FOREIGN RELATIONS: No Fraud or Hoax

• Share

"You begin to get down now to the heart of the matter," said Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at his news conference last week. The U.S.-U.S.S.R. exchanges about a second parley at the summit were moving into their 13th week, and the letters, notes and messages added up to 30,250 words—22,800 Communist, 7,450 U.S.—six times the wordage of the Constitution. "And the heart of the matter is," Dulles went on, "are you going to have a meeting that is likely to accomplish something? Or is it proposed to have a meeting which would only be a spectacle? . . . We do not want to be a party to what would be a fraud or a hoax."

Dulles' statement did not drown out other talk that the U.S. and Russia would probably face each other at summit parley II in 1958. Topflight Washington correspondents speculated that the U.S. might be ready to change its position on nuclear-weapons tests, which was that the U.S. would not stop the tests unless the U.S.S.R. also stopped nuclear-weapons production. The new line: after this spring's nuclear tests at Eniwetok Atoll, the U.S. will know more about "clean bombs'' for limited wars, hence will have less to lose by agreeing to a stoppage of tests without any Russian payment in return. Dulles himself seemed to signal some change in emphasis in recent testimony to a closed session of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He still thinks a cease-test agreement undesirable, said he, but the issue is not a very vital question, and the U.S. now resists such an agreement because Britain and France want to keep testing.

In a broad sense there was no saner warning to U.S. policymakers at week's end than Dulles' own press conference advice: "If we try to outdo ourselves in the spectacular, then we are leading the world in a very dangerous way indeed." To this Vice President Richard Nixon added, in an interview filmed in Washington and televised in London: "History shows that the road to war is paved with conferences that failed."