International: The Magic Mountain

At the pre-arranged hour, the explosion occurred . . .

The taiga around the mountain was Illuminated by a golden radiance;

The old mountain disappeared . . .

These lines, by Soviet Poet Evgeny Do-matovsky, cropped up in a Moscow literary magazine last summer, before the world learned that Russia had developed her own atomic bomb. Last week the vanished mountain turned up again at an unexpected place—the United Nations.

Happiness & Prosperity. In the Special Political Committee, Andrei Vishinsky was attacking the U.S. sponsored plan for atomic energy control, which calls for international ownership of all atomic energy production and rigid international inspection (TIME, Nov. 7). “If, unfortunately, and to our great regret,” said the Soviet Foreign Minister, Russian stockpiling of atom bombs “were necessary, we should have as many of these as we should need—no more and no less.”

But right now, added Vishinsky, Russia was utilizing atomic energy only for peaceful purposes. “We are razing mountains; we are irrigating deserts; we are cutting through the jungle and the tundra; we are spreading life, happiness, prosperity and welfare in places where the human footstep has not been seen for a thousand years.”

U.S. Delegate John Hickerson sharply replied to Vishinsky: “Whether or not this is nonsense, I will not say . . . [But] if nations have devices in their possession which can level mountains, they also have in their possession devices which can level cities . . . [Fissionable material] can be converted . . . easily and almost instantaneously into bombs . . .”

Monday & Thursday. Well, replied Vishinsky in hurt tones, if the world did not believe in Russia’s peaceful intentions, inspectors could cross the Soviet borders and “smell the [atomic] materials, touch them, feel them, do anything they want or desire.” They could inspect ” on Monday, then next Monday, then Thursday, let us say, then the following Thursday, then two weeks after that, or any time . . . You want to do it at twelve o’clock, at five minutes past twelve, at ten minutes past twelve, at one o’clock, at one-fifteen, at one-thirty, because you don’t believe us, because we are thieves . . .”

All of Vishinsky’s rhetoric did not change the fact that Russia had not retreated from her previous stand which) opposes international ownership of all atomic energy plants; 2) calls for inspection only “periodically” and only of officially declared installations; 3) would subject all atomic energy control to Russia’s veto in the Security Council. Nor did his story of the leveling of the mountains give any scientific color to the Russians’ accounts of their peacetime use of atomic explosives, which U.S. experts regard as ridiculous. New York Times Science Reporter William Laurence summed up the U.S. view of Vishinsky’s yarn: “Mr, Vishinsky is using the present tense for something that is in the distant future.”