Not For Export

Fortnight ago, the Soviet government sent a formal protest to Washington. U.S. flyers, said the note, were dropping Colorado beetles on East German potato fields. The Estonian republic set up a people's democratic bug watch to crush the six-legged tools of Wall Street. Czechoslovakia's Red regime piped up, six days later, and said that someone had been sprinkling potato bugs on Czech fields, too.

Washington refused even to reply formally to the Soviet note, unofficially dismissed it as an absurd invention of Soviet propagandists* to explain away the failure of the 1950 potato crop in Eastern Germany. But in Prague last week, U.S. Ambassador Ellis O. Briggs decided to answer the Czech complaint in the same fine spirit with which it had been offered.

"To the extent that the potato bug represents a Czechoslovakian domestic problem," he wrote to the Czech Foreign Office, "it is not a matter of concern to the American Embassy, which nevertheless expresses its sympathy ... To the extent, however, that efforts have been made to connect the United States with the presence of the bug, the matter is of legitimate interest to the American Embassy, which declares that [the] allegations . . . are false and preposterous.

"The Embassy ventures to suggest the inherent unsuitability of the potato bug (Doryphora decemlineata) as an instrument of national policy. The Embassy doubts whether the potato bug, even in its most voracious phase, could nibble effectively at the fabric of friendship uniting the Czechoslovakian and the American people."

*Not altogether--any more than the radio, the electric light and the pop-up toaster. Ten years ago, the Nazis accused British flyers of dropping potato bugs on German potato fields.

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