Moving Back To Square One

By Ed Magneson

Reagan and Andropov joust over arms control

The shadow of Flight 007 still darkens relations between the two superpowers, but last week both Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov shifted their attention to a matter of far more compelling urgency and long-run significance: the menace of nuclear weapons in Europe.

Despite the Soviet Union's egregious act of brutality in the Asian skies, the current session of talks on Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) got under way a scant five days after the 269 people aboard the Korean Air Lines jet were killed by Soviet missiles. With good reason: if Soviet and American negotiators do not reach agreement by the end of the year, the U.S. and NATO plan to counter the Soviet SS-20 missiles targeted at Western Europe with an equally formidable array of Pershing II and cruise missiles. And so far, discouragingly little progress has been made in the 22 months since the inception of the INF parleys.

While the shooting down of the aircraft had set back the Soviet Union's "peace offensive" in Europe, Reagan was still under pressure from NATO allies to show more flexibility in the INF talks. He ordered his arms-control negotiators to place a new offer on the table and planned to describe it in an address to the United Nations General Assembly early this week. In a visit to Voice of America headquarters, Reagan turned his usual Saturday radio broadcast into an unusual worldwide pitch for his arms-control proposals. His words were beamed into Asia, Europe and Africa and were to be translated into 42 languages.

Andropov, on the other hand, warned legislators in Bonn against the planned NATO missile deployment in West Germany, arguing, "You do not want the threat of war to emanate from the territory of your country, a war that would be a hell for the whole of mankind." Communist Party officials from Soviet-bloc nations were summoned to Moscow for a conference on ways to prevent the Pershing II and cruise deployment.

Tensions between the superpowers, at the same time, were mounting over the Middle East. With U.S. Marines still under fire from Druze rebels and Syrian guns in the hills above Beirut, American warships grew more active in supporting the Lebanese government's beleaguered forces (see WORLD). Both Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz accused the Soviets of being involved in Syria's largely successful attempts to frustrate international peace-keeping efforts in the faction-torn nation. Said a White House official: "We've seen a significantly increased likelihood of a U.S.-Soviet military confrontation in the Middle East. We are watching the situation carefully."

Friction over arms control, however, posed an even greater long-term threat to any improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations. The two rivals not only eyed each other across the INF bargaining table but were engaged in a stretch drive to win the support of uneasy Europeans, especially in West Germany. The first nine of a planned force of 108 Pershing II missiles are to be deployed in West Germany on a still undisclosed date in December. Peace groups have scheduled massive demonstrations against the deployment for Oct. 22 in Hamburg, Bonn, Stuttgart and West Berlin.

While the Administration would not provide full details on the new U.S. offer in the INF talks, arms-control sources describe it as a modified "walk-in-the-woods" proposal. That is a reference to the deal worked out by Negotiators Paul Nitze of the U.S. and Yuli Kvitsinsky of the U.S.S.R. during a stroll in the Jura Mountains near Geneva in July 1982. At that time the two agreed that each side could have 75 launchers in Europe. The Soviet force would be made up of three-warhead SS-20s, while the U.S. would deploy the same number of cruise launchers, each with four single-warhead missiles. The U.S. advantage in warheads (300 to 225) was intended to compensate for the inferiority of the subsonic, jet-powered cruise, which would take several hours to reach Soviet territory, compared with the SS-20 ballistic missiles, which fly at supersonic speeds.

This plan involved two key concessions. The Soviets would be required actually to destroy 168 of their 243 SS-20s aimed at European targets; otherwise these missiles could be redeployed in Asia, threatening China and Japan, or simply stashed east of the Ural Mountains and returned to their current sites in a crisis. The big U.S. concession was to forgo deployment of the single-warhead Pershing II, which is feared by the Soviets because, launched from West Germany, it could knock out their key command and communications centers in less than 20 minutes.

Nitze, who did not have clear authority to strike such a bargain, discovered that the Pentagon was sharply opposed to abandoning the Pershing II. Moscow also rejected the formula.

West European diplomats have been pressing Washington to revive the Nitze-Kvitsinsky proposals. Reagan, who stayed too long with his opening gambit--the so-called zero option, under which the U.S. would cancel its planned European deployment if the Soviets eliminated their entire arsenal of SS-20s--finally offered last March to accept "an equal level" of intermediate missiles "on a global basis." That would place Soviet SS-20s in Asia, as well as in Europe, under an overall limit. The U.S. did not suggest a specific ceiling, leaving that to the Soviets, who predictably refused to dignify the proposal with any numbers of their own. Andropov, meanwhile, offered to "liquidate" 81 SS-20s aimed at European targets, but insisted on keeping 162 of them, the precise number of missiles maintained by Britain, and France. The U.S. under Andropov's plan would have to cancel both its Pershing II and cruise deployments.

