U.S. OFFICIALS SHOCKED

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28368, 29 August 1957, Page 13

U.S. OFFICIALS SHOCKED

44 Diplomatic Missile ”

(Rec. 10 p.m.) WASHINGTON, August 28. State Department officials said today that they were shocked by Moscow’s new attack on the West In the London disarmament talks. They described the denunciation of the West’s aerial inspection proposals—which the Soviet Union had accepted in principle —as a “diplomatic ballistic missile.” They suggested that its aim, like that of the inter-continental missile which Moscow claimed to have tested successfully, was to exert pressure, and blackmail the West into major disarmament concessions. President Eisenhower called Mr John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State, to a White House conference to discuss the implications of the Soviet Union’s stand. A Reuter correspondent said Washington dertainly was prepared to enter a difficult phase of the negotiations when Moscow Radio last week described the West’s new proposal for a twoyear suspension of nuclear tests as unacceptable. But, he said, the violence of yesterday’s speech of Mr Valerian Zorin, the Soviet delegate in London, and his apparent total rejection of the heart of the West’s first step disarmament package, dismayed even those officials who had seen a ray of hope. Diplomatic sources said President Eisenhower was faced with a decision, whether the Soviet Union was on the verge of breaking off the talks and removing the disarmament problem from the conference room to the propaganda arena.