30 NOVEMBER 1951, Page 1

TOWARDS DISARMAMENT

/ .14 offering to enter on Four-Power talks with the United States, France and Russia on disarmament, the British Government has given one more pledge of the practical sincerity which backs the Western Powers' policy. So often in the past the violent and abusive speeches of Mr. Vyshinsky have incited Western spokesmen to hot answers that, when Mr. Selwyn Lloyd, in the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, calmly accepted the proposal of Pakistan, Syria and Iraq that private Four-Power talks should be held, he was follow- ing up in the best possible manner the example of.frankness and diplomatic decency set by Mr. Eden in his address to the Assembly on November 12th and the example of sincerity and close reasoning set by Mr. Acheson when he expounded the Western disarmament proposals in the Political Committee. But it was not an easy course to take. Mr. Vyshinsky's speech last Saturday, with its amendments to the Western proposals amount- ing to a return to the Russians' own scheme, gave no great hope of reasonable discussion, even though he seems to have left the more rancorous phrases to be produced subsequently by his col- leagues from Poland and Czechoslovakia. The proposal itself came from its three sponsors carrying the unhelpful implication of which Asian Governments seem to be so fond, that the danger of rearmament springs entirely from the attitudes of the Great Powers and that other countries are merely the victims of these Powers' foolishness. And the Russians' protestations of enthusiasm for disarmament is not matched by any obvious willingness to discuss reasonably its exact terms.

But the step was taken, and it was quite right that it should be taken. There is a new and notable correspondence between the statements of all four Powers on the hitherto disputed pro- positions that there should be only one disarmament commission, to cover both atomic and conventional weapons, that armed forces should be defined to include para-military, security and police forces, and that ultimately there should be a disarmament conference of all States, whether they were members of the United Nations or not. This is undoubtedly an advance which should be followed up. The opportunity to discuss the subject in private, with some hope that the purely propagandist apparatus of " peacemongering " could be left outside the council chamber, is too good to be misted.

It would be wrong, of course, to jump at once into a mood of optimism. What the disarmament question needs is intellectual stamina and technical skill—not emotional demonstrations. It as is likely, the worst difficulty -turns out to be the Russian insistence that atomic weapons must be abandoned at once, irre- spective of all considerations of national security and in advance of any provision for thorough international control, then only a supreme effort can overcome the difficulty. Passionate and loosely reasoned public statements will not help. The methods and qualities required are private and expert discussion, patience, realism and the avoidance of illusions—and these things, most fortunately, happen to be favoured at this time by the Western Powers. It is possible to believe that they are methods and qualities which even the Russians respect.