Oranges & Sour Apples

Winding up his 17-day tour of the Soviet Union, President Gamal Abdel Nasser flew back to Cairo to assume command of the spreading Arab nationalist violence in the Middle East. Before seeing him off in a Russian jet airliner, the dictator of the Moskva hailed the dictator of the Nile for his "bravery, understanding and fearlessness before the colonizers," and pledged "all the help you need from us" in uniting the Arab world. At a huge farewell meeting for Nasser in the Kremlin, Nikita Khrushchev also boasted that with the launching of the new 1 1/2-ton Sputnik III (see SCIENCE), the Soviet Union had again "outstripped the U.S." Amid shouts of post-toasty laughter, he ridiculed the U.S. space satellites as apelsin-sputniks -orange-sized Sputniks. "By all the rules of arithmetic," he crowed, "we can see that they [the U.S.] will need a mighty big basket to hold enough of these oranges to equal our Sputnik III."

For his part, Nasser, plainly enjoying the Russian hospitality, and reportedly given a reduction of his arms debt to Russia as a going-away present, told Khrushchev that "only imperialist, hostile, false propaganda says you are arming and preparing for war."

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