The newest U.S. proposal is a retreat from insistence that the mobile SS-20s in Asia be treated in exactly the same way as SS-20s in Europe under a so-called global ceiling. Now the U.S. is proposing "regional limitations" for Europe and Asia. In practice, that would mean the Soviets could keep more weapons in Asia. The U.S., in turn, would have the right to keep extra weapons of its own in reserve for quick transfer to Europe in a crisis. For the first time, the Administration reportedly is willing to accept some limitations on forward-based aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons, as long demanded by Soviet negotiators. This apparently would affect the American F-111 and Soviet Backfire bombers.

At least as revealed so far, the new Reagan proposal seems more a modification of his March offer than a revival of the walk-in-the-woods plan. The initial reaction by Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, Soviet Chief of Staff, was frosty. He charged that the Reagan Administration was "stubbornly trying to deploy its new Pershings and cruise missiles in Western Europe as the means for a nuclear first strike." TASS claimed that the whole plan "strongly smells of the old, odious pseudo-zero option." U.S. negotiators have placed the proposal formally on the table in Geneva.

While overshadowed by the imminent deadlines in the INF negotiations, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) are scheduled to resume next week in Geneva. These discussions seem equally stalemated, although Chief U.S. Negotiator Edward Rowny last week told editors of the Washington Post that a framework agreement could possibly be reached late this year. Other Washington arms-control experts could find no basis for Rowny's optimism.

Actually, not even Rowny is certain what proposals he will carry to the table in Geneva, since the Administration is still divided on its approach. The Pentagon is insisting that the throw-weight of Soviet intercontinental missiles must be curbed. The State Department wants to concentrate instead on reducing the number of Soviet missile launchers and warheads. The Soviets, on the other hand, are demanding crippling restrictions on long-range U.S. cruise missiles.

Even a breakthrough in Geneva might get a chilly reception on Capitol Hill, where anti-Soviet feeling is running high because of the downing of the Korean airliner. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted last week to oppose a resolution supporting a mutual, verifiable freeze on the production and deployment of nuclear weapons. The resolution had been passed by the House last May by a vote of 278 to 149. The Senate committee, divided along party lines, disapproved the resolution, 10 to 7. But instead of killing it outright, the committee sent it to the Senate floor with the recommendation that it be rejected.

The most surprising fallout from Flight 007 occurred after the Governors of New York and New Jersey took it upon themselves to make foreign policy. They announced that Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko could not land in his special Aeroflot plane at Newark or Kennedy international airports to attend the convening of the United Nations General Assembly. Although Gromyko could have touched down at a nearby U.S. military airport, as the State Department proposed, he chose to consider the ban an official insult and canceled his trip, thereby escaping the censure that would surely have been heaped on him at the U.N. for the jetliner calamity. While the ban did seem to violate a "host country" agreement that the U.S. could put "no impediment" in the way of diplomats traveling to attend U.N. functions, the State Department raised no objection.

When Soviet Delegate Igor Yakovlev spoke up early this week at the U.N. to complain about the flight restrictions, U.S. Delegate Charles Lichenstein, a former public-broadcasting official and ghost writer of Richard Nixon's Six Crises, got fed up. Sarcastically, he assured Yakovlev that Gromyko's plane could land at a U.S. military airfield, and that "we will not shoot it down, even if it should inadvertently stray from its flight path." Then Lichenstein tartly added: "Should the Soviet delegate or the representative of any other delegation feel that the United Nations should get out of the United States, my Government will put no impediment in your way. The members of the U.S. mission will be at dockside waving you a fond farewell as you set off into the sunset." His outburst touched off a lively debate about the future of the U.N. (see following story).

Clearly, the Soviet attack on the airliner had disrupted the normal diplomacy between the superpowers. Still, U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, a hard-liner on Soviet issues, saw no necessary long-term impact on U.S.-Soviet relations. "The shooting down by the Soviets was not a bilateral U.S.-Soviet issue," she contended. "It was not an East-West issue. There was very widespread shock in the world about it, but that is something that involves Soviet relations with a great many countries."

Perhaps so. The Administration's renewed concentration on arms control negotiations was prudent and timely. But the downing of Flight 007, with so many innocent civilians of so many nations blasted cold-bloodedly into the Sea of Japan, stirred highly personal feelings that seemed likely to persist. Not even the professional arms negotiators meeting across tables in Geneva, much less their superiors back home, could be totally immune to those emotions. -- By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Strobe Talbott/Washington, with other bureaus

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