William C. Foster, United States disarmament director, predicts a safe passage in the Senate for any nuclear test ban treaty signed by Russia and the West. He does not agree with those who predict that a treaty would provoke the most bruising battle in the Senate since the proposal to join the League of Nations after World War I. Nor does he believe it would suffer the same dismal fate. “It would be tough,” the 66-year-old Mr. Foster said in an interview, “but we could get a treaty through the Senate." Mr. Foster, director of the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, will not take part in the United States-British-Russian nuclear test-ban treaty negotiations in Moscow next month. But, from his office here, he will back up the efforts of the American negotiators. The chief negotiator for the United States at the Moscow talks, scheduled for next month, will be Undersecretary of State Averell Harriman...

President Kennedy announced Monday that the United States, Russia and Britain have agreed to send high-level negotiators to Moscow next month in a fresh start at hammering out a nuclear test-ban treaty. He said the agreement to start the high-level talks had been reached by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and himself. In the meantime, the President announced, the United States will not conduct any nuclear tests in the atmosphere - so long as the Soviet Union and other nations hold back on their tests, too. Mr. Kennedy spoke of the talks as a badly needed first start on negotiations "where the end is in sight." But he cautioned that his announcements were "no substitute for a formal binding treaty - but I hope it will help us achieve it." British officials seemed more optimistic...

A News Analysis - Is the present furor over Cuba based on fluff or substance? The real answer may lie in the secret correspondence of Soviet Premier Khrushchev and President Kennedy. In the last few weeks of controversy and confusion, an odd drama has been played In Washington. Critics first railed at the administration, crying that Soviet missiles and missile sites still remain in Cuba. The storm drove the administration into an unprecedented picture-show defense of its intelligence operations. But, in the defense, the administration revealed a concern and an uneasiness not about missile and missile sites but about the removal of Soviet troops. None of the published correspondence between Khrushchev and Kennedy contains any promise to remove Russian troops from Cuba. But the secret correspondence reportedly does. In short, the critics, still may have helped draw attention to a raw nerve of the administration on Cuba policy...

THE CAPTURE of military personnel, and of key civilians, is vital to a Pentagon publicist, but his more exciting, perhaps more significant, work centers on the capture of the mass media — Hollywood, television, the press, even the comics. The Department’s Office of News Services has an Audio-Visual Division which, among its other duties, sees to it that some movies and television shows have good chunks of military propaganda. The division examines scripts and then lends aid to those deemed worthy of cooperation from the Department of Defense. Cooperation can save a producer a good deal of money. Indeed, if he plans a movie based almost entirely on the activities of the armed services, cooperation can determine whether he will have a movie at all. For a producer clutching a script blessed by the division, the services may provide military equipment that he can’t get elsewhere: modern tanks, weapons, ships, planes. An officer, acting as technical adviser to insure the movie’s authenticity, often is sent along...

IN THE SPRING of this year, Martin Burke, Gilbert Bauer and David Figlestahler, pupils of the Holy Redeemer Elementary School in Portsmouth, Ohio, wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. In the event of war, Russian troops “will be landing inside our borders,” they told the Secretary. If that comes to pass, “the American people will defend this country in a last ditch, to the death stand, along with the military.” The civilian population must train itself for this future. “Please send us any able weapons,” the schoolboys asked. They listed recoilless rifles, antitank guns, bazookas, mortars, machine guns, browning automatic rifles and submachine guns. Martin, Gilbert and David said the weapons would help them learn about arms and would “help us prepare ourselves for our future military service.” The boys closed with a compliment: “We the senders of this letter are in full accord with your conduction of your duties so far as Secretary of Defence” [sic]. Although the schoolboys had not learned their spelling, they had learned other lessons well, for they are growing up in a time when all the channels of communication and education overflow with images of war and might and glory, images that tend to obscure the views of death and destruction that linger from other times and other lands...

ONCE A YEAR America dances in a comic ballet against the backdrop of a world of terror. The dance masters call their creation, Operation Alert, fitting it snugly into a continuous show entitled, Civil Defense. This year’s show took place May 3. In New York, Civil Defense authorities qualified the Men’s Bar at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel as a shelter area, and 100 men continued to sip their highballs as three mythical nuclear bombs hurtled toward the city. At Yankee Stadium, bleacherites cowered under the stands while more affluent customers remained in their comfortable grandstand seats. Several Manhattan firms stopped work, but one company declared its 400 employees “automatically dead” and kept them on the job. In Washington, Congress ignored the drill, and President Eisenhower spent the day elsewhere. Only one top government official scurried from the city to his secret command post in Virginia - Leo A. Hoegh, Director of the Office of Civil Defense and Mobilization. The State Department set a new record as 4,000 employees tucked their secret papers into safes and rushed from the building in eight minutes (previous record: twelve minutes). Fifty-five schools stayed out of the drill, serving as polling places for the District of Columbia’s Presidential primary...