Arms & the Summit

Though no one could agree when a summit would be held, there was at least some agreement about the only thing that might profitably be discussed there. The subject: disarmament--or, as the technicians prefer to call it, arms control.

Once President Eisenhower managed to eliminate the deadline from the Berlin ultimatum, the urge to discuss Germany had evaporated amongst everyone but the British. As French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville put the German problem bluntly last week: "The best thing for the West is to maintain the status quo. It is to Russia's interest that there be changes. We are not in a hurry to get to that point."

Worm's Progress. But if Germany offered no lively hopes as a topic on the agenda, why did anyone expect much on disarmament? The hopeful signs were few. Delegates from the U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union have been meeting for a year in Geneva to negotiate a treaty banning nuclear-weapons tests. Early last week there was a nicker of progress. Soviet Conference Delegate Semyon Tsarapkin launched into a 45-minute attack on towering (6 ft. 4 in.) U.S. Ambassador James Wadsworth. According to Tsarapkin, Wadsworth's insistence that Russia must agree to study U.S. data on the difficulties of long-range detection of underground nuclear tests was a clear attempt "to throw the talks into a hopeless impasse." Then, with that off his chest, Tsarapkin blandly announced that Russia was now ready to "propose" that a joint working party of Soviet, British and U.S. scientists be directed to study the U.S. underground data.

Tsarapkin's "concession," hedged with qualifications, came at the 132nd session in Geneva. Such inchworm progress has been characteristic of all postwar disarmament negotiations. In 14 years of dickering so complex that even the participants have trouble keeping the record straight, East and West have achieved only one concrete measure--a temporary suspension of nuclear testing, which expires, so far as the U.S. is concerned, Dec. 31. The U.S. is talking about resuming underground tests. And France made clear last week at the U.N. that unless "the first three atomic powers renounce their nuclear armament," it intends to explode its own A-bomb at its testing ground in the Sahara desert some time within the next year.*

To some extent, the enthusiasm for disarmament as a summit topic reflected a conviction that the summiteers were unlikely to make any progress on anything else. Yet more was involved. Today's armaments include weapons capable of destroying civilization--and this unsettling thought makes any rational statesman ready to consider any practical alternatives, even if he is not convinced that the choice is confined to common agreement or collective death (another possibility: continuing disagreement that does not result in nuclear war).

Ceiling Unlimited. But all great powers find themselves helplessly engaged in a kind of no-ceiling poker game in which each feels obliged to arm itself not only against its opponents' existing weapons but also against every Flash Gordon device that the opposition might conceivably develop. Every nation is thus alarmed by the ballooning of arms costs. Harold Macmillan, returning last winter from Moscow, found arms budgets the chief subject on Khrushchev's mind.

If there is to be some give on the subject, it is not likely to take the form of the grandiose gesture made at the U.N. by Khrushchev. It will come as heads of state re-examine positions on nuclear tests so laboriously discussed at Geneva--the possibility of agreeing on an international inspection system that could lead to the reduction of armaments, step by conditional step. Even such arms control (as opposed to disarmament) will not be ensured in a single summit session.

*To Afro-Asian outcries that this would menace the health and safety of millions of Africans, French Delegate Jules Moch brought forth maps showing that more than 10 million Americans live within 1,000 kilometers of the Nevada test sites, that nearly as many Russians live within a similar radius of the Soviet test center in Kazakhstan, but that only a few hundred thousand people live within 1,000 kilometers of the French testing center in the Desert of Thirst near Reggan.

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