Finally, a START on Arms Curbs

By Strobe Talbott

As talks begin, nobody expects a quick da to reduce arsenals

Edward Rowny read aloud a letter from President Reagan calling the superpowers "trustees for humanity in the great task of ending the menace of nuclear arsenals." His Soviet counterpart Victor Karpov delivered a brief homily, concluding that "the most important thing about these talks is that we are now finally talking." With that opening exchange last week at Villa Rose, Moscow's diplomatic mission in Geneva, the two negotiators ended a hiatus of three years and resumed an esoteric, tedious and secrecy-shrouded but vital business: trying to reduce the swollen Soviet and U.S. inventories of the most powerful weapons on earth.

Rowny laid out a proposal based on President Reagan's May 9 call for a mutual one-third cutback in long-range ballistic-missile warheads. At the envoys' second session, held in the penthouse of the Geneva office of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Rowny made it clear that he did not expect an instant da from the Soviets. "The President wanted to know if I needed some leather pants to be patient," he quipped. "I told him no. Karpov, like his namesake [World Champion Anatoli Karpov], plays chess. We in the West like to play Pac-Man. We like to see instant results, but it's not going to be that way." Indeed, the differences between the two sides--some left over from past negotiations and a few new ones--may make any agreement unattainable. The very selection of the chief negotiators symbolizes what has changed since the previous round of talks ended, during the June 1979 Vienna summit between Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev. Rowny, 65, a retired Army lieutenant general, was the representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the second Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT n). He opposed compromises made during the talks and quit the delegation in protest on the eve of the treaty-signing ceremony. He then devoted himself to defeating SALT II in the Senate and to electing Ronald Reagan as President.

Thus Rowny personifies the Administration's repudiation of the past. By contrast, Karpov, 53, headed the Soviet negotiating team during the final months of SALT II and was proudly present during the ceremony in Vienna. He represents Brezhnev's determination to "preserve what is positive that has already been accomplished."

According to a Soviet official who is advising the Kremlin on arms-control policy, Brezhnev has deliberately avoided referring to SALT by name. He recognizes that Reagan's repeated denunciation of SALT as "fatally flawed" during the 1980 presidential campaign and in the first year of his Administration makes it impossible for the President to reverse himself and ratify the treaty. But the Soviets are counting on the impact of their own negotiating tactics, combined with growing pressure from the West European allies and the nuclear-freeze movement in the U.S., to improve prospects for a new pact. Moscow's hope is that the Administration will gradually be forced into a tacit acceptance of SALT, both as a set of ground rules for competition in the short run and as a basis for a new, long-term treaty.

On the first point, the Soviets have already seen the Administration come a long way. On Memorial Day, Reagan reluctantly and belatedly committed the U.S. to abiding by the unratified 1979 SALT II agreement, as well as the expired 1972 SALT I accord on offensive weapons, as long as the Soviets do the same. He had been persuaded, primarily by his military advisers, that in the absence of the SALT limits, Moscow could proliferate its warheads much more quickly than the U.S. could take either offensive or defensive countermeasures. In an interview with TIME last month, Brezhnev's chief spokesman Leonid Zamyatin for the first time made a similar pledge of restraint on behalf of the Kremlin leadership.

But leaving SALT in place as what the Administration calls an "interim measure" is one thing. Resurrecting it as a basis for the Rowny-Karpov talks is quite another. Both literally and figuratively, Reagan has changed the name of the game. He has rechristened the negotiations START, for Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, as a somewhat artificial way to distinguish his Administration's goals from those of its predecessor. The Soviets profess to share the desire for reductions; they have even added the word to the Russian designation of the talks ("Our first concession," says Zamyatin with a wry smile). But they object strenuously to the sorts of reductions that the U.S. wants.

While the American plan is built around the goal of equal, drastically lowered ceilings, it is deliberately designed so that the Soviet Union would have to cut far more than the U.S. in order to fit its arsenal under those ceilings. Moreover, the proposed reductions apply mainly to those categories of weaponry in which the U.S.S.R. has concentrated its nuclear firepower, particularly intercontinental ballistic missiles (iCBMs). The key feature is a requirement that neither side have a total of more than 2,500 warheads on its ICBMs. That is about 3,000 fewer than the Soviets are allowed under SALT II. Yet it is nearly 350 more warheads than the U.S. has on its own Minuteman and Titan ICBMs. The U.S. force of land-based warheads could expand even as the Soviet one would be required to contract. Meanwhile, there would be no restriction on bombers and cruise missiles, weapons in which the U.S. has an overwhelming advantage both numerically and technologically.

The rationale for the one-sidedness of the proposal is partly a matter of negotiating tactics: the U.S. should make an offer heavily weighted in its own favor, since any Soviet counteroffer is sure to be at least as much tilted in the other direction. More important, the U.S. proposal reflects a strongly held view in the Administration that the Soviets' sizable edge in land-based missiles and warheads has dangerously upset the "parity," or "rough equivalence," of the '70s.

At the beginning of the Administration, Reagan and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger wanted to put bilateral disarmament efforts indefinitely on hold, while they tried to remedy what they saw as inequality in the strategic balance and the vulnerability of American forces--that is, arm in order to parley. Largely because of the freeze movement and public fears of nuclear war, the Administration began to look for ways that, in its view, would restore equality by means of arms control. In other words, arm and parley at the same time--a fairly traditional concept, one that has kept both SALT and the arms race going for a long time.

