Battling the Gods of War

The dangerous breakdown of the most vital negotiations of our time

Of all the ways in which the U.S. and the Soviet Union compete, none is more dangerous than their rivalry in the development and deployment of strategic nuclear weapons. Of all the ways in which the two countries conduct diplomacy with each other, none is more important than strategic arms control, the cooperative effort by which these otherwise competing superpowers try to regulate their rivalry and keep it from getting out of hand. Of all the ways in which Soviet-U.S. relations have declined over the past year, none is more ominous than the breakdown in strategic arms control. Of all the challenges facing both leaderships in the months and years ahead, the resumption of arms control is the most vital.

Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMS), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and heavy bombers--these are the arms with which the world's most powerful antagonists would strike each other if they ever came to blows. There is a good chance that a nuclear war between them would destroy both countries, and perhaps the rest of humanity as well.

Even short of the apocalyptic danger of their being fired in anger, strategic nuclear weapons represent a momentous, complex and delicate aspect of the Soviet-U.S. relationship. They have come to symbolize both nations' assertion of their global, often conflicting interests and their willingness to use ultimate force to defend those interests. It is their huge nuclear stockpiles that make these two countries truly superpowers, and it is the antagonism between them that makes them arm so heavily against each other; peace, and the survival of the planet, depends on the maintenance of a stable balance between the two arsenals.

If one side feels its security jeopardized by unfavorable trends in that balance, it is likely to ascribe the most sinister motives to its adversary and to take countermeasures it regards as corrective but that the other side regards as threatening. That is the dynamic of vicious cycles, escalating mutual suspicions and potentially disastrous miscalculations.

For more than a dozen years, spanning four Administrations from the late '60s until the advent of the Reagan Administration in 1981, the mechanism for keeping the competition under some measure of control was SALT, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. While the arms race continued, SALT produced a series of pacts that established rules of the road: the 1972 SALT I accords, one of which severely limited antiballistic missile (ABM) defenses, and an accompanying "interim agreement" that capped the number of missile launchers (underground silos for ICBMS and tubes for SLBMS) allowed on each side; and the more comprehensive SALT II treaty of 1979, which limited bombers and missile warheads as well as launchers.

SALT II was never ratified by the U.S. Senate, partly because of doubts over its terms. Critics on the right complained that it left the Soviet Union with too many of its existing weapons; critics on the left complained that it permitted both sides to develop too many new weapons. But most of all, SALT II was a victim of "linkage," the susceptibility of the arms-control process to fallout from adverse events in other areas. The debate over Senate ratification was approaching its climax when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, just as the leader who had signed the treaty for the U.S., Jimmy Carter, was under strong attack for vacillation and weakness in his response to Soviet adventurism.

Carter's Republican opponent in the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan, charged that SALT II was "fatally flawed." However, shortly before Election Day in 1980, Reagan vowed, "As President, I will make immediate preparations for negotiations on a SALT III treaty.

My goal is to begin arms reductions."

It took Reagan nearly a third of his first term even to make a proposal for strategic arms control.

Then the ensuing negotiations collapsed last December, after the Soviets walked out of the parallel talks on Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) to protest the initial deployment of 572 new American Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe. While the problems besetting strategic arms control have been in part a side effect of the impasse in INF and of the downward slide of Soviet-U.S. relations, the strategic talks were never promising in their own right.

The U.S. at the outset locked itself into a negotiating position that seemed almost calculated to guarantee Soviet rejection. In both its opening proposal and the subsequent negotiations in Geneva, the Administration seemed bent on forcing drastic cuts in existing Soviet forces while accepting only marginal restrictions on future U.S. programs. Administration officials admitted that their position was "front-loaded" with measures that would squeeze the Soviets in the short run, but they claimed that the long-term effect would be true equality and greater stability. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and other Soviet spokesmen were contemptuous in dismissing what they called a "cynical American trick." They complained that the "essence" of the U.S. policy was to re-establish American superiority.

By the time the Administration, under pressure from Congress, began tinkering with its proposal, to make it appear more reasonable, the policymaking process had become too confused and the international atmosphere too poisonous for a breakthrough to be possible. The Soviets deserve much of the blame. Their tightening of the screws in Poland, their brutality against the guerrillas resisting their occupation of Afghanistan, their political pressure tactics against Western Europe--all these developments contributed to the overall deterioration in East-West relations and therefore in the prospects for arms control.

Meanwhile, both sides have stepped up military programs that could soon undermine what is left of SALT. President Reagan's Star Wars initiative for space-based antimissile defenses will, if pursued, violate the 1972 ABM treaty; the Soviets are developing two new types of ICBMs, while SALT II permits only one per side. Thus the arms-control constraints of the past are further unraveling at a time when the quest for new agreements is at a dead end.

For the three years that the Reagan Administration was actively engaged in the conduct of strategic arms control, TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott chronicled the intense infighting on the American side and the frequently acrimonious negotiations in Geneva. In the following account, he has assembled the hitherto untold story of a divided Government at work, of U.S. officials battling one another over turf, military strategy and political philosophy, even as they tried to deal with the nation's principal adversary.*

It is sometimes as dismaying as it is fascinating that public servants with the best interests of the nation at heart could differ so passionately over how to deter the twin threats of nuclear war and Soviet aggressiveness. No doubt there have been similar intramural struggles behind the walls of the Kremlin and the closed doors of various ministries in Moscow, but only one of the superpowers is a democracy in which the kind of self-examination contained here is possible.

