Threat

Behind the wordy panoply of the United Nations General Assembly, the two big Western allies last week privately--and temporarily--patched up a fissure in their alliance. Britain agreed to swing over to the U.S. position for the "current year" and oppose all talk of Red China's admission to the U.N. It also switched to the U.S. side in the delicate U.N. struggle over Communist efforts to squeeze India and other neutralist-minded nations into the Korean peace conference.

Loosely united again on the most ticklish problem now facing the U.N., the West stepped into the Assembly's big 60-nation meeting to head off a bulldozing Communist campaign to reopen the whole Korean peace conference issue and wheedle Peking into China's U.N. seat. With dispatch, the diplomats elected India's Madame Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit as the Assembly's first woman president (see below), agreed to argue about most of the world's dreams and ills, from disarmament to difficulties in landscaping the U.N. skyscraper headquarters in Manhattan.

But hardly had the formalities ended when Russia's Andrei Vishinsky tried to force the Assembly into inviting Red China to "its rightful seat." After two hours of parliamentary maneuvering, the delegates balked Vishinsky, 44 votes to 16. Red China pitched in from Peking with a demand for undoing the recent special Assembly decision to confine the Korean peace talks to the countries which fought the war--the issue on which Britain had split with the U.S. (TIME, Aug. 24). But the committee of 16 U.N. nations which fought the war bluntly answered back that the old decision still stood.

Impressed as many of them were by the tone of moderation in U.S. Secretary of State Dulles' exposition of U.S.foreign policy (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), the delegates were not by any means certain to stand solidly behind the 16 nations' position; many were still wavery on the question of opening the Korean conference table to neutralist-minded countries like India. This week Vishinsky capitalized on the uncertainty with a fresh demand to reopen the whole question. Communist demands for a full-blown "roundtable" peace conference "must be met," he declared. It sounded very much like a threat to torpedo the peace talks unless the Reds get their way.

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