GENEVA: Acid Test

Under the great gold-and-brown murals of Geneva's Salle du Conseil, where the Heads of State met three months before, the Big Four foreign ministers met and talked in the polite tones suitable to the spirit of Geneva. Their voices echoed coldly in empty galleries. Outside the hall, delegations from both Germanys circled restlessly.

President Eisenhower had called this second meeting of Geneva "the acid test" of whether the spirit of Geneva marks a genuine change on the part of the Russians. But the Russians had all but declared in advance that they had no intention of settling anything at the second Geneva meeting. They had got what they wanted at the first Summit meeting—a finding, brought in not by the statesmen but by the public, that the world did not stand in danger of war. In effect, they had got "peace" merely by declaring it. They felt no need or compulsion to bargain further.

Fastening Failure. Faced with such a sterile situation, the duty of diplomats is to fasten the failure on the other party. The West entered the lists firmly united on a basic proposition: no European security pact, or even discussion of it, without a settlement of the reunification of Ger many. Molotov arrived with the paraphernalia he had peddled in July: "European security" came first, German reunification was "subordinate," and there was no hurry about it anyway.

In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev had been explicit. "Do not ask us for what we cannot give you," he had told West Germany's Konrad Adenauer. "We cannot give you unification, and we cannot do anything to help NATO." The Russians were vividly aware that, under any unification terms the West would accept, they would lose the part of Germany they now hold. "How could we explain to our people the presence of a defeated Communist government-in-exile in Moscow?" asked Khrushchev of his visitor.

Sun in the Eyes. With Adenauer ailing, with a shrewd suspicion that the French in particular were not as eager for a resurgent Greater Germany as the West Germans like to think, the Russians were well set for a holding action of indefinite duration. "We can wait; we don't have to fight with the sun in our eyes," Khrushchev had told Adenauer.

This the Western ministers knew in advance as they gathered to keep their appointment with Molotov in Geneva. But to leave it at that was to join in an empty exercise in propaganda, inviting the world to call a plague on both their houses. The West's response, almost lost in the irritable discussion of the futility of the second Geneva, was a dramatic proposal offering Russia all it could reasonably ask in security guarantees if security guarantees were really what the Russians were after.

The Western plan had sweep and imagination. It had been approved by all 15 NATO nations. The plan would create a vast armed belt across the middle of Europe of equal depth and equal strength, and give each side the right to inspect the other.

The details: