Beneath the Bubbles

The waiter bearing the tray loaded with champagne-filled glasses hustled through the crowd of dignitaries in the reception room of the Kremlin's richly decorated Catherine Hall. He zipped by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev --but he didn't get far. Khrushchev spotted him, shouted, beckoned him back and told him to pass the wine around. Then, as Khrushchev, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and British Foreign Secretary Lord Home smilingly raised their glasses, a Soviet band struck up George Gershwin's 1938 hit, Love Walked In.

Probably very few there knew the lyrics, but they expressed the official Moscow view: Love walked right in and drove the shadows away, Love walked right in and brought my sunniest day . . . One look and I had found a world completely new, When love walked in with you.

Only a few minutes before, Rusk, Lord Home and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had signed the 800-word treaty that banned nuclear tests in space, in the atmosphere and under water. When it came time for speeches, Gromyko called it "a success of the peaceful policy of the Soviet Union, a success of all the states advocating the aversion of the danger of a new war." Lord Home orated emotionally, saying the treaty meant that "every human family can live, from now on, free from fear that their unborn children will be affected by man-made poison in the air."

Dean Rusk was not so carried away. The treaty was, in his opinion, "a good first step, but only a first step." It was, he said, impossible "to guarantee now what the significance of this act will be. History will eventually record how we deal with the unfinished business of peace."

Sprouts. Khrushchev had set down his champagne glass, and he scowled as Rusk spoke, but later he said at a reception that the treaty only represented "the first sprouts of international confidence that have appeared."

No matter what the pact failed to solve, it received an almost universally enthusiastic reception for what it did do. By week's end, ambassadors of about 40 nations had rushed to scrawl their names on copies of the treaty in Moscow, London and Washington. Some governments were so inspired that they had their representatives sign in all three capitals. More than 100 of the world's 117 sovereign nations are expected to sign eventually--even though most of them know perfectly well they may never have a nuclear device to test or call their own. Most notable holdouts from signing are France and Red China. West Germany, which had feared that the treaty might somehow signify official recognition of East Germany, at week's end tentatively agreed to join in.

President Kennedy sent a ringing message to the Senate, urging ratification (see box opposite). And the Senate, which must approve the pact by a two-thirds vote, seemed certain to say yes, sometime next month--after hearings and floor debate. Said Kentucky Republican Thruston Morton in a curious choice of words: "I think we have no choice but to vote for it. Either from a national or a worldwide standpoint, we are on a tough petard./-"

Promising as the pact was, there were questions about what other "sprouts" the nuclear test thaw might produce. To get an idea of what the Soviets had in mind, Dean Rusk stayed in Russia for four days after the treaty was signed, met several times with Gromyko. The Secretary of State wound up the week with a shirt-sleeve conference and a badminton game with Khrushchev (in which the roly-poly Russian easily bested the man from the New Frontier) at the Premier's vacation villa on the Black Sea. There appeared to be two areas in which Russia and the U.S. might build some kind of an agreement in the near future: 1) putting international inspectors into territories of both East and West to watch and warn about preparations for a surprise attack, and 2) setting up "atom-free zones"--Such as Africa, and possibly even the Balkans.

Step or Misstep? But one of Khrushchev's most persistent demands is for the creation of an East-West nonaggression pact. The term has been bandied about so much by the U.S. State Department that cables arriving from overseas refer to it simply as "NAP." Publicly, the U.S. has demurred, saying it can do nothing until the subject has been thoroughly discussed with all members of the Western Alliance. Some allies, notably West Germany, fear that NAP could lead to recognizing and "normalizing" a permanently divided Germany. If that were to happen, the test ban treaty, designed as a first step toward lasting peace, might turn out to be the first step in quite another direction.

/- A metal or wood case containing an explosive for use in blasting. The word's root is a French word meaning "to break wind."

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