Signing the Pledge

If the truce talks at Panmunjom were a high-school debate, the U.N. debaters would have had their Communist opponents backed into an uncomfortable corner last week. Major General Howard Turner reminded the Reds of a statement made last month by North Korea's Nam II to the effect that his side would certainly build and repair North Korean airfields during an armistice (the theory being that North Korea was a sovereign nation, and that the U.N. had no right to interfere in its internal affairs). Now Red China's Hsieh Fang was saying that the U.N.'s charge that his side intended to build and repair airfields was a "misrepresentation and slander."

Which, General Turner asked, is the true statement? Will you or will you not enlarge your airfield capacity during an armistice? The Reds refused a straightforward answer.

In the prisoner-of-war discussions, also, the U.N. debaters had the foe all boxed up--verbally. In trying to account for tens of thousands of missing South Koreans, the Red negotiators had said that large numbers had been "re-educated" and had voluntarily joined the Communist forces. Their reluctance to go home, the Red negotiators implied, should be respected. But last week they insisted that Red prisoners in Allied hands should all be repatriated, whether they wanted to be or not. Rear Admiral Ruthven Libby scathingly pointed out the discrepancy.

Bound to Evade. Unluckily, there was no debate judge to pound a gong and say that the U.N. had won. The Reds knew they were not in a debate. In the Communists' eyes, their spokesmen at Panmunjom were fighting a battle, just as truly as their troops in the field had been fighting up to the November lull. In their view, the negotiators were as thoroughly bound as battlefield soldiers to evade, confuse and deceive their enemy.

Washington--which had been up to its eyes in the truce talks since November--was beginning to see that the inspection business was not workable. It seemed clear that, no matter what they agreed to at the conference table, the Reds would fix up their blasted North Korean airstrips and build new ones as soon as they had the chance.

Fussy Rigmarole. Vice Admiral Charles Turner Joy, the chief U.N. delegate, flew to Tokyo last week, conferred lengthily with Matt Ridgway and returned to Munsan with what correspondents believed to be the latest Washington compromise proposal in his briefcase. The newsmen thought that the U.N. would ask the Communists for a general pledge not to build up their "military capability" during an armistice. If the enemy broke the pledge and then breached the peace as well, the U.N. would have what the Pentagon re gards as moral justification for punitive action against Red China itself (TIME, Jan. 14).

The pledge business seemed a fussy sort of rigmarole. But it was a sign that Washington was flexing its slack muscles and bracing itself to launch a policy of determent (i.e., a warning of direct punishment, rather than a mere renewal of battle in Korea) as the best means of preventing a Korean truce from becoming a dangerous trap.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.