Complex and Difficult Problems

With the light in his eyes, Vance spars with Gromyko on SALT

"This is not Secretary Vance's first visit to Moscow," said Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, raising his crystal goblet of champagne on high. "But it would be close to the truth to say that the responsibility on him and on the Soviet side is far greater than in the past. There is no need to draw the conclusion which we all understand."

Laughter rippled down the banquet table at a government guesthouse in Lenin Hills on the outskirts of Moscow last week following Gromyko's circumlocutory sally. Every one of the 75 Soviet and American officials present--especially Secretary of State Cyrus Roberts Vance--understood all too well the reference to Vance's disastrous March 1977 visit, which marked a major setback for the new Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) and for Soviet-American relations in general. Vance was now back, 13 months later, intending to avoid a repeat performance. As Vance told Gromyko on the eve of the first of their three scheduled days of talks, "complex and difficult problems remain" on the road to SALT II. There are, in fact, three major sticking points in the complex bargaining:

o Both sides have agreed in principle to limit the flight testing and deployment of "new types" of strategic missiles. But they have not agreed on definitions of "new" missiles, or on all the limits. The U.S. fears that the Soviets may want to introduce new missiles that represent a "significant change" in the nuclear balance.

o The U.S. wants to nail down prohibitions against Soviet use of the Backfire bomber as an intercontinental weapon. Administration arms controllers are not convinced that the Backfire is very useful in that capacity, but domestic critics of SALT II feel strongly otherwise. Vance therefore sees the measure as necessary to protect the treaty as a whole during Senate ratification.

o On the Soviet side, there is great insistence that SALT II prohibit the U.S. from transferring technology--specifically, the cheap, effective cruise missile--to its European allies. U.S. officials have rejected such a proposal. At best, they say they will agree to limits on testing and deployment of the cruise for a fixed period of time.

As Vance and his entourage began discussions with the Soviets in a Kremlin conference room, there were encouraging signs of renewed willingness to negotiate from the other side of the 30-ft. green felt-covered table. (As usual, however, the Russians arranged things so that the U.S. negotiators sat with the light in their eyes.) For one thing, Gromyko brought along Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, the Soviets' First Deputy Minister of Defense and chief of the Soviet general staff. His uniformed appearance was the first by a high-ranking military specialist at SALT negotiations since Gerald Ford met with Leonid Brezhnev at Vladivostok in 1974. Gromyko also brought a thick folder marked Pervaya Beseda (First Session). Noticing that Chief U.S. SALT Negotiator Paul Warnke, on Vance's right, had only a blank legal pad, Gromyko asked jokingly whether that meant the Americans had neglected to bring any new proposals. Of course, Gromyko knew better. Vance soon offered a detailed presentation of the U.S. position, while Soviet aides took notes furiously.

Both delegations were embarrassed at an incident that took place in front of the U.S. embassy while their talks went on. A Russian woman, Irina McClellan, married to an American professor of Russian history at the University of Virginia, chained herself to an embassy fence to protest a four-year Soviet refusal to give her a visa to join her husband. The woman was arrested and held for three hours, then released. Soviet authorities blocked transmission of U.S. wire-service photos of the incident and prevented CBS from sending satellite pictures of the woman chained to the fence. The next day, embassy officials formally protested the interference, and Vance specifically mentioned the affair in his talks with Gromyko. That led to one of the most contentious exchanges of the visit, with Gromyko complaining sharply about the Carter Administration's continuing emphasis on human rights.

Nevertheless, that abrasive moment soon passed. At week's end U.S. State Department Spokesman Hodding Carter was able to announce that "the overall tone was good" and that there had been "some movement on all the fundamental" SALT issues. During several hours of private talks in which Vance and Gromyko were joined only by their interpreters, the two managed to narrow disagreements on the definition of new missile types and on transferring technology, although little progress was made on the difficult Backfire issue. As expected, Vance and Gromyko agreed to meet for another round of SALT talks at the U.N. in May.

Before his weekend departure, Vance received yet another sign that his second mission to Moscow had gone better than his first: during a final, two-hour meeting with Brezhnev, the Soviet leader and Vance agreed in principle that a Carter-Brezhnev summit would be desirable in midsummer--if a SALT agreement can be worked out by then.

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