A Hot Nuclear Exchange

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Reagan puts the ball in the Soviet court--and Gromyko bangs it back

The first salvo from Washington prompted an unprecedented counterblow from Moscow, which in turn triggered a second strike from the U.S. Fortunately, this intercontinental escalation involved only words about nuclear missiles--in fact, competing proposals for getting rid of them. But the public relations battle, essentially for the mind of Western Europe, could not have been more serious.

Ronald Reagan made the first use of a high-tech propaganda weapon: international television. As cameras hummed in the East Room of the White House, projecting his image not only across the country but also by satellite to Europe, he announced on Wednesday morning that the U.S. is now prepared to negotiate an "interim solution" to the problem of medium-range nuclear-tipped missiles in Europe. If the Soviets would dismantle a significant number of their 351 modern, triple-warhead SS-20s, Washington would reduce the number of American missiles, capable of hitting the U.S.S.R., that it is scheduled to station in Western Europe beginning in December. Instead of deploying the 572 single-warhead Pershing II and cruise missiles now planned, the U.S. would install only enough to match the Soviets warhead for remaining warhead.

Previously, U.S. negotiators at the intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) talks in Geneva had stressed the zero option: if the Soviet Union scrapped all its medium-range missiles, the U.S. would deploy no missiles at all in Europe. But, said the President, in 16 months of negotiations it has become obvious that the Soviets will not agree to that plan. Thus the U.S. was willing to accept a less ambitious solution on the missiles. Said Reagan: "It would be better to have none than to have some. But if there must be some, it is better to have few than to have many."

The President had no illusion that Moscow would embrace this idea or even bargain seriously about it for many months. His real purpose was to prevent a potentially disastrous split between the U.S. and its NATO allies. Under pressure from a noisy antinuclear movement that regards the installation of American missiles as a dangerous escalation of the arms race (conveniently overlooking the fact that the Soviets are installing new SS-20s at the rate of one a week), West European governments have been pleading with Washington to show more flexibility in the Geneva talks. Initial government and press reaction indicated that Reagan had told Western Europe what it most wanted to hear. Said a front-page headline in the influential Paris daily Le Monde: WASHINGTON SCORES A POINT.

The point obviously struck home in Moscow too, provoking the Kremlin into an all-out propaganda counterattack. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko called a televised press conference to reply to Reagan. That in itself underscored the urgency felt by the Soviets: in 26 years in his job, Gromyko had given only a handful of news conferences in Moscow, and this was the first broadcast outside the U.S.S.R. The two-hour session was beamed live to the U.S. starting at 2 a.m. Saturday, Eastern time (see box). Gromyko's aim was obviously to keep European nuclear fears high by quashing any hope that Reagan's initiative could lead to a breakthrough in the Geneva INF talks.

Thus the Soviet Foreign Minister described elements of Reagan's plan as "absurd," and said that if the U.S. sticks to it, "there is no chance of an agreement." Moreover, he grumbled darkly that if the U.S. goes through with the deployment of the Pershing IIs and cruises, "then the Soviet Union--there can be no doubt--will take the necessary measures in order to defend its legitimate interests." Gromyko did not amplify, but other Soviet leaders have hinted that the U.S.S.R. may station medium-range missiles close to the U.S., possibly on submarines off American shores.

Gromyko assailed the U.S. negotiating position on three specific points. First, he noted, the President demands that the 162 British and French nuclear missiles be left out of any calculations on how many warheads would be permitted on each side under an interim agreement. Also, he said, Reagan's proposal "does not take into account hundreds and hundreds of U.S. nuclear-delivery aircraft based in Western Europe and on aircraft carriers." Finally, he objected strenuously to Reagan's demand that any reduction of missile totals be "global," which means that it must apply to 108 SS-20s now stationed in the Asian part of the Soviet Union and presumably targeted on China and Japan. These missiles "have nothing to do with Europe," said Gromyko, and American insistence on this demand "precludes the possibility of an agreement."

Gromyko's statement was by no means a surprise. As he noted, wryly and accurately, "We do not believe that Washington counted on any other reaction on our part." But unwilling to let the Soviets monopolize European attention even for 24 hours, the U.S. State Department began composing a point-by-point rebuttal as telex machines were still chattering out the transcript of Gromyko's press conference. Spokesman Alan Romberg handed out the official American response at midday Saturday, in time for it to share evening TV news programs in Western Europe with tapes of the Soviet Foreign Minister's performance.

British and French missiles should be left out of Geneva bargaining, the statement asserted, because "these forces are national strategic deterrents designed to defend France and Britain," not the other West European countries menaced by the SS-20s. "To include aircraft [in the missile bargaining], as Mr. Gromyko suggests, would divert attention from the most threatening and destabilizing systems and complicate the negotiations." And SS-20s stationed in Asia must be included because these highly mobile missiles could easily be shifted westward and retargeted on Western Europe in a crisis. The statement concluded: "The Soviet Union owes the world a more positive response."

