Geneva's Lost Spirit

By George J. Church.

The test scheduled for this Tuesday is code-named Mighty Oak. If all goes as planned, a U.S. nuclear device will explode in a tunnel beneath the dry lake beds of Nevada, some 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. On the scale of modern tests, it rates as a penny-ante blast, releasing a mere 20 kilotons of explosive power, equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. Such a test usually does nothing more than rattle the china in a few Nevada closets. But this time the shock waves could reverberate around the world.

The Nevada explosion, designed to test the effects of radiation on American warheads, will underline in the bluntest possible manner the swift White House rejection of the Kremlin's latest arms-control overture. With the deft mixing of propaganda and substance that has been the hallmark of his style, Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev went on television two weeks ago, with no advance word to the U.S. through diplomatic channels, to propose that President Reagan meet him promptly in Europe to negotiate a total ban on nuclear tests. If the U.S. rejected the offer and continued testing, Gorbachev warned, the Kremlin would end its self-imposed eight-month moratorium. New nuclear tests by both sides, following a long series of diplomatic developments that have shaken relations between the superpowers over the past few months, would deeply affect an even more fundamental question: Can anything be preserved of the accommodative "spirit of Geneva" that emerged from the Reagan-Gorbachev summit only five months ago?

A preliminary answer should be forthcoming promptly. On Tuesday--possibly just as the U.S. nuclear test blast is going off--Anatoli Dobrynin, who is departing after 24 years as Soviet Ambassador to the U.S., is scheduled to call at the White House for a talk with Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz. U.S. officials hope Dobrynin, who is taking up a Kremlin post as a senior adviser to Gorbachev, will be carrying a message that could get private discussions going again after months of what diplomats brand "megaphone diplomacy." Indeed, Dobrynin reportedly has been empowered to set a date for a meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze that Shultz has been trying to arrange for months. They would begin preparing a more important meeting: the second Reagan-Gorbachev summit, which is supposed to occur in the U.S. this year.

That would be an encouraging development in view of private growling lately from both sides that they can do very well without another summit, thank you. But even if both sides agree to keep planning for a summit, it will take much more to dispel the sour atmosphere that has developed between the superpowers since the Geneva meeting. In fact it may tax diplomats' ingenuity to keep relations from deteriorating further, and fast.

What happened? It is easy enough to call a roll of words and actions that have darkened the outlook. On the U.S. side, the Reagan Administration has stepped up a campaign of military pressure on Soviet clients, blasting Soviet- installed missile sites in Libya, lobbying for resumed military aid to the contras in Nicaragua, and now supplying missiles to anti-Marxist guerrillas in Angola and rebels battling the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Then there have been symbolic actions that infuriated Moscow: a naval mission skirted U.S.S.R. waters to eavesdrop on Soviet communications on the Black Sea coast, and the U.S. ordered 38% of the Soviet diplomats at the United Nations (many of them spies, in the Administration's view) to be sent home in the next two years.

Justified though each of these actions may seem to many Americans, in Soviet eyes they appear to constitute a coordinated campaign of hostility. "We look upon these actions as defiant and provocative, contrary to the spirit of Geneva," said Deputy Foreign Minister Georgi Korniyenko in Moscow. In an interview with an Algerian weekly, Gorbachev complained that the Geneva summit "half opened the door to hope, but this ray of light so frightened the people associated with the U.S. military-industrial complex that they threw their weight against the door to slam it shut." As one Soviet official exploded to an American journalist, "Your side is taking us for gullible fools."

The prime U.S. complaint is that Moscow has lately abandoned private diplomacy in favor of a new series of grandiose--and uncomfortably skillful --public initiatives. These began with Gorbachev's January proposals to eliminate all nuclear weapons from the earth by the end of the century. Though the proposals had some interesting elements, Gorbachev annoyed the U.S. by disclosing them to the White House only hours before Soviet television trumpeted them to the world. Meanwhile, U.S. officials complain, the Kremlin has let private contacts dwindle to almost nothing and passed up opportunities for serious talk about more achievable agreements--a ban on chemical weapons, for example. Said Secretary Shultz to reporters flying back with him from a European trip: "We are never going to get anywhere doing things that way. We will get somewhere in our relationship with the Soviets when we are able to have some discussions that are relatively direct and quiet."

This sequence culminated with Gorbachev's surprise proposal for a quickie test-ban summit. The Administration is puzzled as to why Gorbachev has invested so much of his personal prestige in a test-ban proposal that he must know is a non-starter. Though there are valid arguments for and against a ban (see box), the Reagan Administration has made it unmistakably clear that, as one White House aide put it, "that bird ain't going to fly." About the best advisers can figure is that the Kremlin has reverted to its old game of trying to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its West European allies.

