THE TABLET March 15th, 1958. VOL. 211, No. 6147

THE TABL ET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

MARCH 15th, 1958

NINEPENCE

1 WO E x t r e m e s I Government Policy and Sir Stephen King-Hall file Free Trade A rea: Differing Views in London and Paris. By John Dingle After the P ra to Case: The Church and the Coining Elections in Italy Gaelic ill Ireland : The Debate about Language. By G. J. Hand

Gregorian Researches : The L iterary Evidence. By Anthony Milner Lenten Meditations : IV. Sinai and the Cloud. By Sebastian Bullough, O.P.

Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

WHAT KIND OF CONFERENCE?

/A N E obvious truth about the summit talks is that the shorter the time they are allotted, the fuller the preparation must be. If they are meant to be compressed within a very few days, then all the work will need to be done beforehand, and the talks will really be a platform from which to announce what agreement there is. If, however, the talks are seen to be quite as important as a peace conference, as Vienna, Versailles, or the allied meeting at Potsdam, then less preparation needs to be done, for the work will really be done, as it was at Versailles, by those who can speak for and in great measure commit their countries. But they must expect to be in conference for weeks or months.

Disarmament in the nuclear age is quite as important a subject as any that previous generations of statesmen have.had to treat. It was never easier, with the aeroplane and the telephone, for Presidents and Prime Ministers to keep in close touch with affairs at home. Yet the tenor of Mr. Macmillan’s answers suggest that the talks are still thought of as a brief meeting, which must be most carefully prepared, and, if this is so, it is rather surprising to find that the British Ambassador in Moscow has just at this juncture returned for a month’s leave.

Mr. Bevan taunted the Prime Minister with the prospect that the Western world will be in a trade recession, to use no harsher term, just when the talks finally happen. But, even if this is not so, it may well be that the foreign participants, both the friendly and the not so friendly, will think that the Conservative Government is reaching the end of its term, with the consequent loss of authority. There is so little fundamental difference between what Mr. Gaitskell and Mr. Bevan want and what the Government will at any rate consider that the Government should open again the door which Mr. Selwyn Lloyd slammed in the face of the Opposition. The time spent in preparatory talks with the Russians should also be used to see whether it would not be possible for Great Britain to go to the summit talks with both the great parties represented.

The Opposition today want to go further than the Government in stopping further tests and delaying the construction of what look like being in any event very temporary missile bases. But there is probably not much more substance in the Opposition idea that such gestures will help to create the right atmosphere, and will at any rate please a large section of the electorate, than there is in the ministerial idea that one more successful test will strengthen our hands at the conference table. The hope placed in such a conference at all is not a hope that rests on the state of the tests, but on there being a broad realisation among all the Governments most concerned that at present they are all drifting in a direction in which none of them can want to go.

In face of the perils now facing humanity, differences of timing in preparations, such as divide the official Labour leadership from the Government, are small enough to be bridged, and ought to be bridged. The prospect of a two-party approach should very much strengthen the hands of the Labour leadership against the swelling volume of dismay and doubt in the rank and file of the party, a mood to which concessions have already had to be made. It is a mood not confined to the Labour party, and one which may go much further, because it represents a belated awakening to the grim possibilities of a position which has been allowed to come about, largely unobserved, over the last few years.

Mr. George Ward, the Secretary of State for Air, gave the Commons on Monday some information on the progressive equipment of British forces with nuclear weapons of the kind called tactical. This process has been going on for some years, both in the Army and the Air Force, for the defence of Western Europe, as a way of compensating for the failure of the European NATO Powers to provide even the minimum divisions.