Ever Optimistic

Out of Moscow, in a personal, 2O-page letter to Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan from Soviet Premier Nikolai A. Bulganin, came so tough a rejection of everything the West thought it was bargaining for that--if taken literally--there was no further need to continue the disarmament talks in London. The West decided not to take it literally.

By linking any ban on nuclear tests with an enforcible ban on further output of nuclear arms, wrote Bulganin, the West is "condemning in advance" any chance of agreement. Russia, he made plain, is willing to play only if the nations agree to ban the tests, ban the bomb--and, of course, ban any inspection system too. With a cynical show of amiability ("With the best will in the world we cannot see ..."), Bulganin proceeded to accuse the British of perfecting "the most lethal and destructive" weapons, under cover of "endless talks on the desirability of disarmament," and to charge that the West was deliberately sabotaging the London negotiations by tying disarmament issues to German reunification in a "deal" simply to help the Adenauer government win reelection. He threw in a gratuitous hint that the nuclear warfare against the British, "in view of their geographical and economic conditions, would mean irremediable catastrophe."

Bulganin's letter was the latest in a series of cold war, cold water exchanges. By now the British are about ready to give up this little game of Post Office, feeling that they have got more slaps than kisses on the last couple of rounds.

But neither the British nor the undauntably optimistic U.S. Negotiator Harold E. Stassen is ready to take the Russians at their harsh word. Do not the Russians often talk uncompromisingly just before giving in? It was decided to believe that the Russians are still seriously negotiating disarmament in London.

In ordering Secretary Dulles to fly to London for the talks, President Eisenhower hoped to settle a snag in the Western presentation of its case. Western Europeans do not want their territories open for Soviet aerial inspection unless the U.S. is inspected too. On the other hand, they would resent an arrangement which set up inspection zones exclusively on U.S. and Soviet territory, leaving Europe out. Dulles' mission is to resolve just what segment of the world's horizon is to be offered to the Russians as an "open sky."

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