FOREIGN RELATIONS: Geneva: Questions & Answers

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"For the last three weeks I've been negotiating with the Russians at Geneva," said John Foster Dulles on a nationwide radio and television broadcast, "and that's quite a job. As I expect you know, this Geneva meeting didn't get us very far . . . In fact it didn't get us anywhere at all . . . Now the ex planation as I see it is this: the Soviet leaders appear to want certain results, but they are not yet willing to pay the price."

Lawyer Dulles, a great popularizer and simplifier, then told the U.S. what happened at Geneva in terms of the agenda.

ITEM 1: Reunification of Germany and the security of Europe. No agreement. "We do not believe that solid peace in Europe can be based on the injustice of a divided Germany. The Soviet proposals were based on preserving the Soviet puppet regime in East Germany ... at least until Soviet control could be extended to all Germany. We tried very hard, but in vain . . . For obviously if Germany were reunified by free elections that would mean the end of the Soviet puppet regime. And this fall of the East German regime would in turn have serious repercussions on the other satellite states of East Europe. There the Soviet-controlled governments are facing rising pressure. Many within the satellite countries believe that the spirit of Geneva meant something for them."

ITEM 2: Limitation of arms. No agreement. "The Soviet Union . . . continues to urge agreements to do one thing or another, even though there would be no way to check up whether these agreements were in fact being fulfilled."

ITEM 3: Development of East-West contacts. Some agreement had been expected, but none materialized. "The Western powers put forward 17 proposals . . . Every one of these proposals the Soviet delegation rejected. It was willing to have some contacts which would enable it to garner technical know-how from other countries. It was willing to send and receive persons under conditions it could closely control. But it reacted most violently against anything that smacked of the elimination of barriers to the freer exchange of ideas . . . After a generation of fanatical indoctrination the So viet rulers can hardly bring themselves to loosen their existing thought controls so as to permit a freer contact with the free world."

Dulles next asked himself several questions, the kind that any citizen would ask, and gave his answers.

Is the spirit of Geneva dead? "The Soviet leaders would like to have at least the appearance of cooperative relations with the Western nations. [But] they are not yet ready to create the indispensable conditions for a secure peace . . . They have seriously set back the confidence that the free world can justifiably place on Soviet promises . . . However, it does seem that they do not want to revert to their earlier reliance on threats and invective. In that respect the spirit of Geneva still survives."

Is there any new danger of war? He did not think so.