The '62 Models

What the Genevans really cared about was the auto show.

In the Palais des Expositions, glittering new MG, Alfa Romeo and Mercedes models had been assembled for the city's annual automobile exhibition. There was only mild competition from the diplomats meeting in that hall of doom, the League of Nations' old Palais, for last week's 17-nation disarmament conference. The West at least went out of its way to offer new accessories, but the Russian delegates had scarcely bothered to touch up their old, familiar model.

See No Evil. In 1960 diplomats had haggled fruitlessly for months over the two opposing disarmament schemes put forth by the West and by Russia. The Russians then, as now, offered a glittering but empty scheme for total abolition of all armies and weapons over a four-year period. The West also had a step-by-step program for armament cuts, but there was one big difference. The U.S. insisted on careful, on-the-spot verification to ensure that all countries 1) destroyed the arms they said they would destroy, and 2) did not replace them with other weapons manufactured secretly. Crying espionage, the Russians flatly rejected the idea of foreign investigators poking around their countryside, suggested instead that nuclear nations adopt a sort of honor system of "national" self-inspection.

It was this crucial question that seemed certain to produce a stalemate again at Geneva. Adding some further details to the U.S.'s basic disarmament plan--a 30% cut in conventional weapons and in nuclear bomb carriers, such as rockets, within three years--U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk last week argued that "no government large or small could be expected to enter into disarmament arrangements under which their peoples might become victims of the perfidy of others." But if the Russians were so worried about inspectors, he said, the U.S. would be willing to discuss "sampling techniques," i.e., geographical spot checks, which would discourage treaty violations "without maintaining constant surveillance everywhere."

Rusk's suggestion certainly gave the Russians something to bargain about, but all the signs pointed to flat Soviet rejection. On the day after the main conference began, Soviet Delegate Semyon ("Scratchy") Tsarapkin met U.S. and British delegates to hear details of President John F. Kennedy's offer to cancel--in exchange for an inspected nuclear test-ban treaty--the U.S.'s own nuclear test series scheduled to begin in the central Pacific in late April. Tsarapkin abruptly rejected the offer.

Hollow Boast. Sitting nervously among the big nuclear powers were the eight "middlemen" of the U.N. disarmament meeting, the delegates of Brazil, Burma, Ethiopia, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Sweden and Egypt. Many were utter novices in the murky technicalities of the cold war, but, being wooed by both East and West, they soon rallied under the leadership of India's V. K. Krishna ("The Unspeakable") Menon. Brazil's Foreign Minister Francisco San Thiago Dantas, for example, criticized the Soviet Union for last fall's tests, went right ahead to urge the U.S. to cancel its own spring series.

All the disarmament talk seemed even more futile when reports arrived of Nikita Khrushchev's latest speech in Moscow, plainly aimed at supporting Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and his chief disarmament negotiator, peppery U.N. Ambassador Valerian Zorin, in the task of frightening the smaller nations. Again rejecting an inspected test-ban treaty, Khrushchev boasted of a "new" Soviet "global rocket," which "is invulnerable to anti-missile weapons" and makes U.S. radar detection systems useless, since the rockets "can fly around the world in any direction and strike a blow at any set target." This was hardly news, and the U.S. could make the same claim, as proved by the 5,000-mile flight of a Titan II rocket on the very same day Khrushchev spoke. In Washington, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara replied that U.S. nuclear striking power is so great that the nation could take a surprise attack, then destroy Russia and still have enough left over to counter a threat from any third power.

In Geneva, the delegates settled in for lots more talk about disarmament. Seasoned Arthur Dean, who will take over from Rusk next week as U.S. delegate, already was house hunting.

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