If the SALT-INF talks are renewed, they may prove to be the most important negotiations of a generation--perhaps even in our lifetime. Moreover, any hope for real improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations ultimately rests in the area of arms control. Therefore it is all the more important to appreciate what has gone before in order to understand what lies ahead. Many of the characters in this revealing account are still in place, and would be likely to return in a second Reagan Administration. Their role is central in determining who was really in charge of U.S. arms-control policy under Reagan, how they acted and why, and with what consequences for the future. For the U.S. to find a way out of the current dead end in arms control, it must understand how it got there. Talbott's report:

An Administration Divided

Soon after he came into office, Reagan was convinced that despite his campaign rhetoric about its fatal flaws, the unratified SALT II treaty of 1979 should remain informally in force, since its rules restricted Soviet weapons programs more than American ones. That was the view of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were holdovers from the Carter Administration, and of Secretary of State Alexander Haig. Without SALT II regulating the number of multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MlRVs) on each side's ICBMs, the Soviets would be able to increase their MlRVed ICBM force much more quickly than the U.S. Such an increase would open even wider the "window of vulnerability" that Reagan believed threatened the U.S. with a nuclear Pearl Harbor.

"You can't beat something with nothing," said Haig in one of his first meetings with his staff, "and we don't have our own SALT policy, so we'd be nuts just to throw out the old one." But that was just what the new political leaders of the Pentagon wanted to do, particularly the youthful, hawkish Navy Secretary, John Lehman. He publicly recommended on March 3, 1981, that the U.S. not comply with SALT.

That very day Haig's principal aide on arms control, Richard Burt, a young, hard-driving former think-tank specialist and newspaperman, was chairing the first meeting of a group that was supposed to decide the new Administration's policy. He resented Lehman's shot across the bow. Burt had the State Department issue a formal statement disavowing Lehman, saying, "While we are reviewing our SALT policy, we will take no action that would undercut existing agreements so long as the Soviet Union exercises the same restraint."

Reagan kept aloof from the arms-control process and was sometimes puzzled by policies that were being made in his name in what he found to be an esoteric, uninviting field. He was surprised and a bit annoyed by the State Department's public declaration that the U.S. would abide by SALT, since it seemed to challenge his own accusation that SALT was harmful to U.S. interests. Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese, who had overall responsibility for national security policy, reassured Reagan that the contradictory statements being issued from the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom were just a case of "the bureaucracy sorting itself out."

In fact, it was the President's senior advisers, not just middle-level bureaucrats, who were divided. At a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) in mid-May 1981, Reagan asked, "What are we doing about SALT anyway?" Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and National Security Adviser Richard Allen made a number of claims about how SALT was obstructing weapons programs that the U.S. needed in the near future.

"Like what?" challenged General David Jones, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"Like cruise missiles," replied Weinberger, referring to the small, jet-powered drones that can duck under enemy radar and deliver nuclear weapons with pinpoint accuracy.

Jones explained that no cruise-missile program then in the works was hindered by continued compliance with SALT.

"These guys have got a lot to learn," said Jones to an aide after the meeting.

Supply-Side Arms Control

From the outset of the new Administration, there was uncertainty and passionate disagreement over what, if any, agreement it should seek for the future. The idea of a new acronym that substituted an R for reduction in place of the L for limitation in SALT came from Richard Pipes, a Harvard history professor and leading hawk who had joined the NSC staff. Pipes and Allen wanted to call the new talks SART. That did not catch on. White House Chief of Staff James Baker passed a note to Allen during a meeting: "How about 'Faster Arms Reduction Talks' ?"

In fact, faster talks were just what the new Administration did not want. It preferred to stall as long as possible and concentrate on quantitative and qualitative improvements in the American arsenal so that eventually, if and when the U.S. did return to the bargaining table with the Soviet Union, it could do so from a position of far greater strength, if not superiority.

The most articulate and effective advocate of this position was Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, a former congressional aide to the late Senator Henry Jackson and a longtime opponent of SALT. Perle and Burt--"the two Richards," as they came to be known--were to become the principal antagonists in the battle over the Administration's conduct of nuclear diplomacy. That battle continues behind the scenes to this day, with Burt trying to maneuver the Administration back toward talks that might yield an agreement, and Perle blocking him at every turn.

Perle once joked that he and like-minded officials were going to "teach the nation a lesson in supply-side arms control." He meant there would have to be years of unilateral buildup in American defenses before there could be a resumption of bilateral talks. Even then, Perle would be deeply skeptical about the wisdom of any arms control. "This stuff is soporific," he once remarked to Burt. "It puts our society to sleep. It does violence to our ability to maintain adequate defenses." Meese was echoing this sentiment when he said, early in 1981, that strategic arms control "will be lucky if we let it get away with benign neglect."

By the end of 1981, SART had become START. Reagan liked the initials because they suggested a new beginning, and he put a brief plug for START in a speech. But the Administration was still a long way from having a proposal to go with the word. Not until early 1982, when the White House became concerned about the growing nuclear arms freeze movement and congressional opposition to the MX--a longstanding program to develop a new, large, ten-warhead ICBM--did the Administration buckle down to serious, high-level consideration of its options for START. By then, Allen had been replaced as National Security Adviser by Deputy Secretary of State William Clark, and Clark had brought with him from the State Department Robert McFarlane to help run the NSC staff.

McFarlane worked closely with Burt to prepare a memo from the White House in early March 1982 that ordered the various agencies to close ranks behind a START proposal by May 1. The purpose of the deadline, remarked McFarlane, was to set off "an explosive charge that will blast apart the log jam in the bureaucracy."

The various agencies had agreed upon a general goal for START, but were divided over the means of achieving it. The goal was to force the Soviet Union to give up many if not most of its iCBMs, particularly its large, multiple-warhead ones. As a land power, the U.S.S.R. has traditionally considered heavy artillery "the god of war"--and ICBMs are the artillery of the nuclear age.

