Spirit of Geneva, 1958

For the 40-odd scientists of East and West meeting in Geneva, the outside chill of events rarely interrupted their scholarly labors. Iraq erupted, British and U.S. troops landed, Khrushchev cried that war was about to break out. But in Council Chamber No. 7 at the old League of Nations Palace, Russian and Western negotiators each day made their inch of progress toward agreeing on an international plan for detecting atomic tests. Last week, despite uncommunicative two-line communiques, final agreement was reportedly all but reached.

The Communists had first threatened to boycott the conference unless the West agreed beforehand to stop its tests, but when soft-spoken James B. Fisk, executive vice president of Bell Telephone Laboratories, announced that the U.S. would show up anyway, the Communists decided to let their scientists go too. One of Gromyko's top aides, Semyon Tsarapkin, kept a beady eye on things, but the top Soviet scientist, jovial Evgeny Fedorov, turned out on occasion to be freer to make decisions without consulting home than the Westerners (including scientists from Britain, France and Canada). After seven weeks' discussion, the scientists had settled on the value of four main methods of nuclear detection:

P: The acoustic method, suited for any kind of blast except for those set off underground or in outer space. With sensitive microbarometers and hydrophones, observation posts could pick up the low-frequency sound waves that fan out for thousands of miles after every nuclear explosion. Unfortunately, the sound waves are subject to distortion by such natural upheavals as volcanic eruptions, meteorites, landslides and even thunder. P: Collection of Radioactive debris that can travel up to 1,200 miles a day at a height of 40,000 ft. Touchy about having air patrols over their territory, the Russian scientists at first balked at the idea of using planes, insisted that collection must wait until the debris could be gathered on the ground. Eventually, the scientists agreed on the right to use both methods. Debris is no help in measuring fallout caused by explosions in space. P: Electromagnetic radiation. Control posts, equipped with photocells and low-frequency radio receivers could pick up the X rays and ultraviolet rays that turn into light and radio waves after an explosion. They could even pick up the light pulses resulting from a blast in space. P: The seismic method, which with astonishing accuracy has already detected the size and location of underground explosions thousands of miles away. Main drawback: seismographs cannot always distinguish between a nuclear blast and an earthquake, though differences between them are now being studied.

Having decided on these various methods, the scientists turned to touchier problems. The Russians wanted only no control posts, the West 650. At week's end, after small private sessions (in English) with all translators and typists excluded, both sides seemed ready to compromise on 170. Other problems included whether the inspection posts should be fixed, as the Russians wanted, or whether inspectors should be free to move about, and whether inspectors should be members of the country involved, plus one neutral observer. These were ruled to be political questions, outside the scope of the conference.

For the West, the main accomplishment of the conference was that the Communists had at least in theory accepted the feasibility of inspection. But the Russians often carefully explore issues technically, only to reject them on political grounds. For the Communists, the big gain was that, once a policy of inspection was agreed upon, they could argue that it should be easy to reach agreement on the suspension of testing, and the U.S., Britain and France would be under increased pressure to stop tests. But the scientists at Geneva, who have even thawed some at two joint cocktail parties, hoped that the world had come a step closer to a practical discussion of disarmament.

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