From 50 Years Ago: Problems of Disarmament.

In this country particularly, and in Asia and Africa in general, the news of the breakdown of the disarmament conference at Geneva will have been received with very great dis-appointment; and in the grip of this disap-pointment, there may be a very strong tendency to lay all the blame for the break-down at the door of the Russians. Many of the other points about the failure of the talks may not be clear to the man in the bazaar, but the fact that the conference broke up when Mr Zorin got up from his chair and walked out with his entire delegation is there for everyone to see. …Indeed the Russians themselves had put forward proposals which had drawn the im-mediate support of Shri Nehru. And now the Russians, inscrutable as ever, had once again sabotaged an effort of which they themselves had been the prime authors – just as they had done at the Summit at Paris. …A more apparent reason for the decision taken by the Russians to call off the confer-ence may be that Mr Khrushchev is genuinely convinced that it is pointless to try and do any business with the Eisenhower Government in the concluding days of the President’s term. Even if that belief is not genuinely held in the Kremlin, this may be Mr Khrushchev’s way of lending strong indirect support to the Demo-crats at the coming elections. …If the Russians take the same abrupt at-titude at this Conference as they did at the disarmament talks, then it will really be time to reassess the whole of Mr Khrushchev’s policy. But not yet.