No Sudden Cloudbursts

Gromyko's View on SALT

Trials? What trials?" said Soviet I Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, cupping his ear as if he did not understand the reporter's question. "I don't want to speak of these things." His American counterpart, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, when asked about the effect the trials of two Soviet dissidents would have on the scheduled Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, was more direct. Without even cupping an ear, he strode away quickly to a waiting car.

Vance knew that his two days of bargaining with Gromyko in Geneva would be sensitive. He had brought with him a message from President Carter to Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev expressing concern about the dissidents' trials. He also had a symbolic appointment to meet Avital Shcharansky, to emphasize American sympathy for her husband, Anatoli Shcharansky. But Vance vowed as before not to link the new Soviet-American controversy with the arms negotiations. When several Senators publicly urged him to postpone his trip, an unusually tense Vance replied: "The imperatives to go to Geneva now are that we are dealing with negotiations that affect the national security of our nation and the well-being of the world." There was, however, no sharing of meals or social mixing with the Soviets in Geneva last week. The atmosphere between the countries was too strained to permit the clinking of champagne glasses or the exchange of vodka toasts.

On Vance's past trips to Moscow, he noted that his hosts performed a little power ploy: they seated him facing the sun. So when the Soviet delegation-including Gromyko, Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin and Veteran Interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev--arrived at the eighth-floor conference room of the U.S. SALT delegation office last Wednesday morning, Vance responded in kind. He guided the Russians to the side of the 25-ft.-long teak table that faced the windows, giving them a good view of the water-skiers cavorting on Lake Geneva, and of the sun. However, the American delegation--Vance, Ambassador Malcolm Toon, Chief Arms Negotiator Paul Warnke and others--did have to face a wall ornamented by three almost blinding LeRoy Neiman sport prints.

Vance, with a 5-in. stack of black ring-binder briefing books in front of him, opened the talks by presenting new American proposals on how to resolve the key remaining technical problem: restrictions on developing new missile systems. This would be part of a three-year protocol that would accompany a SALT II treaty limiting levels of current offensive nuclear systems until 1985. Gromyko had proposed at the ministers' May meeting in Washington that new development be banned for the duration of the treaty, but the U.S. contended, as one delegate put it, "that was a goddam joke." The U.S. wants to maintain its greater technological capacity just as certainly as the Soviets want to restrict it.

Vance's proposal, reported TIME Correspondent Christopher Ogden, was a complex collection of new formulas and definitions for the modernization of missiles and the testing of new ones. Washington officials, pressed by SALT critics who fear that U.S. ICBMS may soon become vulnerable to increasingly accurate Soviet missiles, have been insisting on the right to develop the MX, a new, multiwarhead mobile weapon. One early plan was to mount the new missiles on railroad tracks in covered trenches so that the Russians could never know precisely where they were. But it was found that such a rail system might itself be penetrated. Another possibility is being promoted by the Defense Department. It is a kind of shell game called MAP (multiple aiming points). For each of 200 Minuteman ICBMS there would be not one underground silo but 20, of which 19 would be empty. The 200 missiles would secretly be shuttled among the 4,000 holes, making them less liable to surprise attack. But Vance, Warnke and other diplomats do not think much of the scheme, saying the Soviets would want the same thing, and it would be hard to detect cheating. As a result, Vance discussed mobile missiles at length with Gromyko but not specifically MAP.

After a recess, with the Americans taking a long lunch in Vance's three-room suite in the Intercontinental Hotel and Gromyko taking a nap in the Soviet mission building, the SALT talks reconvened for Gromyko's three-hour response. Said one American participant: "Listening to Gromyko for an hour is like listening to anyone else for three." Said another: "The meetings [on Wednesday] weren't negative. But the end game gets very complicated when there is not much to finish. There's very little room to maneuver."

When the SALT meeting was adjourned for the day, Vance held a private 15-minute session with Gromyko to deliver Carter's message on Shcharansky (an act considerably undercut that same day by Ambassador Andrew Young's statement that the U.S. has political prisoners). Gromyko offered little satisfaction. As he said when a reporter later asked him about the affair, "That is a question that is within the internal competence of the Soviet Union, and I have no intention of discussing it with anyone, not even you--and I hope you'll not take offense."

On Thursday the scene shifted to the neoclassical 19th century building, once the Lithuanian embassy, that is now the Soviet mission. For more than two hours Vance and Gromyko spoke privately, with only their interpreters, in a small room dominated by an oil portrait of Brezhnev. One issue that remained unresolved was the problem of the Soviets' Backfire bomber, which Moscow says should not be included in the SALT ceilings because it does not have the range at present to attack the U.S. The U.S. argues that it could be adapted for long-range use and wants written restrictions on its deployment. Vance believes this is a political problem and must be handled at the presidential level.

At the end Vance and Gromyko categorized the talks as "useful," which is one of the lowest-ranking diplomatic code words. Both declined to use the word progress. But high officials said that the Soviets appeared to be more flexible on some issues than they had been before, and that the talks could serve as a basis for narrowing the gap between the two nations. Said a senior member of the negotiating team: "The atmosphere of the talks was quite positive." Both sides presented new wrinkles to previously stated positions.

Neither side immediately accepted any of the other's proposals. "Such decisions are not taken with the suddenness of a cloudburst," Gromyko explained. He did, however, give reason to look forward to his next meeting with Vance, at the September opening of the U.N. General Assembly: "What the Secretary [Vance] said is certainly to my liking. Tension in relations between us can yield nothing but harm ... The effort for peace and further detente is certainly worth the effort expended on it."

Vance agreed. Said he: "We both hope we can achieve a sound SALT agreement in the interests of both our nations this year." Added Gromyko, in English: "The sooner the better."

"Right," said Vance. But considering the state of U.S.-Soviet relations, and the building anti-Soviet mood in the U.S., later seems more likely than sooner.

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