Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1956-02-10
BoIIooning the Big Lie

How prepoSterouS can the kremllnS
propagandists get? Besides arranging for
a barrage of protests from their puppet
satellite lands, they have now staged an
elaborate "presS conference" in an effort
to make the world believe that our coun-
try'S unleaShing of weather balloons con-
Stitutes sinister attempt to conduct a
policy of to the brink Of war" This is
utterly silly. In fact, it is so silly, and
such brazen example of the Big Lie
technique, that one wonders whether 1t
might not be an obfuScating maneuver
designed to pave the way for some drastic
Communist action-possibly action to
carry out the yelled East German threat
against Western air travel to and from
Berlin.
In any event, this latest Moscow stunt
seems particularly outlandish in view OF
our Governments earlier conciliatory
reply to the Kremlin's formal protest
against American launched aerial
spheres" intruding upon Russian airspace.
After all, the reply is an altogether rea-
sonable one. While disavowing reSpon-
sibility for the Nberty-espousing propa-
ganda balloons released by private or
CARNATIONS like the Free Europe Com
mittee, the United States unhesitatingly
acknowledges that the Navy and Air
Force have been sending aloft thousands
of the big weather balloons, and it is
willing to admit that some of them may
have drifted over the territory of the
USSR. From now on, however, in defer
ence to Soviet objections and to prevent
misunderstanding, it will seek to avoid
unleashing any that might stray to that
territory.
But the United States, in taking this
position, has made several other points
abundantly clear. Thus, for one thing,
all our experience with the weather
balloons-which have built-in safety fea-
lures along with their radio and photo
graphic instrumentation-haS demon
strated that they are not hazard even
to dense civilian air traffic. Second, they
are not launched surreptitiously; on the
contrary, they have been widely publ
cized as a project in which numerous
countries are cooperating. Third, to en-
courage such cooperation everywhere,
they carry with them instructions in sew
eral languages including Russian. And
fourth, far from being sinister, they
serve purely scientific purpose-namely,
to measure and record meteorological
phenomena and accumulate information
that should contribute substantially to
the worlds knowledge during the pro-
grams projected for the 1957-58 Interna-
tional Geophysical Year.
In other words, our weather balloons
represent an undertaking calculated to
serve the whole of mankind in an age
when it is important to learn as much
as possible about such things as air jet
streams. Yet, through its "press confer
ence" in Moscow, the Kremlin (Which in
cidentally has been sending up some
"aerial spheres" of its OWN has sought to
depict this open and aboveboard project
as a sort of conspiratorial operation
aimed at bringing everybody to the brink
of war. Actually, of course, as the State
Department has suggested in its note,
the Soviet leaders should be cooperating
with us in the program instead of Will
flying US. Apparently, however, they
prefer to get whatever they can out Of
the Big Lie.