Khrushchev's Purpose

Three weeks ago, in a polite but damning note, Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan wrote to Nikita Khrushchev, "I simply do not understand what your purpose is." It was not the kind of remark to provoke a humble confession of contrition from Khrushchev, and it didn't. Last week came his reply: a letter that blamed the West for the summit collapse, the Berlin stalemate, the RB-47 incident, the Congo crisis, the Cuban situation and a few other disturbances that crossed Nikita's mind.

As such, it was not a bad reflection of East-West relations last week. At the U.N., Russian officials raced about lobbying among delegates against convening the 82-nation U.N. Disarmament Commission next week, as the U.S. proposed. Alternately hinting boycott and begging support, the Red diplomats talked up Khrushchev's counterproposal: postponing any disarmament discussion until September, at which time, Nikita suggested, as many as possible of the 82 U.N. chiefs of state should gather at the General Assembly for the biggest summit meeting in human history.

The Lonely Visitor. Khrushchev's grandstanding offer, if meant to be taken seriously, casually undercut his dictum--reiterated only last week in his letter to Macmillan--that he would never again sit down at a conference table with Dwight Eisenhower. At such a spectacular get-together of chiefs of state, Russia might find it easier than in a more professional Disarmament Commission session to avoid explaining why the self-styled champions of peace had stalked out of the ten-nation Geneva disarmament talks last June. And if the Disarmament Commission is prevented from meeting, it is prevented from urging the Russians to get back to serious negotiations.

Khrushchev might have something else in mind. The Red leader plans to visit "brave little Cuba," and has been angling --unsuccessfully so far--for invitations to visit other Latin American nations, particularly Mexico. By dropping in at the General Assembly--even if no other chief of state shows up--Khrushchev might make his Cuban call seem a less provocative gesture.

Talk-Weary. In the talk-weary halls of Geneva, Soviet maneuvers were just as devious. The nuclear test-ban talks sessions had gotten down to discussing about how many on-site inspections a year would be permitted. The U.S. and Great Britain wanted about 20; fortnight ago Russia consented to three. Though U.S. Delegate James J. Wadsworth rejected the Russian offer as "ludicrous and completely unacceptable," he added hopefully: "At least we now know the range of bargaining." But Russia last week rejected out of hand another U.S. proposal: to pool obsolete U.S., British and Russian atomic devices in developing instruments necessary to detect underground atomic blasts. Since Russia did not intend to carry on any underground detection tests, declared Soviet Delegate Semyon Tsarapkin, there was no need for such a pool.

But despite "Scratchy" Tsarapkin's tough talk, Western delegates still clung to the conviction or hope that Russia would not abandon the test-ban talks. Their grounds: the Soviet delegation's surprisingly candid private declarations that Russia feels a pressing need for a test ban "before other nations start developing nuclear weapons." And of course the Russians let it be understood that the "other nation" they most want kept out of the nuclear era is Red China.

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