Apart from talking test ban, Moscow was talking movies. One Aleksei Ro manov, Russia's commissar of the cutting room, announced last week that even though Federico Fellini's 8½ had won first prize at the Moscow Interna tional Film Festival, it was far too pessimistic to be shown to the Russian peo ple. The criticism was unfair. The Fellini picture is all about a befuddled movie director who wants to dramatize the nuclear destruction of mankind but in stead surrenders himself to just loving everybody. "Let us all join hands," he cries as the whole cast dances a ring-around-the-rocket. "How simple life is. Let us live it together." That is precisely the Kremlin line about the virtues of the test ban treaty and the joys of peaceful coexistence. Off the screen, however, life is not quite as simple as that.
Status Seekers. With Secretary of State Dean Rusk and British Foreign Secretary Lord Home in Moscow this week for the formal treaty signing, oth er nations are only too eager to join hands and sign, too. Ironically, they are all non-nuclear powers, and except for a handful, they will never have a nucle ar capability. At week's end the following had agreed to sign: Afghanistan, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, East Germany, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Finland, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Laos, Li beria, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Soma lia, the U.A.R. and Uruguay. In addition, about 50 countries have shown an official "interest" in signing, and presumably will do so soon.
Most of the countries are merely using the test ban treaty for international politics. Examples: Israel, which is in fact working on an atomic bomb, is trying to show that it is just as peace-loving as Egypt's Nasser, and East Germany is trying to assert its status as a sovereign nation, though unrecognized as such by the West.
But France, the one power besides the three signatories that is close to having its own nuclear force, flatly refused to take part in the new test ban togetherness. And Charles de Gaulle promised to make his position clear.
For two days at his country home in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, he studied questions submitted in advance of a scheduled press conference and memorized the answers. At 3 p.m. on the appointed day, as the raspberry-red draperies parted in the Elysée Palace's gilt-encrusted Salle des Fetes, De Gaulle strode to the carpeted dais, and for the next 80 minutes delivered a virtual monologue to the assembled crowd of 900 correspondents, government officials and others.