A Farewell to Arms?

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Soviet diplomats frequently call at the State Department. Particularly since the Geneva summit, there has been a great deal of mid-level diplomacy. So there was no reason to expect anything out of the ordinary when Oleg Sokolov, the Soviet charge d'affaires in Washington, arrived early last Wednesday morning to see Secretary of State George Shultz. But when Sokolov handed him a lengthy letter from Mikhail Gorbachev to Ronald Reagan, Shultz became the first man in official Washington to be startled by a sweeping and unexpected new arms-control proposal. It was studded with ambiguities and potentially risky approaches, but it also set forth a bold schedule for making the world nuclear-free and left the Administration scrambling for a way to respond. One quick reading of the letter sent Shultz straight to the White House.

Some three hours later in Moscow, the proposal was presented to the world's public--the audience at which it was largely aimed--in typical Soviet fashion. The anchorman on the nightly newscast Vremya (Time), his face expressionless, picked up a sheaf of papers and announced, with no more emotion than he might have used to present a weather report, that he had a "statement by the General Secretary of the Communist Party." Then he droned on for half an hour as the news agency TASS distributed the statement around the world.

As many Soviet and American leaders had done before, Gorbachev called for total elimination of nuclear missiles, warheads, bombs and other weapons from the planet. But this was not presented as a vague goal for the future; he proposed a fairly detailed, three-stage timetable culminating at the end of the century. He also offered tantalizing hints about ways to break specific deadlocks. If his plan is adopted, Gorbachev grandly concluded, "by the end of 1999 there will be no nuclear weapons on earth."

Propaganda? Certainly, and very skillful propaganda too. Both its grand vision and many of its specifics are clearly designed to win Moscow public support in Western Europe and around the world while allow in to retain certain strategic advantages. The plan has a Grammsky-Rudsky appeal, decreeing a timetable for eliminating nuclear weapons the way the Gramm-Rudman Act has decreed a timetable for eliminating the U.S. budget deficit. As with Gramm-Rudman, the cuts proposed by Gorbachev seem to have an easy and automatic simplicity, but the plan ignores the hard and complex choices that will have to be made down the road to preserve the delicate nuclear balance. Indeed, the initial reductions in strategic weapons would tilt the balance dangerously in the Soviets' favor. In addition, the whole scheme appears to hang on a condition that Gorbachev knows Reagan resists: U.S. abandonment of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, whose goal is to develop a defensive shield against nuclear missiles.

But Gorbachev's plan also contains some surprising elements not readily dismissed. Its proposal for the removal of U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe is similar to the "zero option" offered by Reagan in 1981. Gorbachev also declared himself ready to accept "on-site inspection" as a means of verifying any agreements. Although it is by no means certain that Moscow will eventually agree to the type and number of inspections necessary to ensure that the Soviets cannot cheat, this represents a concession that Moscow had never made quite so explicitly before.

Gorbachev's proposals caught Washington totally by surprise. At the very moment that Shultz was relaying the Soviet leader's letter to Reagan in the Oval Office, other senior officials were telling journalists in the White House briefing room a few yards away that they expected no significant change in Moscow's negotiating positions until after the Soviet Communist Party Congress next month. The following day, Reagan told reporters, "We are very grateful for the offer." Inexplicably, he added, "It's just about the first time that anyone has ever proposed actually eliminating nuclear weapons"--forgetting not only his own statements identifying that as an ultimate goal but the many similar proposals stretching back over the past four decades (see box).

When Soviet and American bargainers met in Geneva on Thursday to kick off a new round in the arms-control talks that have been recessed since November, Soviet Chief Negotiator Victor Karpov primarily confined himself to a word-for-word repetition of Gorbachev's statement. American negotiators, headed by Max Kampelman, could coax only one elaboration. Asked if the proposal for a ban on Star Wars "development" would forbid research, a Soviet representative referred the Americans to Gorbachev's interview with TIME last August, in which the Kremlin leader said that fundamental research--a term maddeningly difficult to define--might be permitted.

