NATO: The Bargaining Begins

ONLY a few hours before the 15 NATO foreign ministers met in Lisbon last week, a powerful bomb exploded at the city's central telephone and telegraph office, severing communications with the outside world. Later, three more bombs, presumably planted by left-wing terrorists to embarrass the government, went off in the Portuguese capital. The blasts in no way distracted the NATO ministers from an urgent and potentially historic task. That was to formulate a reply to Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, who late last month called on NATO to "taste the wine" of Russian intentions on force reductions in Central Europe.

After two days of consultation and debate in the restored 19th century Palacio da Ajuda overlooking the estuary of the Tagus River, the NATO ministers settled upon an answer. With the notable exception of France, which still refuses to cooperate in NATO's military activities, the 14 remaining ministers agreed to consider test-tasting the Kremlin vintage. The ministers, who first proposed the Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) during their 1968 Reykjavik meeting, set up a two-step exploratory phase:

STEP 1: NATO members will individually probe Warsaw Pact countries about their concepts and intentions in regard to troop reductions.

STEP 2: If the soundings are encouraging, NATO deputy foreign ministers will meet in Brussels as early as autumn to draw up a joint NATO negotiating position. NATO representatives will then be chosen to probe further into Warsaw Pact reactions to the NATO proposals. If there appears to be a possibility for success, NATO would then invite the Communist countries to a full-dress conference, possibly in Copenhagen, that would start the bargaining process for a scale-down of the huge concentration of men and weaponry that is squared off and combat-ready in the heart of Europe (see map).

The troop-reduction talks would be the conventional-arms equivalent of the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. But they would be even more complicated. For all its complexity, SALT involves only two nations and deals with relatively few types of weapons, notably intercontinental ballistic missiles, sub-launched missiles, plane-borne H-bombs and anti-ballistic missiles. By contrast, troop reductions could directly affect as many as 20 nations and would deal with a welter of men, weapons, firepower and geographical considerations.

"Fool's Bargain." NATO insists that any force reductions must be reciprocal, phased and balanced. Yet it will be extremely difficult for rival blocs to agree upon the calculus by which both sides could scale down without upsetting the present precarious balance of military power in Central Europe.

The most difficult factor is the geographical reality that while U.S. troops would withdraw 3,000 miles across an ocean, the Russians have only to pull back a few hundred miles to their border areas, where 400,000 Soviet soldiers in European Russia are already stationed in combat-ready divisions. The geographical inequity leads French Minister Maurice Schumann, who on Gaullist grounds is bound to oppose bloc-to-bloc negotiations anyway, to consider MBFR a "marche de dupe" (fool's bargain) and a lot of "hot air." His reasoning: the West would never accept a symmetrical 1-to-l ratio of reduction, while the Russians would laugh themselves sick if the West proposed an asymmetrical, perhaps 5-to-1 drawdown.

Other NATO members have different worries about force reductions. The Portuguese, Greeks and Turks, who are especially sensitive to growing Soviet seapower, suspect some devious plot behind Brezhnev's invitation. Most nervous of all are the West Germans, who fret that the East Germans would be represented as an equal and independent bargaining agent in the troop-reductions conference. They would thus gain international recognition without having to agree to an accommodation on Berlin, particularly as concerns free access routes to West Germany.

Soviet Risk. Nonetheless, the Nixon Administration feels that if it does not press the Soviets for mutual troop drawdowns in Europe, it might lose the next time Senator Mike Mansfield submits his bill for drastic cuts in U.S. military strength in Europe. Consequently, Secretary of State William Rogers persuaded his ministerial colleagues to treat Berlin and troop reductions as separate issues. The NATO ministers reiterated their determination not to accept the Soviet invitation to a broader conference on European security and cooperation until there is a successful outcome in the Berlin talks.

In a sense, however, the force-reduction issue is as nearly accurate a reflection of Soviet intentions as a Berlin settlement would be. Soviet troops in Eastern Europe perform the dual role of providing a forward defense for the Soviet homeland and enforcing political loyalty to Moscow. Each period of even the slightest relaxation in Eastern Europe has produced demands for more freedoms, which led in turn to renewed repression. Even a small scale-down of the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe would almost certainly kindle nationalistic hopes for greater sovereignty and freedom of action among the peoples of Eastern Europe. The initial Russian reaction to the Lisbon meeting was negative. Tass. the official Soviet news agency, complained that the NATO reply to Brezhnev's invitation was not sufficiently concrete. Still, the question that remains to be answered is whether over the coming months the Kremlin's desire for detente with the West will outweigh the fear of new threats to its own power in Eastern Europe.

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