That Shrill Soviet Campaign

Moscow tries to ward off new missiles for NATO

We are faced with a build-up of aggressiveness in the NATO bloc," railed Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov. U.S. leaders, he declared last week, were paying lip service to peaceful cooperation while actually fomenting "an atmosphere of fear" and "whipping up the arms race." With some of the toughest public language used by any Soviet leader in years, he even accused the U.S. of making "concrete plans and preparations for a war aimed against the U.S.S.R. and its allies."

Ustinov's blast from the pages of Pravda sounded the shrillest note in a Soviet propaganda campaign that has gathered unusual force. The objective: to head off the deployment in Western Europe of nuclear missiles aimed, for the first time, at the Soviet Union itself. The rest of the controlled Soviet press pulled out all the stops in cautioning about the dangers of a new arms race. Uniformed generals made rare personal appearances on television, to talk about "the peace policy of the Communist Party." Soviet officials in Moscow, unusually attentive to Western journalists, argued that the missile build-up was an attempt by the U.S. to circumvent SALT II. Communist parties and other left-wing groups in Western Europe were enlisted to spread the word that the U.S.S.R. might have to take unspecified steps to strengthen its security.

Moscow's drive has already assumed the proportions of its campaign in 1977 and early 1978 against the proposed deployment of the neutron warhead. Under withering pressure from leftists and peace activists, Western Europeans resisted the idea, and President Carter eventually decided to abandon it. The stakes are higher in the current proposal: to modernize NATO's theater nuclear forces with the deployment of 572 mobile, intermediate-range cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western European countries, as a counterforce to the more than 100 advanced multiwarhead SS-20 missiles already stationed in the western Soviet Union.

Failure to approve the plan at the next defense ministers' meeting in Brussels in December, it is feared, could perpetuate a serious military imbalance. Although Moscow loudly claims that the new NATO missiles would give the West a perilous "strategic advantage," NATO planners, as well as the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, estimate that they would at best achieve nuclear parity on the Continent. In conventional weapons, Moscow and its Warsaw Pact allies have a decided superiority.

The Soviet campaign is clearly aimed at pressuring Western European parliaments, but this time with both carrot and stick. Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev, who last week dispelled rumors that he was gravely ill by appearing in public for the first time in 16 days (he showed up at a Moscow airport to welcome South Yemen's President), made ample use of both when he first launched the Soviet pitch in East Berlin on Oct. 6. On the one hand, he warned that if NATO carried out its ''dangerous'' plan, the Warsaw Pact would have to ''take necessary extra steps''--meaning an additional arms build-up of its own. On the other hand, he renewed Moscow's proposal for a Continental disarmament conference to promote further ''military detente in Europe.'' As the most tempting carrot of all, he announced the unilateral withdrawal over the next year of as many as 20,000 Soviet troops and 1,000 tanks from East Germany. Brezhnev also said the Soviet Union would reduce the number of its medium-range nuclear missiles along its western frontier, provided NATO deploys no new ones.

Moscow's propaganda efforts were aimed principally at Britain and West Germany, the two keystone countries of the NATO scheme. After Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher publicly supported the missile proposal, and skeptically belittled Brezhnev's promise to withdraw what she called "a few tanks and troops," Pravda promptly labeled her a "bellicose lady" and scoffed that "she tried on Winston Churchill's trousers but they don't fit." Bonn, meanwhile, was put on notice that its whole Ostpolitik of seeking peaceful relations with the East would be in jeopardy. Calling the missile issue "literally a touchstone," the Soviet news agency TASS warned that Bonn's inclination to go along with the NATO plan was in "clear conflict with the officially declared objectives of the German Federal Republic's foreign policy."

The harshest invectives, however, were leveled against the U.S., which was accused of endangering detente by placing new weapons not covered by SALT II on the doorstep of the Soviet Union. Fumed Central Committee Official Valentin Falin: "How would the U.S. have reacted if we, the Soviet Union, after concluding SALT II, started bringing medium-range weapons closer to their territory?" To drive home the argument, TIME Moscow Bureau Chief Bruce Nelan reported, other officials privately drew a parallel with Cuba in 1962. One Moscow editor told him: "There was a crisis when you thought missiles in Cuba could hit the U.S."

For the moment, Washington was being careful not to respond with a hard-sell counteroffensive of its own. Rather, at the December NATO meeting the allies also plan to introduce an arms-control proposal of their own for limiting medium-range weapons. The judgment of the State Department is to watch the strident Soviet campaign, at least for the time being. Whatever the problems the NATO allies may have with their divided or left-leaning parliaments, the prevailing West European attitude toward the Soviets is believed to have hardened in the past two years. ''So far the Europeans have reacted pretty staunchly,'' said one senior U.S. specialist. Added a Defense Department official: ''With the scars of the neutron bomb on our back and theirs, they're determined not to let it happen again.''

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