FOREIGN RELATIONS: Suspense on Quemoy

DULLES SCENTS BRINK VICTORY, proclaimed the Christian Science Monitor last week as the Secretary of State flew’back from a few days at his Duck Island retreat to a capital hoping against hope that Red China would make its seven-day ceasefire on Quemoy permanent. Dulles conferred with Under Secretary of State Christian Herter and Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs Walter Robertson, hit a quick consensus that the Communists had stopped shooting because their artillery blockade of Quemoy had failed, and they were unwilling or unable to step up the pressures in the teeth of U.S. and Chinese Nationalist firmness. In Tokyo General Laurence S. Kuter, Pacific Air Forces commander, reviewing gun-camera pictures of Chinese Nationalist jet victories,*said flatly that Red China had taken “a beating.”

In this suspense Dulles trod warily between firmness and non-provocation as he sought to keep the cease-fire alive. Specifically last week the U.S.: <¶Suspended U.S. Navy escorting of Chinese Nationalist convoys to Quemoy—a Red China cease-fire condition—figuring that the Chinese Nationalists had all but licked the supply problems (see FOREIGN NEWS) and could well do the job on their own;

¶Continued the U.S.’s own basic military buildup on Formosa itself—a buildup powerfully augmented last week by the arrival of the Army’s Nike-Hercules ground-to-air atomic rockets; ¶ Persevered with the Warsaw talks, in their seventh session, between the U.S.’s Ambassador Jacob D. Beam and Red China’s Ambassador Wang Ping-nan on how to make the cease-fire formal, even though Chinese Nationalists on Formosa termed the talks “futile.”

At week’s end Dulles got the word that Red China was extending its Quemoy cease-fire for another fortnight. “This is not a betrayal,” Red China’s local commanders felt it necessary to assure their troops in a special proclamation. “This is a racial righteousness. We must draw a clear-cut line between the Chinese and the Americans.” The crude Communist pitch: to split Chinese Nationalists off from the U.S. But whatever Red China’s reasons for cease-fire’s extension, the first fact about Quemoy was that Red China, after 44 days of shelling, had failed to subdue a little island only seven miles from its shore and was thus the current candidate for paper tiger. Said President Eisenhower on cease-fire’s extension: “Good news.”

*Camera evidence: Red China’s jet pilots were so poorly¶ trained that they did not cut in afterburners, or even drop off wing tanks, to get more combat speed.