A Mix of Hope and Hokum

By Evan Thomas

For months the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been posturing about arms control in high-visibility pronouncements to journalists and government leaders and in various public forums. There was talk just about everywhere, it seemed, except at the bargaining table in Geneva. At times the propagandizing appeared to be aimed less at reducing the arsenals of nuclear weapons than at jockeying for public support.

Last week, however, the battleground finally shifted. Victor Karpov, the chief Soviet arms negotiator, sat down at the banquet-size table in the Botanic Building, the drab headquarters of the U.S. arms-control delegation across from Geneva's tidy botanical gardens, and began reading slowly from a lengthy document. For half an hour the Soviet negotiator droned on, speaking in the argot of nuclear weaponry. His monologue was technical and arcane, yet it was immensely important. At the least, it promised to deliver arms control from the realm of rhetoric to the real business of negotiated give-and-take over numbers and weapons. After months of stonewalling at the talks that began in Geneva in March, the Kremlin had at last presented a specific offer, one foreshadowed by Kremlin Leader Mikhail Gorbachev in a letter to President Reagan a few days earlier. The prospect of serious bargaining, however, did nothing to halt the war of words. On a highly publicized visit to France, Gorbachev played the familiar Soviet game of trying to divide the Western alliance. He offered to cut side deals for weapons reductions with Britain and France and unilaterally declared reductions on Soviet missiles aimed at Europe. In a speech to French legislators, he called on the Europeans to help halt what he called "the infernal train" of the arms race. Gorbachev's exchanges with French leaders and reporters, heavily played on the nightly news in the U.S. as well as in Europe, were watched closely as a kind of dress rehearsal for his November summit with Reagan.

As portrayed by the Soviets, the proposal they offered in Geneva appeared breathtakingly simple. It called for nothing less than a 50% reduction in nuclear arms capable of hitting the territory of each superpower. But the actual details, while encouraging in some ways, were intricate and studded with traps. For those who hold out hope for a comprehensive arms-control agreement, there was some good news: Moscow's plan offers a significant reduction in the weapons that Washington considers most threatening, warheads deployed atop land-based strategic missiles. There was some bad news too: the Soviet method of counting weapons so distorts strategic realities that it is simply unacceptable to the U.S. Equally an anathema to the Reagan Administration is the continued Soviet insistence that the U.S. abandon its Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known as Star Wars.

Arms-control naysayers within the Administration scrambled to portray the Soviet offer as a non-starter. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger said that "when you start out with an asymmetrical situation and you propose equal reductions, it still leaves the gap" (see interview).

Still, President Reagan appeared to welcome the Soviet proposal, sounding even a bit more optimistic than some of his advisers. "Everything they are saying represents a change in their position," the President declared expansively to reporters at an impromptu press conference held in a soap factory near Cincinnati, where he had flown last week as part of his lonely crusade on behalf of tax reform. The President, in fact, has seemed somewhat more detached than usual from the details of foreign policy while making repeated forays on behalf of a tax plan most people appear to have forgotten. He also found himself slightly out of step with his advisers on Israel's attack last week on P.L.O. headquarters in Tunisia. After initially characterizing the reprisal raid as "legitimate," he later sent "condolences" to the Tunisian government.

After presenting his plan, Karpov, in an unusual gesture, welcomed reporters to the Soviet delegation's spacious Geneva headquarters with some pointed banter. The Kremlin's offer "is balanced," the Soviet negotiator proclaimed, "as balanced as I am, standing on both my feet." He insisted that the Soviets were doing their part to ensure the success of the upcoming Geneva summit, but the U.S. had been "dragging its feet from the very start" on arms control. Quipped Karpov in the kind of Western cliche that seems to spill effortlessly from publicity-conscious Soviet diplomats these days: "It takes two to tango." His American counterpart, Max Kampelman, said the U.S. was "hopeful" that the proposal would provide the basis for "serious negotiation." But, he added, "it is important to pay close attention to the fine print."

