When to Hold 'Em -- and to Fold 'Em

By Jacob V. Lamar Jr

The most extraordinary bargaining session in the history of arms control was reaching a crescendo. For almost two days, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had continued to up the ante. Now, as night closed in on Hofdi house, the "grand compromise" was in sight. But the whole startling package of proposals was hanging on the Soviet insistence that Star Wars research be confined to the laboratory. Ronald Reagan made a last-ditch appeal to Mikhail Gorbachev. He declared he had made a pledge to the American people not to trade away SDI. "Please," Reagan said, "don't ask me to do it." Impervious, the General Secretary replied, "Nyet."

With that, the President gathered his papers and stood up. Minutes later, as the two leaders descended the outside steps, they conducted a tense, terse dialogue.

Gorbachev: I think we can still deal. There is still time.

Reagan: I don't think you really wanted a deal.

Gorbachev: I don't know what else I could have done.

Reagan: You could have said yes.

Why did the President, who had declared that the Reykjavik meeting was supposed to be merely a "base camp" for a full-scale summit in the U.S., allow it to turn into a breathtaking marathon marked by snap decisions on some of the most complex and fateful issues of the nuclear age? Did Reagan's men let themselves get carried away by the promise of the deal of the century, when they should have been nailing down a more realistic agreement on medium- range missiles? Instead of pulling an all-nighter in Iceland, why didn't the Americans simply say, "We'll get back to you in Geneva or when you come to the U.S."?

Gorbachev set the stage for the grim Sunday denouement on Saturday morning when he plucked a typewritten page from his briefcase. The paper summarized his wide-ranging set of new proposals, including cutting the strategic arsenals of both sides by 50% and eliminating intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) from Europe altogether. Gorbachev called for ten more years of strict adherence to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, a provision that would prevent SDI from producing "weapons of any new type which would provide military superiority to that side." He also made clear that the missile cutbacks were linked to curtailment of the President's cherished Star Wars plan.

Reagan puts great faith in his ability to persuade people through the force of his personality; that is one reason why he accepted the Iceland invitation and why he felt confident about getting into a major bargaining session once there. So, rather than aggressively pursuing a more limited agreement, Reagan and his advisers found themselves scrambling after Gorbachev's vision. The U.S. negotiators pursued a strategy that was in some ways a mirror of the Soviet one: putting together enough tantalizing agreements so that when the decisive moment finally arrived, the other side would be willing to back down a bit on SDI. The President accepted the 50% cut in strategic weapons as well as the plan on intermediate-range missiles, which was almost identical to the "zero option" the U.S. had proposed in 1981. But the two leaders sparred to a draw on SDI that afternoon.

Saturday night a working group of Soviet and American experts stayed up wrestling with arms issues. The ordinarily glacial process of arms negotiating suddenly took on the mood of an all-night, no-limit poker game. "We were settling things in a couple of hours that had gone nowhere for years in Geneva," said White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan. "Why go slow if you ) can get something? That is the essence of negotiation."

Overnight the negotiators agreed to a cap of 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads for each side and a ceiling of 1,600 on the means to launch them. They also settled on eliminating medium-range missiles in Europe. Some major points, however, were left for the leaders to resolve. Among them: what to do about Soviet medium-range missiles in Asia and what to do about SDI.

After reviewing the group's proposals Sunday morning, Reagan returned to Hofdi house. Gorbachev went along with the cuts in strategic weapons and swiftly resolved the INF question by suggesting that Moscow be allowed to keep 100 warheads in Soviet Asia and Washington be permitted to keep 100 medium- range warheads in the U.S. But the terms of the ABM treaty and its relationship to SDI proved sticky.

When talks resumed at 3 p.m. Sunday, the U.S. side finally realized that unless the ABM question was resolved, there was no point in pursuing other accords in the package. Reagan went upstairs to confer with his aides. The Americans decided to go for broke, to see just how serious Gorbachev was about his oft-proclaimed desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons by the year 2000. Paul Nitze and Richard Perle, often at odds on arms-control issues, joined Shultz in persuading the President to extend his commitment to the ABM treaty to ten years. Reagan added his own proviso: both sides must agree to the total elimination of ballistic nuclear missiles by the end of that period.

At 5:32 p.m., Reagan, Gorbachev, Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze reconvened for the last time. The Soviet leader agreed to wipe out his ballistic nuclear missiles and added that all nuclear weapons, including those carried by bombers and cruise missiles, be eliminated. But the real sticking point was his demand for a "strengthening" of the ABM treaty to restrict Star Wars research to the lab. The President argued that Gorbachev was stretching the interpretation of the treaty to kill SDI. "But what is the function of a defense," asked the Soviet leader, "if there are no missiles?" Reagan countered that Star Wars was an "insurance policy." Reagan quoted a Russian saying, "Doveryai no proveryai," meaning "Trust, but verify," or, as Shultz later translated it, "In God we trust; all others pay cash."

The summiteers argued until nearly 7 o'clock Sunday evening. Finally the President simply stood up to go. Later, observers would ask why Reagan suddenly called it quits, why he did not at least try to salvage part of the package, perhaps the INF deal. "We'd been there a long time," explained Shultz. "We'd come through a great many issues, and in the end we couldn't close on the critical one . . . Human beings being what they are, the hour what it was, there was just no mood to do anything anymore."

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With reporting by Barrett Seaman/Washington