Epidemics & Patience

For weeks the Communists have been accusing the U.N. of waging bacteriological warfare in North Korea, thus trying to explain away disease epidemics spreading north of the battle lines. The U.N. countered by proposing that an International Red Cross commission go into North Korea to investigate. Since that was the last thing the Reds wanted, they had to find an out. Last week they invented one.

The Peking radio charged that, with the knowledge and tacit consent of the Red Cross, U.N. doctors had been performing Nazi-style medical experiments on Red prisoners of war both on Koje Island and on an LST set up as a "special floating laboratory." Therefore, the Peking radio insisted, the Red Cross is tarnished with U.N. crimes and unfit to investigate anything.

For brazen effrontery, the medicalatrocity charge was the high point so far of the Reds' propaganda campaign. Such an accusation by them would have been unthinkable in the first weeks of the truce talks last summer, when the U.N. held the whip hand and once broke off the talks for several days over a mere matter of Communist soldiers strolling in Kaesong. Since then, the U.N.'s military pressure has slackened, and its anxiety for a truce has been openly publicized. Now, apparently, the Reds believe that anything goes--the U.N. will keep on coming to the truce table.

Rear Admiral Ruthven Libby, one of the allied negotiators, last week stoutly predicted that chances of a truce are still 50-50. A man who has borne the brunt of many Red jeers, he manfully tried to justify his unhappy assignment:

"We must continue to be patient and keep hanging on to this thing, and I think it will pay off in the end. But if we get impatient, we are going to suffer for it. By that I mean we will get either poorer armistice terms, or no armistice at all. The period now is very critical. We must hang on, keep at it, and try to get this thing through."

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