Even more than most Soviet arms-control proposals, Gorbachev's plan is a tantalizing mixture of old and new, ambiguity and detail, apparent concessions and repeated demands. Its distinctive feature is its specific timetable. In the first stage, covering the next five to eight years, Washington and Moscow would agree to and begin a 50% reduction in nuclear weapons capable of striking each other's country. Each side would be limited to 6,000 remaining "nuclear charges" (warheads and bombs), only 3,600 of which could be placed on the long-range land-based missiles that are the backbone of the Soviet arsenal. Washington has also proposed a 50% cut; indeed, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed on one in principle at their November summit meeting. But the U.S. wants to confine the cuts to "strategic" weapons, primarily land-based intercontinental and submarine-launched missiles, while Gorbachev would include America's medium-range bombers based overseas that could hit the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev's first phase would also include an agreement for "elimination" of U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range missiles from the "European zone." At first glance that looks like Reagan's zero option: no U.S. missiles in Western Europe (the U.S. is deploying 108 Pershing II ballistic and 464 Tomahawk cruise missiles in five countries); no Soviet missiles targeted on Western Europe (Moscow has more than 250 mobile, triple-warhead SS-20s in place). Up until last week, the Soviets insisted on keeping enough SS-20s (roughly 140) to equal the number of missiles in the independent British and French nuclear forces. Gorbachev apparently dropped that demand, though on the condition that Britain and France agree not to "build up" their deterrents.

But Gorbachev left it unclear whether the SS-20s to be removed from Europe would be destroyed or simply shuttled into Soviet Asia. From there they could be quickly moved back into Europe during a crisis. In addition, London and Paris are unlikely to halt the scheduled modernization of their nuclear forces.

Another question is whether an agreement on intermediate-range missiles would be conditioned on U.S. renunciation of Star Wars. Negotiator Karpov told journalists in Geneva that elimination of so-called Euromissiles could be negotiated "without links to strategic or space weapons." But Gorbachev's statement asserted that large-scale reductions would be possible "only if the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. mutually renounce the development, testing and deployment of space strike weapons."

In the second stage of Gorbachev's program, which would begin by 1990 and last five to seven years, the U.S., the Soviet Union and "other" nuclear powers would make further reductions in intermediate-range missiles and carry out a phased elimination of battlefield nuclear weapons. The problems are obvious: agreement would be required not only from Britain and France but from China, the other known member of the "nuclear club" and a nation that has so far refused to join any nuclear negotiations. An even stickier problem is that the U.S. and its NATO allies depend on nuclear weapons to deter the Soviets from attacking or threatening Western Europe. The Warsaw Pact has a hefty superiority in ground troops and conventional weapons.

Gorbachev's third stage is the most visionary: starting no later than 1995, all nations would get rid of any remaining nuclear weapons and pledge never to build any more. "Mankind [could] approach the year 2000 under peaceful skies and with peaceful space, without fear of . . . annihilation."

Gorbachev also advanced a host of more immediate proposals. In tacit recognition of the link between battlefield nuclear weapons and conventional arms, he called for a speeding up of the negotiations on troop reductions in Europe that have been dragging on in Vienna for twelve years, and matched a Western concession made last December with one of his own on verification. He proposed an agreement on chemical weapons that moved beyond Moscow's previous willingness to destroy only existing stockpiles and called for dismantling production facilities as well. He also extended for three months a Soviet moratorium on weapons tests that began last August and was to have expired on Jan. 1, and he pledged to prolong it further if the U.S. should join. Washington insists it needs to test in order to catch up to Soviet advantages.

Gorbachev is obviously seeking to put Reagan on the defensive, which he has. The Soviet leader's proposal is deftly crafted to appeal immediately to many West Europeans who are anxious about nuclear missiles stationed on their soil or aimed at them. The President will now feel pressure to demonstrate progress toward a deal when the two meet in Washington for their second summit, possibly as early as June.

Gorbachev's initiative will make it ever more difficult for Reagan to put forth a public case for pursuing his Star Wars program. Said the Soviet leader: "Instead of wasting the next ten to 15 years by developing new weapons in space, allegedly designed to make nuclear arms useless, would it not be more sensible to eliminate those arms?" Reagan is caught in a public relations bind: it will be difficult for him to explain convincingly why he is prepared to scuttle a plan to rid the world of nuclear missiles by insisting on the right to build a defensive shield against those missiles. The Soviets are likely to confront Reagan with the somewhat illogical statement he made in his Oct. 31 interview with four Soviet journalists, in which he pledged to seek the elimination of nuclear missiles before deploying a defense against them.

