Moscow v. Japanese Peace

The U.S. is making swift progress toward a generous peace treaty with Japan (TIME, April 9). Last week the Soviet Union tried to ram a sprag into the moving wheels. U.S. Ambassador Alan G. Kirk was summoned to the Foreign Office in Moscow, handed an eleven-page memorandum which attacked the U.S. treaty draft as "illegal" and "impossible."

Instead, Russia proposed a treaty to be written by the foreign ministers of the U.S., Great Britain, Russia and Red China. Replied a U.S. State Department spokesman: the Moscow proposal is one that Russia "makes periodically whenever it wants to stall the conclusion of a Japanese peace . . . The Soviet effort is to get a veto, and now, through Communist China, a double veto. It is a mockery to pretend ... to negotiate Japanese peace under these conditions."

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