On Trusting the Soviets

By Hugh Sidey

Paul Warnke, who led President Carter's SALT II negotiators for nearly two years, is back in his twelfth-story law office. The window beside his desk frames the White House, the Washington Monument and a spectacular panorama of the Potomac River valley as far as Mount Vernon. The scene haunts him these days as agreement nears on the new strategic arms treaty with the Soviet Union, and America prepares to debate the issue. Rejection in the Senate would heighten tension and accelerate the arms race, Warnke believes. Acceptance would renew hope that nuclear weapons could ultimately be reduced and more tightly controlled.

Mounting national suspicions of the Soviets and the sense that we are losing our leadership position have cast a long shadow over the final outcome of SALT II. It may be, Warnke muses, as critical a time in our national life as we have faced since the end of World War II.

Warnke can argue the numbers of missiles and nuclear warheads. He sees the U.S. as the overall equal to the Soviet Union, though the two have a different mix of weapons. He has little doubt that without the treaty both nations would be forced to arm faster. But a compelling part of his message has nothing to do with hardware and dollar signs. It is, finally, the human assessment of those men who guide the Soviet Union. With inoculations of suspicion and skepticism, Warnke has approached what he regards as a moment of truth. Though the Soviets remain unruly and difficult world citizens, Warnke believes that they are a bruised and lonely people who fear nuclear war, who in their singular way are searching for their place in the family of man.

In Moscow once, Warnke felt the urgency in Leonid Brezhnev's pleading for peace. Back in his hotel room, Warnke pondered it all while watching the war movies that saturate Soviet television. He decided to take Brezhnev a bit at his word.

In Geneva, Warnke measured the Soviet negotiators across the table, difficult and different men. They came with well-developed inferiority complexes.

"They liked the talks," recalls Warnke, "'because they were treated as a superpower. They have no great characteristics of a superpower except military power." Time and time again the sense of loneliness showed itself. The Soviet Union has no real allies in the world. Partnerships are forced, unreliable. On every horizon, Warnke concluded, the Soviets see some threat. They sit on their massive land, powerful and friendless, driving for acceptance in some manner, maybe by force, but maybe through treaties like SALT II.

For men like Vladimir Semyonov, 67, with whom Warnke dealt, the Soviet Union seemed a miracle that they do not want scorched or disfigured. Semyonov was a boy during the Revolution, lived through the Stalin terror, survived World War II. Warnke decided that this kind of pain is not habit forming in such a man.

Throughout the talks, Warnke felt that a poetic resonance with the motherland still echoed in the hearts of the Communists. And they related themselves in a strange way with Americans--common people of practical view. "We are alike," they kept saying.

Maybe Warnke's (and America's) natural sympathies were being manipulated. But living together on this small planet must finally be based on some trust. Warnke thought he felt it one night when invited to Semyonov's Geneva apartment for dinner. When Semyonov learned that two of Warnke's sons, Tom, 19, and Ben, 18, were in the city, he insisted that they come too. Before dinner, Semyonov's teen-age daughter by his second wife came in to meet the guests. For that moment this hard-line Communist was clearly a father dedicated to something far weightier than megatons.

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