The Other Geneva

A few days before Secretary of State Christian Herter took off for a new round of the Geneva conference on Berlin (see FOREIGN NEWS), a bipartisan delegation from Congress' Joint Committee on Atomic Energy marched into his office to voice some grave misgivings. The committee's worry: in spite of a technically interesting scientists' agreement last week (see SCIENCE), the U.S. seemed to be floundering around aimlessly at the other Geneva conference--the nuclear-test-ban negotiations that have dragged on since last Oct. 31.

Tennessee's Democratic Senator Albert Gore, leader of the expedition to Herter's office, had just come back from Geneva, and he was convinced that the U.S., lacking clear ideas of what it is trying to achieve, had let the test-ban conference become an exercise in futility. Lost in the floundering was the U.S.'s sense-making proposal to ban easy-to-detect atmospheric tests (from ground level to 31 miles up)--a proposal (TIME, April 27) that could be put into effect on short notice if the Russians really wanted to start with a workable agreement.

Said Gore: The public announcements of the U.S., British and Soviet test-ban negotiators had led people in the U.S. and around the world to suppose that a lot of progress had been made. In fact, there had been no meaningful progress and no real Soviet concessions on the tough issues: the nature, methods and control of an inspection system. Meanwhile, argued Gore, the Soviet Union had made propaganda profits out of the conference by advertising the mere preliminaries of a test-ban agreement as substantial Soviet concessions. The U.S., said Gore, should 1) adopt firm, realistic goals for the test-ban conference, 2) set a timetable to keep it from dragging on indefinitely, and 3) force the Soviet negotiators to deal with the tough inspection issues instead of sliding around them.

Secretary Herter, so busy with his own Geneva that he can give little thought to the test-ban conference, listened attentively but made no promises.

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