Uproar over Arms Control

By Ed Magnuson

But, the President insists, the Administration is not in disarray

The timing was, at best, unfortunate. For weeks the Soviet Union had waged a clever campaign to convince America's nervous NATO allies that the U.S. was stubbornly opposed to any real progress in the Geneva talks on limiting intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. By contrast, Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov grandly revealed that he was willing to make generous-sounding "concessions." There were bitter divisions in the Reagan Administration over how to respond. The confusion was compounded last week when the President fired his arms control chief, Eugene Rostow, 69, and replaced him with Kenneth Adelman, 36, an arms control neophyte with pronounced conservative views.

The shift at the top of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) sent the wrong signal at the wrong time. Rostow, perhaps too publicly for his own good, had argued for a more flexible U.S. approach to the arms talks. His sacking was seen in European capitals as evidence that Reagan either was not serious about arms reduction or, almost as worrisome, had no idea how to respond to the Kremlin peace offensive. "The Administration has played right into Andropov's hands," said a French foreign affairs specialist. Indeed, the Soviets were quick to capitalize on their propaganda windfall. Rostow's dismissal, reported TASS, the official Soviet news agency, "can be viewed abroad as another evidence of utter confusion in the Reagan Administration's approach to the question of restricting the arms race."

By late last week Reagan was so alarmed at the impression that his Administration had lost its sense of direction on arms control that he called a sudden press conference specifically to deny that this was so. After terming arms control the "most important undertaking of our generation," he added: "Our allies should not be . . . concerned about whether we're lacking in determination or whether we are, indeed, in disarray. We're not."

The dustup over weapons policy came just as Reagan was trying to dispel a similar impression of disarray on important domestic issues. He spent much of the week grappling with ways to reduce the deficit-swollen federal budget and nudging a blue-ribbon commission toward a compromise on the politically explosive question of restoring the solvency of the Social Security system (see following stories). The air of uncertainty in the capital was heightened by the resignation of Richard Schweiker as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and by word that Tennessee Republican Senator Howard Baker, the Senate majority leader and Reagan's point man on the Hill, may not run again in 1984--except possibly for President, in the event Reagan decides not to seek reelection,

The shake-up at ACDA will inevitably set back the already faltering U.S. effort to come up with a coherent and credible negotiating posture at the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces talks, which resume Jan. 27 in Geneva. The Soviet aim there is to prevent the U.S. from deploying Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe later this year. A strong peace movement on the Continent, supported by some U.S. advocates of a bilateral freeze on nuclear weapons, also opposes such deployment. In November 1981 Reagan proposed his "zero option," under which the U.S. would forgo this positioning of missiles that could strike the Soviet Union if the Kremlin would agree to dismantle all 350 of its SS-20 missiles, many of which are aimed at targets in Western Europe.

The Administration has clung to this bargaining position, even though it is widely viewed by arms experts as inherently unacceptable to the Soviet Union. The proposal is unreasonable, they say, not only because the U.S.S.R. would have to dismantle missiles already deployed while the U.S. makes only paper reductions, but also because French and British missiles would not be affected. France is not part of the NATO military alliance and maintains an independent arsenal of 98 intermediate-range missiles, most of them trained on the Soviet Union; Britain, though a member of the alliance, also has its own force of 64 missiles.

Rostow, a conservative Democrat, former State Department official and longtime professor at Yale University Law School, came under fire from the White House last summer when he and Paul Nitze, the INF negotiator whom Rostow supervised, recommended that the U.S. pursue an informal proposal that Nitze had discussed with Yuli Kvitsinsky, the Soviet INF negotiator at Geneva. As one Administration official recalls, it offered "the glimmer of a damned good outcome." William Clark, Reagan's National Security Adviser, criticized both Rostow and Nitze for not staying in closer contact with the White House. Nitze responded with a question, "How can you negotiate with a guy if you can't talk to him?" After the incident, contends one American official, "there was a noticeable hardening of the Soviet position."

Rostow had other problems with the White House. It undercut his attempt to appoint the man he wanted as his deputy, Robert Grey, a career State Department official, choosing to give in to the challenge of a few conservative Republican Senators, including North Carolina's Jesse Helms. Reagan, in fact, finally dropped Grey's name from consideration. White House aides leaked word that this was really a ploy to get Rostow angry enough to quit. They maintained that Rostow treated the President with professorial condescension, was too prickly to deal with and offered his opinions on matters beyond his official duties. They were especially irritated by Rostow's objections to parts of the Administration's Middle East policy, including the sale of sophisticated U.S. aircraft to Arab nations. Rostow was talked by aides out of quitting over the Grey nomination with the argument that "you shouldn't resign on personnel matters; you resign on issues."

Rostow's personal fate was hardly a matter of great national concern. But then Andropov shrewdly stepped up pressure on the U.S. to abandon its zero-option position. He first indicated that he might be willing to move as many as a hundred SS-20 missiles east of the Ural Mountains into Asia, leaving only about 160 in the western region of the U.S.S.R., roughly equal to the number of French and British missiles. This was unacceptable to the U.S., since the two allies' missiles do not come under American control. Moreover, the Soviet offer was not as generous as it sounded; each SS-20 has three warheads to only one on the French and British missiles. Another snare: the SS-20 is mobile, and in a crisis could be returned to its original position and targeted on Europe.

