Escalating the Propaganda War

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

In agreeing to an interview with TIME, Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev was obviously hoping to have his words read and analyzed around the world. As it turned out, his well-informed if one-sided comments made the desired splash. In the U.S., the interview and a subsequent meeting with a group of visiting Senators got such heavy TV play that a State Department official grumbled about "Gorbachev getting more camera time than Brooke Shields." In Western Europe, France's respected Le Monde front-paged the interview, while the Milan daily Corriere della Sera, generally considered to be the most influential newspaper in Italy, gave it Page One play for two days in a row.

American officials were apprehensive that Gorbachev had raised "the level of expectations for the summit" by dangling hints of a sharp reduction in nuclear weapons only if the U.S. would stop development of its Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), commonly known as Star Wars. White House Spokesman Larry Speakes tried to downplay any idea of substantive arms-control bargaining at the summit. Said Speakes: "The important thing is to get to this meeting, to have the two men look each other over, size each other up, lay out their views on these various topics and then be able to set an agenda ) to deal with these in the future." Speakes gamely asserted that "we are pleased that Mr. Gorbachev was able to present his views to the American public." Now, he said, Moscow should give President Reagan "a comparable opportunity to express his views to the Soviet people" by arranging to have him and Gorbachev appear on television in each other's countries.

Moscow let this offer pass, while barely containing its glee over Gorbachev's urbane performance. The main Soviet evening TV news program, Vremya, devoted a full hour to reading the interview text, while TASS, the official news agency, rounded up favorable comments from as far away as Zimbabwe. The U.S.S.R.'s state publishing house put on sale, at ten kopecks (12 cents) each, 200,000 copies of a 30-page booklet containing the text of the interview as compiled --and slightly censored--by TASS. The agency deleted a joking allusion to an aged Soviet Finance Minister and a glancing mention of Nikita Khrushchev, who apparently is still a nonperson in the U.S.S.R. Most striking, TASS changed a Gorbachev reference to "God on high" to "honestly . . ."

The censorship did not go unnoticed. TASS PURGES GOD jeered a headline in the Milan daily Il Giornale. But otherwise the reaction in Western Europe, a prime target of Gorbachev's comments, was both impressed and worried. A common opinion among political analysts there was that "the charm offensive of Gorbachev," as the Paris daily Le Matin called it, might succeed in putting Reagan on the defensive at their November meeting in Geneva. The Bonn daily General-Anzeiger noted the "knowledge of details" that Gorbachev had demonstrated in the interview and added delicately that Reagan "is not known for having on hand in ample measure all the time the political facts that the leader of a great power needs." Summed up Le Monde: "The American 'Great Communicator' has met his public relations match."

Gorbachev continued his propaganda blitz with some carrot-and-stick diplomacy. He dangled the carrot in front of eight American Senators, led by West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, who called on him in the Kremlin. Gorbachev, said Byrd, promised that if the U.S. "would agree to prohibit the militarization of space," in other words call a halt to Star Wars, Moscow would "put on the negotiating table . . . the very next day" a set of the "most radical proposals" to reduce offensive nuclear weapons.

Moscow brandished its stick 24 hours later. TASS portentously declared itself "authorized to state" that if the U.S. goes forward with an impending test of an advanced antisatellite (ASAT) weapon, which Gorbachev considers a potential component of a Star Wars defense, "the Soviet Union will consider itself free" not just to test but to deploy its own ASAT. The stick, however, was not especially menacing. The State Department pronounced the Soviet threat to have "little practical meaning" since the Soviet ASAT is already operational; in any event, American experts consider it crude and slow. The Pentagon announced that it would proceed with its ASAT test, reportedly this Friday.

For all the propaganda, Gorbachev did appear to open one possibly fruitful avenue for negotiation. In the TIME interview, he drew a distinction between "fundamental" or laboratory research into Star Wars weaponry, which he conceded "will continue" because there would be no way to verify a halt, and the building of "models or mock-ups or test samples," which could be stopped by a verifiable agreement. Byrd found this a welcome contrast to the previous "stonewalling" of Soviet negotiators, who had insisted that SDI research of any kind must cease as the prelude to an arms-control deal. It could point toward the kind of trade suggested by such American conservatives as former President Richard Nixon and Columnist William Safire: limitations on the deployment and, perhaps, testing of defensive systems, though not on research, in return for cuts in the numbers of missiles and warheads. Although Reagan has ruled out using SDI as a bargaining chip, such a deal has an ap-pealing logic: it was the Soviet offensive buildup, after all, that prompted Star Wars in the first place.

Logical or not, a bargain along these lines would be exceedingly difficult to negotiate. The line between research and testing is by no means clear. The U.S. regards all 15 tests of SDI weaponry it has scheduled for the next few years as a kind of research program, to see if any of the technologies involved look feasible, rather than as developmental testing of deployable weapons. Even so, William Hyland, editor of Foreign Affairs, voiced the hope that Gorbachev's hint about accepting some research was a "beginning" and an "invitation to negotiation." Hyland's advice: when arms-control talks resume in Geneva next week, Chief U.S. Negotiator Max Kampelman should "take (Soviet Delegation Chief Victor) Karpov aside and say he is intrigued and wants to know more about it."

With reporting by David Aikman/Washington and James O. Jackson/Moscow