Explosive Clash

To the Editors:

"Will the Gulf Explode?" The answer is no. As hot as the situation may be around the Persian Gulf [Oct. 27], it is not going to explode because there is still a good amount of wisdom in the land of the eagle and the land of the bear.

Dia E. Chatty

Los Angeles

Your cover showed the American bald eagle and the Russian bear, eyes glistening, watching the time bomb over the Persian Gulf. Is this the symbol of our current foreign policy--furnishing arms, along with the Soviets, and waiting to pick the bones of the victims?

Edwin P. Peterson

Ukiah, Calif.

When will the U.S. realize that it must get out of the Persian Gulf before it is dragged into a war to protect its energy interests? Now is the time to stop the demand for Middle East oil.

R. Daniel Laesch

Chicago

A good case can be made for the proposition that Iran is a candidate for the kind of Yalta-type partitioning that Soviet and American statesmen engineered in Europe in 1945. Such a partitioning would secure the oil of Khuzestan for our European and Japanese allies and, by restoring Azerbaijan to Soviet hegemony, would give them a buffer insulating the people of Turkistan from the virus of Muslim self-determination.

Such an arrangement would disabuse the perception of the small powers that when it comes to their vital interests, the superpowers are muscle-bound giants.

Holman Jenkins

Swarthmore, Pa.

Before the war in the gulf began, my blood used to boil at the very mention of Ayatullah Khomeini. But today I cannot help sympathizing with the poor devil. His spectacular crusade captured the world's imagination, and it is a sorry spectacle to see such an industrious personality faltering before his adversary and heading toward inevitable disaster.

Rajesh Joshi

Bombay

Your article could be the outline of a political soap opera. What is Assad's real motive in his friendship with Gaddafi? Can Saddam Hussein pull enough strings to promote his own desires for power? What is the true relationship between King Hussein and the P.L.O.? Was there any hanky-panky at the last office party between Brezhnev and Assad?

Tune in next week.

Barbara Coyne

Rock Island, III.

Adultery in the Heart

Pope John Paul's statement that lust for one's wife could be adultery in one's heart [Oct. 27] aroused hostility and opposition because it pricked the consciences of those who view sex not as a sacred union, but rather as mutual masturbation and a means to voyeuristic gratification.

Haven Bradford Gow

Arlington Heights, III.

"Thou shall not covet thy wife" does have the ring of a rather strange Eleventh Commandment. But I felt sure the Pope was not that stupid. He isn't. The full text of his talk is a magnificent treatise on the dignity of the human person. No woman, says the Pope, should be viewed only as a sex object. Not even your wife.

(The Rev.) Larry N. Lorenzoni

San Francisco

Brainpower

Governor Hunt of North Carolina deserves praise for establishing a school for the gifted [Oct. 27]. We share his concern for what our public school system is doing (or not doing) to these young people. I am convinced we've blown the discovery of a cure for cancer at least three times in the past 15 years because we turned off too many minds.

Nita Malbasa

Mayfield, Ky.

The North Carolina Governor is to be encouraged for recognizing that equality of educational opportunity does not mean the same type of education with the same price tag for every student. Cream will rise to the top, but if not properly used, it is the first to spoil.

Chris Lortz

Davenport, Iowa

Women at the Wheel

Your article "Vroom, Baby!" [Oct. 27] points up the fact that ladies have enormous influence in the auto marketplace. I believe that women are more concerned about gas mileage than men are, and for that reason most of us drive small cars.

Irma Almaguer

Half Moon Bay, Calif.

How sweet. Detroit has decided that a woman might be intelligent. If she is and has tolerated years of condescending advertising, quite possibly she would no longer want to touch a Detroit car.

Eleanor Avery

Northridge, Calif.

The first premise of any successful business, large or small, is to know the market. Maybe that explains why I'm buying my second foreign car.

Dot Johnson

Melbourne, Fla.

