The Elusive Quest

Even before there was a nuclear arms race, there were visionary plans afoot to end it. In 1946, while the U.S. still had a monopoly on the revolutionary new weapons, Washington proposed creating an international agency that would take control of all nuclear weapons and material, after which the U.S. would relinquish its arsenal. "We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead," declared former Wall Street Financier Bernard Baruch in presenting the plan to the fledgling United Nations. Moscow's Ambassador, a youthful Andrei Gromyko, put forth a Soviet counterproposal: a ban on the construction of atomic weapons and the destruction of the U.S. arsenal, with no provisions for inspection or enforcement. The cold war was just getting under way, and no compromise was reached. Three years later the Soviets successfully tested a bomb of their own.

Through the years, both nations have often proclaimed their fealty to a world without nuclear weapons and occasionally presented vague plans with phrases like those used by Gorbachev last week. In 1952 Benjamin Cohen, the American delegate to the U.N. Disarmament Commission, offered a set of guidelines that included "the dead" of all instruments adaptable to mass destruction." Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 declared Moscow's support for "general and complete disarmament." The phrase became a staple of Soviet pronouncements and a regular item on the U.N. agenda, though the U.S. and U.S.S.R. have never quite been able to agree on what it means, much less how to achieve it.

Ronald Reagan came into office proclaiming that his goal would be significant reductions rather than merely limits on nuclear weapons, as his predecessors had attempted through the SALT process. (Carter had proposed the same idea in 1977, but backed away when the Soviets balked.) Moscow walked out on the negotiations in late 1983 in reaction to the U.S. deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe, but spurred by the desire to prevent Reagan from proceeding with his Strategic Defense Initiative, it returned to Geneva early last year to open a new round of negotiations.

During Reagan's term, both sides have shown a propensity for publicly unveiling sweeping new proposals on the eve of important talks, partly as propaganda. Gorbachev's latest gambit follows in this vein. It also follows in the thus far fruitless tradition of proclaiming the goal of total nuclear disarmament. But the goal is no less worthy than when Baruch spoke of the choice facing the world at the dawn of the atomic age 40 years ago.