Toward Geneva

The U.S. and U.S.S.R. last week took the first big step toward disarmament since the breakdown of the London talks last fall. The U.S.S.R.'s Foreign Minister Gromyko handed to U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson an aide-memoire accepting the weeks-old U.S. invitation to convene a meeting of scientists and technicians to discuss ways of inspecting any stoppage of nuclear tests. Place of meeting: Geneva. Time of meeting: July 1; composition of meeting: the U.S., Britain and France on one side, the U.S.S.R., Poland and Czechoslovakia on the other.

Gromyko wrapped up the deal by naming an eight-man delegation of Soviet scientists that ranged from Sputnik Authority Evgeny Federov through Nobel Prizewinning Chemist Nikolai Semenov to nonscientific Semyon K. Tsarapkin, one of Gromyko's oldtime U.N. scowlers. They will meet with the British and French delegates and the U.S. trio, composed of University of California Physicist Ernest O. Lawrence, Bell Telephone Laboratories' Executive Vice President James Fisk and Caltech Physicist Robert Bacher.

Here and there were still some reservations amid the U.S.-U.S.S.R. cordiality. At his press conference, held before Gromyko's note was in. Secretary of State Dulles put out a couple of realistic hedges. Hedge No. 1: International inspection, to be effective, might have to be set up not only in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. but in Australia, where Britain has an atomic testing ground, the Sahara Desert (presumably the French portions) and Communist China. Hedge No. 2: Suspension of tests alone would mean little without inspection against surprise attack, suspension of nuclear war production, limitation of conventional arms. "I would anticipate that any agreement to suspend testing, if made, would not be an isolated agreement, but be a part of other arrangements . . . All suspension of testing means is that the arsenal of nuclear weapons that you have is accumulating without any exact knowledge as to what the consequences of their use would be."

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