Judgments & Prophecies, Aug. 1, 1955

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PRESIDENT Eisenhower's dramatic offer to open the skies has caught the imagination of the world, but it has nothing to do with disarmament. It is part of a sustained attempt to convince the Russian leaders, and through them the Russian people, of the sincerity of American motives. Even if the plan were to be accepted by them—which seems unlikely—it would be of limited practical importance.

The disadvantage of reaching for the skies is that you are satisfied with nothing else. The Eisenhower declaration will inevitably overshadow Sir Anthony Eden's far more modest but realistic proposal for inspecting armaments, for actually reducing the number of guns and soldiers. The one is aimed at disarming men's fears; the other at actually taking the rifles out of their hands. Perhaps the President's great experiment has more of the exhilaration of the summit, but there is much to be said for the more pedestrian manner.

LONDON NEWS CHRONICLE: HAD it come from anybody else, we might have caught a whiff of a political maneuver: but it is plain from all who were present that here was a man truly saying what he deeply felt. Its chances of acceptance must be almost nil. But what the speech accomplishes is suddenly to raise Geneva from the clammy folds of petty technicalities, from the orders of priority on this or that agenda, to what is in fact the true summit—the idealism which is prepared to fight for peace at any cost.

Paris' left wing COMBAT: IT doesn't seem that the proposal of President Eisenhower adds anything very new, because his request for aerial photographs of territories is merely a desire to apply modern techniques to ordinary methods of control. The French proposal (i.e., to cut armaments, use the money in underdeveloped parts of the world), on the other hand, proceeds from a particularly concrete view of things.

West Germany's BONNER RUNDSCHAU EISENHOWER'S step is exactly what every sensible person has been expecting from statesmen for a long time —that they should show each other, if they want peace, those things that are a threat to peace and then abolish them.

This time the Russians will not be able to escape showing their true colors and demonstrating whether their desire for peace is genuine or whether the Communist-organized "peace conferences" in Stockholm and elsewhere were merely set up to misuse a few thousand well-meaning, cranky intellectuals.

The prerequisites for power spheres are military means of power. If these are abolished, the spheres will melt into one another and the wounds heal by themselves. That is the wider meaning of Eisenhower's proposal. What do the Russians have to answer him?

The Vatican State Secretariat: MORALLY, the proposal is possibly the greatest act in the annals of diplomatic meetings. For the first time in history, the greatest power in the world is willing to leave the whole of that power open to statistical investigation and air examination. In other words, the greatest power in the world is renouncing one of the most important coefficients of that power in order that peace and reasonableness shall prevail.