America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

The Vienna talkathon on conventional forces in Europe (CFE) may turn out to be something new in the history of arms control: a negotiation that could tangibly improve the daily lives of ordinary citizens, particularly in Eastern Europe.

In that respect, CFE is different from its variously initialed cousins SALT, START and INF, which dealt with the arsenals of Armageddon: missiles and bombs that are too unconventional to use. The control of nuclear arms is part of the larger, thoroughly laudable, but often abstract exercise of fine-tuning the balance of terror so as to make it a bit more balanced and a bit less terrible. CFE, by contrast, deals with real weapons, things that actually hurt people: a tank that can crush bodies on a town square; high explosives not measured in kilotons but still able to destroy a building and everyone in it; and that most essential fighting machine, a young man in uniform afraid of dying and therefore ready to kill.

NATO's objective has long been to reduce the number of tanks, guns and soldiers in the Warsaw Pact and thus diminish the threat of a Soviet-led armored blitzkrieg. Mikhail Gorbachev has rendered that nightmare less plausible with the stunning cutbacks and withdrawals that he announced at the United Nations last Dec. 7.

Western defense experts have been busy plugging the numbers in Gorbachev's various initiatives into their computerized war games, along with plenty of worst-case assumptions about the readiness of NATO. As a result, the bottom line of many such calculations has changed: the most often cited "sneak- attack scenario," which might before have yielded a Soviet victory, now leads to stalemate or even defeat.

Building on Gorbachev's unilateral cuts, the CFE talks could further lessen the likelihood that the Kremlin's hordes will ever invade Western Europe. With that reassurance, American and allied statesmen can turn their attention to the much more immediate danger of political turmoil and military crisis inside Eastern Europe.

The Warsaw Pact has the bizarre distinction of being the only alliance in history that has occupied or invaded not enemy territory but that of its own member states: East Germany '53, Hungary '56, Czechoslovakia '68. The imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981 was nothing less than a Soviet- backed military coup d'etat within the Communist Party.

The Warsaw Pact is both the symbol and the instrument of Soviet domination over what used to be called the captive nations. Even if the forces of the pact were cut to one-third their current size, they could still "protect the gains of socialism" by "extending fraternal assistance" to a regime facing revolt or collapse.

But just as the specter of an East-West conflict has receded, East-East police actions may also grow harder to justify, and someday perhaps harder to execute. Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria have all followed Gorbachev's lead by announcing large cuts in defense spending. The gradual demilitarization of those societies could fuel economic reform by freeing resources for civilian industry.

But most important, a decrease in the Soviet military presence -- whether in garrisons on the outskirts of East bloc capitals or over the horizon in the U.S.S.R. itself -- may induce those regimes to rely less on the threat of force and more on a genuine social compact between a government and its citizens.