Any attempt to assess what happened to the spirit of Geneva must begin with the question of whether it really existed at all. In the sense of a genuine urge to compose differences, it probably never did. At most, there was an ephemeral belief by each leader that for the moment it suited his purposes to be seen chatting politely around a cozy fire with the other. But those purposes were quite different.

Reagan essentially was out to protect his Strategic Defense Initiative, known as Star Wars. He wanted to prove that he could restore civil, if not exactly harmonious, relations with the Soviets without making any major concessions on SDI. So he was happy to conduct a meeting that was mostly symbol and little substance. He succeeded. After growling that there would be no point to a summit if the U.S. remained adamant on SDI, Gorbachev came anyway and acted amiable. Crows one Reagan adviser: "We gave up almost nothing at Geneva and the world did not come apart. That was an important confidence builder. Gorbachev began to appear less formidable, like his bark was worse than his bite."

Since then there has been a marked change in Ronald Reagan's attitude. His gut instinct has always been to put as much pressure on the Soviet Union as possible, and in the past few months his confidence has grown that he can do this without incurring any major risk. According to the prevailing view among Reagan's advisers, the Soviets have the most to lose if they back out of the upcoming summit, so the U.S. has nothing to lose by acting assertive.

No one event and no single adviser has brought about this feeling. But the collapse of world oil prices has benefited the U.S. economy to the extent of making Reagan and his aides think they can continue the American military buildup unchecked for at least another year (Congress, of course, has grave doubts). Simultaneously, it has damaged the Soviet economy, since oil exports are Moscow's chief source of hard currency.

The U.S., says one national-security adviser, wants another summit, but with Soviet rather than American concessions. "We would like them to engage in a fundamental reassessment of their policy on regional issues," he says. "Until now the Soviets have not been seriously challenged in their regional initiatives--Afghanistan, Angola, Libya, Nicaragua--and they may have overextended themselves. Like every bureaucracy, the tendency has been for them to muddle through. Now we want them to learn what the costs are of all this adventure."

Another reason that Reagan has done little to preserve the spirit of Geneva is that on arms control the Administration is as deeply divided as on the day it took office. One faction, encouraged by Shultz, wants to search for negotiable agreements. It is pushing a new argument: if Americans do not perceive some progress on arms control, their willingness to pay the defense bill will diminish. But hard-liners led by the Pentagon's civilian chiefs remain adamantly opposed to any arms limitations and indeed are working to upset one already in existence.

An important test is coming next month, when another U.S. submarine equipped to fire Trident II nuclear missiles puts to sea. To stay within the ceilings imposed by the SALT II treaty, which both sides are observing even though it has never been ratified, the U.S. would have to dismantle two older Poseidon submarines the moment the Trident begins sea trials. The Pentagon, contending that the Soviets have already violated the treaty, argues that the Poseidon subs instead should be dry-docked so that they could be quickly returned to sea. Opponents contend that such an outright breach of SALT II would be supremely dangerous because if all limits are scrapped, the U.S.S.R. will be able to increase the number of its warheads much faster than the U.S. However this dispute turns out, the continuing division leaves Washington disinclined to give its negotiators new instructions for the arms-control talks resuming May 8 in Geneva. Nor has there been any effort to set forth new proposals that meet Gorbachev's demand for "concrete progress" on arms control at any new summit.

Gorbachev's motivation can only be a subject of speculation. But it seems clear that he genuinely wants an arms-control agreement--specifica lly one that bans strategic defenses or at least curbs them significantly. He apparently settled for a smile and a handshake at Geneva in hopes of stoking world longing for a superpower arms agreement sufficiently to bring irresistible pressure on Reagan to yield on SDI.

An advance of the Dobrynin visit, the betting in Washington was that Gorbachev would eventually agree to come to a second summit. To stay home, in this view, would hand Reagan a devastating propaganda advantage. In other words, Gorbachev needs a new summit more than Reagan does.

Maybe, but maybe not. A contrasting view is that the Soviets too think Gorbachev let Reagan get the better of him in Geneva, so that he is now under pressure not to meet again unless something tangible can be won. Some Soviet / officials have indeed begun to hint that they are prepared to forgo another meeting, not just this year and next but for the remainder of the Reagan presidency. Georgi Arbatov, a key adviser on American affairs, muttered darkly on a Soviet television program last week, "Soviet relations with the U.S. did not begin with Reagan, and they will not end with Reagan." That may be bluster, as Gorbachev's pre-summit comments last year proved to be, but there is a chance that this time the Soviets just might mean it.

With reporting by James O. Jackson/Moscow and Johanna McGeary/Washington