Summit Meeting

Three hours after Dwight Eisenhower welcomed Britain's Elizabeth II to the White House, London and Washington simultaneously announced another British visit: Prime Minister Harold Macmillan would land in Washington this week for summit talks with the President about the gravity of Soviet missile diplomacy and Soviet penetration in the Middle East. It was the first emergency-induced U.S. trip for a British Prime Minister since Clement Attlee came during the Korean crisis.

During their Bermuda conference last March, the President and Macmillan informally agreed to future meetings; a Macmillan trip to Washington had since been tentatively planned for next February. The speedup, arranged through regular State Department-Foreign Office channels (the President did not directly speak to Macmillan by telephone), came only after Russian threats had placed the cold war on a new and urgent basis. Subjects on the Eisenhower-Macmillan agenda:

SPUTNIK : The success of the Soviet satellite, followed as it was by a mighty surge of Russian propaganda, made neces sary a re-examination of free-world technological progress. It has long been a cardinal aim of British foreign policy to share in U.S. nuclear secrets; Harold Macmillan would push hard for such a sharing, and in the Sputnik era there seemed a fair chance that the U.S. Congress would at last approve. On a broader basis, President Eisenhower has long felt the need for an overall pooling of NATO scientific talent. At the White House dinner for Elizabeth II, he gave in his toast a key to a top Macmillan agenda item: "We have the power. The only thing to do is to put it together. Our scientists must work together. NATO should not be thought of merely as a military alliance. NATO is a way of grouping ability."

MIDDLE EAST: Russia had accused the U.S. of plotting with Turkey to attack Syria and set the probable D-day as Oct. 27. Both Party Boss Nikita Khrushchev and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had flexed their new rocket muscles in promising to retaliate against Turkey (see FOREIGN NEWS). The U.S. fear was not so much that Russia would risk all-out war by Middle Eastern aggression, as such, but rather that it would dangerously spread its influence in the Arab world by appearing as the noisy champion of Arab Syria. The Eisenhower-Macmillan talks would dwell less on the intramural problems of the Middle East than on methods of keeping the Russian influence out.

No sooner had the announcement of the Macmillan trip been made than Khrushchev demanded that he be included in a new summit meeting. Khrushchev's other-side-of-the-mouth belligerence had already ruled out any such possibility. But he had nonetheless done the free world a favor. By creating an emergency over Sputnik and the Middle East, he had newly welded the Atlantic alliance, perilously creaky since Suez, and inspired its members to get on with their business of collaboration.

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