Failure of the Foreign Ministers’ Conference at Geneva [1955]

THIS UNPUBLISHED LETTER to the editor of an unidentified newspaper was written at the conclusion of the meeting of American, Soviet, British and French foreign ministers in Geneva from 27 October-16 November 1955. This gathering had been arranged as a follow-up to the Geneva Conference of heads of state from 18-23 July. This earlier summit had been the first meeting of the great powers at this level since the Potsdam Conference at the end of the Second World War. As such, it had been a noteworthy international occasion, keenly anticipated as soon as an agreement to convene had been reached in May 1955. Russell’s optimism had been tempered by a realistic sense of the attainable: “It would be a pity”, he had written a few days prior to the conference, “if excessive expectation caused unreasonable disappointment at the outcome” (1955f). He seemed reasonably satisfied after the talks concluded, even though “nothing was settled at the meeting of the Big Four except that war must be avoided” (1955i). In Paper 1, however, he is clearly frustrated that this shared recognition of the nuclear peril had not yet produced a breakthrough on any of the substantive issues broached at the July summit-namely, Germany and European security, disarmament, and East-West contacts. Understandably absent here is the hopeful note struck by Russell and his co-signatories of the message to the foreign ministers that is printed as Appendix VIII. Although he holds all parties accountable for a potentially tragic misreading of new strategic realities, Russell seems to have regarded Vyacheslav Molotov as especially culpable for the failure of the conference (see Headnote to Appendix VIII, p. 394). On 8 November the Soviet foreign minister had delivered a long speech (Molotov 1955) in which he so flatly rejected the possibility of German reunification that the Western delegations decided that further discussion of this key item on the agenda was futile. It is not known whether Russell simply refrained from sending his letter or whether it was withheld from publication by the newspaper to which it was sent.