Conditional Acceptance

The day after President Eisenhower went before the United Nations to propose an international pool of atomic material for peaceful purposes (TIME, Dec. 14), a Soviet spokesman shrilled over the Moscow radio that Eisenhower had "threatened atomic war" with his "war mongering speech." But last week, after most of the free world had enthusiastically endorsed the Eisenhower plan as a step to peace, the Kremlin moderated its tone and agreed to the President's proposals for "confidential or diplomatic talks" between Russia and the Western powers to work out the details.

The Big Needle. The agreement to confer was disposed of in a couple of short paragraphs, but the great bulk of the 3,000-word Soviet note was taken up with needling Eisenhower for failing to call for "unconditional banning of atomic and hydrogen weapons, as well as other types of weapons of mass destruction." Why not, said the note, devote all atomic material to peaceful purposes? This was a skillful playback of a seven-year-old Soviet propaganda line on which U.N. atomic conferences have always foundered. The line has clamored for an immediate outlawing of atomic bombs (the West's prime lever against vast Soviet armies), while the Russians have fought any effort to set up a system of inspection which would insure real international control of the atom and protect the world against the Russians' breaking their promise.

Said the Russian note: The Soviet government will join the new talks "on the idea that . . . the states taking part" in the pool agreement will also "undertake solemn and unconditional pledges not to use atomic, hydrogen or other weapons of mass extermination.''

Secretary Dulles had no illusions about the Russian answer. The readiness to talk, he said, was "hopeful." But, said Dulles, "the Soviet Union seems not to have caught the spirit of the President's proposal. Its very purpose was to find a new basis which will permit of actually getting started. It has long been evident, and the tone of the Soviet response makes it even clearer, that little can be achieved by the continuance of public debate."

The New Reason. The U.S. had a vital new reason for holding fast to its demand for workable inspection before agreeing to any total atomic control plan. Last week New York's Representative W. Sterling Cole, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, was prodded into admitting on a television panel that the Russians were ahead of the U.S. "in some respects" in atomic development.

High-level Washington hummed with the rumor that the U.S. had picked up new aerial samples of a second Russian superbomb explosion--a blast which, said the rumor, indicated that the Soviet Union may well have found a short cut to a superbomb that is smaller and more easily delivered than the U.S.'s own.

Last week the Soviet Union proposed Jan. 25 as the date for a Big Four foreign ministers' conference in Berlin. Britain, France and the U.S. had suggested Jan. 4, but probably will go along with the Russian date without much complaint. U.S. diplomats guessed that the Russian stalling was an effort to prolong the French National Assembly's delay in acting on the European Defense Community.

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