"When the Day Comes ..."

The U.N. General Assembly picked up last week where it left off last December: searching, with little faith and less hope, for a formula to end the Korean war. Asked to pose for the conventional opening-day pictures, the new chief U.S. delegate, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., refused to shake hands with Russia's Andrei Vishinsky. "Certainly not," he snapped. "Don't you understand? There's been a change of administration in Washington."

This was likely to endear Lodge more to his fellow citizens than to fellow U.N. diplomats, who regard handshakes between antagonists, however bloody, as good form. Lodge made a better impression on the diplomats next day, when in his maiden speech he pinned responsibility for continuing the war where it belongs.

"Except for the active aid furnished to the ... Communist aggressors by the Soviet Union," said Lodge in level tones, "the war in Korea would now be over ..." He presented the committee with ten blunt facts, which he challenged the Russians to disprove. Among them:

P: North Korea's army uses Soviet tanks, artillery and aircraft.

P: Naval mines washed up on the coast of South Korea are made in Russia.

P: More than 4,400 Soviet-made planes have been thrown against the U.N.

Lodge's conclusion was that "there is little point" in elaborately reworking the Indian peace proposals, which the Assembly adopted last year, only to be spurned by Moscow and Peking. "When the day comes," said Lodge, "that the aggressors in the Far East have a change in heart--for whatever reasons, and they can be many--it will not be difficult for them to show it ... The rulers of the Soviet Union can stop the war whenever they want to--and Mr. Vishinsky knows it." Vishinsky waited three days for instructions from Moscow. "The Soviet Union," he then admitted for the first time "has never concealed the fact that it has sold and continues to sell arms to its ally, China." But what was wrong with that? The real criminal is the "U.S. Republican Administration, which is ... carrying out the Truman-Acheson line."

The U.S., he cried, is using Asians as "cannon fodder," building "strong armies--in Japan, Formosa, Burma, Pakistan, Thailand and South Korea.'' What seemed to worry the Soviet delegate was the fact that these armies might one day be used to defend Asia from Communist aggression. "It is clear," he snapped, "that there can be no question of a peaceful program in such circumstances.''

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