Soviet Veto Expected On Plane Inquiry Bid

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29265, 25 July 1960, Page 15

Soviet Veto Expected On Plane Inquiry Bid

NEW YORK, July 23.

In planning to bring in a resolution in the Security Council to set up an international inquiry into the RB-47 incident, the United States was understood to anticipate a Soviet veto. It would be the eighty-eighth cast by the Russians.

A Russian resolution asked the Security Council to condemn the “provocative actions” of the United States Air Force. „ The United States had been “caught red-handed” in sending over Soviet territorial waters the RB-47 reconnaissance aeroplane shot down on July 1 by Soviet fighters, said the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister <Mr Vasily Kuznetsov). The dispatch of the RB-47 was “an act of aggression, an act of force” for which the United States stood responsible. As he spoke, six wives of the crewmen of the aeroplane, shot down by Soviet fighters over the Barents Sea three weeks ago. listened quietly in the public gallery of the Security Council yesterday. “This great Power, the United States of America, is playing with the destinies of the world,” Mr Kuznetsov said. “The U2 aeroplane and now the RB-47 are links in the one and same dangerous chain of deliberate acts of aggression against the Soviet Union.” Mr Kuznetsov said the RB-47 approached Archangel at about 530 to 560 miles an hour, ignoring the signals of a Soviet fighter. It was shot down by the fighter, which was following orders to defend Soviet frontiers. Mr Kuznetsov introduced a formal resolution which would have the council condemn "provocative actions” by the United States Air Force and consider such acts “aggressive” and insist that the United States Government “take immediate measures to cease such actions and prevent their recurrence.”

Mr Kuznetsov presented the resolution in a long speech in which he also accused Britain

and Norway of having been accomplices of the United States in the "aggression.” The aeroplane tooK off from a United States base at Brize Norton. Oxfordshire.

He also accused the United States of “the provocative buzzing” of Soviet merchant and scientific research vessels on the high seas, actions which were links in a chain making up United States “brink of war’ policies.

Mr Kuznetsov again asked how the United States might have reacted if a Soviet aircraft had been shot down over the United States. It would have "precipitated such speeches in the Senate and would have shaken the dome of the Capitol. He asserted that the Soviet Union had shown “considerable patience and restraint in not putting rockets and nuclear weapons into action” in face of American intrusions.

It must be understtod, he said, that the Soviet Union was not obliged each time an aeroplane intruded to limit itself to halting that one intrusion. “We have the full right to take measures that go further than that—to make sure that no, one will be tempted to violate our orders again,” he warned.

The United States delegate (Mr Henry Cabot Lodge) replying to Mr Kuznetsov, described his statement as “a pretty revolting bit of hypocrisy.” After a brief reply by Mr Lodge, in which he said the downed aircraft never was closer than 30 miles from the Soviet coast, the council adjourned until Monday. Mr Lodge reserved the right to make his main address then. y c-t