Israel denounced today Soviet “rocket rattling” and “nuclear intimidation” in an appeal to the great powers to make a start in the direction of global disarmament by initiating “regional regulation” of arms in the Middle East.
Abba Eban, chief Israeli delegate, addressed the General Assembly’s political and security committee in support of a 24 power resolution, which has the endorsement of the United States, Britain and France, as “the most comprehensive and integral disarmament proposal now before us.”
“Since we met last year, “Mr. Eban said, “many countries in Europe and the Middle East have been reminded, through diplomatic note or public statement, that a nuclear power could destroy them with relative ease and that their security hangs on a thread. Nuclear war has not broken out; but nuclear intimidation has entered the diplomatic relationships between the small and the great powers.”
Warning that an attack by a great power by a small country anywhere in the world could be under the present circumstances only a stage in the sequence of a global conflict, “the Israel diplomat reminded Russia–without naming it–that the cessation of “rocket rattling” in diplomacy and in propaganda would help ease international tensions.
“The disarmament question is usually conceived in terms of the balance between the arms of the great powers,” Mr. Eban noted. “But the dispatch of the surplus weapons into areas of tension for the sake of winning a counteracting political influence has become an accepted feature of their competition.” He told the delegate that Israel “strongly appeals” for an end to this regional arms race by the Great Powers.
Meanwhile, speaking on a national radio program, Sir Leslie Knox Munro, president of the General Assembly, expressed the opinion that no country would “take an action which could produce either a local or a more than local conflagration.” He underlined the Soviet Union’s interest in the Middle East and noted that while there might not be negotiations with the USSR at the UN over the Middle East, there were discussions in progress.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