No one expects any such response soon. The Geneva talks recessed last week and will not resume until May 17; the intervening six weeks will probably be devoted to scoring propaganda points. Even when the bargainers return to Geneva, it is unlikely that a specific American proposal will be on the table. Reagan last week decided against spelling out what number of warheads on each side the U.S. might accept, and instead challenged the Soviets to say, "To what equal level will you reduce?" The only Soviet offer so far has been to reduce the SS-20 force--in Europe, not Asia--to 162 missiles, matching the British and French arsenal, if the U.S. cancels its European missile deployment completely. Both the U.S. and its European allies call this proposal "zero on one side."

American officials readily concede that if they cannot prompt a new Soviet proposal, U.S. Negotiator Paul Nitze will have to fill in some numbers on warhead limits to keep the talks from completely stalling. But the almost universal expectation is that the Soviets will not seriously negotiate until just before the U.S. missiles begin going into Western Europe and perhaps not until after deployment has actually started. The reason: the Kremlin must first be convinced that demonstrations by the European antinuclear movement will not be strong enough to block the installation of the U.S. missiles. In other words, Moscow is hoping for a different sort of zero-zero outcome: no American missiles, no concessions from the U.S.S.R.

That depressing prospect made it incumbent on the U.S. to take a new line in the Geneva talks. The allies strongly made the case for an interim solution to Vice President George Bush when Reagan sent him to Europe in February to sound out opinion, and Bush argued it with equal vigor at the White House when he returned. The Administration then decided to wait until after the West German elections of March 6. Once those elections had confirmed in power the pro-American government of Christian Democratic Chancellor Helmut Kohl, an interagency group under Deputy Secretary of State Kenneth Dam started intensive planning of a revised American position.

The Europeans were closely consulted at every step. Reagan exchanged letters with the heads of government in all five of the countries that are scheduled to accept U.S. missiles (Britain, West Germany, Italy, Belgium and The Netherlands), and is said to have talked by telephone with Kohl and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. These consultations were so fruitful that when the President announced his decision last week, the British, German and Italian governments all claimed partial credit for prompting it. Said one British official: "It was a model exercise of how these things should be done."

Within the U.S. Government, all factions quickly agreed that the Administration could not simply stand pat on the zero option. But the Pentagon tried to stay as close to it as possible, while the State Department sought to move away from it. The dispute came to a head at a secret meeting of the National Security Council on March 18. Pentagon representatives argued that Reagan should propose limits on warheads only if the Soviets agreed, as a precondition, to eliminate them entirely eventually. The State Department not only opposed that idea but argued for a specific proposal limiting warheads to 300 on each side (an idea approved by the Europeans), to be made immediately.

Largely at the urging of National Security Adviser William Clark, Reagan, as he does so often, settled on a kind of minimal compromise: he rejected both ideas. He would retain the zero option only as an ultimate goal, not a condition for any agreement. And he would make the offer general rather than specific. Reagan provided some clues to his thinking in a speech late last week to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. In remarks that were directed specifically against nuclear-freeze proposals, but that also seemed applicable to the INF bargaining, he asserted, "If one side seems too eager or desperate, the other side has no reason to offer a compromise and every reason to hold back, expecting that the more eager side will cave in first."

Reagan's advisers agreed that an announcement should be made before the Easter weekend in the hope that it would take some of the steam out of antinuclear demonstrations scheduled in Britain and West Germany over the holiday. (That hope was not entirely fulfilled: some 50,000 to 100,000 demonstrators linked arms on Friday to form a human chain around Greenham Common Air Base, a British facility where cruise missiles are to be installed.) Reagan first proposed to break the news in his Los Angeles speech last Thursday. But diplomats pointed out that if he did so, he would not catch the attention of many European newspaper readers on Good Friday.

So Reagan called ambassadors from the NATO countries into the White House on Wednesday morning for a 15-minute briefing and immediately afterward delivered his televised speech from the East Room. In it, he sought to depict the Soviets as the intransigent party and the U.S. as the flexible one. The failure of the Soviets to make a "serious" counterproposal to the U.S. zero-option plan, he said, "is a source of deep disappointment to all of us who have wished that these weapons might be eliminated ... But I do not intend to let this shadow that has been cast over the Geneva negotiations further darken our search for peace ... If the Soviets will not now agree to the total elimination of these weapons, I hope that they will at least join us in an interim agreement." In Los Angeles the next day, Reagan pledged that "my goal--and I consider it a sacred trust--will be to make progress toward arms reductions in every one of the several negotiations now under way ... To the leaders and people of the Soviet Union, I say: Join us on the path to a more peaceful, secure world."

As always with Reagan, it was effective theater. And in this case it was more relevant than usual. The U.S. has no hope of installing missiles in Western Europe to counter the Soviet SS-20s, or of negotiating limits on them, without the united support of its allies. And to hold that support, Reagan must appeal to European opinion against the efforts of Soviet leaders, who, as Gromyko proved last week, are consummate public relations artists themselves.

--By George J. Church.

Reported by Douglas Brew with Reagan and Strobe Talbott/Washington

With reporting by Douglas Brew, Reagan, Strobe Talbott/Washington This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.