UNITED NATIONS, N. Y., Dec. 7—The old venomous Cold War rhetoric is back again at the United Nations—this time between Ambassadors Yakov Malik of the Soviet Union and Huang Hua of China—but somehow even the vindictive daily slanging matches between the Communist giants seem a little out of date.

The nations have changed since the days when Nikita Khrushchev could pound his shoe on a desk in the General Assembly and send a shudder through the world. The human tragedy of the Indian‐Pakistani war is so immense that the spiteful exchanges between the Communist ambassadors embarrassed even their own supporters, and didn't even get much space In the press.

This was not because Ambassadors Malik and Huang have lost the art of diplomatic billingsgate. They were both eloquently provocative.

Mr. Malik referred in the Security Council the other night to “the low level to which the traitors to Socialism on the Chinese side have fallen.” He complained that “the Chinese representative [Huang Hua], with his vicious, pathological slander against the Soviet Union, is aspiring ... to the role of an imperialist jester. He is amusing the imperialists with his malicious slander against the Soviet Union.”

But the fact is that the “imperialists”—if Mr. Malik meant the delegates from the United States, Britain, France and the rest of the Western world—were not “amused” by the verbal brawl in the Security Council. They were saddened by it, for suddenly the ideological conflict between Moscow and Peking threatened to overwhelm the urgent business of stopping the war between India and Pakistan and make a mockery of the U.N.'s peace mission in the process.
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There are obviously wide and deep differences between the Communist and the non‐Communist nations, but the days are long past since Washington took pleasure in the alarming ideological and territorial differences between the two major Communist nations.

Moscow has a million armed men along the Chinese border, confronting a Chinese force at least that size, and officials in Peking talk openly about the possibility of a Soviet attack on China and point to the underground air raid shelters in the Chinese cities as evidence of their concern. In this situation, nobody at the U.N. is very “amused” to find the Sino‐Soviet differences suddenly erupting In the Security Council and thereby not only interfering with the efforts to end the Indo‐Pakistani war, but seriously increasing the tensions between Moscow, and Peking.

The Chinese are an interesting study in this debate and Huang Hua is no jester. They did not expect to be sitting in the Security Council at this session, and have not been here long enough to adopt the normal U.N. techniques of polite pretense. In fact, they seem determined not only to challenge the Soviet Union's expansionist policies in the Indian Ocean, but in the Middle East, the Mediterranean and in Europe as well, and to demonstrate that they are not deceived by Moscow's diplomatic strategy and not intimidated by Moscow's power.

China's position is clear enough. It knows that the Pakistani Government was savage in its repression of the East Pakistani rebels, though it says very little about the hundreds of thousands of casualties and the millions of refugees driven into India by the brutality of the Pakistani Army.

But in Peking's view, this was an internal conflict, a rebellion and even a Pakistani civil war, which India helped provoke by arming the rebels, and then used as an excuse to settle old scores and dismember the Pakistani state.

Accordingly, Huang Hua accused the Soviet Union not only of backing India's intervention in the Pakistani conflict, but of using Its veto power in the Security Council to help the progress of the Indian Army, and he didn't stop there.

For he went on to point to Moscow's hypocrisy in calling for total withdrawal of Israeli troops in the Middle East controversy while opposing cease‐fire and the withdrawal of the Indian and Pakistani troops—all of which, the Chinese Ambassador suggested, was in keeping with Moscow's “social imperialism,” its expansion into the Mediterranean and now into the Indian Ocean, and even its “aggression against the people of Czechoslovakia.”

Huang Hua weakened his argument by paying little attention to the savagery of the Pakistani Government against its own people, but at least he was consistent with Peking policy, for China opposed the Soviet Union's use of military force to install the kind of government it wanted in Prague and it is opposing India's use of force to get the kind of government it wants in East Pakistan.

This is not an argument that can be lightly dismissed, for if foreign armies are to cross international borders to correct the internal tragedies of other states, what about the internal repression in the Soviet Union, or in South Africa and many other places? And is the tragedy of the Pakistani rebellion worse than the larger Indo‐Pakistani war?

The United Nations cannot even stop pointless international wars like Vietnam, let alone deal with the internal massacres of sovereign states, no matter how tragic. Its only hope is that it can persuade the member nations to pay a little more attention to its first principle to refrain from the threat or use of military force in the settlement of their disputes. And it cannot even do that if the great powers reject the principle and turn the Security Council into an instrument for propaganda, dissension and division.

No doubt India, backed by the Soviet Union, will have her way and. Pakistan will be dismembered and the U.N. weakened even more, but once there is an East Bengal state, the process of fragmenting the subcontinent will have begun again, and disintegration has always been a greater threat to the future of India than the menace of a divided Pakistan.