Playing to a Western Audience

By John Kohan

In his foreign debut, Andropov offers a "grand peace proposal"

"The peace-loving forces on earth are looking at Prague in anticipation," the Soviet Communist Party daily Pravda reported with due solemnity. If they were, all that they saw was perfunctory television footage when leaders from the seven Warsaw Pact nations converged on Czechoslovakia's capital last week for their biennial summit. The main attraction was the tall, stooped figure who stepped off a Soviet airplane at Prague's rain-soaked Ruzyne Airport. Yuri Andropov was making his first trip abroad since he became party chief last November. As it turned out, his foreign debut did not quite measure up to the advance billing in the Soviet press, but the Kremlin's new leader proved more artful than his predecessors in putting pressure on the U.S. and its NATO allies.

After two days of closed-door discussions in the centuries-old Hradcany Castle overlooking Prague, the Soviet-led military alliance unveiled a "new grand peace proposal." Noting that nuclear war would have "catastrophic consequences," the Warsaw Pact leaders urged the Western alliance to join with them in a "treaty on the mutual nonuse of military force and the preservation of peaceful relations." The nonaggression pact also called for a ban on nuclear testing, chemical warfare and neutron weapons.

During a press conference in Washington later the same day, President Reagan called the proposal something "to be considered," although it "would require consultation with all our allies in NATO." Reagan declared that he would "welcome" a meeting with Andropov, but only after careful preparation. The President's tone contrasted noticeably with the Administration's outright rejection three weeks ago of an Andropov offer to reduce the number of Soviet nuclear missiles aimed at Western Europe, from an estimated 250 to 162, the number that Britain and France now have in their independent nuclear arsenals. At that time, Reagan outspokenly stuck to the U.S. position at the Geneva talks on intermediate-range nuclear weapons, a "zero option" under which NATO would forgo the planned deployment, starting at the end of this year, of 572 new Pershing II and cruise missiles if the Soviets dismantled all intermediate-range missiles.

U.S. allies were not responsive to the latest Soviet overture. British Foreign Secretary Francis Pym pointed out that the United Nations Charter and the 1975 Helsinki Final Act contained "perfectly satisfactory" nonaggression clauses. In West Germany, where the NATO missile plan has become a major issue in the campaign leading up to national elections on March 6, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher urged Moscow "to follow its words with deeds." Responding to the Andropov proposal to reduce the number of Soviet missiles to fewer than 162 if France and Britain trimmed their nuclear arsenals, French President Franc, Mitterrand warned that it was "useless to dream that France would reduce its present armaments in the slightest."

Still, such tough-sounding language might give way to calls for compromise if there is no sign of progress in Geneva. U.S. officials pointed out that the East bloc has been talking about a nonaggression pact for more than 25 years and dismissed the Prague plan as a propaganda exercise. The Warsaw Pact proposal, however, was tailored not for the Pentagon but for public opinion in Western Europe, where peace protests are expected to spread as the NATO missile deadline approaches. If Reagan did not dismiss the Prague offer out of hand, it may be because Administration officials are becoming sensitive to criticism of the President's defense policies.

Two days before the Prague summit, Pravda also offered its most detailed critique to date of the Reagan Administration's proposals for the separate Geneva negotiations on limiting intercontinental ballistic missiles. The editorial called the White House plan, which would allow no more than half of each nation's arsenal of strategic nuclear warheads to be land based, a scheme for the "unilateral disarmament of the U.S.S.R., camouflaged as a proposal on reductions." The U.S., Pravda asserted, was "totally responsible for the stalemate" in the strategic-arms talks.

The Prague summit resulted in some fine-tuning of a new Soviet peace offensive, but it apparently accomplished little else. The final statement offered no solutions for the serious economic problems besetting the nations of the Warsaw Pact. With lagging industrial productivity, persistent shortages of consumer goods and a $70 billion debt to the West, the seven-nation alliance can ill afford an escalating arms race with the West. Financially strapped Poland, which owes the West some $26 billion, was offered only the most perfunctory assurances that it could "rely on the moral, political and economic support from its socialist, fraternal countries."

Andropov's foreign debut may have seemed devoid of drama, but his low-key performance merited close attention. Said a French Sovietologist: "Basically, there is nothing "new, but there is a much more skillful use of language, adapted to the different audiences to which it is addressed." Long accustomed to monotone and heavyhanded Kremlin pronouncements, Western leaders are fast learning that in the future they will have to evaluate messages from Moscow with increasing sophistication.

--By John Kohan. Reported by John Moody/Bonn, with other bureaus

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