Back to Geneva

Two summers ago, Averell Harriman, during a quiet trip to Moscow, laid the groundwork for the 17-nation disarmament committee's only major breakthrough in its three years of effort: the 1963 treaty banning above-ground nuclear tests. Last week as the committee prepared to reconvene in Geneva's Palais des Nations after a ten-month recess, Harriman by an odd coincidence was just finishing up another quiet week in Moscow--a "vacation," he called it, in which he just happened to meet twice with Russian Premier Aleksei Kosygin for some five hours of talks.

Suddenly Willing. Conceivably, all they talked about was Viet Nam and the fishing on the Black Sea. But it was hardly surprising that some of the chair swivelers in the chancelleries of Europe began to wonder if another Washington-Moscow disarmament deal was in the works. After all, for months the Russians had been insisting that they would never come back to the Geneva table so long as the war in Viet Nam continued. Now they suddenly seemed only too willing to rejoin the disarmament talks.

The West Germans were naturally more suspicious of a deal than anyone else. What they dreaded was U.S. agreement to scrap the NATO multilateral nuclear force--Germany's chance for a share in A-arms--in exchange for Russian agreement to a non-proliferation treaty. MLF has been all but quietly shelved anyway since last December, and Russian Chief Disarmer Semyon ("Scratchy") Tsarapkin's parting shot at the last committee meeting was that "the solution of the urgent and vital problem of non-proliferation could be found here and now except for the obstacle of the plan for a NATO multilateral nuclear force."

Just a Platform? There were no other visible, substantive reasons for Moscow's change of heart about another round of talks. But the Geneva delegates will have plenty of unfinished disarmament business to bring up again from previous sessions. There is the "bomber bonfire" scheme to scrap part (proposed by the U.S.) or all (as Russia urged) of their nuclear bomber fleets; the proposal to reduce the mounting stockpiles of fissionable material on both sides; and an extension of the test ban treaty to underground blasts, which has been stymied over whether three or seven on-site inspections a year would be enough to keep everyone honest.

Of them all, non-proliferation seems the most likely area for a breakthrough, as both the U.S. and the Soviet Union grow increasingly uneasy about the number of nations on the brink of atomic weaponry (TIME, July 23). The British delegation to Geneva has already been circulating a non-proliferation draft, and the U.S. has been readying a document of its own to put before the committee. If this was not the subject uppermost in Russian minds, then, diplomats guessed, they might not want anything more at Geneva than a daily public platform for berating the U.S. about Viet Nam.

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