Andropov next hinted to Hans-Jochen Vogel, the West German Social Democratic Party's candidate for Chancellor, that he might be willing to dismantle an unspecified number of the SS-20s. Vogel last week said that Andropov also told him that numbers of warheads, rather than just numbers of missiles, could be considered in seeking an overall arms agreement in the European theater.

All of those Andropov proposals presumably will be on the table in Geneva. Last week Rostow asked for an appointment with Secretary of State George Shultz, who is above the semiautonomous arms control agency in the federal bureaucracy, to discuss possible U.S. responses to the Soviets. Instead, Shultz took the occasion to solemnly inform Rostow that the White House had lost confidence in him and wanted his resignation. The stunned Rostow, who is on crutches from a hip operation, went back to his office and told two aides, "I've been sacked." He wrote a brief resignation letter to the President.

Rostow's dismissal was engineered by Clark, who advised Reagan earlier in the week that the professor should be replaced, mainly because he was too difficult to deal with. "It was a personality problem," contends one arms control specialist. "Rostow had a whole lot of enemies and a paucity of friends." Said Reagan to Clark: "Fine, let's do it." The firing was delayed only long enough to find a replacement. Ironically, Adelman, who had served as Deputy Representative at the United Nations under U.S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, is a friend of Rostow's. Both had served on the Committee on the Present Danger, a private group that has lobbied for greater U.S. military strength.

The Administration moved quickly to try to counter the notion that there was now a vacuum in decision making on arms control. While Adelman (see box) awaits a Senate confirmation process that may be rough ("The hearings will be a theater for a full debate on U.S. arms control policy," predicts an Administration official), James L. George, an obscure assistant director of the ACDA, ostensibly will take charge. Selection of the inexperienced Adelman seemed to suggest that the agency's work was being downgraded so that Shultz could assume a broader role in arms policy. The danger, of course, was that the Soviets could use Adelman's nomination as proof that the U.S. does not take the arms talks seriously. Shultz dramatized his increased involvement by appearing unexpectedly in a State Department briefing room to declare that "we have the situation firmly under control." He announced that his own deputy, Kenneth Dam, will take over "day-to-day policy guidance" of ACDA. "If it is ultimately viewed in Europe that Shultz has won a big battle over [Defense Secretary Caspar] Weinberger," says one Administration official, "that will be a big plus for us." Agrees a high West German official: "Shultz is the only person who can pull the American act together."

The White House may have as much trouble reassuring moderates at home. Part of their nervousness stems from Shultz's unfamiliarity with the nuclear debate. "The Secretary is just learning, the professionals at ACDA are gone, and there is no expertise at all at the White House," laments one State Department official. "But we do have very knowledgeable experts at the Pentagon who also happen to be intransigent and inflexible." As another State Department official noted ruefully: "They won."

Reagan's real intentions at Geneva remain concealed from public view. "He's very much involved, and he's the boss," said Shultz last week. But it is unclear whether the President truly wants to negotiate an agreement on missiles in Europe or is merely maneuvering to achieve what the Soviet leaders are determined to prevent: the deployment of those new missiles in Europe. But why should the Administration make a sham of the negotiating process? By repeatedly proclaiming that it is interested in serious bargaining while at the same time refusing to budge from its unrealistic zero-option idea, the U.S. is letting the Soviets score unchallenged and important propaganda points in Europe. The U.S. faces a Hobson's choice of accepting a compromise on Soviet terms or abandoning the bargaining pretext and trying to deploy the Pershing Us and cruise missiles, assuming that deployment remains politically possible in West Germany.

The Administration has needlessly let itself become boxed in. So long as the Soviet Union can appear willing to compromise, while the U.S. is made to look unbending in the face of any arms control agreement, the Soviets can achieve their cynical negotiating goals. America's NATO allies do not sit at the table in Geneva, but they do exercise a practical veto over the outcome. West Germany, in particular, is involved in an emotional debate over nuclear arms. While the Soviet negotiations could stall, NATO leaders would find it hard to risk the political heat of accepting the American missiles. "What the Americans need is more skill in presenting their case," one diplomat in Bonn observed bluntly last week. "Let's face it, we're not in a security argument, we're in a political debate."

At his suddenly called Friday press conference, Reagan described the personnel shifts at the arms control agency as "a few management changes so that we'll have a streamlined team in place through which we can reach decisions promptly and get results in the Geneva talks." Declared the President: "Let there be no doubt, we are ready, we'll consider every serious proposal and we have the determination to succeed."

But would Reagan explore alternatives to his zero-option proposal, a reporter inquired. The President, reasonably enough, replied that he could not discuss such options in public because then "you've tied your hands with regard to attaining anything." The trouble with the answer, however, was that Reagan's rival in the Kremlin has been talking quite openly about negotiating positions--and tying Reagan up in knots. Preposterous as it seems to Americans, Andropov is managing to portray the Soviet Union as the superpower most concerned about controlling nuclear weapons.

--By Ed Magnuson.

Reported by Strobe Talbott and Gregory Wierzynski/ Washington

With reporting by Strobe Talbott, Gregory Wierzynski/Washington This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.