The U.S., by contrast, decided in the early '60s to develop a deterrent that was more diversified and made use of high-technology propulsion and guidance systems.

As a result, American ICBMs are smaller and less numerous than the Soviets'. The mainstay of the U.S. ICBM force, 550 Minuteman IIIs, are classified as "light" ICBMs and have three warheads each, while the backbone of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces is made up of 308 "heavy" SS-18s, each able to carry ten warheads, and around 500 "medium" SS-17s and SS-19s, with four and six warheads respectively. The American MX, which is still under development as well as under heated debate, is about the size of the SS-19, but would have as many warheads as the SS-18. However, even if the controversial MX is eventually deployed, there will be many fewer MXs than Soviet monster missiles.

On the other hand, the U.S. has a formidable lead in warheads based on its submarine forces, as well as in those on its bombers and cruise missiles. It is ahead on new frontiers of technology, like the development of so-called Stealth bombers, which will be virtually invisible to radar and therefore less vulnerable to antiaircraft defenses than present-day aircraft. No technological edge is guaranteed to be permanent, but the U.S. has geographical advantages over the Soviet Union as well: far easier access to the open seas for its submarine fleet and to allies around the periphery of the U.S.S.R. whose land and territorial waters offer forward bases for American weapons, particularly cruise missiles. Thus American assets counterbalance Soviet ones in a system that Henry Kissinger has described as one of "offsetting asymmetries." That makes for an overall strategic balance of parity or rough equivalence.

Perle and others did not accept the notion that the asymmetries truly offset each other and that parity still existed between the superpowers. They argued that ballistic missiles, particularly land-based ones, were potential first-strike weapons and therefore the most threatening and destabilizing, while aircraft and cruise missiles were purely retaliatory weapons and should not be subject to limitation. They felt justified in seeking in START the elimination of those asymmetries that favored the Soviet Union and the preservation of those that favored the American side of the equation.

Reagan came to accept this rationale, commenting in a number of NSC meetings that he wanted START to discourage the proliferation of "fast flyers," particularly ICBMs, and to reward the retention of "slow flyers," or bombers and cruise missiles. The Soviets, however, see American bombers and cruise missiles as far less benign, arguing that if Stealth technology and cruise missiles work properly, they are just as effective instruments of sneak attack as ballistic missiles. Also, the Administration's concept of a START agreement would mean, in practice, asking the Soviets to transform their forces to fit the model of the more diversified American deterrent.

Throughout 1981 and well into 1982, the Administration was divided into two camps over how to bring this transformation about. One camp, led

by Perle, wanted to seek deep reductions in ballistic-missile throw weight, the cumulative lifting power of rockets. Because the preponderance of their strategic forces is in the form of large ICBMs, the Soviets have an advantage of approximately 3 to 1 over the U.S. in throw weight. Equality by that measure would mean that the Soviets should reduce to the American level.

The other camp, led by Burt, opposed throw weight as the bargaining currency, or "unit of account," in START and wanted instead to limit launchers (silos and submarine tubes). Launchers had been the unit of account in SALT, but Burt's scheme would have been far more stringent and one-sided in its impact on Soviet forces than SALT had been. Perle's throw-weight reductions would have been even more so.

When Perle argued for limiting Soviet throw weight directly, by setting a low ceiling on that measurement of nuclear firepower, Burt replied that the same objective could be accomplished indirectly by the combination of warhead and launcher limits. He knew that using throw-weight limitations alone would be totally unacceptable to the Soviets as a unit of account and that "people will say this proposal is designed to fail," while launchers had been the currency of SALT and would therefore be more "plausible" and more negotiable.

Precisely because launchers had figured prominently in SALT, Perle denounced Burt for "trying to maneuver us back into a bankrupt, discredited old way of doing things, trying to fudge on the real issue, which is throw weight." Perle had the support of Eugene Rostow, then director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and Edward Rowny, who was to be the chief START negotiator. Rowny had been the representative of the Joint Chiefs during SALT II but had split with them over the merits of the treaty. They had given their lukewarm endorsement to SALT n, while Rowny announced his resignation from the delegation just before the treaty was signed and then campaigned against its ratification.

Seeing that he was outnumbered, Burt looked for a way to give the State Department option what he called "a little sex appeal." He suggested proposing to the Soviets a straight swap: the U.S. would cancel its program to develop the MX if the Soviets would dismantle all 308 of their SS-18 heavies.

Burt got the idea from two veterans of SALT, Lieut. General Brent Scowcroft (ret.), who was advising the Administration on what to do about the MX, and William Hyland, then a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and now the editor of Foreign Affairs. Scowcroft and Hyland had been aides to Kissinger and later ran the NSC staff during the Ford Administration.

Perle ridiculed the swap scheme, in part because it came from "the old SALT gang." Burt tried to enlist the support of the Chiefs. On a bright spring day in 1982, Perle was coming down the escalator at the entrance of the Pentagon when he spotted Burt just ahead of him. Perle hailed him and asked what he had been doing.

"Just seeing some people."

"About what?"

"Oh, a number of things."

"Aha!" exclaimed Perle. "I'll bet you've been briefing the Chiefs on START!"

Burt looked pained and headed for his car. Perle complained to the Joint Chiefs about their letting Burt go behind his back.

