EISENHOWER ON A-WEAPONS

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31169, 20 September 1966, Page 15

EISENHOWER ON A-WEAPONS

(N.Z.P.A. Reuter —Copyright) NEW YORK, September 19.

The former President, General Dwight Eisenhower, said last night he was prepared to use nuclear weapons against Communist China in 1953 to bring an end to the Korean war.

He said he let it be known then that if an’armistice was not signed he would no longer regard the war as be-

ing limited “nor would I be bound by the kind of weapons that we would use.” Speaking in an educational television network interview, the former President said he did not reveal his position regarding the use of nuclear weapons in a public statement, but let it leak out through several channels. “I’m sure this had a great effect because the answer came back that the Chinese were ready to resume conversations about the armistice,” he said. General Eisenhower, who assumed the Presidency when the Korean war had been in progress for some time, said it was “inconceivable” to him that fighting should have gone on for another two or three years. Pressed on his readiness to use nuclear weapons, he said: “1 don’t mean that we’d have used those great big things and destroyed cities but we would use them enough to win—and we of course would have tried to keep them on targets, not civil targets . . . “I don’t mean to say I wanted to use them but I just said that it was intolerable; our own country alone had 135.000 casualties in that war.

“But this does not mean that in sticky situations you couldn’t use a proper kind of nuclear weapon sometime. I just don’t see any difference between gas warfare and this kind of warfare, if you’re going to indulge in it.”