The U.S. is making swift progress toward a generous peace treaty with Japan (TIME, April 9). Last week the Soviet Union tried to ram a sprag into the moving wheels. U.S. Ambassador Alan G. Kirk was summoned to the Foreign Office in Moscow, handed an eleven-page memorandum which attacked the U.S. treaty draft as "illegal" and "impossible."
Instead, Russia proposed a treaty to be written by the foreign ministers of the U.S., Great Britain, Russia and Red China. Replied a U.S. State Department spokesman: the Moscow proposal is one that Russia "makes periodically whenever it wants to stall the conclusion...