The main reason for the failure of

the idea of trading off the MX for the SS-18 was that the Administration as a whole, and Reagan in particular, decided that the U.S. must have the MX no matter what the outcome of START. Like cruise missiles and bombers, the MX was thus to be unavailable as a bargaining chip. The U.S. might settle for a smaller number of MXs with a START agreement than it would otherwise have deployed, but the missile system was seen as an indispensable part of the U.S.'s "strategic modernization" program.

By the time of the first NSC meeting devoted to START, in April 1982, the State Department's idea of a straightforward trade-off between the MX and the SS-18 was dead, and the advocates of a low throw-weight ceiling seemed to have the upper hand. On the eve of the meeting, Perle circulated a paper that criticized State for advocating an approach that offered "the appearance but not the reality of significant limits on Soviet strategic power ... and [that] would drive the Administration to a repetition of past mistakes."

Defense Secretary Weinberger made an impassioned appeal at the meeting for using START to confront the Soviet Union with a "challenge" by demanding that it bring its throw weight down to the U.S. level. Haig rebutted Weinberger. Slamming down his fist and fixing his steeliest gaze on Reagan, Haig warned that the Pentagon's option would be dismissed not just by the Soviets but by the U.S.'s allies as a cynical ploy, and that the result would be "a military and political catastrophe." How the President resolved the dispute, said Haig, would be "the most important decision of your Administration." Rostow sided with Weinberger and delivered a lengthy, withering indictment of Haig, accusing him of timidity and of favoring an approach to START that amounted to "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." Through much of the debate, Reagan was noticeably distracted and impatient, occasionally interjecting the appeal, "Can't you fellows work this out?"

A Pyrrhic Victory for State

As the May 1 deadline drew closer, Burt again began courting the Joint Chiefs of Staff to see if they would support the State Department against the rest of the Government. As it turned out, they did--for reasons having at least as much to do with their concept of the nation's mili tary needs as their desire to see arms control continue. The Chiefs felt that their civilian colleagues in the Pentagon, Weinberger and Perle, were overrating the impor tance of throw weight. The Chiefs argued that what gave missile warheads their ability to threaten ene my silos was their accuracy, not their destructive capability, and accuracy was not a function of throw-weight. Also, they were determined to see START preserve limits on launchers, and the lower the better.

The Chiefs had two reasons for wanting a low launcher ceiling. First, the fewer ICBM silos and submarine tubes the Soviets were allowed, the fewer high-priority military targets the Chiefs would have to worry about being able to hit in a nuclear war.

Second, a low launcher ceiling would enhance the rationale for their cherished MX. Since a single MX will carry ten warheads, it is an efficient way of fitting many warheads under a low launcher ceiling.

On the eve of a May 3 NSC meeting, less than a week before the President was to unveil a proposal in a speech at his alma mater, Eureka College in Illinois, the Joint Chiefs shocked Weinberger and Perle by joining forces with the State Department on a common option. START, they proposed, should contain three limits: 850 missile launchers, 5,000 warheads on all strategic ballistic missiles (SLBMs and ICBMs), 2,500 warheads on ICBMS alone.

This proposal was adopted by the President, but it quickly drew widespread criticism both inside and outside the Administration, and from all across the ideological spectrum. Moderates were concerned that the numbers would still be nonnegotiable:

the Soviets were being asked to reduce their ICBM warheads by more than 50%, while the U.S. was below the proposed ceiling and would be able to build up.

Liberal and conservative experts alike criticized the high ratio of warheads to launchers that the proposal would produce. Each side would end up with an ICBM force made up largely of stationary multiple-warhead missiles such as the MX and SS-18. While in their silos, they would be sitting ducks, vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike; once in the air, they might be first-strike weapons. Therefore the incentive of each side to shoot first in a crisis would be increased, and the stability of the nuclear balance would be upset.

Perle said that he thought the 850-launcher ceiling was "crazy," adding, "Fortunately, we can count on the Soviets to save us from the stupidity of our own proposal by never accepting it." He and other hard-liners like Rostow agreed with Democratic crit ics of the Administration such as Congressmen Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee and Les Aspin of Wisconsin that arms control should encourage "de-MlRVing," the evolution from a reliance on Hydraheaded missiles to small, mobile, single-warhead ICBMS. A de-MiRved deterrent would theoretically neither tempt nor threaten a pre-emptive attack. Thus, while START was in tended to enhance the case for the MX by increasing the ratio of warheads to launchers and by putting a premium on large MlRVed missiles, it inadvertently increased opposition to the big missile in Congress and instead spurred development of the "Midgetman": an entirely new ICBM, a small, single-warhead alternative to the large MlRVed MX.

As a sop to the Pentagon, Haig had suggested a "two-phase" approach to START, with limits to be sought on war heads and launchers in the first phase, and on throw weight in a vaguely defined second phase. The State Department believed it had, in Burt's phrase, "neutralized the throw-weight boys."

That turned out not to be so.

Having listened to Weinberger make the case for throw weight at the NSC meeting, Reagan told McFarlane afterward, "Cap has a point." So McFarlane drafted a secret presidential directive that made throw weight an unpublicized part of Phase 1. In Phase 2 of this plan, the Soviets would have to reduce from more than 5 million kg to the U.S. level of about 2 million kg, but they would also have had to come down to 2.5 million kg in Phase 1 .

Perle was able to use this document to regain ground that he had lost to the State Department. Unless the U.S. insisted on the elimination of the entire Soviet SS-18 force and many of the SS-19s and SS-17s as well, he argued, START would not achieve "our mandate from the President" on throw weight. As a compromise, the State Department agreed to "collateral restraints" on Soviet missiles that would cut the SS-18s and SS-19s by two-thirds and require elimination of the somewhat smaller SS-17s. The MX, however, would be virtually unconstrained.

