Cold Winds and Heated Words

By Russ Hoyle

Antinuke protests begin, and the propaganda war intensifies

The first major confrontation promised to be unpleasant. White-helmeted riot police in armored cars faced more than 2,500 antimissile demonstrators outside a U.S. Army barracks near the North Sea port of Bremerhaven, West Germany. As the protesters attempted to blockade the American installation, police laid down oversize coils of barbed wire and erected barricades on access roads, sealing off a perimeter a mile from the base. At one point, a military vehicle was accosted by demonstrators who scrawled PIGS and NO WAR on its side. Some 250 activists were dragged away, and water cannons were turned on hundreds more. There were few injuries, however, and the formal beginning of Western Europe's "hot autumn" of antimissile protests was relatively peaceful. Not many Europeans were convinced that the antimissile campaign would stay that way.

Indeed, mounting anxieties over NATO'S plans to deploy Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe beginning in December took on a heightened urgency last week, especially in the nation scheduled to receive the bulk of the new firepower, West Germany. While organizers were putting the final touches on plans for coordinated demonstrations across Western Europe this week, Moscow was doing its best to turn up the diplomatic pressure on the government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Soviet spokesmen forcefully renewed threats to pull out of the Geneva arms talks and to begin an aggressive new round in the nuclear arms race if the NATO missiles are installed.

Last weekend Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko flew to Vienna to meet with his West German counterpart, Hans-Dietrich Genscher. There were reports that Gromyko asked Genscher to help arrange a summit between the superpowers to help avert a crisis over the missile deployment. The latest Soviet moves appeared to signal an increased willingness in Moscow to push its war of nerves with Washington over the missiles to the crisis point. Said a West European diplomat: "The Soviets are trying to scare the hell out of everyone."

The week's first saber rattle came in Hamburg, where Kremlin Spokesman Leonid Zamyatin issued the strongest warning yet that Moscow was prepared to pull out of both the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) negotiations and Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) in Geneva if the missiles are deployed. 'We do not want to take part in negotiations leading to a situation in which powerful new missiles and warheads will be stationed in Europe," declared Zamyatin, a close adviser to Soviet President Yuri Andropov and a member of the policy-setting Central Committee. Zamyatin was asked if he meant that deployment would end the Geneva negotiations. He replied, "You have understood me correctly."

Moscow appeared intent on conveying its warning to West Germans through the left wing of the opposition Social Democratic Party and through East German Leader Erich Honecker. After two days of meetings with officials in Moscow, Egon Bahr, a West German defense expert and prominent Social Democrat, declared that "negotiations in Geneva will lose their meaning the minute the first new missiles are deployed." Honecker, meanwhile, sent a letter to Chancellor Kohl warning him of a "new ice age" in relations between the two Germanys unless the Bonn government strives "to put a stop to the arms escalation."

Almost simultaneously, Warsaw Pact Commander Marshal Viktor Kulikov, speaking on the eve of a Soviet bloc foreign ministers' meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria, outlined the retaliatory measures Moscow is prepared to take in the event of deployment. Kulikov vowed that the Soviets would "deploy additional nuclear weapons to offset NATO'S growing nuclear might in Europe and we shall take corresponding countermeasures with regard to U.S. territory." It was another explicit warning that Moscow is prepared to introduce new missiles into Eastern Europe and mount new cruise-type missiles on refurbished submarines that could patrol U.S. coastal waters. Though Kulikov did not say so explicitly, Western analysts believe that the land-based missiles would probably be located in East Germany and Czechoslovakia.

None of the Soviet threats are entirely new, but rarely have they been so blunt Soviet diplomats in both Western Europe and the U.S. have warned for more than a year that Moscow was prepared to pull out of both sets of Geneva arms negotiations, perhaps permanently, if NATO went ahead with deployment. The reason: the Kremlin has taken the position that any new Western missiles would disrupt the nuclear balance that it insists already exists in Europe. A top Soviet official told TIME last spring that he expected suspension of the arms talks if there was no progress in Geneva, but refused to say how long such a walkout might last. Similarly, Western defense experts believe that the Soviets are developing a sea-launched cruise missile and are planning to replace older missiles in Eastern Europe with newer, short-range SS-21s, SS-22s and SS-23s.

The timing of the new barrage of threats was clearly calculated to heighten anxiety among West Germans just as the antimissile demonstrations heat up. In addition, Moscow was trying to place the blame for the stalled Geneva talks on the U.S. Says a Western diplomat: "They do not want to appear to bless any U.S. deployment before it takes place." Anticipating the Soviet tactic last week even before Zamyatin's remarks, U.S. officials publicly said that a Soviet walkout at Geneva might be imminent. The warning was an attempt to put the burden of responsibility for a breakdown in the talks squarely on the Kremlin.

In an apparent attempt to shift the blame for any failure in Geneva back to the U.S., the Warsaw Pact foreign ministers in Sofia issued a communique declaring that "if agreement is not reached by year's end, it is essential that the talks be continued." Despite the public posturing on both sides, U.S. and Soviet negotiating teams were scheduled to reconvene this week in Geneva.

With reporting by Gary Lee This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.