NATO: A Taste of Soviet Wine

WHEN the 15 NATO Foreign Ministers assemble in Lisbon's walled Palacio das Necessidades this week, their meeting may prove as important as any since the alliance's present form was set in 1952--also in Lisbon. Only a few weeks ago, the Ministers seemed destined to cover routine and well-traveled ground. But suddenly, some long-standing barriers to East-West negotiations have been lowered, however slightly.

The immediate task facing the Ministers is to explore Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev's call for NATO to "taste the wine" of Russian intentions on mutual force reductions in Central Europe--or, as NATO prefers to call it, Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions.* Two weeks ago, President Nixon and the Soviets agreed on a framework for proceeding with Strategic Arms Limitation Talks covering both defensive and offensive weapons. Last week, SALT negotiators wound up their fourth round of talks in Vienna (they will reconvene in Helsinki in July) on what one U.S. observer called "a substantially positive note."

There was some movement on the issues of troop reduction and arms limitation because the Soviets had relaxed their positions. Does this mean that the Kremlin is genuinely seeking better relations with the West? Certainly the Russians have enough reasons to do so. With the recent slight thaw in Sino-American relations, Moscow is worried anew that a Washington-Peking rapprochement may threaten its interests; force reductions in Europe would allow the Soviets to move more troops to the Chinese border. Another factor, which Brezhnev stressed to visiting Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau two weeks ago, is the economic drain of maintaining massive forces in Eastern Europe. Perhaps the most compelling reason of all is that a detente would further the old Soviet goal of loosening the military ties between the U.S. and Europe.

A more ominous view of Russian intentions--and one that could influence U.S. attitudes in future negotiations--is suggested by the Defense Department. Dr. John Foster, the Pentagon's director of research and engineering, has embarked on a controversial campaign to persuade Congress that the Soviets are bent not on slowing the arms race but on stealing a march. Last summer, says Foster, he and his staff were able to "crack the code" of the Soviet research budget. For the first time, they claimed, they could figure out--through estimates and conventional analysis--how much Russia spent on space and how much on military research. They discovered that since 1968 Moscow's military research budget has kept climbing--to around $10.5 billion at present, compared with just under $8 billion for the U.S. That means, says Foster, the Russians are rapidly erasing the U.S. technological lead. The result, says the Department of Defense, could be "just the kind of situation that is potentially dangerous: across-the-board military technological surprises."

Foster's critics--most notably the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists, a 25-year-old nonpartisan organization of 2,000 scientists and engineers--contend that he is engaging in "a classical numbers game featuring selective disclosure, questionable assumptions, misleading language, and alarmist, non sequitur conclusions." Foster's estimates, say the scientists, are "soft, the kind of evidence you use to do a study but not to guide a country." Foster concedes that he is working from assumptions, plus estimates that come from classified intelligence and cannot be publicly evaluated. Yet if he is right, the Soviets could willingly agree to limit their present troop levels and strategic weapons, confident that they will pull ahead of the U.S. in weaponry not covered by any agreement.

A New Gap. If Foster is wrong but manages to convince the Administration that such a threat exists, the result could be to destroy the spirit if not the substance of the SALT negotiations, and cut to a minimum any chances of real force reductions in Europe. After the "bomber gap" of the 1950s and the "missile gap" of the 1960 election campaign proved to be nonexistent, a "technology gap" cannot be taken on faith today--especially when it could seriously affect the chances of a detente.

Characteristic of the credibility problem was the official alarm raised in March when reconnaissance satellites detected a series of huge holes being dug in south-central Russia. They were cited by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird as "confirming the sobering fact that the Soviet Union is involved in a new and apparently extensive ICBM construction program." The implication was that Moscow was either installing a new family of awesomely powerful missiles or at the very least expanding its network of 25-megaton SS-9s, the most formidable ICBMs anywhere. By last week, Russian crews were trundling up concrete liners for the holes--suggesting that the Soviets were merely building hardened missile sites, as the U.S. has already done for its Minutemen.

Sticking Point. The gathering debate over Soviet military advances is only one of the factors that promise to complicate life for East-West negotiators. The West Germans are nervous over Russian proposals for mutual force reductions. Bonn sees Brezhnev's bid as an attempt to heighten the international status of East Germany. Reason: in any negotiations between NATO and the Warsaw Pact concerning troop levels, the Pankow regime would sit as a full-fledged member of the other side. That issue of sovereignty is the central sticking point of the 14-month-old negotiations over the status of West Berlin, which revolve around whether the Big Four or East Germany should have the responsibility for access to the city. Long stagnant, those negotiations are proceeding in a noticeably improved atmosphere.

Last week, the Bonn government tried to maintain that no talks about force reduction should start before progress has been made on Berlin. Bonn retreated from that position quickly, since NATO long ago suggested such talks without prior negotiation. But the West Germans had a point when they pleaded that other negotiations should not be allowed to undermine or sidetrack the Berlin bargaining. Chancellor Willy Brandt, showing up unexpectedly at a meeting of NATO Defense Ministers at Mittenwald, Bavaria, emphasized that "new initiatives should not be permitted to serve as an excuse for lessening the intensity with which the negotiations over Berlin are being pursued." Later in the week, addressing a meeting of the Socialist International at Helsinki that also attracted Israel's Premier Golda Meir and Britain's former Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Brandt warned: "There is little point in speaking of detente unless the situation in Berlin, that source of tension and danger, can be defused. An effective and lasting improvement in the Berlin situation is a test of mutual trust."

Common Vocabulary. To get talks about force reduction under way, the NATO allies will eventually have to cope with other, equally labyrinthine problems. What, for instance, is meant by balanced? Since U.S. forces must pull back all the way across the Atlantic while Soviet troops need withdraw only to the Russian border, would balance mean withdrawing three Russians for every American, or three for two? NATO must also consider that its weakness in conventional forces is no longer made up by overwhelming U.S. nuclear superiority. While the Warsaw Pact nations have only a slight advantage in actual manpower in Northern and Central Europe--about 820,000 troops to some 750,000 for NATO--the Communists have a substantially greater mobilization and reinforcement capability.

Just as the first round of SALT was little more than a formal probing, so any early meetings on troop reductions will probably be concerned with working out a common vocabulary, or "dictionary," in the parlance of negotiators. Once that is done, the actual negotiations would have to encompass specific questions not only of manpower, but also weaponry, the balance of foreign and national forces and the scope of defense budgets. With luck, the first probings could begin this summer, preliminary negotiations by fall and perhaps substantive negotiations some time in 1972.

* Or MBFR. Unlike the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT, this makes for an absolutely unpronounceable acronym. Adding letters is no improvement: MUBAFORE? Nonsense. Obviously, the thing will have to be renamed. Dropping "Mutual" could yield BALFORE, which is not ideal but has a certain statesmanlike ring. Rearranging the words to make it "Balanced and Mutual," etc., could lead to BAM, for short. One could even start talking about a proposed Treaty on Troop Reductions, or TROT, for the headline writers.

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