Coping with the Global Minefield

A U.N. conference examines the age-old goal of disarmament

They pulled up to the United Nations' glassy Manhattan headquarters by the limousine load--President Valery Giscard d'Estaing of France, Premier Thorbjoern Falldin of Sweden, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada. All together, 20 heads of state or government were scheduled to drop in on the five-week-long proceedings. The occasion that brought them: an unprecedented session of the 149-member General Assembly devoted solely to disarmament, the largest group ever convened in an attempt to reverse the world's steady accumulation of ever more and deadlier weapons.

The chief promoters of the conference were the unaligned nations of the Third World, who feel most threatened by the bulging arsenals of not only the superpowers but also smaller regional powers. Keynoting their cause was General Assembly President Lazar Mojsov of Yugoslavia, who castigated the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. as the "chief actors" in the arms race and called for the huge sums spent on weapons development to be channeled into alleviating poverty and exploring new sources of energy. To expect any such sweeping progress toward the centuries-old goal of disarmament was obviously unrealistic, and one West German Foreign Ministry official went so far as to dismiss the conference as "a propaganda exercise for all concerned." Perhaps so, but other speakers broached more modest ideas that could at least provide some safety markings on the global minefield, if not defuse it.

The limited expectations for the conference seemed to be confirmed by the conspicuous absence of the leaders of the two nuclear superpowers, Leonid Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter. While the Soviet chief might be excused because of his increasingly obvious ill health, Carter had been expected to use the U.N. forum to repeat his inaugural call for the "elimination of all nuclear weapons from this earth." But by a coincidence, a full-scale meeting of NATO partners had been scheduled for the week following the opening of the U.N. conference. Carter is planning to argue compellingly at the NATO summit for a 3% annual increase in alliance defense spending--and he could scarcely make a credible pitch for disarmament before the General Assembly just a few days earlier.

Moreover, Washington is in a highly delicate phase of its Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the U.S.S.R. Any strong statement from Carter in favor of disarmament might have offered Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko an opening to press for U.S. concessions in the latest round of SALT discussions between him and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.

Sidestepping these problems, Carter dispatched Vice President Walter Mondale to the U.N. as head of a 72-member U.S. delegation that included Actor Paul Newman, a longtime backer of liberal causes. To nearly everyone's surprise, Mondale delivered a toughly worded speech accusing the Kremlin of mounting "a continuing buildup of unprecedented proportions in Europe." In addition, he attacked the Soviets for deploying the SS-20 missile. Though the Vice President made it plain that "no nation can be asked to reduce its defenses below the threat it faces," he did make one substantive proposal to the disarmament assembly. This was an offer to provide supersophisticated U.S.-built electronic monitoring systems for surveillance of arms and policing any disarmament agreements. Mondale declared the U.S. would consider foreign requests for what he termed "these eyes and ears of peace."

President Giscard's appearance at the meeting broke a 16-year French boycott of disarmament talks. In a wide-ranging speech, Giscard indicated that France would be disposed to join a new U.N. disarmament commission, provided it was not dominated by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., as the French claim the present Geneva-based disarmament committee has been. Such a commission, explained a French aide, could lure the Chinese into the arms debate for the first time.

That prospect brought a predictably sharp response from the Soviets. Said Gromyko pointedly: "We see no need to give up existing negotiating channels or to restructure them." In some other respects, the Russian proved conciliatory, offering to negotiate a "substantial" reduction in strategic arms.

Gromyko may have kept a moderate tone in part to avoid provoking excessive reaction at this week's NATO summit in Washington, where the 15 members are scheduled to consider a "longterm defense program" to meet the Soviet arms threat over the next 15 years. Though some quarreling among members of the chronically troubled alliance seemed inevitable, U.S. planners were encouraged by advance pledges of support from British Prime Minister James Callaghan, who will be one of twelve heads of government attending. By ironic coincidence, the meeting's chairman will be Turkish Premier Buelent Ecevit, who is one of the alliance's more disaffected members as the result of a congressionally imposed arms embargo. However, he is expected to play his cards skillfully in the hope that Carter will be successful in his effort to persuade Congress to lift the 3 1/2-year-old arms ban.

Most troublesome for Carter will be his meeting with West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who came not only for the U.N. meeting but also for the NATO summit and a breakfast at the White House this week. Schmidt has strongly disagreed with the President on a number of issues, including Carter's opposition to the international sale of fast-breeder nuclear reactors and Washington's inability to stabilize the dollar on world money markets. West German officials warned that despite Schmidt's warm endorsement at the U.N. of measures to control the world arms race, disarmament hardly described the Chancellor's mood as he headed for Washington.

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