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When the outcome of the Bundestag vote was announced, government deputies gave Chancellor Kohl a standing ovation. Social Democrats and the Greens, by contrast, sat in dejected silence. "For me, this is a black day," said Egon Bahr, the SPD disarmament spokesman. "But this is still the beginning."
The final Geneva meeting, held the day after the Bundestag vote, was the shortest ever. As host, Nitze invited Kvitsinsky to make an opening statement. Kvitsinsky instead read his closing remarks. Nitze responded by declaring that the U.S. "profoundly regrets" the Soviet discontinuance of the talks, a decision that he said was "as unjustified as it is unfortunate." He reminded the Soviets that during the two years of talks, the U.S.S.R. had increased its force of SS-20 missiles in Europe and Asia from some 140 to roughly 360. The U.S., said Nitze, "throughout this period has continued negotiating." As farewell gifts, the Americans presented the Soviets with pocket calculators; the Soviets bestowed lacquered bowls, caviar and vodka. After his departure, Kvitsinsky made a one-sentence statement to newsmen: "The present round of negotiations has been discontinued, and no date has been set for a resumption."
At a follow-up press conference, Nitze stressed that the Soviet walkout should not be viewed as a death knell for the talks. Progress, he said, "has been made on almost all issues." He added that the U.S. is "prepared to continue the negotiations at any time. All I can say is I hope they come back. They should come back."
Earlier in the week, Administration officials had expressed little concern about the imminent walkout. "It is a victory for the alliance and sour grapes for the Soviets," a cheerful State Department official had said. But Andropov's Thanksgiving Day statement came as a disappointment. Insisting, as the Soviet Union has done at every stage of its SS-20 buildup, that a "rough parity continues to exist in Europe" between NATO and Warsaw Pact medium-range missiles, Andropov warned that the U.S. and its allies must bear the consequences of their "myopic" policy. He labeled further participation in the Geneva talks "impossible" and then spelled out planned Soviet military countermeasures.
They were: 1) the end of a Soviet moratorium on the deployment of additional SS-20s in Europe, 2) accelerated preparations to introduce "operational tactical missiles of increased range," presumably meaning SS-21, SS-22 and SS-23 weapons, into East Germany and Czechoslovakia, 3) the probable deployment near U.S. shores of Soviet submarines carrying new long-range (1,500-mile) cruise missiles or rapid, depressed-trajectory ballistic missiles. At a meeting of NATO ambassadors in Brussels, Nitze called the Andropov statement a "hardening of the Soviet position."