Bomb Ban Proposal “Very Encouraging”

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29170, 2 April 1960, Page 13

Bomb Ban Proposal “Very Encouraging”

GENEVA, April 1. When the Western delegates to the Geneva negotiations on banning atomic tests tabled the joint declaration by President Eisenhower and Mr Macmillan suggesting a treaty banning, all detectable tests and a moratorium on small underground tests, the Soviet delegate said: “This is a very encouraging step forward.”

But the Soviet delegate, Mr Semyon Tsarapkin, told reporters after the 191st meeting of the 17-month-old conference: "Many things are still unclear and will have to be discussed."

The Soviet Union proposed earlier that the moratorium on mall tests should last four or five years, but the United States delegate (Mr James Wadsworth) was said by sources to have told the conference today this was dearly excessive. Mr Tsarapkin said the length of the ban would be decided after other details had been settled. la the parallel 10-nation Geneva disarmament conference today. Britain criticised as lacking “precision and necessary details” the Soviet three-stage plan for total world disarmament within four years. The British delegate (Mr David Onnsby-Gore) said that the Soviet proposals were really Nothing more than a “guide to disarmament.” The Soviet plan, Mr OrmsbyGore said, made no reference to the creation of international Machinery to keep the peace in • disarmed world. “The curious conception of a

harmoniously ordered international anarchy which underlies the third stage of the Soviet plan remains for us an utterly unrealistic conception,” he said. The Soviet delegate (Mr Valerian Zorin) said the West did not seem to believe in the possibility of a disarmed world. It had to grasp at the idea of an armed organisation to maintain peace—in contrast to the Soviet concept of general and complete disarmament.