The official U.S. starting point for the talks is indeed new. Of the five successive American Administrations that have tackled strategic-arms control, Reagan's is the first to go to the negotiating table with what it believes is a position of overall military weakness. As he has stressed in recent speeches, Reagan is confident that the West enjoys an ultimately decisive economic, political and ideological advantage over Communism. But in the hard, cold numerology of nuclear arsenals, the President and many of his aides believe, the U.S. is distinctly second best. Many defense experts think the Administration exaggerates both Soviet strengths and American weaknesses. "Neither side has unequivocal superiority," says former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger. "It is a mistake for the President to describe our position as inferior."

The Administration's belief in Soviet nuclear superiority makes the negotiations more difficult than they would otherwise be. The U.S. has set itself the task of persuading the Kremlin leaders 1) to accept the proposition that the strategic balance is heavily in favor of the U.S.S.R. and 2) to accept the corollary that reductions, particularly in ICBMs, must be in favor of the U.S. In Reagan's view, ICBMs are "the most destabilizing" weapons, since they alone pose the threat of a preemptive attack; bombers and cruise missiles are too slow flying, and submarine-launched missiles insufficiently accurate, to be anything but retaliatory. Says Eugene Rostow, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency: "There is no harm in asking for unequal reductions that achieve an equal level of stability."

The trouble is the Soviets insist that equality now exists. They agreed to SALT II because, in their assessment--which was shared by many Americans--the treaty acknowledged that equality. Leonid Brezhnev keeps urging his own version of a freeze, partly because he believes the present level of nuclear arsenals assures what he calls "equal security."

Experts in Moscow concede that their government has consciously sought an edge in ICBMS, but they see that advantage merely as offsetting other factors that favor the U.S. "Would your leaders really like to trade your neighbors for ours?" asks one of these officials. "Canada and Mexico for NATO and China? It is true that we rely heavily on iCBMs. They are the artillery of the nuclear age. We are a land power. Our military has always worshiped artillery as the god of war. You Americans are a naval and air power. Yet your President proposes limits only in land forces."

Karpov and his colleagues went to Geneva last week with instructions to reject in the strongest terms the propositions on which the President's START proposal is based. But the Reaganauts are not likely to abandon their proposal so quickly as the Carterites did in 1977 when their own deep-cuts plan was rudely thrown back in Cyrus Vance's face. This Administration is ready, if not eager, to engage in some serious, protracted stonewalling of its own at the disarmament talks in Geneva while it sells the American public on the need for massive rearmament.

That possibility is taken seriously by the Soviets, who are genuinely frightened of an all-out American buildup. They are worried that an array of new American weapons--the land-based MX and Pershing II, the submarine-launched Trident II, the B-l and "Stealth" bombers, and cruise missiles deployed on land, at sea and in the air--threaten them with vulnerability and inferiority by the 1990s.

As the two delegations settle into the slogging routine of biweekly meetings and more frequent, less formal conversations, they will first be probing each other for potential areas of flexibility. If Karpov tables a counterproposal, the Reagan Administration will face some hard choices. What if the Soviets are willing to cut their land-based warheads, but not so deeply as the U.S. wants? Will they do so only in exchange for the U.S. giving up the MX or some other system under development? And is the Administration willing to link START and the negotiations on Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) that are already under way in Geneva?

The Soviets regard the intermediate-range Pershing II as even more of a strategic threat than the intercontinental MX, since it will be based in West Germany, only a few minutes' flying time from their territory. Ground-launched cruise missiles are already on the agenda of INF. The Kremlin wants to deal with sea-launched cruise missiles and its own Backfire bombers in INF; the U.S. is leaning toward treating both in START. Therefore the possibility may arise of merging the two sets of talks.

Rowny and Karpov can raise these questions, but they do not have the authority to decide on answers. That can take place only at a higher level. Before he resigned two weeks ago, Secretary of State Alexander Haig had been busily setting up a "back channel" with the Soviet Ambassador in Washington, Anatoli Dobrynin, and a working relationship with Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Haig had established himself as the Kremlin's principal point of contact on START. Now the Soviets are worried not only about Haig's departure, but about the possibility that Weinberger, who favored an even tougher stance on negotiations, will reassert himself.

Even if Secretary of State-designate George Shultz prevents that from happening by following Haig's policies and filling his role, the problem of trade-offs and fallbacks in START and INF will almost surely touch off negotiations within the U.S. Government. They will be at least as arduous, acrimonious and suspenseful as those in Geneva.

The outcome may depend largely on Reagan's overall political fortunes and the strength of the antinuclear movement a year or two from now. Administration hard-liners believe that no START is better than warmed-over SALT. They fear, in Rostow's words, that it would be "fatal to say we are trying to get an agreement before an election." The Soviets could be tempted to read that as a signal that they need only wait until American resolve in the negotiations cracks under domestic political pressure.

If, however, Rowny and Karpov are still far apart as the 1984 presidential campaign gets under way--and if Ronald Reagan is feeling politically vulnerable on foreign policy issues--he may decide to retreat from his bold but one-sided opening proposal and settle for a limited, interim agreement. That way, he could claim to have accomplished something more in strategic arms control than just to have made a stubborn and unsuccessful try. --By Strobe Talbott

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