Cruise missiles were to be nonnegotiable in Phase 1, although the Soviets would be most eager to limit them, not only because the drones are evasive and highly accurate, but because the U.S. was ahead in development of the drones and had more geographical opportunities for their deployment. Cruise missiles would be come negotiable in Phase 2, but only after the Soviet Union had agreed to cut its throw weight by more than 60%.

Given Haig and Burt's goal of preserving some hope that an agreement might be negotiated, the State Department had achieved only a temporary and perhaps Pyrrhic victory over the Pentagon civilians.

Rehearsal in the Bubble

At a press conference in New York City, Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko rejected the proposal for a low ceiling on launchers and ballistic-missile warheads that Reagan had announced at Eureka College in May. When the arms talks began in Geneva in late June, Krasnoslav Osadchiyev, who represented the Council of Ministers on the Soviet negotiating team, said that the weapons the U.S. was trying to reduce--Soviet MIRVed ICBMs--were "the absolute mainstays of our defense."

The Kremlin then made a counterproposal, offering to lower the ceilings on strategic launchers (ICBM silos, submarine tubes and intercontinental bombers) from the level of 2,250 established by SALT II to 1,800. The Soviets indicated they might accept some limits on warheads, or what they called "nuclear charges," as long as the U.S. was willing to include bomber armaments, particularly cruise missiles, as well as ballistic-missile warheads. But the Americans had no authority to discuss "slow-flying systems"; those were, as Rowny told his counterpart, Victor Karpov, "strictly a Phase 2 issue, and we're in Phase 1." Karpov replied that the two-phase structure amounted to "asking us to buy a pig in a poke" (or, in the Russian idiom he used, "a cat in a sack"):

"You say we should reduce our missiles in this first phase, yet you won't tell us what you'll give up in exchange in the second phase."

The negotiations quickly became an exercise in mutual stonewalling. Rowny did not seem to mind. After years as the odd man out SALT, and with his conviction that the U.S. had caved in to Soviet negotiating tactics too often in the past, he rather enjoyed these new talks. As he put it, "I like watching the other guys squirm and go up the wall a bit. It's no more Mr. Nice Guy with me." He told his staff he was prepared to "hold off the Russians on this cruise-missile thing until hell freezes over." But a number of members of his delegation and key officials of the State Department, especially Burt, realized that the U.S. had to find a way of putting cruise missiles on the table if there was to be any progress at all.

Perle was willing to move "slow-flying systems" from Phase 2 to Phase 1, but only on the condition that throw weight, too, be moved from the periphery to the center of the agenda in the talks. That way a change in the U.S. position that might make it more negotiable would have to be accompanied by another change that was certain to make it even less negotiable. The State Department was hoist with the petard of its own two-phase idea.

During the autumn 1982 round of talks, Rowny was authorized to say that he was now prepared to talk about limits on some cruise missiles--as long as the Soviets were prepared to consider limits on ballisticmissile throw weight. The only cruise missiles the Pentagon would permit to be put on the table in Geneva were the air-launched variety (ALCMS, pronounced al-kums), which were already limited in SALT II. Ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs, or glickums) were considered intermediate-range weapons, not strategic ones, and they were being negotiated in INF talks. Sea-launched cruise missiles (SLCMS, or slickums) were considered exempt because the Navy needed conventionally armed SLCMS, principally as antiship weapons; and the distinction between nuclear and conventionally armed SLCMs was impossible to verify.

Karpov replied that his government considered "throw weight inappropriate as a unit of account because it discriminates against our side." Nor were he and his colleagues impressed by the American shift on cruise missiles, since ground-and sea-launched versions of the weapon would still be unrestricted. As Osadchiyev commented tartly, "You've already made cruise missiles into Stealth weapons. They're invisible in these negotiations and invulnerable to limitations."

The negotiations were as sterile as ever, and preparations for the biweekly meetings were becoming a rare form of torture for some of the Americans. Rowny would assemble his team in the "bubble," a specially designed, bugproof chamber in the U.S.

Geneva headquarters, and rehearse the long, often polemical statement that he intended to read to the Soviets at the next session. "At least the Russians only had to listen to the thing once," lamented one of Rowny's colleagues. Rowny's attempts at bon homie did little to improve morale. At a birthday party for one of the secretaries attached to the delegation, Rowny pulled out a harmonica and asked the group to sing along while he played "the arms-control theme song." The tune he played was I'm For ever Blowing Bubbles.

Early in 1983, rumors were circulating that Rowny had pre pared a "secret hit list" containing his derogatory estimates of members of the delegation and other Administration officials.

"There is no hit list," Rowny kept asserting. But in March it came to light that Rowny had indeed given a private memorandum to Kenneth Adelman, the young conservative deputy to U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, whom National Security Adviser Clark had selected to replace Rostow as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The document criticized various individuals, including Rowny's principal deputy, James Goodby, who was declared suspect on grounds of being too eager for an agreement. (Goodby subsequently left the START delegation and now heads the American negotiating team at the Conference on Disarmament in Europe, which meets in Stockholm.) Adelman's nomination was al ready in trouble in the Senate; it was approved only after vigorous lobbying by the White House. Now a number of legislators called for Rowny's dismissal. Congressman Aspin, who was emerging as a key moderate in the fight to save the MX, warned Clark's deputy McFarlane: "If you guys want to buy yourselves some political running room for START and the MX, there are two ways you can do it. Either you can change the players--fire Rowny and Adelman; otherwise you've got to change the negotiating position."

