The Press MONDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1961. Ban The Bomb... But How?

Press, Volume C, Issue 29681, 27 November 1961, Page 14

The Press MONDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1961. Ban The Bomb... But How?

The United Nation* General Assembly's latest pro-

nouncements on nuclear weapons will embarrass rather than assist the world’s peace-makers. Few resolutions m this forum have at once been so unexceptionable morally and so impracticable. During the debate on the Afro-Asian group’s proposal to outlaw atomic arms, the Western Powers found themselves in the intolerable situation of seeming to oppose the central objective of their policy—the preservation of humanity through disarmament. Their opposition to the proposal rested—as in similar circumstances it has done before—upon the knowledge that it would, in the absence of effective controls, be suicidal for nations heeding the ban, and auspicious for those intending to cheat. By European standards, many of the nations of Africa and Asia are extremely naive politically; and the difficulty is to convince them that the Western hope of atomic disarmament is none the less sincere because it is realistic. The enormous increase of Afro-Asian representation in the United Nations lays upon the Western Powers

new burdens of diplomacy, of which the atomic debate has provided only a foretaste. Mutual suspicion between “ neutralists ” such as Mr Nehru and Western conservatives dies hard. It will be unfortunate if this latest expression of neutralist sentiment hampers a better understanding. As a result of the United Nations’ urgings, the threePower conference on a nuclear test ban is expected to reconvene in Geneva tomorrow. Because this will be another constructive attempt to agree on an inspection system, it should encourage human hopes much more than the sweeping generalities of last week’s Assembly debate. But the debate, in its impact on world opinion, did nothing to offset the impression of nuclear irresponsibility created by Mr Khrushchev in recent weeks. For the first time it was revealed that since sabotaging the earlier Geneva talks Russia had exploded the fantastic total of 50 nuclear devices. Having thus provoked condemnation by Western and neutralist peoples alike, Mr Khrushchev may now feel readier to compromise over the means for ending tests.