In one critical area, the proposal tabled by the Soviets last week goes a long way toward meeting U.S. demands. It would significantly reduce the total number of warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which have always formed the backbone of the Soviet Union's offensive capacity. The Soviets now have 6,400 such warheads, while the U.S. has 2,125. Moscow's new formula, TIME Washington Bureau Chief Strobe Talbott learned, would allow each of the superpowers no more than 3,600 ICBM warheads. More specifically, the Soviet proposal would limit what Moscow calls "nuclear charges" (bombs, cruise missiles and ballistic-missile warheads) to 6,000 per side. No more than 60% of that figure, or 3,600, would be allowed on any one category of weapons system, such as ICBMs. In 1982 Reagan had proposed that each side be allowed 2,500 ICBM warheads.

The concessions are significant because the Reagan Administration has long feared that the Soviets' land-based forces give them the capacity to launch a pre-emptive attack. The Kremlin's 3-to-1 edge in ICBM warheads--which because of their size, speed and accuracy are called "prompt hard-target killers" or "silo busters"--could conceivably wipe out American land-based missiles in a first strike, making it hard for Washington to retaliate. Though many U.S. submarine- and bomber-based warheads would survive, most of these weapons are too slow or inaccurate to be effective against the Soviets' super-hardened military targets. In this grisly war-game scenario, an American President's only options would be to surrender or use his remaining weapons in a suicide attack on the "soft targets" of Soviet cities, knowing that the Kremlin could retaliate by destroying American ones.

The Soviets also implicitly offered concessions involving the power of rockets used to launch warheads. In the argot of nuclear weapons, this power is known as throw weight, the ability to hurl a payload. The Soviets now have about 5.7 million kilograms of ballistic-missile throw weight, while the U.S. has a mere 2 million kilograms. The Soviet proposal offered last week would reduce the Kremlin's throw weight to no more than 3 million kilograms, according to an analysis for TIME by Ted Warner, an arms-control expert at the Rand Corp.

Arms-control hard-liners have long insisted that Moscow's reluctance to lower throw weight has been one of the most serious impediments to arms control. Reductions of throw weight would lessen the risk of a dreaded phenomenon known as breakout, the capacity of one side suddenly to increase its offensive force and intimidate the enemy. The issue will become an important factor as the U.S. gradually moves away from a land-based ICBM force made up of multiple-warhead missiles in underground fixed silos (like the Minuteman) and relies more on mobile single-warhead missiles (the proposed Midgetman). Such weapons would be vulnerable to a barrage of enemy warheads, and very high levels of throw weight translate into an increased ability to conduct barrage attacks.

The Soviets did not budge, however, on their opposition to Star Wars. In fact, the formal Soviet proposal appeared to retreat from Gorbachev's suggestion to TIME last month that the Kremlin might at least agree to permit "fundamental" research on space-based defense systems. The Soviet proposal stipulates a prohibition on "development (including scientific research) of space strike weapons." In Geneva, Karpov did leave a little maneuvering room by stating, with studied ambiguity, that "we're not against basic research--we never were. We are against research that leads to the creation of space strike weapons." If the Soviets insist on a narrow definition of research, an arms deal could be aborted. Speaking to reporters last week in Cincinnati, Reagan refused to "retreat from research" on SDI. Asked if he would stand firm on testing components for Star Wars, he replied, "That goes along with research."

The President was just as adamant with his advisers in private. A National Security Council meeting called to consider the Soviet proposal last week turned into "a pep rally for SDI," according to one participant. While the White House did not absolutely rule out the idea of negotiating over Star Wars, the meeting discouraged in-house arms-control advocates hoping to trade off U.S. advances in missile defense for Soviet reductions in offensive weapons.

The other major pitfall in the Soviet plan, from the U.S. perspective, is the method of counting offensive weapons. The Soviets propose a 50% reduction in all "relevant" systems, those that can reach the other superpower's territory. But they count the "relevant" systems very differently from the U.S.--and in a way that is blatantly unfair.

