The Paris Conference: Quick Reflex

The Russians did not even wait for the NATO chiefs to get back home. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko briskly dismissed the NATO chiefs’ proffer of a new foreign ministers’ conference on disarmament. “We are in fact invited to sit again at a conference table with the same NATO members with whom we have patiently negotiated until now,” he told the Supreme Soviet, “and to launch again into sterile negotiations which do not advance the cause of disarmament one whit.” In almost the same breath and on almost the same grounds, he scuttled any idea of renewed Russian participation in the U.N.’s Disarmament Commission, even though, in the hope of luring the Russians back, the commission had been enlarged to include 25 members. Thus disposing of practical roads to disarmament, he airily suggested two impractical ones: a special disarmament session of the entire 82-member U.S. General Assembly or a vague “international conference on disarmament” between all capitalist and Socialist countries.

At this juncture, Khrushchev went to the rostrum and ratified what his foreign minister had said (“I fully agree”). Conceding that the NATO communique statement that the West will never attack Russia unless attacked itself “is not badly put,” he added a suggestion of his own: a summit meeting between the U.S. and Russia alone.