Britain Has a Point

INTERNATIONAL

UNITED NATIONS

This week, 26 years to the day after the League of Nations, brave in its new motley, took its first bow, a bright and gaudy United Nations calliope will call the faithful to order in London.

Drafty Central Hall, Westminster, was all spruced up for the meeting. Its walls had been painted a chaste cream; new fawn carpets had been laid. In approved conference formation, 40-foot-long refectory tables, each of which would seat three delegations, were ready for the delegates of the 51 convening nations.

The Americans and French will put up at swank Claridge's, the Russians in their own Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens ("Millionaires' Row"). Last week one hotel requested more Scotch "for the Americans." Ruled the Foreign Office: "They'll get enough at the various receptions."

Fighting Mood. All the Scotch in the world would not wash away the probability that UNO was heading into a rough maiden voyage. The original intention was to confine the first meeting to first matters like establishing the Security Council and electing a Secretary-General. But the world was too full of controversy to keep the agenda antiseptic.

Britain, in particular, was coming to the meeting in a determined mood. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin long ago put on record his Government's intention to sacrifice a good deal, but not everything, for world collaboration. Britons did not hide their feeling that at Moscow U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes had sacrificed too much for too little. The British are convinced that Russia is not the almighty, irresistible force which she makes herself out to be.

The well-informed Whitehall Letter, driving this point home, last week noted that it would be foolish "to overlook the fact that Russia's problems of demobilization, reconversion and reconstruction must inevitably be of a formidable character." This, with the rest of the letter, was a polite way of saying that Jimmy Byrnes & Co. had indeed been so foolish as to overlook exactly those factors, and had acted in Moscow as though Russia were invulnerable to any and every form of resistance to her demands.

Cool Hope. Britain was out to prove her point at this first UNO meeting by broadening the discussion. A struggle over which areas of the world are to go under the new trusteeships seemed certain. Into the Assembly's arena, too, would probably go the problem of Palestine and the whole question of European refugees.

Despite efforts to keep them out, the problems of Russian-occupied Iran and the Soviet demands on Turkey might well burst into the meeting. The Bomb was another likely candidate for controversy -if for no better reason than U.S. Senate dissatisfaction with the Moscow plan for a commission to "inquire into all phases" of atomic energy.

Press dispatches and headlines would undoubtedly relate every ripple in world politics at this meeting. But as the Assembly convened, the fact was that London's mood was refreshingly cool. There was a feeling that perhaps not a great deal would be done, but that something could certainly be done. In the world of 1946, "something" would be a good deal.

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