Through the broad streets of Geneva early this week surged the innumerable supporting troops of diplomacy—reporters, secretaries, protocol officers, and the conspicuously invisible agents of the U.S. State Department's security service, Britain's Special Branch and the Soviet MGB. In villas scattered through the city's parklike suburbs, the foreign ministers of Britain, France, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. took one last look at their briefs. In the ornate League of Nations Council Chamber overlooking the turquoise waters of Lake of Geneva and facing snow-capped Mont Blanc, workmen shuffled the furniture about. The great East-West confrontation was about to begin.
Seemingly by reflex, Nikita Khrushchev gave the gathering diplomats their first reminder of the ugly possibilities beneath the bland protestations of peace. He told a group of West German visitors to Moscow that Russia could put their homeland "out of action" with not more than eight H-bombs; in a nuclear war, he conceded, Russia would suffer "losses, and great ones," but "the Western powers would be literally wiped off the face of the earth."
Not with such sweeping considerations, but with a finicky attention to details, did the foreign ministers assemble in Geneva. They disputed about what shape the conference table should be. Russia wanted a round one; the West held out for a square table, whose four-sidedness, reasoned Western tacticians, would emphasize that the talks concerned the four occupiers of Berlin. The Westerners had anticipated a Soviet demand for inclusion of Polish and Czechoslovak delegations, to "even up sides."
But with less than 24 hours to go before the conference opened. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko—at 49 the youngest of the foreign ministers—suddenly demanded that the two German delegations be included as full-fledged participants. To the West, this would be to concede in advance what the argument is about: it would involve its recognition of the legitimacy of the East German Communist regime. The Western powers flatly refused, insisted that the two German delegations could appear in the Council Chamber only as "advisers." Britain's Selwyn Lloyd conferred privately with Gromyko, who would not budge.
Nuts & Bolts Week. The issue was obviously more than procedural, and there were mutterings that the conference might break down even before it got started. At best, the Western delegations expected an early Soviet rejection of the Western "package plan" (TIME, May 11) for settling in one interlinked proposal the future of Berlin, German reunification and European armaments levels. "The first phase of the conference," predicted a gloomy West German diplomat, "will be to wait until the Russians stop laughing at the Western proposals."