The Piece of Paper

In a carefully guarded back room, behind the huge stage of Paris' Palais de Chaillot, representatives of six nations--Canada, China, Belgium, Argentina, Colombia and Syria--tried for over a week to work out a compromise on Berlin. (The press called them the "neutral nations," although they were all, as the Irish say, neutral against Russia.) The Russians still wanted the Berlin case thrown out of the U.N. Security Council.

The small powers decided that they needed more time for their mediation efforts. To achieve delay, they asked both Russia and the West to "explain circumstantially" why the blockade had been imposed to begin with, and why the talks between the four military governors last summer had broken down. That had been already amply explained in the U.S. White Paper (TIME, Oct. 4). But the Western powers, who wanted to avoid any suspicion of railroading the small nations, politely agreed to answer.

Not so Russia's Andrei Vishinsky. He broke his week-long silence in the council to snarl: "It is useless to think that the U.S.S.R. delegation will bite at this bait. It is naive to believe that the U.S.S.R. delegation will stick to the glue which has been spread over the piece of paper which is now called the Berlin question."

This week, the council will continue its deliberations without Russia's answer. Any resolution calling on Russia to lift the Berlin blockade was sure to run straight into a Russian veto. Said a visiting U.S. officer from Germany: "It's going to be a cold winter for the boys in Berlin."

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