Western Summit Position Eroded By Test

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29130, 16 February 1960, Page 15

Western Summit Position Eroded By Test

[By FRANK OLIVIER] (Special Correspondent N.Z.P.A.) WASHINGTON, Feb. 14. France’s entry into the “nuclear club” was received here with a good deal of coldness and the event has served to refocus attention on the spring summit meeting, about which doubts and fears continue to grow.

The general feeling about the French atomic device is that it still leaves France a very junior member of the club, still unable to manufacture a true nuclear bomb and still lacking a bomber in which to carry it if it could be manufactured. The principal effect of the Sahara explosion seems to many here to make more difficult the summit meeting and to give Russia an excuse to resume testing nuclear devices if she chooses.

When the Secretary of State (Mr Herter) recently expressed publicly his doubts about any Berlin agreement at the May meeting, it was regarded as reflective of the pessimistic attitude of the Administration towards that meeting. However, there is no sign that this official pessimism extends to all summit meetings, but simply to the May meeting, which is now widely regarded as being in the nature of an interim meeting from which nothing may be expected. The Russians are not expected to produce any new ultimatums at the May meeting if only because they would almost ruin

President Eisenhower’s visit to Russia in June. Available evidence indicates that the Russians propose to give the President an enormous and noisy reception. However, there is no knowing what may happen after that. Official circles here express the view that Russia has been getting tougher, not softer, on the Berlin issue. The Washington “Post” thinks, however, that Mr Khrushchev’s tough and insulting remarks to President Gronchi, of Italy, in Moscow do not really change the outlook for the summit very much, and that rumblings from Moscow about the necessity for a Berlin settlement and the imminence of a peace treaty between Russia and East Germany probably amount to no more than the customary strong talk in advance of the meeting.

But whether Mr Herter is correct in thinking Mr Khrushchev is now taking a tougher line, there is general agreement that the outlook for any acceptable agreement at the summit is bleak. Some sections of the press comment gloomily that President de Gaulle’s difficulties . have not strengthened the Western position any more than the prospective missile gap will help the President when he next faces Mr Khrushchev across the conference table.

The President persists in the view that American prestige is not particularly involved in the missile gap and the race into space, but a number of his critics feel he will talk with less force at the summit and in Berlin because of those two important matters.

The United States, it appears,

would like to stand pat on present Berlin arrangements and does not see the chance for an interim pact with the Russians as London apparently does. Russia alone wants channels in Berlin, and it is recognised here that if Mr Khrushchev signed his peace treaty with the East German puppets it could open the way for many difficulties and harassments for the West.

However, the feeling here is that the real critical issue between Russia and the United States is not Berlin but the control and reduction of nuclear weapons, which the Eastern and Western nations will start discussing in Geneva in March. The Washington “Post” says there is continued hope for an acceptable nuclear test treaty, but that fundamentally no broad understanding with Mr Khrushchev is possible until he is convinced he cannot get his way by threat and bluster. A noted columnist in the same paper, however, says: “Whether Mr Eisenhower and Mr Khrushchev, either at the summit or when they meet in Moscow, can resolve the Berlin impasse or the nuclear weapons inspection issue is the great imponderable of international life today. To say that there is any feeling of optimism in Washington would amount to almost total exaggeration.”

It is felt strongly that this lack of optimism cannot be detached from the erosion of Western strength caused by French difficulties and that much discussed missile gap.