Assurances

The fall leaves turned gold, the swallows arrowed south, and the world's statesmen came back from the beaches and the mountains to the cares of a new season. The cares were still dismally the same--they had taken no vacation--but the atmosphere around them was changed.

Summer had begun with Moscow's peace offensive running full blast. Fall was beginning with stirrings which could, without much stretching, be called a Western peace offensive. The movement was loose and vague, but it somehow fell together around one word: assurances.

In their public pronouncements and private talks, Western diplomats last week repeated the word again and again--assurances that will convince Russia that the West wants peace, assurances against renewed fighting in Korea, assurances to quiet France's fears of reborn Germany. Britain's Winston Churchill spoke up again for four-power talks to negotiate Locarno-type assurances between Russia and the West. At the U.N., where U.S. Secretary of State Dulles had set the tone by recognizing Russia's right to assurances against hostile encirclement (TIME, Sept. 28), France's Maurice Schumann carried the matter further. "No nation understands better than France what the haunting fear of invasion and the obsessive longing for security can mean," said he. He turned pointedly to Russia's Andrei Vishinsky. "I assure you, you will find us ready to seek with you ... a guarantee against the modification by force of existing boundaries." Schumann also thought he saw hope of negotiating peace in Indo-China (see below).

The U.N. talked of a new plan to neutralize Korea and exchange mutual assurances with the Communists against renewed aggression there. In Western Europe, allied diplomats concentrated on ways to reassure hesitant France that it can safely unite with Germany in the EDC (see below), while France took pains to tell Russia--as did Germany's Konrad Adenauer before them--that assurances can be negotiated to convince Moscow of EDC's peaceful purpose.

If all the talk meant what it seemed to mean, the West was embarked on a real effort to test Russia at the negotiating tables.

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