Washington Puts Forth a Plan

In more than four months of U.N.-Communist truce parleys in Korea, the Pentagon and the State Department looked avidly over Matt Ridgway's shoulder, but allowed the Supreme Commander free tactical management of the negotiations, so long as he stayed within broad lines of policy laid down in July. Recently, however, Washington has had a queasy feeling that Ridgway was being too stubborn, and Washington decided to intervene. Somewhere between Foggy Bottom and the thick-carpeted rookeries of Pentagonia, a plan to break the deadlock over a ceasefire line was cooked up and handed to Ridgway. Last week Ridgway's men served it up, piping hot, to the Reds in the rain-soaked tent at Panmunjom.

No Ultimatum. The plan was quite simple. The U.N. would give the Reds what they wanted--a tentative cease-fire line based on the present battlefront. If, within 30 days of Communist acceptance of this proposal, the remaining items on the truce agenda could be negotiated and settled, the tentative line would become a permanent line, with a 2 1/2mile buffer zone astride it, and the armistice would be signed. The plan was no ultimatum. If no agreement should be reached in 30 days, a new tentative line would be drawn on the basis of the battlefront then existing, and the negotiators would start out again from there.

During the 30 days, fighting would continue. Thus the U.N. negotiators' bugaboo --a "de facto cease-fire"--would be avoided. But the effect might well be the same. Since the Eighth Army would prefer not to spend blood for territory that might later have to be given up, the U.N. would probably reduce its ground activity to token fighting, designed to hold its positions and keep down casualties. Either side, legally, could launch an offensive if it suited its purpose.

Whatever its merits and shortcomings, the Washington plan rescued the U.N. sub-committee men at Panmunjom from an uncomfortable position. Earlier in the week, they were being accused by the Reds of "disloyalty to the agenda"--of refusing to settle the cease-fire line in its proper order among the agenda items.

Qualified Yes. The first Communist reaction to the 30-day trial offer was favorable. Said North Korea's Major General Lee Song Cho: "We have heard your proposal, but we have yet to make a full study of it. I can tell you this much, however: your proposal seems in the main in accordance with our principles." This week it seemed that the Reds might accept.

Once more optimists' hopes soared, and once more pessimists expected those hopes to be dashed. The pessimists not only had past performances on their side, but a prospect of visible troubles ahead--the enormous difficulty of negotiating a truce supervision arrangement with inspection-shy Reds, and the exchange-of-prisoners problem, now sharpened by front-page talk of Communist atrocities (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). If these mountainous obstacles could be overcome in the short span of 30 days, it would be one of the diplomatic wonders of the cold war.

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