Hopeless?

In Paris, Andrei Vishinsky unreeled a long harangue in which he called the Korean truce talks all but hopeless because of the U.N.'s "unreasonable demands." The white-thatched old propaganda monger called General James Van Fleet a "latterday cannibal," added that he was unfit to conduct the truce talks. Since Van Fleet, the Eighth Army's military commander, has no hand or voice in the ceasefire negotiations, Vishinsky's attack was either a willfully silly distortion or a ludicrous mistake.

The impression got around the world that the Kremlin's puppetmasters are plainly preventing, or at least delaying, a Korean truce. At Panmunjom, the atmosphere was reminiscent of last August, when the Reds broke off the talks for two months. The deadlocks that had existed for weeks--on safeguarding the armistice and exchange of prisoners--continued.

The Reds charged that allied planes had flown over Mukden and other cities in Manchuria. There was no accusation that the planes had attacked, but the Peking radio bawled about "aggressive provocations" and violations of Red China's "air sovereignty" by "American air pirates." Then the Communists alleged three more acts of U.N. barbarism: a U.N. bombing of a Red P.W. camp at Kang-dong, 18 miles northeast of Pyongyang; an air strafing of a properly marked Red truce delegation convoy north of Kaesong; and an air attack on the Kaesong zone itself, where a crater 25 ft. wide and 8 ft. deep was exhibited to U.N. investigators.

Allied newsmen in Korea, who hang on the words of briefing officers and whose expectations of peace rise & fall daily and sometimes very steeply, pronounced the situation grimmer than at any time since the conferences were resumed in October.

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