Outsider Step In

The principal negotiations throughout 1983 were not between the U.S. and the Soviet Union but be tween the White House and Congress. The beleaguered MX pro gram was about to run a gauntlet of votes on the Hill, and an increasingly assertive group of Congressmen made it clear that they would continue to support funding only if the Administration adjusted its START proposal to take account of their ideas about what constituted sound arms control.

The main group in the House, led by Aspin and Gore, favored de-MlRVing and Midgetman. Another group in the Senate, led by a Republican, William Cohen of Maine, and a Democrat, Sam Nunn of Georgia, advocated a so-called guaranteed mutual build-down, whereby each side would be required to retire more weapons than it deployed in its arsenal. The build-down was seen by its advocates as a moderate alternative to the freeze that was compatible with the Administration's stated goals of modernization in its defense program (i.e., developing new weapons like the MX) and dramatic reductions as the objective of arms-control talks.

Reagan telephoned Cohen, saying that he liked the build-down idea. But Pentagon and NSC officials did not. Reagan was interested in the possibility of collaboration with moderates on the Hill; his advisers, however, were concerned about the sub stance of the build-down proposal, which would lump bombers and cruise missiles together with ballistic missiles. That feature, known as "comprehensiveness" or "aggregation" of bombers and missiles, might have helped in the negotiations, but it was anathema to an Administration that insisted on subjecting to separate and unequal treatment "fast and slow flyers."

McFarlane told Cohen that the build-down scheme was being "thoroughly scrubbed"--i.e., studied--by an interagency committee; McFarlane told his own staff he was hoping that the idea could be "killed with kindness." Suspecting as much, Cohen accused McFarlane of "nitpicking the plan to death." He warned that the Administration's support for the MX was "eggshell thin." On McFarlane's advice, Reagan appointed a commission of outside experts that initially was supposed to answer the old, troublesome question of how to base the MX; later its charter was extended to advise on arms-control policy more generally.

The chairman was Scowcroft, who enjoyed considerable respect in Congress.

In April, after close consultation with key Congressmen, the Scowcroft commission issued a report recommending that the MX proceed as a short-term, stopgap measure, but that Midgetman be the principal ICBM of the future. The report recommended that the Administration, in order to make room for numerous Midgetman missiles, lift the 850-launcher ceiling that had been incorporated into the original START proposal at the behest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The report questioned the Administration's longstanding but widely contested claim that American ICBMs were already vulnerable to pre-emptive attack from the more numerous Soviet ICBMs, and it obliquely criticized the Administration for being unrealistic in the demands it was making on the Soviets in START.

Moderates in the Government, especially in the State Department, welcomed the report, hoping that it would strengthen their hand against the Pentagon. Burt encountered Aspin at a party and told him that the coalition that was forming between the Scowcroft commission and Congress "may yet get this Administration off the dime in arms control. Just up." keep the pressure The MX survived a number of votes, but by diminishing margins. By last summer, White House officials were hinting to key Congressmen that in addition to the lifting of the 850 ceiling on launchers, a number of the other more unrealistic features of START were "flexible." This applied particularly to the 2,500 ceiling on ICBM warheads and the stipulated two-thirds reductions in SS-18s and SS-19s.

In fact, however, those and other provisions remained on the negotiating table in Geneva, and the Pentagon civilians were pressing for the incorporation of throw weight as a principal bar gaining feature. Weinberger succeeded in persuading the Joint Chiefs of Staff not to oppose him this time around. That task was made easier because General David Jones and his fellow hold overs from the Carter Administration had by now retired; the new Chiefs, headed by General John Vessey, were less experienced in arms control and less inclined to lock horns with the Pentagon civilians.

Weinberger also lobbied hard with the new Secretary of State, George Shultz. "Cap has a point about throw weight," Shultz told his startled and discouraged staff after a meeting with Weinberger. It was almost exactly what Reagan had said more than a year earlier. Burt worked to convince the Secretary of State that throw weight would "just gum up the works in the negotiations. It's not worth our trying to make it the be-all and end-all, and it's certainly not productive."

In June the NSC produced what was intended to be a synthesis between the State and Pentagon positions. The Soviets would be told they had a choice: either they could meet the American concern about their excess "destructive capability and potential" by accepting direct limits on throw weight, or they could meet that concern by means of indirect limits involving deep cuts in the number of their large missiles.

While that might have worked as a compromise between the State and Defense departments, it did not look like one to the Soviets. Osadchiyev summed up their response by saying, "Your idea of 'flexibility' is to give a condemned man the choice between the rope and the ax." The U.S., said the Foreign Ministry's Aleksei Obukhov, was still trying to make "dead souls" out of the Soviet Union's most valued weapons.

A Kabuki Dance

By August 1983 it was clear that START was as badly stalled as ever.

The MX faced yet another vote in the fall. Scowcroft stepped up his attempt to broker a three-way compromise that the Administration, the Midget-manners and the build-downers could all live with. His right-hand man was R. James Woolsey, a lawyer who had been an adviser to the U.S.

SALT delegation and a Pentagon official in the Carter Administration, but was also a vigorous proponent of more "robust" American defense and a believer in the importance of throw weight. He was a friend of both Aspin's and Perle's.

Woolsey and Perle lived near each other in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, and they ran into each other at a neighborhood swimming pool. While their children were splashing around, they talked about the possibility of expanding the concept of throw weight to take into account the payload of bombers, particularly cruise missiles. This, they figured, would satisfy Cohen, Nunn and the other pro-build-down Senators, who were insisting on "comprehensiveness."

Perle said it was important that any new plan restrict ballistic missiles more stringently than bombers and cruise missiles, but he did not rule out the possibility of some form of aggregation.

Woolsey told Scowcroft that Perle was "ripe for a little discreet massaging, and won't necessarily go on the warpath against us."

