IKE'S PROPOSAL: WHAT THE WORLD THINKS

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: PRESIDENT Eisenhower uncorked Jone of the most sensational proposals ever made anywhere at any time. Said Ike, in effect: Let's you Commies and us Americans toss all our armament cards on the table, to examine at our leisure.

The Eisenhower double bombshell was cheered by Britain's Eden and France's Faure; but Premier Bulganin of Russia was silent. Our guess is that Bulgy was dumbfounded. The West unquestionably grabbed the initiative at Geneva. The man who did that was our own President Eisenhower. It is hard to imagine how he could have done it more dramatically, or in a way better calculated to put the Kremlin on one of the hottest spots it has ever yet occupied. Our feeling about it all: Hurray for Ike.

The New York Times's WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF JAMES RESTON PRESIDENT Eisenhower joined the propaganda parade with a vengeance. He produced the only new dramatic proposal of the week, the surprise of the conference for a variety of reasons. In the first place, it was generally regarded as unrealistic. Second, it is illegal under U.S. laws. Third, it seemed to other Western delegates to be a proposal which had no chance of being accepted. Fourth --and this was the greatest surprise of all--the idea apparently was not explored in any detail, if at all, with Congressional leaders, who make the laws.

EDITOR RALPH MCGILL, in the ATLANTA CONSTITUTION : PRESIDENT Dwight D. Eisenhower may not know too much about the fine arts of diplomacy. But as an excellent bridge player, he well understands the technique of leading through strength to weakness. In one grand-slam move the President took from the Russians the "peace" initiative they have so long held. The world has but to stretch forth its hand to have peace and prosperity such as we have not dared to dream.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE:

EISENHOWER'S offer is said to be a smart move. It surely wasn't a smart move if Mr. Eisenhower had any expectation that it would be accepted. [It] would give the soviet war planners precisely the information they most need if they are to knock us out with a surprise attack. This plan was put forward not to be accepted but to be rejected. By this means we are to prove to the world the insincerity of Russian pretensions and thus gain a great propaganda advantage. That is, we are to prove Russian insincerity by demonstrating our own insincerity. The Geneva Conference did give us a wonderful opportunity to prove our own good intentions and to expose soviet duplicity, but this opportunity was missed.

LONDON DAILY MAIL:

THERE is something Churchillian about President Eisenhower's sweeping plan for peace--and we could pay him no greater compliment than to say that. It is startlingly simple, but many great ideas are simple in their essentials. Its acceptance would mean more to the world than the complicated tangles of all the non-aggression pacts and guarantees that have been proposed.

LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH:

PRESIDENT Eisenhower's dramatic offer to open the skies has caught the imagination of the world, but it has nothing to do with disarmament. It is part of a sustained attempt to convince the Russian leaders, and through them the Russian people, of the sincerity of American motives. Even if the plan were to be accepted by them--which seems unlikely--it would be of limited practical importance.

The disadvantage of reaching for the skies is that you are satisfied with nothing else. The Eisenhower declaration will inevitably overshadow Sir Anthony Eden's far more modest but realistic proposal for inspecting armaments, for actually reducing the number of guns and soldiers. The one is aimed at disarming men's fears; the other at actually taking the rifles out of their hands. Perhaps the President's great experiment has more of the exhilaration of the summit, but there is much to be said for the more pedestrian manner.

LONDON NEWS CHRONICLE: HAD it come from anybody else, we might have caught a whiff of a political maneuver: but it is plain from all who were present that here was a man truly saying what he deeply felt. Its chances of acceptance must be almost nil. But what the speech accomplishes is suddenly to raise Geneva from the clammy folds of petty technicalities, from the orders of priority on this or that agenda, to what is in fact the true summit--the idealism which is prepared to fight for peace at any cost.

Paris' left wing COMBAT: IT doesn't seem that the proposal of President Eisenhower adds anything very new, because his request for aerial photographs of territories is merely a desire to apply modern techniques to ordinary methods of control. The French proposal (i.e., to cut armaments, use the money in underdeveloped parts of the world), on the other hand, proceeds from a particularly concrete view of things.

West Germany's BONNER RUNDSCHAU EISENHOWER'S step is exactly what every sensible person has been expecting from statesmen for a long time --that they should show each other, if they want peace, those things that are a threat to peace and then abolish them.

This time the Russians will not be able to escape showing their true colors and demonstrating whether their desire for peace is genuine or whether the Communist-organized "peace conferences" in Stockholm and elsewhere were merely set up to misuse a few thousand well-meaning, cranky intellectuals.

The prerequisites for power spheres are military means of power. If these are abolished, the spheres will melt into one another and the wounds heal by themselves. That is the wider meaning of Eisenhower's proposal. What do the Russians have to answer him?

The Vatican State Secretariat: MORALLY, the proposal is possibly the greatest act in the annals of diplomatic meetings. For the first time in history, the greatest power in the world is willing to leave the whole of that power open to statistical investigation and air examination. In other words, the greatest power in the world is renouncing one of the most important coefficients of that power in order that peace and reasonableness shall prevail.

This unprecedented gesture should be a practical step towards peace, aside from any technical difficulties, because surely it should suggest ways and means by which information can be exchanged and suspicion dispelled.

New Delhi's HINDUSTAN STANDARD: EXCHANGE of information about military establishments and aerial photographs cannot have any practical bearing on peace or on war unless in the first instance agreement is reached on main issues of disarmament.

MAINICHI SHIMBON, Japan's second-largest daily: THE historic proposal is perhaps the greatest statement in recent world history toward a world without war. The gravity of the proposal lies in the fact that neither side could then keep secrets and, therefore, attack each other with weapons that could annihilate entire mankind. Eisenhower believes that with reason and mutual trust, the vicious mammoth could be domesticated.

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