Trying to Lower The Ceiling

From the moment Henry Kissinger arrived at the Kremlin last week, it was obvious that his visit would not exactly be a love feast. In his latest negotiations with Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, the Secretary of State was seeking a breakthrough that would end the Soviet involvement in Angola and get the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks moving again. At their first meeting, a jovial and healthy-looking Brezhnev declared: "The main subject is the achievement of a new SALT agreement." When an American reporter asked if Angola would also be discussed, Brezhnev replied with a shrug: "For me there is nothing to talk about on Angola. Angola isn't my country, after all." Kissinger interjected: "It will certainly be discussed." Said Brezhnev with a grin: "You discuss it with [State Department Counsellor Helmut] Sonnenfeldt."

Public Putdown. The wisecrack was an extraordinary bit of prenegotiation banter and an embarrassingly public putdown of Kissinger. Still, after eight hours of bargaining with Brezhnev across a felt-topped table and another four hours of talks with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, Kissinger left Moscow with something to show for his journey.

American officials said that Kissinger had used "brutal" terms in warning Brezhnev that Soviet backing of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola was endangering detente. The officials refused to say what, if anything, Kissinger extracted from the Soviet leader on the Angola situation. Perhaps significantly, however, they said that the U.S. will watch closely in the coming weeks to see if the Soviet leaders exert pressure on Fidel Castro's Cuba to withdraw any of its 10,000 troops, which have helped the M.P.L.A. gain the upper hand against two U.S.-backed factions (see THE WORLD).

If the Angola situation remained cloudy, a high-ranking U.S. official claimed "a considerable degree of progress" on the SALT talks. Stalled since July, the talks are designed to button up the broad agreement between President Ford and Brezhnev at Vladivostok in November 1974 to limit each side's strategic nuclear weapons to 2,400 long-range bombers and missiles. An unresolved question was how to prevent the Soviets from converting their existing missiles to more powerful models. Details remained secret, but Kissinger and Brezhnev apparently agreed on a way to define "heavy" missiles, thus disposing of that issue.

Possible Compromise. In addition, Kissinger and Brezhnev came up with a possible compromise on the critical question of whether the agreement should apply to two new weapons systems: the U.S. cruise missile and the Soviet Backfire bomber. The Soviets wanted to exempt their bomber, but not the U.S. missiles, from the agreement. To get around this, the U.S. had previously proposed raising the Vladivostok limits to allow both countries to add some of the new weapons to their arsenals. The Soviets rejected this proposal. The new scheme, advanced by Brezhnev, would lower the Vladivostok ceiling by a few hundred; the exact number is secret, but one possibility is to drop the figure to 2,200. In deploying cruise missiles, accordingly, the U.S. would have to stay within this new limit.

At the same time, the Soviet Backfire would not be considered a strategic weapon and would not have to be counted as part of the reduced ceiling, but the Soviets would agree to deploy no more than 200 of the bombers. They would also be required to confine the Backfires' range by not providing any tanker fleet of aircraft to refuel the bombers in midair, nor could the new aircraft be based in the Arctic. This arrangement would, in effect, exempt the Backfires from the Vladivostok accord but give the U.S. an indirect way of limiting them.

Some Pentagon critics may regard the proposal as disadvantageous to the U.S. On the other hand, reported TIME Correspondent Strobe Talbott, who accompanied Kissinger to Moscow: "Many respected U.S. SALT experts believe that the Backfire is indeed, as the Soviets claim, a tactical and not a strategic weapon and that Pentagon protestations about its threat to the U.S. are based on phony arguments."

Now Kissinger must sell the proposed agreement to the Pentagon and Congress. If he can do it, Ford and Brezhnev will be free to hold their long-delayed summit in Washington later this year.

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