Maneuvering Around Square One

By Strobe Talbott

A legitimate, perhaps indispensable part of diplomacy is symbolism. Whenever statesmen get together, it serves to remind the world, and the principals themselves, that for all the complexities of arms control and other matters of discussion, much still depends on individuals. It is not just systems that clash or coexist, but human beings.

What was most significant about the imagery in Geneva last week was not that two men were meeting at the summit--that is, at the peak of personal and national power--but that they were, for nearly five hours, meeting off to one side alone. Their apparent personal rapport, or at least civility and restraint, made the meeting a symbolic success. But on the most important issue confronting them, controlling the arsenals of nuclear weapons, there is no assurance that the "fresh start" and "momentum" they spoke about will actually lead anywhere. Not only was there no resolution of the basic issues dividing the two sides, which could hardly have been expected, but there was no hint of progress toward resolution, a more reasonable hope. How American plans to develop space-based strategic defenses can be reconciled with the quest for deep reductions in strategic offenses remains as much of a conundrum as ever. An American negotiator who is a regular at the ongoing arms-control talks in Geneva remarked, "It's nice to have our bosses wish us luck and urge us to do our best, but the nitty-gritty of our work here is going to be as tough as ever."

Thursday's joint statement required intensive negotiation, yet it was little more than an enumeration of the lowest common denominators of the relationship. On arms control, it mostly reiterated earlier declarations of intent or endorsed vague goals that have already provoked dispute. The "principle" of a 50% reduction in nuclear arms begs such extremely tricky questions as whether gravity bombs aboard bombers (in which the U.S. has an advantage) should be lumped together with more threatening warheads atop large missiles (in which the Soviets have the lead). The statement also promoted the "idea" of an interim compromise on medium-range weapons, which Washington first floated in 1983 and Moscow proposed this fall. But there again, both sides are still a long way from agreement about what kinds of weapons should count.

On the critical issue of the Strategic Defense Initiative, the document contains nothing more than a reaffirmation of a communique that Secretrary of State George Shultz signed with former Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in January, along with a vow to "accelerate the work" of the arms talks. Said one participant in those talks: "To accelerate implies that we were already moving. We weren't, and we still aren't. We're maneuvering for position around square one."

Some of the U.S. officials who came to Geneva with Reagan had hoped the final document would include another reaffirmation, that of the antiballistic-missile (ABM) treaty of 1972. Advocates of arms control within the Administration want to seize every opportunity to commit the U.S. to keeping SDI within the bounds of that treaty. Doing so, they hope, might allay Soviet concerns and induce concessions. Why was there no mention of the ABM treaty in the joint statement?

"Ask Richard," snapped a U.S. official, referring to the Administration's most persistent and skillful critic of past arms-control agreements, Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, who was present in Geneva and active behind the scenes on the American side. Perle says that while he does not consider the ABM treaty a "taboo subject," he does not want to encourage the interpretation that the treaty restricts SDI.

So deep is Reagan's commitment to SDI that there was a wrangle among the Americans over whether to include the seemingly innocuous reference to the January communique. The reason: that earlier document proclaimed the objective of "preventing an arms race in space," and Reagan has never liked that phrase because it sounds like an aspersion of SDI.

Thus, between the lines, even some of the blandest passages of the joint statement augur not imminent accord but protracted discord, and not just between Moscow and Washington but within the Administration as well. Resolving those disputes will take time, probably a long time, and that may be where the summit turns out to have helped most. As Georgi Arbatov, the Soviet Union's best-known Americanologist, put it, "The meeting has improved the possibility that there might be real breakthroughs achieved later on."

Only a few days earlier, Soviet spokesmen were talking as though there would be no "later on." They seemed to be predicting dire consequences, perhaps even a breaking off of arms negotiations, if the U.S. failed to give ground on SDI. Arbatov and other Soviets were portraying the summit as perhaps a last chance for an offense-defense compromise, an agreement for deep cuts in missiles in return for a curtailment of Star Wars. That there is now talk of long roads ahead, despite the fact that neither side budged on SDI, is in itself significant, since deadlines have no place in superpower relations.

While Reagan and Gorbachev seem not to have succeeded in cutting any of the knots in arms control, they may have bought some more time for their negotiators to continue trying to unravel the strings. Here is where the symbolic success, and the resulting improvement in atmosphere, can be important. Now that the two smiling leaders have displayed so publicly their determination to pursue arms control, it is harder to imagine their more hard-line advisers' scuttling the process. Just as Reagan has his hawks who would like to see SDI provide a pretext for abandoning past agreements and blocking new ones, Gorbachev likewise is faced with comrades who want to hold even partial progress on arms control hostage to massive American concessions on SDI. As a result of what happened last week in Geneva--however modest that result may be in substance--those hawkish views are less likely to prevail in either capital. --By Strobe Talbott