's history and present political reality, take the train from Hanover or Hamburg. The border crossing from West to East Germany gives the first clue. Barbed wire and high fences line the track; police line the station platform. The few East German civilians who are waiting for their own trains seem to look right through you as though you were invisible—a ghost train heading for Berlin.

“Be afraid. Nuclear death threatens us all!” So read the banners unfurled at this June's biennial assembly of the German Protestant Churches in Hamburg. In Frankfurt a businessman was adamant. “The best days are behind us. Now the Americans will drag us into a nuclear war. And all for what?”

Fear is abroad in West Germany, fear of what may happen if American medium-range rockets are installed on West German soil to counter the threat from the Soviet SS-20, Opposition to the proposed deployment has emerged as the one issue that may crystallize the disparate strands of unease and discontent within the country into something much more powerful-something that could, if unchecked, not only hasten the collapse of the ruling coalition of Social and Free Democrats, but rock the foundations of the Atlantic Alliance until it collapses.

Three thousand years ago the Cheshnuk dynasty of Libyan nomadic tribesmen ruled over a vast North African empire stretching from Morocco to the Red Sea. With his recent annexation ot neighboring Chad, openly claimed as part of Libya's “vital living space,” Colonel Qaddafi has taken the first successful step toward his much-publicized aim of recreating that empire. If his seizure of Chad is consummated by the planned political union between the two states, Qaddafi at last will be able to strut around as a latter-day duce, lord and master of four million people and an arid mass of sand and mountain the size of Western Europe.

Undoubtedly the colonel has a problem. Libya is a vast country, rich in oil, but with a population of only a million and a half–scarcely adequate for a would-be successor to Garnal Abdul Nasser or the Cheshnuk emperors.