Total Silence

A third arms-talk hiatus

For ten years members of the NATO Alliance and the Warsaw Pact have been meeting in Vienna to talk about decreasing their conventional military strengths in Europe. Last week the little-known 19-nation talks on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) came to an ambiguous halt. As the 31st round of the discussions dissolved, Dutch Representative Willem de Vos van Steenwijk announced that NATO representatives had called for further talks to start in January 1984. But, he added, the Warsaw Pact delegation, headed by the Soviet Union, "has neither accepted this proposal nor proposed an alternative date nor provided any explanation for this procedure."

The MBFR hiatus came a week after Moscow avoided setting a date for the next round of U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in Geneva over intercontinental nuclear arsenals and three weeks after the Soviet breakoff, with much threatening fanfare by Yuri Andropov, of the Geneva talks on Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) in Europe. Though the rupture in Vienna was less crucial, it meant that no arms limitation discussions of any kind were under way between the superpowers.

By bringing all three forums to a standstill, the Soviet Union evidently hoped to pressure the U.S. and its NATO allies into reversing the deployment of new cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe. The odds of Soviet success in that objective are just about nil, since NATO is standing firm in insisting that the Soviets are the ones who must change their INF posture. Nonetheless, at a meeting in Moscow last week with Finnish Foreign Minister Paavo Vaeyrynen, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko once again echoed the refrain that the aim of U.S. military policy is to "lord it over other countries," meaning the West Europeans.

Following the meeting with Gromyko, Vaeyrynen reported a Kremlin feeling that it cannot deal at all on arms matters with the present U.S. Administration. The depth of that feeling, however, is still open to question. As a senior Soviet official told TIME last week, "The situation is abnormal. We have to realize that Reagan may be in office for another five years and that this confrontation has gone far enough. We not only have to coexist with America, but coexist in a better atmosphere."

The Reagan Administration greeted last week's dissolution of the Vienna talks with a familiar litany of its own: expressions of regret and declarations of a readiness to negotiate whenever the Soviets are willing. President Reagan also kept a bland demeanor after meeting at the White House last week with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who urged him to try harder to clarify the peaceful aims of U.S. arms control policies. Said Trudeau: "I found myself telling him that he should be communicating better, and he's the expert communicator." The President thanked Trudeau "for coming here and sharing your ideas with us."

The last remaining glimmer of hope for early resumption of the arms control dialogue now appears to be the Conference on Confidence and Security-Building Measures and Disarmament in Europe, a 35-nation gathering that aims at reducing East-West tensions. The meeting is scheduled to begin in Stockholm on Jan. 17. U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz has indicated that he will appear at the session, but Gromyko has been far less forthcoming. Even if both men attend, however, there is no guarantee in the current climate that Moscow will want to talk face to face about more than diplomatic niceties--or that the Soviets will take the opportunity to talk at all. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.