Barb and Weasel

Perhaps the sharpest barb yet hurled at the Kellogg Peace Pact came last week from onetime Director Salvador de Madariaga of the Disarmament Section of the League of Nations. Wrote he to the London Times: "It is evident that a state which offers to renounce all but defensive wars (and that is what the American proposal means, despite its, in appearance, unqualified condemnation of war) renounces nothing at all so long as it retains the right to define when it is fighting a defensive war.

"At the very moment when it offers Europe and all the nations of the world a pact renouncing war as an instrument of national policy the American government is engaged in operations in Nicaragua which many people, both in the United States and abroad, consider as a war. . . . This fact eloquently shows that a mere pact renouncing war (whatever that may mean) as an instrument of national policy (whatever that may mean) is not going to prevent a nation from undertaking operations which a considerable proportion of the world may be unable to discriminate from war. Something more is wanted. . . ."

Nothing more is wanted by Japanese Prime Minister Baron Giichi Tanaka, although he informed the U. S. State Department last week that the Japanese Government "take [the Kellogg pact] to imply the entire abolition of the institution of war, and they will be glad to render their most cordial cooperation toward the attainment of that end."

No matter how unequivocal this statement may appear, it is actually a statesman's weasel, as appears from the Baron's next sentence: "The proposal of the United States is understood to contain nothing that would refuse to independent states the right of self-defense."