The trick now was to figure out how to measure and limit destructive capability in a way that included bombers but was still weighted against ballistic missiles. Scowcroft gave that task to Glenn Kent, a nuclear weapons expert at the Rand Corp.'s office in Washington. Like Scowcroft, Kent was a retired Air Force lieutenant general. He had something of a genius for taking abstract concepts of nuclear peace and strategies for nuclear war and converting them into mathematical formulas.

With the help of another Rand analyst, Ted Warner, Kent devised an intellectually elegant, immensely complex formula that became known as double build-down. It would require both sides to reduce their strategic forces by two measurements: ballistic-missile warheads and a new unit of destructive capability called a standard weapon station (SWS). That unit might represent bombs, cruise missiles or ballistic warheads.

The double build-down was based on a complicated set of equations with different constants assigned to different sorts of weapons. For example, a large Soviet warhead, like one on an SS-18, would count as a certain number of SWS's, a smaller ballistic warhead on an SLBM, a Minuteman III or even an MX would count as fewer SWS's. A bomber armed with cruise missiles would have a greater SWS total than one armed with bombs.

The Scowcroft commission, the Midgetmanners and the build-downers all joined in what Aspin called a Kabuki dance intended to make the double build-down seem like a joint brain storm. After consulting closely with Scowcroft, Aspin released a letter calling on the commission to recommend a new START proposal. It was to meet a series of criteria spelled out in an accompanying essay, which in turn was written by Woolsey and was designed to elicit a proposal along the lines of the Kent double-build-down scheme.

Scowcroft's part of the script called for him to respond to Aspin by holding a press conference and by saying that he thought the double build-down "fits well with what the commission has recommended." Flying across the country to attend the funeral of Washington Senator Henry Jackson, Nunn and Cohen conceived a letter similar to Scowcroft's, which they released in mid-September. The Senators stated that the build-down plan that Kent helped devise contained "the ingredients for a bipartisan consensus."

Now it was time for the Administration to join the Kabuki dance.

Ronald Lehman, a former aide to Perle now working for McFarlane at the NSC, appealed to a group from the Hill: "There's got to be something here for the President to call his own.

You can't leave him in the position of having a major area of his responsibility overhauled outside the Executive Branch."

Scowcroft, Aspin and the others were willing to let the Administration come forward with some version of the double build-down so that it would look like a presidential initiative. But the policymaking machinery of the Administration was close to breaking down. Despite Woolsey's optimistic reading of Perle's attitude, the Pentagon was still fighting the idea of trade offs between ballistic missiles and bomber weapons.

The Magna Carta

Meanwhile, Burt and others at the State Department were pushing their own new plan for START. It came to be called the "framework approach," and it would entail keeping launcher limits along the lines of both SALT II and the Soviet proposal in Geneva, but adding limits on warheads and cruise missiles. The U.S. would be giving up, once and for all, its attempt to focus exclusively on fast flyers, particularly MlRVed ICBMs. At the same time, the Soviets would have had to accept much more severe limits on their MlRVs than under their own proposal.

With Defense and State still at loggerheads, the Administration was unable to close ranks behind the double build-down, or any other coherent new initiative in START. In late September the Scowcroft commission and the Congressmen set about to impose their de-MIRVing and build-down goals on the Administration, and they used the MX as leverage. If the Administration wanted to maintain the support for the MX, they said, the big missile would have to fit into a long-term plan in which it would eventually give way to the single-warhead Midgetman.

The White House gave the Congressmen a memorandum of understanding in which the Administration agreed to incorporate into its START proposal the first half of the double build-down: the phased reduction in missile warheads. The second half, involving aggregation of missiles and bombers, might come later. That was not good enough for the Congressmen, especially Cohen. The White House draft was filled with "waffle words," he said. "It's going to have to be a lot firmer before I'm going to support it."

Negotiations continued until Oct. 3, when, at a meeting in the White House Situation Room, a compromise was finally reached--a "Magna Carta," Aspin called it. The Administration's formal START proposal would remain essentially the same, with some additional flexibility on ALCMs, but the U.S. would propose to the Soviets that a separate working group be established to study the double build-down as an alternative to the two sides' formal positions.

Also, Woolsey would be added to the negotiating team. Woolsey's role, said Aspin, was "to make sure that our concerns are represented and to keep Ed Rowny honest over there in Geneva ." The Congressmen had little confidence in Rowny or, for that matter, in the President. Reagan seemed genuinely interested in achieving progress, but at the same time he dismayed a number of key Congressmen and even some of his own aides with his evident lack of command over the issues at hand.

During encounters with delegations from the Hill last fall, he confessed that he had not realized until more than a year after his Eureka proposal that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was concentrated on ICBMs and that his proposal might therefore have seemed one-sided. In an even more shocking, though no doubt tempo rary, lapse he suggested that ballistic missiles were more threatening than bombers and cruise missiles because only ballistic missiles were nuclear armed. (In fact, 27% of U.S. strategic nuclear warheads are on bombers and cruise missiles.) Once the October compromise had been hammered out, Congress men and Administration officials alike congratulated themselves and each other on having finally achieved the long-sought bipartisan consensus, which would provide the basis for a treaty that could be ratified by the Senate.

Whether it would provide the basis for a treaty that could be negotiated with the Soviet Union was another matter. Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin told Aspin and Cohen that his superiors in Moscow regarded the double build-down as "pure propaganda."

Besides, he added, how could the Soviet government take it seriously when the Pentagon, the State Department and Rowny were all reported by the press to be against it? The reception in Geneva was no more encouraging, especially since Rowny stressed to Karpov that the "basic position of this Administration has not changed." Karpov cited this as further evidence that "Ambassador Rowny is not a serious man."

