THE NATION: The Price of Peace

Just 22 hours before the anniversary of the day on which the North Koreans crossed the 38th parallel, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Jacob Malik faced a microphone on the U.N.’s Price of Peace program. His text clanked along on familiar Communist lines until, at the end of the broadcast, came the words that caused the world to prick up its ears: Russia was proposing a Korea armistice. Did it mean that the Communists had had enough?

Washington read the speech backwards and forwards. So did London, Paris and Tokyo. The proposal was highly unspecific (see WAR IN ASIA) ; it seemed to be more than mere peace propaganda, less than an offer. A speech which President Truman had prepared to deliver in Tennessee was hurriedly rewritten, and this week, in two short paragraphs, without mentioning Malik, he gave Russia the U.S.’s fast answer.

There would be no retreats on any front. The President said determinedly: “We can put ourselves in a position to say to [the Soviet rulers]: attack—and you will have the united resources of the free nations thrown against you; attack—and you will be confronted by a war you cannot possibly win . . .

“We are ready to join in a peaceful settlement in Korea now as we have always been. But it must be a real settlement which fully ends the aggression and restores peace and security to the area and to the gallant Korean people. In Korea … we must be ready to take any steps which truly advance us toward world peace. But we must avoid like the plague rash actions which would take unnecessary risks of world war, or weak actions which would reward aggression.”

The U.S. made no bones about it; it longed for peace in Korea. AsEisenhower’s HQ expressed it: “Naturally, everyone would like to see an end to the fighting.”

U.S. troops in Korea had already been fighting almost as long as U.S. troops did in World War I.* From the handful of 256 men (two and a half companies of the 24th Division) who made the first desperate stand north of Osan a year ago, the total of Americans committed had grown to 400,000. Of those first 256, more than half were dead or imprisoned. Of the 400,000, more had been killed or wounded in the past bitter year than were on all U.S. casualty lists in World War II’s first year.

But all this did not mean that the U.S. was ready to quit. After the heavy price already paid, the U.S. could not afford any bad bargains.

* The U.S. entered World War I in April, 1917; U.S. troops fired their first shot on the Western front on Oct. 23, suffered their first casualties in action Nov. 2, just a year and a week before the Armistice.