Affronts & Finesse

At the top of the U.S.'s list of urgent diplomatic problems in a more than crowded week was the hot and dangerous strife in Lebanon (see FOREIGN NEWS). There, the West was trying to keep the fire in the tangled underbrush of Lebanese politics from igniting the vast political munitions dump of the Middle East.

Elsewhere, Russia's new switch back to the hard line brought a new batch of affronts. In Moscow, an obviously stage-managed mob milled around the U.S. embassy for three hours, yelling insults and shaking fists. Russian fighter planes forced down a strayed U.S. Air Force transport plane south of the Caucasus Mountains, took the nine crewmen captive, charged the U.S. with a "gross" and "deliberate" violation of Soviet airspace. And stubborn foot-dragging met U.S. efforts to get back nine other U.S. servicemen who landed in East Germany in early June after their helicopter got off course on a training flight.

Even a U.S. effort to make a little progress toward peace ran into a squall. Over the course of months, the U.S. had patiently managed to get the Russians to agree to hold an East-West scientists' conference on nuclear-test detection. Time: this week. Place: Geneva. But last week, in a surprise note phrased with deliberate ambiguity, the Russians threatened to boycott the conference unless the U.S. agreed in advance that the meeting's aim is a nuclear-test ban.

In a White House huddle, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles decided to 1) refrain from denouncing the Russian backout threat, and 2) send U.S. experts to Geneva anyway, leaving it up to Moscow to break the engagement. Announced Dulles, at a special White House press conference: "As far as we are concerned, we expect the conference to proceed, and our experts will continue on their way." At week's end Russian experts were on their way too.

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