The British, French and West German governments reacted to Gorbachev's proposals about the same way Washington did, expressing both cautious interest and wary skepticism. But one British diplomat ruefully asserted, "It is so simplistic. Good Guy Mikhail offers to get rid of all nuclear missiles while Ron the Hawk lumbers on with his antimissile system. It is going to be a difficult task to explain to public opinion that in the real world it is the small print that really matters, not the grandiose initiatives."

At the moment, Washington is stuck for an effective way to counter Gorbachev's grandiose initiative. Caught off guard, officials have only begun to ponder whether to make a new American propos al, and, if so, what to put in it. The debate is likely to be sharp; the Administration has long been deeply divided over arms control, and previous American proposals have emerged only after prolonged and sometimes heated pulling and hauling.

For now, the U.S. line is simply to insist that Soviet negotiators spell out all the small print in Gorbachev's proposals. So far as it goes, that is logical. For all its ambiguities and propagandistic sweep, the plan hints at enough concessions to spur serious negotiating. Only detailed probing at Geneva will determine how much is real and how much is propaganda, and there is room for healthy skepticism. But the heat will be on Washington--both for the sake of winning the battle for public opinion and, more important, for keeping alive the hope of a genuine arms-control breakthrough--to come up with a response as imaginative as Gorbachev's. In arms-control negotiations, skepticism is always necessary but rarely sufficient. --By George J. Church. Reported by James O. Jackson/Moscow and Johanna McGeary/Washington MOSCOW'S PROPOSALS BENEATH THE SURFACE INITIAL REDUCTIONS: Gorbachev repeated his 1985 plan to cut by 50% all Soviet and American nuclear arms that can hit the other country, this time making it part of a phased plan for total disarmament. Each side would be limited to 6,000 such warheads, only 3,600 of which could be based on land. Both sides agreed at the Geneva summit on the goal of '50% reductions, but the U.S. would apply it only to intercontinental weapons, whereas Moscow wants to include American intermediate-range weapons that could hit the U.S.S.R. from bases overseas. INTERMEDIATE-RANGE FORCES. Gorbachev put forward a new version of the old American zero option by proposing that both superpowers agree to eliminate their missiles in Europe. In an encouraging change, Moscow would not include British and French missiles at this stage, though it would forbid these from being upgraded with more warheads, as now planned. The U.S. wants assurances that the mobile Soviet SS-20s in Europe will be destroyed rather than merely moved over the Ural Mountains into Soviet Asia. And the Soviets do not address the SS-20s already in Asia. The U.S. wants the right to deploy at least some missiles in Europe. Besides, Britain and France might prove unwilling to curtail their missile modernization. STAR WARS: Gorbachev still made any reduction in nuclear weapons contingent on an end to the U.S.'s Strategic Defense Initiative, though some experts said he again left vague the question of research. By envisioning a world without nuclear missiles, Gorbachev undercuts Reagan's public case for a costly space-based defense against them. Though the Administration is already finding it awkward to counter this argument, Reagan remains "fully committed" to SDI. TEST BAN: Moscow extended its five-month ban on all nuclear testing by three months and again called for a permanent ban. The U.S. continues to reject a test ban, arguing that it trails Moscow in missile modernization. VERIFICATION: In a potentially significant shift, Moscow went further than ever in expressing willingness to allow on-site inspections. Although it is not clear just how far the Soviets would go in practice, this proposal might defuse one long standing obstacle, Washington's claim that the Soviets have cheated on treaties. OTHER NATIONS: In Stage 2, beginning by 1990, other nations would join in eliminating nuclear missiles and battlefield nuclear weapons. This would require Britain, France, China and others to agree to scrap their arsenals, and it would require NATO to rely solely on conventional arms, in which the U.S.S.R. has a big advantage, to deter a Soviet attack. FINAL GOAL: The third stage, beginning by 1995, calls for eliminating all remaining nuclear arms "by the end of 1999," the first time Moscow has set such a deadline. The U.S. has proclaimed since 1946 that it supports the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons. The question remains: Can the superpowers agree on how?

TIME Chart by Renee Klein

With reporting by James O. Jackson/Moscow, Johanna McGeary/Washington