After Geneva: a Greater Task for Nato

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THE "summit" at Geneva seems to have been a more comfortable and relaxing place for a meeting than "summits" often are. The results achieved there have been rightly hailed throughout the world as marking the beginning of an effort by the leading nations of the two power blocs to adjust by discussion and negotiation their conflicts of national interest and ideological difference which have divided and distressed the world during the last decade.

This conference, however, was not an end but a beginning-- though a good beginning--and it would be foolish, perhaps dangerous, to draw premature and exuberantly optimistic conclusions from it. Peace will not be achieved by one or even by two or three meetings at the "summit," but by many meetings and much hard, constructive work at lower levels. This work, which is one of negotiation, and is now well launched by top statesmanship, remains to be carried on through day-to-day diplomacy. It will be conducted, one may hope, without all of the fanfare and publicity which unavoidably and, no doubt, rightly attended the conference at Geneva. While it is important to relate the results and implications of the Geneva meeting to the current international situation, it is even more important to decide the right course to follow in the new and warmer international climate which the conference has generated.

The Geneva talks have a special and immediate significance for NATO. The Atlantic organization, indeed, is involved in terms of both cause and effect. The collective strength--political and military--which we have developed in NATO was perhaps the most important of the international forces which made the recent discussions possible; just as the growing realization by Soviet as well as by Western leaders of the dread risks and consequences of nuclear warfare made them essential...