Rusk ‘Doubtful’ On Buffer Plan

Press, Volume C, Issue 29657, 30 October 1961, Page 13

Rusk ‘Doubtful’ On Buffer Plan

(NXP-A.-KeuMr—Capyrtgftt) WASHINGTON, October 29. Proposals for neutralised or buffer zones in Europe would be “extremely difficult to accept” as long as the Communist world continued to press its notion of a world revolution, the United States Secretary of State (Mr Dean Rusk) said yesterday.

He was speaking in a radio interview in the first of a series of new programmes by the Voice of America entitled “Problems and Policies.” Mr Rusk said in reply to a question that proposals for the Soviet forces in Europe to withdraw to the boundaries of the Soviet Union and for United States forces to withdraw across the Atlantic “is not an evenly-balanced military arrangement.” “But quite apart from that, we are very doubtful about the idea of a buffer zone, about disengagement, about a neutralised zone, because these long-range commitments which the Communist world has publicly announced mean that neutral zones or buffer zones are for them areas of future exploitation, exploration and penetration." Mr Rusk said that so long as it was the policy of the Communist bloe to press its notion of a world revolution, “then the notion of longterm neutralised and buffer zones would become extremely difficult to accept or to bring to reality." A better approach, he said, was to give direct attention to the broader problem of general disarmament.

Mr Rusk was asked to comment on suggestions that the West should look at the Berlin crisis from the viewpoint of the Soviet Prime Minister (Mr Khrushchev)—that the Soviet leader could not permit an island of freedom to exist behind the iron curtain. Mr Rusk replied that the Soviet Union had built up problems of prestige in public statements which would make adjustments of their point of view difficult “But most of these problems are self-made and they are not the basis for any surrender of the vital interests of the peoples most directly concerned or of those of us who have those people under our protection,” Mr Rusk said. Mr Rusk was asked to comment on the current wave of criticism in the United States against the line followed by many neutral countries in international politics. He replied that the United States would indeed have been glad to see a stronger stand taken at the recent Belgrade conference of nonaligned countries on the resumption of atmospheric testing by the Soviet Union.