The Soviets climbed on an old and familiar hobbyhorse by insisting that American intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) capable of hitting the Soviet Union be counted--and accordingly limited--as "strategic" weapons. All American Pershing II missiles in West Germany and Tomahawk ground-launched cruise missiles in Western Europe, plus many carrier-based and land-based tactical aircraft in Europe and Asia, would be counted as strategic. Soviet medium-range bombers, on the other hand, would not be counted, nor would the Kremlin's intermediate-range missiles, most notably the triple-warhead SS-20, even though they could wipe out Western Europe. By adding up virtually all "forward-based" U.S. nuclear weapons while at the same time refusing to count Soviet weapons capable of hitting Europe or Asia, the Soviets would be stacking the deck against the U.S. before cutting it (see chart).

The Soviets also continued their old practice of counting warheads delivered from bombers in the same manner as those launched on missiles. The U.S. has argued that bomber weapons (gravity bombs, air-launched cruise missiles and short-range attack missiles) should be treated more leniently, since bombers take longer to reach their targets and are vulnerable to enemy antiaircraft defenses. The U.S. argues that the bombers are thus not first- strike weapons.

Fearful of U.S. high tech, the Soviets would ban all long-range cruise missiles. This would force the Pentagon to cancel its program to outfit B-52s with such weapons, stop the U.S. from deploying long-range ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe, and bar development of long-range sea-launched cruise missiles. Such a prohibition would rescind a concession that the Soviets had made at the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in 1983.

Under the Soviet proposal, the development of any new strategic weapon would be banned or severely restricted. The worst-case interpretation of the provision would forbid the two new American land-based ICBMs--the MX and Midgetman--as well as a new Trident II submarine-launched missile that has a hard-target kill capacity. Yet it would somehow permit inclusion of the two new Soviet ICBMs, the SS-24 and SS-25, which are roughly the equivalent of the MX and Midgetman.

Gorbachev's importunings to the Europeans in Paris further muddy the picture. Rather than offer to trade Soviet missiles aimed at Europe for U.S. "Euromissiles" aimed at the Soviet Union, Gorbachev last week offered to negotiate separately with Britain and France. He suggested that the Kremlin might slash the number of weapons targeted at Europe in return for cuts in the British and French nuclear arsenals, which have not been counted in talks between the superpowers. As a sweetener, Gorbachev made a tantalizing but rather fuzzy and perhaps deceptive offer to reduce the number of SS-20s in range of Europe to 243, the same number the Soviets deployed before NATO began installing U.S. missiles at the end of 1983. (NATO claims the current total of Soviet SS-20s is 441.) The concession was aimed particularly at the Dutch, who had announced that they would install 48 U.S. cruise missiles only if the Soviets had more than 378 missiles aimed at Europe as of Nov. 1.

Both France and Britain swiftly and emphatically rejected Gorbachev's effort to cut a separate deal. Still, the U.S. did not bolster Western solidarity by bungling a call for a pre-summit meeting of seven Western powers in New York City this month. French President Francois Mitterrand, who had not been consulted, felt compelled to rebuff Reagan's invitation. The Belgians and Dutch were irked that they had not been invited. Secretary of State George Shultz tried to pacify them by offering to go to Brussels for a pre-summit parley.

The road to the summit, now six weeks away, is likely to follow two paths. Both sides will continue to court world opinion with public diplomacy. At the same time, the Soviet proposal offers them an opening to begin the hard, detailed work of private diplomacy. The task is daunting: to reshape, by mutual agreement, their swollen and still growing nuclear arsenals to reduce the risk that they may one day be used. Nothing specific may be accomplished by the time Reagan and Gorbachev meet next month. Even so, there now appears to be at least the possibility of a major arms-control agreement before the end of Reagan's term.

With reporting by James O. Jackson/ Paris and Strobe Talbott/Washington