The First Step

Through the broad streets of Geneva early this week surged the innumerable supporting troops of diplomacy--reporters, secretaries, protocol officers, and the conspicuously invisible agents of the U.S. State Department's security service, Britain's Special Branch and the Soviet MGB. In villas scattered through the city's parklike suburbs, the foreign ministers of Britain, France, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. took one last look at their briefs. In the ornate League of Nations Council Chamber overlooking the turquoise waters of Lake of Geneva and facing snow-capped Mont Blanc, workmen shuffled the furniture about. The great East-West confrontation was about to begin.

Seemingly by reflex, Nikita Khrushchev gave the gathering diplomats their first reminder of the ugly possibilities beneath the bland protestations of peace. He told a group of West German visitors to Moscow that Russia could put their homeland "out of action" with not more than eight H-bombs; in a nuclear war, he conceded, Russia would suffer "losses, and great ones," but "the Western powers would be literally wiped off the face of the earth."

Not with such sweeping considerations, but with a finicky attention to details, did the foreign ministers assemble in Geneva. They disputed about what shape the conference table should be. Russia wanted a round one; the West held out for a square table, whose four-sidedness, reasoned Western tacticians, would emphasize that the talks concerned the four occupiers of Berlin. The Westerners had anticipated a Soviet demand for inclusion of Polish and Czechoslovak delegations, to "even up sides."

But with less than 24 hours to go before the conference opened. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko--at 49 the youngest of the foreign ministers--suddenly demanded that the two German delegations be included as full-fledged participants. To the West, this would be to concede in advance what the argument is about: it would involve its recognition of the legitimacy of the East German Communist regime. The Western powers flatly refused, insisted that the two German delegations could appear in the Council Chamber only as "advisers." Britain's Selwyn Lloyd conferred privately with Gromyko, who would not budge.

Nuts & Bolts Week. The issue was obviously more than procedural, and there were mutterings that the conference might break down even before it got started. At best, the Western delegations expected an early Soviet rejection of the Western "package plan" (TIME, May 11) for settling in one interlinked proposal the future of Berlin, German reunification and European armaments levels. "The first phase of the conference," predicted a gloomy West German diplomat, "will be to wait until the Russians stop laughing at the Western proposals."

The second phase, if it got that far, would presumably consist of a Russian attempt to "unpack the package" by throwing out a series of isolated counterproposals, each designed to catch the fancy of one of the Western powers and to horrify the others. (Example: an appeal for a mutual reduction of armed forces in central Europe, which would hold out to Britain the prospect of dismantling her costly Army of the Rhine, but would strike France and West Germany as the forerunner to U.S. military withdrawal from Western Europe.) Aware of the West's well-publicized failure to formulate any agreed-upon "fallback" positions, the Soviets could thus hope to set the four Western powers squabbling among themselves.

The Hole Card. In somber anticipation of this train of events, many of Europe's pundits had already dismissed the Geneva meeting as "the useless conference." But most of the Western diplomats directly concerned believed they held at least one strong hole card: Nikita Khrushchev's seemingly overriding desire for a summit meeting. Trading on this, the U.S. had already served indirect notice that any Russian move during the conference to shut off Western access routes to Berlin, or even to sign a separate World War II peace treaty with its Communist East German satellite, would result in an immediate Western walkout at Geneva and an end to all hope for a later summit conference.

The betting was that nothing would really be agreed upon at Geneva, except the necessity to take differences to a higher level.

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