NEWS, Tuesday, Dec. 26, 1972

An analysis

Bombing casts pall on Asia

Here dead we lie because
we did not choose

To live and shame the land
from which we sprung.

Life, to be sure, is little
enough to lose;

But young men think it is,
and we were young.

— A. E. Housman

By Keyes Beech

Daily News Foreign Service

HONG KONG — The lines were written long ago by a British poet, but they have a special poignance this Christmas time when the peace that was “at hand” two months ago has been reduced to a shambles by what, perhaps with some exaggeration, has been called the most savage bombing in the history of the world.

"World Revolts in Anger at U.S. Bombing" was the headline in the conservative, British-owned South China Morning Post.

"Cruelly, the Christmas cup of peace in Vietnam has been snatched from mankind's lips," said the fiercely independent Far Eastern economic review, adding: "Bitterly, the world must decide between two versions of what happened."

Special
Daily
News
report

Beech

The sense of outrage is understandable. Even the most hard-nosed anti-Communists in this part of the world were shocked at President Nixon's decision to order the most intensive bombing of the war less than two months after the world was led to believe, in Henry A. Kissinger's words, that "peace is at hand."

THERE WAS a feeling of unease that this time Mr. Nixon, who mined Haiphong and still went to Moscow, had overplayed his hand, that he had committed himself to a course from which there was no moral retreat.

You don't have to be a Communist or a Pacifist to sympathize with a small country that is being bombed to pieces by the most powerful nation on Earth — especially when the

justification for that bombing is, to put it mildly, unclear.

Emotionalism and morality aside for the moment, the vital question is: Will the bombing bring Hanoi to its knees and end the war?

If that happened, there might be some kind of ratio-nale for it. But there is nothing in the past or present to indicate that the bombing will succeed. It is easy to believe the men in Hanoi when they say that even if Hanoi and Haiphong are leveled, they will fight on. They always have.

Another question is how many more B-52s, now that they have their immunity, can Mr. Nixon afford to lose over North Vietnam and have their crewmen join the ranks of more than 400 American prisoners who, it was hoped, would be home by Christmas.

AND IF THE bombing does not work, what then? What does Mr. Nixon do for an encore?

"Maybe Mr. Nixon knows something we don't know," sighed a U.S. official with nearly 20 years in Asia. "He'd damned well better."

One thing the bombing has done is to cast a cloud over the general spirit of detente in

Asia that Mr. Nixon himself created with his historic journey to Peking.

It makes it more difficult for Japan's conservative government to maintain a pro-American stance that it genuinely believes is in Japan's self-interest. But probably the most unhappy Asian leader of all at the new turn of events is China's Premier Chou En-lai, the architect of Peking's rap-prochement with Washington.

It is farily well known there was strong opposition in China to Chou's move toward an ac-commodation with the United States. The savage bombing of North Vietnam cannot fail to give aid and comfort to his critics.

IT IS NOTEWORTHY that Peking has used less harsh language than Moscow in condemning the bombing. And the consensus among observers here is that both Moscow and Peking have too much riding on a detente with Washington to do anything to erase the progress that has been made.

Yet the question lingers: How much longer can the two Communist giants stand by and let their "little brother" take a beating from the "imperialist American bully"?

CHICAGO DAILY NEWS, Tues

Insight

400 m.p.h. trains would zip
far underground to airport

“Tunnelport” urged for

By Edwin F. Gillen

Chicago could have a third major airport only nine min-
utes from the Loop if the city takes advantage of tech-
nological breakthroughs and federal seed money.

The airport could be built on relatively cheap fields, let's say in the area south of Frankfort, 37 miles southwest of downtown between Joliet and Chicago Heights.

The trip to the Loop would take only 9 minutes because it
would be aboard a new generation of trains powered by
linear induction motors and using gravity for acceleration or
deceleration.

AND THE TRAINS WOULD GO underground at a maxi-
imum of 400 miles an hour.

They would travel through deep tunnels, "evacuated" of
air to cut wind resistance and dug by the latest in tunnel
boring machines. At the deepest point, the tunnel would be
from 1,000 to 2,000 feet down.

There is no longer any question of whether such a tunnel
system will be built in the United States. It's a matter of
where the first one will be constructed, relatively free of cost
to the locale because of the infusion of U.S. research and
development funds.

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) is studying
the tube vehicle system (TVS) as a mass people-mover.

SOME OF THE UNUSUAL TVS advantages, according
to DOT, include:

* Much shorter trip times than surface travel, at the same comfort level.

terminal entrances, would be the only evidence of thousands
of people being transported hourly.

SUCH A TVS TO THE LOOP from a Frankfort airport
could be a bonanza for Chicago.

Chicago would be a human reservoir of workers for the
airport—and for any belt of industry built around it.

If a 10,000-acre buffer zone of industry were built around
the airport, employees living in Chicago's inner city could use