PROPAGANDA: Fission Wishin’

If wishes were horses, beggars wad ride, And a’ the warld be drowned with pride.

Last month, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky emphatically told the world that the peace-loving Soviet was using atomic energy for peaceful purposes “right now” (TIME, Nov. 21). Said he at Lake Success: “We are razing mountains; we are irrigating deserts.” But in reporting his speech, Pravda made a significant switch: it quoted Vishinsky as saying only that Russia’s atomic energists wanted to raze mountains.

Asked by U.S. newsmen at U.N. last week what he thought of Pravda’s editing, Vishinsky merely snapped: “The topic is exhausted.” But a Russian engineer in Berlin cleared up the whole thing in a speech at the House of Soviet Culture. The moving of mountains is still only the wish of the Soviet people and not an accomplishment, he conceded. But, he added, “since wishes and reality lie close together in the Soviet Union, one can expect the execution of the project in a short while.”