The Soviets gave the back of their hand to the double build-down, partly because INF, or Euromissiles, were the issue of the hour, but also because they understood the new proposal in START well enough to know they did not like it. Even before they were officially briefed on the proposal, they had read enough in the press to see that the SS-18 would probably end up counting twice as much as the MX and that they would have to give up a large portion of their ICBM force.

Karpov said the concept of an aggregated index of destructive potential that discriminated against MlRVed ICBMs was "based on artificial distinctions [between bombers and missiles] and was clearly designed to emasculate our strategic forces."

He did not flatly refuse to set up a working group to study the build-down, but he said it would be a "worthless exercise."

In late November the first U.S. Pershing II ballistic missiles arrived in West Germany, and the first Tomahawk ground-launched cruise missiles were placed in Great Britain. That triggered the long-threatened Soviet walkout from the INF talks. Two weeks later, on Dec. 8, Karpov and his delegation ended the fifth round of START with an announcement that "in view of the deployment of new U.S. missiles in Europe, which has already begun, changes in the global strategic situation make it necessary for the Soviet side to review all problems under discussion."

The Soviet Union refused to agree to a date for resumption of the talks in 1984.

Impasse Continues

Gromyko told visiting West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher last month that arms-control talks with the U.S. could not resume unless the U.S. removed its missiles from Germany and Britain.

The strong implication was that START, as well as the INF talks, would remain stymied by that Soviet demand. If the Soviet Union is unyielding on that point, there may never be a resumption of serious negotiations.

There are a number of reasons the U.S. cannot and should not remove or even freeze missiles deployed in Europe without adequate Soviet concessions. It was the Soviets who upset the balance in nuclear weapons in the key region of the world covered by INF, principally by the deployment of their triple-warhead SS-20 missiles. Therefore the U.S. and its West European allies are justified in deploying the Pershing IIs and Tomahawks in the absence of a negotiated settlement in INF. Also, the Soviet Union cannot be allowed to veto the implementation of a collective decision of the Western Alliance. Nor should the Soviets be permitted to get their way in diplomacy when they resort to ultimatums and nonnegotiable demands.

The situation in START is different from that in the INF talks in two key respects. First, parity still exists at the level of strategic weapons, and proposals in that area must there fore be seen by both sides as equitable in their impact on existing and projected weapons systems; the "front loading" of Soviet concessions in START is harder to justify than in INF (not to mention harder to negotiate). Second, in START, it is the U.S. rather than the Soviet Union that has been hanging tough with an intransigent and unrealistic position.

Not that the Soviet position should be acceptable to the U.S. in anywhere near its entirety. For example, the Soviet of fer of two years ago to reduce launcher ceilings from the SALT II levels would still permit a threatening proliferation of ICBM warheads. Further, that offer was conditioned on the U.S.

cancellation of its plans to deploy intermediate-range missiles in Europe. Had the Soviets been willing to remove Euromissiles from the agenda of START and deal only with intercontinental weapons, their position might have led to an accept able compromise. The result could have been significant though not drastic reductions in their ICBM forces in exchange for limitations on American air-and sea-launched cruise missiles.

A number of authoritative Soviets have privately hinted that the troublesome and, from the American standpoint, un acceptable insistence on banning deployment of U.S. Euromissiles as part of a START agreement might eventually have been set aside if there had been progress on other issues in START. But there was none, partly because the American opening position was so objectionable to the Soviets, and was made even more so by the modifications of last year.

Some American and European officials believe that the Soviets will come back to the table on acceptable terms after the U.S. election in November--no matter what the outcome.

If they are confronted with the reality of four more years of Reagan, along with the reality of more American missiles in Europe, they will realize their stonewalling has failed and negotiate a compromise in INF. At the same time, they will return to START in order to secure meaningful limits on American cruise missiles and other new strategic weapons that worry them. So goes the analysis inside the Administration.

That optimism may be pre science or wishful thinking. A second Reagan Administration might be ready to try to engage the Soviets in a meaningful compromise in INF.

Shortly before the Soviet walkout at the end of last year, the Administration had finally abandoned its zero option (cancellation of the NATO deployments in exchange for elimination of all SS-20s throughout the U.S.S.R.); it was inching toward a reasonable compromise whereby the NATO deployments would be scaled back in exchange for a reduction in European SS-20s, with more lenient treatment for SS-20s in Asia. In the INF talks, the major obstacle was, and remains, Soviet intransigence.

In START, it is just the reverse.

The Soviets have from the outset shown signs of being willing to improve on what the Joint Chiefs called SALT IIs "modest but useful" regulation of the strategic arms race, but they have yet to see an American proposal that meets them halfway. What would be required is nothing less than a whole new American START negotiating position, one that offers more in the way of genuine concessions on cruise missiles and demands less in the way of drastic reductions in the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces. The best alternative to surface so far is the State Department's framework approach of last year, with its combination of ceilings on launchers (including bombers) and warheads (including cruise missiles).

Whether a second Reagan Administration will adopt a new, more realistic START policy will be determined to some extent by the President's own goals, but he had laudable goals as a candi date and as a newcomer to office. Given his apparent inability to engage himself in the arms-control policymaking process, much will depend on the team to which he delegates the task of realizing his objectives. His current team is dominated by individuals who have proved themselves unable, or unwilling, to pursue strategic arms control in a way that yields progress with the Soviets or that generates support from Congress.

* Another Talbott report, on the INF negotiations, appeared in TIME, Dec. 5, 1983. His book, Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control, will be published by Knopf later this year.