The Neutron Bomb Furor

A mishandled power play produces international confusion

"What is going on?" asked a bewildered official in the West German Chancellery last week. "Has Jimmy Carter decided or hasn't he?" Sighed a high-ranking West German diplomat: "Carter's unpredictability makes any thing possible." In Paris, the left-leaning daily Le Monde observed in an editorial: "Rarely has American confusion and emptiness been so deep." At NATO headquarters in Brussels officials shook their heads incredulously and hoped that the President would explain his seeming reversal of U.S. policy.

There was similar consternation in Washington, from the Pentagon and State Department to Capitol Hill. "Another in a long line of Carter mistakes," declared Senate Republican Leader Howard Baker Jr. of Tennessee. Said Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, a friend of Carter's and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee: "I'm dismayed and puzzled. I don't understand. They're not on a very clear course."

This transatlantic furor was set off last week by an incorrect front page report in the New York Times that Jimmy Carter had decided against production of the neutron bomb. For months U.S. diplomats had been trying to win NATO nations' support for the bomb on the ground that its lethal radiation would offset the Soviet Union's 3-to-l superiority in tanks in Central Europe. Now Carter seemed to have changed his mind despite the recommendations of his chief advisers on defense and diplomacy. All week long U.S. officials kept denying the Times report, insisting that it was all a misunderstanding, that no firm decision had been made.

On Friday, finally, after a NATO Council meeting in Brussels, Carter publicly announced that he was not scrapping the bomb--but not putting it into production either. Instead, he postponed his final decision on full-scale production. At the very least, the President was keeping open his options while determining not only what effect the deployment of the bomb would have but also what the Soviets might give up in exchange for cancellation of the weapon. Nonetheless, the uproar, and Jimmy Carter's response to it, raised unsettling questions about the way he makes important decisions and conducts foreign policy. Conceded Defense Secretary Harold Brown: "We could have handled it better."

At issue is a 1-kiloton nuclear bomb* that can be delivered to battlefield targets by 20-ft. Lance missiles, with a range of 75 miles, or by 8-in. howitzer shells, which can be fired about 13 miles. The weapon gets its name from the fact that on detonation it releases enormous quantities of radioactive neutrons that kill people without destroying buildings. According to proponents, the bomb could break up a Soviet tank attack without destroying buildings outside the battle zone. Moreover, since most neutron radiation dissipates in seconds, NATO troops could move in quickly to secure the battlefield; the radiation from conventional nuclear weapons would remain hazardous much longer. If built, the neutron bomb would replace many of NATO's 7,000 tactical nuclear warheads, which generally range in size from 10 to 50 kilotons, and are stored mostly in West Germany, the front line of the West's defense. Total estimated cost of the ten-year replacement program: from $2 billion to $4 billion.

Most NATO admirals and generals back the neutron bomb because of its advantages over existing tactical warheads, but their civilian leaders have reacted more coolly, and some military men also voice dissent. British Admiral of the Fleet Sir Peter Hill-Norton dismisses the neutron bomb as "sexy for the media [but] a new dimension of warfare that we do not want to go into." The Dutch are attempting to keep the bomb out of the NATO arsenal and Christian Democratic Leader Willem Aantjes declared last week that the false report of Carter's decision was "extremely good news" because "the introduction of new weapons has only resulted in the intensification of the arms race." The French, who twelve years ago withdrew from the command structure of NATO, say they would refuse to allow the bomb on their territory and look on it as a problem that mainly concerns Washington and Bonn. The West Germans, however, have been doing their best to evade the issue.

The reason for the caution: an emotional debate over the bomb that has gone on for months on both sides of the Atlantic. Opponents maintain that the weapon is immoral because it destroys people but not property; the argument, of course, overlooks the fact that existing tactical nuclear warheads are also intended to kill people. More to the point, opponents believe that the neutron bomb's limited blast and short-lived radiation would invite its use in a crisis, thus increasing the danger of a conventional conflict escalating into a nuclear holocaust. But, as supporters note, NATO is a defensive alliance and the neutron bombs would only be used on allied territory to beat back a Soviet attack. Soviet propagandists have played artfully on the debate. In Pravda, for instance, President Leonid Brezhnev called the bomb "an inhuman weapon." But in the same article he warned that the Soviets might proceed with their own neutron bomb if the U.S. goes ahead with production. In fact, the Soviets are indeed working on their own version of the weapon.

Nowhere has the neutron bomb debate been fiercer than in West Germany, where relations with the U.S. are already strained because of differences over economic policy, German nuclear energy policy and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's personal dislike of Carter. For months Schmidt has privately told the U.S. that his government backs the bomb and would allow it to be deployed on West German territory. But he has refused to make the commitment public. In this way, he hoped to appease his Social Democratic Party's antibomb left wing, which has the power to split Schmidt's ten-vote majority in the Bundestag. Party Secretary General Egon Bahr has denounced the neutron bomb as "a symbol of mental perversion." The phrase quickly caught on with many West Germans, even though most of them accept the larger tactical nukes already stored on their soil. To escape his domestic political dilemma, Schmidt has insisted that production of the neutron bomb was "solely an American decision." If the bomb is produced, he wants the U.S. to use it as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Soviets to reduce tank forces in Europe and to limit their new SS-20 mobile missile, which has a range of more than 2,200 miles and carries three independently targeted nuclear warheads. Only if these efforts fail does Schmidt want to announce that the bombs can be installed in West Germany.

