The session was hardly a breakthrough, but the outcome, a slight easing of East-West tensions, was nonetheless welcome. When Secretary of State George Shultz emerged last week from the red brick residence of the U.S. Ambassador to Finland overlooking Helsinki harbor, walking in affable fashion alongside him was a smiling newcomer to the game of superpower politics, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, 57, appointed only a month ago. The two men paused briefly to exchange chitchat with the help of interpreters and to pose for eager photographers. Later Shultz declared that three hours of private talks with his Soviet counterpart had provided a "good first step" toward the Geneva summit meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev scheduled for Nov. 19 and 20. The comment sent ripples of relief through Helsinki delegates representing the U.S., Canada and every European country except Albania. The 35 delegations had convened in the Finnish capital's modernistic Finlandia Hall to mark the tenth anniversary of the agreements on security and cooperation in Europe known as the Helsinki Accords. But for most of the participating diplomats, the main question, at a time of dramatic change in Moscow's top leadership, boiled down to the state of U.S.-Soviet relations. What would happen when the Reagan Administration dealt with the younger, if less experienced, Soviet management team that has been propelled into positions of leadership by Gorbachev since he took power in March? The first-ever encounter between Shultz and Shevardnadze, whose replacement of the formidable Andrei Gromyko came as a shock to most Kremlinologists, was expected to provide at least preliminary answers.
Even before the Helsinki meeting began, there were indications of what the future might bring in the form of a spirited new round of East-West propaganda dueling. Both the White House and the Kremlin had been planning public relations moves in advance of the conference. As it turned out, the proposals they put forth were radically different. Responding in part to a Soviet complaint that a recent U.S. underground test of a nuclear device had exceeded the 150-kiloton limit permissible under the 1974 Treaty on the Limitation of Underground Nuclear Weapon Tests, President Reagan, in a letter to Gorbachev, invited the Soviet Union to send experts to monitor the next U.S. test in Nevada. That essentially painless suggestion, similar to an offer Reagan made last year, was intended to show U.S. goodwill in developing arms-control-verification procedures that Washington has long sought.