THE COLD WAR: Facing the Facts

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The rulers of Russia have begun at last to tell the Russian people the sobering facts of the thermonuclear age. Said Premier Georgy Malenkov last week in a major address from Moscow: "A third World War would mean the destruction of world civilization." To the Russians this was news. For years, they have been told by their leaders, in the style set by Joseph Stalin and Georgy Malenkov himself, that a new war would destroy the capitalist system, not the Communist world. They have been kept in ignorance of the horrors and the dangers of atomic warfare.

The occasion was Soviet Russia's quadrennial election campaign; it was time again for the Russians to elect unanimously their unopposed commissars and some 1,330 equally unopposed lesser Communists to the Supreme Soviet. Candidate Malenkov addressed his campaign speech to the world.

Russia, he said, wants a truce in the cold war. "It is not true that mankind has to face only the choice between fresh world slaughter or the cold war . . . The Soviet government stands for further reduction of international tension." Malenkov gave no hint of what the Soviet government might do to help reduce world tension, insisting that the deeds must come from the "aggressive circles in the West that are still hopelessly dreaming of destroying our socialist society." As a first step, he added, Western Europe should abandon EDC, "by which, under the guise of a little Europe, there is created a large and aggressive Germany." None of that was new, or suggestive of any helpful turn in Russia's cold-war line.

But there was an odd sort of comfort for the West in Malenkov's measured warning about the menace of nuclear war. It was the first concrete evidence that the men in the Kremlin, like those in the free world, recognize the suicidal implications of the H-bomb.