Call It Peace

From behind the Iron Curtain last week came a noisy eruption of growls and threats, mixed with a few bullets.

To lead off, Moscow pounced on a provision in the Mutual Security Act which authorizes $100 million in MSA funds for aid to "any selected persons who are residing in or escapees from" Iron Curtain countries, either to form them into military units under NATO or "for other purposes." To the State Department's embarrassment, Wisconsin's Republican Representative Charles Kersten had said quite plainly that his amendment was intended to "render aid for underground liberation movements in the Communist countries."

With Ill Grace. This was a clear case of "financing subversive activity . . . against the Soviet Union," cried the Kremlin. It also constituted "an unheard of violation of the norms of international law," and violated the Litvinov-Roosevelt agreement of 1933, in which each country promised not to interfere in the internal affairs of the other by force, propaganda or plot.*

Snapped the State Department in reply: "Charges to this effect come with singular ill grace from a Soviet regime which consistently supports subversive activities against the U.S. and other nations of the free world." Anyway, State added, the charge was "groundless."

As if on cue, junior partner Hungary piped up with a 3,000-word report designed to "prove" that the U.S. "interferes with [Hungary's] internal affairs, hinders her economic progress, and tries to overthrow her democratic existence."

At the U.K. Assembly meeting in Paris, Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky pushed the Russian charges by demanding that they be included on the agenda. In the social contacts of diplomacy, Vishinsky and his deputy, Jacob Malik, were all smiles and little pleasantries. But Vishinsky's retort to Secretary of State Acheson's dispassionate exposition of the West's disarmament proposals was savage as ever with invective.

Threats for Peace. Swiveling in another direction, Moscow fired off menacing notes to Israel and the Arab countries, warning that if they wanted to keep the friendship of Russia, they would not join the "aggressive" Middle East Command proposed by the U.S., Britain, France and Turkey. Such action, growled the Russian dove, was a threat to peace. These were followed by notes direct to the four sponsoring powers warning that the Soviet "cannot ignore these new designs" to make the Middle East "a springboard for the armed forces of the Atlantic bloc."

Washington contributed only one overt act to the week's uproar. President Harry Truman ordered all tariff concessions withdrawn from Russia and Poland as of Jan. 5, 1952, and banned the import of most furs from Russia and Communist China ($10 million in 1950). Trade concessions have already been withdrawn from all other Russian satellites in Europe except Hungary (the U.S.-Hungarian trade agreement requires a year's notice).

Twenty years ago, an observer would have surmised from such exchanges that war was imminent. Two international incidents in last week's news would have made the 1931 man sure of it.

Two Planes. A U.S. military transport plane, carrying diplomatic supplies from Western Germany to the U.S. embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, strayed from its course and skimmed the Iron Curtain's borders. Fired on by both Hungarian and Rumanian border guards, it radioed that it was turning back, and vanished. In 1951's topsy-turvy diplomacy as conducted by Communism, the first protests came not from the U.S. but from Hungary and Rumania--they complained that the plane had violated their "air space."

The other incident was two weeks old but became known only last week. On Nov. 7, the Russians had protested to the U.S. that a bomber "of the Neptune type" had violated the Russian border near Vladivostok. When two Soviet fighters approached, said the Russian note, the U.S. bomber opened fire. The fighters returned the fire, and "the American plane went off in the direction of the sea and disappeared."

The U.S. refused to answer directly on the ground that the bomber was operating as a U.N. plane. Last week it reported to the Security Council that a Navy Neptune had failed to return from "a routine weather reconnaissance over the Sea of Japan." The pilot had strict orders not to go closer than 20 miles to U.S.S.R. territory. "It can only be concluded . . . that the plane was intercepted and attacked without warning while over international waters."

Neither the U.S. nor Russia demanded revenge or threatened reprisals. But only five years ago, Yugoslavia's shooting down of two U.S. transport planes had both sides worrying about possible war. In the state of settled, chronic hostility to which the West and Russia had come, such incidents between them had ceased to be any more than a one-day sensation.

When & if the Kremlin makes the decision for war, it will not lack for pretexts. But the pretext will have nothing to do with the decision. Nor will it be preceded by protests and diplomatic notes. Last week's bombast and stray bullets were normal conditions of what 1951 called peace.

*This agreement was part of the terms on which the U.S. finally granted recognition to the U.S.S.R., which had been withheld after the revolution.

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