The 35 Presidents, Chancellors, Premiers and Communist Party leaders assembled in Helsinki had just signed their names to the "Final Act," the 30,000-word charter approved at the European Security Conference (TIME, Aug. 11). There, with great ceremony, the green, leather-bound original copy was sealed away in a corrosion-proof metal vault 60 feet—about 20 meters—beneath the Finnish state archives.
"Better it should have been buried 200 meters deep," a Rumanian official in Helsinki observed bitterly. Added a Yugoslavian: "Now the Final Act has its very own bomb shelter."
Those two sardonic comments, overheard by a Western official, summarize the undercurrent of apprehension...
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