Schmidt's waffling annoyed the White House, which regards the bomb as no bargaining chip at all unless Bonn publicly accepts it. Said a top White House official: "Those warheads aren't worth a damn if they're stored in the basement of the Pentagon."

Ever since last November, when Carter told the NATO allies that he needed their backing before going ahead with the neutron bomb, U.S. officials have been trying to win that support. At a meeting with key defense and diplomatic aides last month, Carter was told that the U.S. had received "very little" in the way of assurances. "The President simply said that wasn't adequate," reported one participant in the meeting. To force Schmidt's hand, Carter dispatched Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Bonn to warn that the bomb might be scrapped unless West Germany publicly agreed to base it on German territory. The news shocked Bonn, which responded by advancing the date of a scheduled trip to Washington by Minister for Foreign Affairs Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

The German minister met last week with Carter, Defense Secretary Brown, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to assure them that Bonn really did back the bomb and its deployment on West German soil. He even said publicly: "We feel that this should be produced." But he stopped short of saying that the bomb could be based in West Germany. A German official described the talks as "correct and businesslike"--diplomatic code words meaning a tough discussion. Still, said a high-level White House aide, "at least we now have a basis for making a decision."

While all this was happening, the New York Times reported Carter's cancellation threat as if it were a completed decision. White House officials believe that the account was based on a leaked cable from the State Department to Christopher in Bonn.

TIME has learned that after Christopher received oral instructions from Carter at the White House on March 27, one of his aides asked the State Department's Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs to draft a memo setting forth background "talking points" for his confrontation with Schmidt. The memo was to be cabled to the U.S. Embassy in Bonn, where Christopher planned to arrive on March 30 after a trip to Turkey. But the author of the memo, whose identity was not disclosed, either misunderstood his instructions or deliberately drafted a cable that a State Department official described as "a lot sharper and starker" than Carter's instructions to Christopher. It gave the erroneous impression that the President had made a final decision against the bomb.

When Christopher read the cable in Bonn, he realized that it exceeded Carter's orders. In his conversations with Schmidt and Genscher, Christopher stuck to his oral instructions and advised them only that Carter was "leaning against" the bomb unless Bonn publicly agreed to it on West German territory. But the cable nonetheless did its political damage. Said a presidential aide: "The cable went from State on an FYI basis to just about all the embassies in Europe. Between 500 and 1,000 people must have seen it, and one of them leaked it."

At week's end, the State Department was still trying to find out who had done so, and why, since leaks of both false and true information often have some partisan purpose. Said one Carter adviser: "It either came from someone who was trying to force us into a certain decision, or from someone who was trying to hurt us in the Senate on SALT." Indeed, some Senators who oppose SALT would probably welcome a public showdown on the bomb because the reaction in NATO would make it more difficult for the Administration to win ratification of a new SALT treaty. Sam Nunn and Democrat Scoop Jackson of Washington warned that if Carter rejected the bomb, they might vote against the Panama Canal treaty, thus probably causing its defeat. Said Nevada Republican Senator Paul Laxalt, a leader of the Senate's antitreaty faction: "He's pulling the pin on these guys."

The Administration's efforts to deny the Times report proved ineffective. Complained a top presidential aide: "I suppose it's in the nature of the presidency that we have to take responsibility for an inaccurate leak." Nonetheless, as TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott observes: "Christopher's mission to Bonn was a risky way for one ally to deal with another, and particularly for Washington to deal with Bonn. Given all the tensions of the past year, the Germans were sure to look on the tactic as diplomatic blackmail." Officials in Bonn could hardly be proud of their dilatory and evasive tactics in dealing with the bomb.

While the White House was suffering from severe political and diplomatic radiation burns, Carter sounded out congressional leaders and consulted again with his advisers. Brown, Brzezinski and Vance favored production of the bomb, but they urged a two-year delay on deploying it while the Administration sounded out Moscow on trading it for limits on Russia's SS-20 missile.

But a decision is not made in the Carter Administration until the President makes up his mind in private. On occasion he does not follow the advice of even his most senior assistants, as he showed when he made his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea. This time Carter went partly along with his advisers' recommendations. He postponed production of the bomb but gave a go-ahead for work on the Lance missile and artillery shell that will deliver it.

What happens next depends mostly on Bonn and Moscow. Carter has flatly ruled out producing the bomb until West Germany agrees publicly to let the weapon be installed on its territory. Because of the bomb's importance to West Germany's defense, Bonn is expected to come around eventually. At the same time, according to a White House adviser, the decision "puts the monkey back on the Russians' back. Now we are giving them a chance to give us something real. If they do nothing, we'll end up with neutron warheads in Germany."

* Linguistic purists in the Pentagon insist that the neutron bomb is a warhead and not a bomb at all, but many military experts classify shells, warheads and other explosive weapons that come down on the enemy from the air as bombs. The word derives from the Greek bombos, meaning a deep hollow sound. In the earliest known use of the word in English, an anonymous translator of a Spanish treatise described in 1588 how the Chinese used "many bomes of fire, full of olde iron and arrowes made with powder & fire worke, with the which they do much harme and destroy their enimies."

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