Space Race

Re your article "Red Stars over the Cosmos" [Oct. 27] about the Soviet space experiments: even the impetus of Soviet competition no longer stirs us from our stagnant state, as it did in the days of Apollo. Our reluctance to support new civilian space research programs may indicate not only disgusting complacency but, worse, creeping national suicide.

John Barnes

Littleton, Colo.

If the Soviet Union is going all out in its space effort, I'm sure it's because he who rules space rules the world. It looks as though only the Soviets realize this.

Don Dondero

Reno

Scrap Those Sex Stereotypes

I will probably buy Letty Cottin Pogrebin's Growing Up Free: Raising Your Child in the 80s [Oct. 27]. But your picture of the Pogrebins may have savaged the book's credibility, since it shows the liberated family with Mr. Pogrebin standing behind them in the classic patriarchal position.

Maureen Maher-Neel

San Francisco

For both parents to be fully informed about each other's specialties, as Pogrebin requires, is time-wasting overkill, not equality. My husband can and does change our son's diapers as well as I, but expecting him to keep track of the day the diaper service comes and whether the bill has been paid this month is as silly as asking if I can put my hands on the Venezuela project file in his office.

Ellen Eshbach Nordby

Chicago

Evolutionists vs. Creationists

Scientific creationists owe Carl Sagan [Oct. 20] a note of thanks. His statement that "evolution is not a theory, it is a fact" will do much to swell the ranks of the numerous scientists who have already left the fold of evolutionists because of just such arrogance.

Hilbert R. Siegler

Bangor, Wis.

Unfortunately, the religious fundamentalists who still believe that God created man some 6,000 years ago will not tune in to Sagan's excellent Cosmos series; they do not want to be confused with facts.

Robert D. Lindskog

Irvine, Calif.

Good Citizens?

Re the case of Feodor Fedorenko [Oct. 27], the Ukrainian-born immigrant now accused of being a Nazi criminal: I cannot comprehend why the Justice Department is seeking the revocation of his citizenship when more than 78,000 Cubans have immigrated to America and we have become responsible for their welfare.

Fedorenko has been a good citizen. At 73, after working here for 31 years, he now seeks only a peaceful life.

Wasyll Gina

New Haven

The issue is not that Fedorenko and Wolodymir Osidach, another Ukrainian immigrant accused of war crimes, have been good citizens since they arrived in the U.S. The facts are that they lied or accidentally forgot to mention their past "profession," and that is a very important "material fact."

Patricia Braun

Ridgecrest, Calif.

The Electronic Pacifier

Unlike Sociologist Paul Hirsch, I am not convinced that a plausible defense can be made for excessive TV viewing [Oct. 20]. Television is a piece of technology that has not served society well. It stifles creativity, limits imagination and dulls character. In short, TV acts like an electronic pacifier.

Jeffrey M. Boss

Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

Hirsch's harebrained study should be dumped into the garbage. As a high school English teacher, I can testify that in education alone, the moron tube is so poisonous and hypnotic that the disease of illiteracy is rampant.

Robert G. Arthur

Kings Park, N. Y.

News Management

Indonesia's Mochtar Lubis hit the nail right on the head when he questioned the Third World demand for a so-called free and balanced flow of information [Oct. 6]. The Third World attempt at news management represents little more than a self-serving exercise in journalism designed for the self-perpetuation of some authoritarian regime.

National development is not supposed to be a juggernaut demanding the sacrifice of freedom of speech and justice. What developing countries cannot afford is not the luxury of a critical press, but the white elephant of an inept or corrupt government. Only a critical press can keep the government on its toes or put misguided national development back on the right track.

Huang Chang-cheng

Taipei, Taiwan

After receiving my issue of TIME and finding the Essay entitled "The Global First Amendment War" almost completely censored with thick, black ink, I must agree with one of the few lines I was able to read: "Their [developing countries'] governments are, and have long been, in firm control."

Jill Tucker

Bogor, Indonesia

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