No More Mr. Nice Guy

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

In a speech to the U.N., the old Reagan overtakes the new

On the dollar bill, the American eagle is represented clutching an olive branch in one talon, a sheaf of arrows in the other. Ronald Reagan has been trying to present a somewhat similar image of his policy toward the Soviet Union: a string of arms-control proposals coupled with unyielding resistance to Soviet expansionism. Touring Europe two weeks ago, the President waved the olive branch so heavily that he stirred talk of a "new Reagan"--flexible, centrist and eager to negotiate. But last week, almost on the eve of new U.S.-Soviet disarmament talks, he decided to highlight the other aspect of his strategy. The old Reagan abruptly reappeared, rattling the arrows.

His forum was the second United Nations Special Session on Disarmament, a gathering in New York City that has drawn many heads of government. West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin also addressed the session last week (an Arab-led boycott left many seats empty for Begin's talk). British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is expected on Wednesday. Some aides had billed President Reagan's speech as "the capstone of his various disarmament proposals," and indeed Reagan did repeat his suggestions for elimination of intermediate-range land-based missiles in Europe and a one-third reduction in strategic nuclear warheads deployed by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. But as delegates from 157 nations, including a sour-faced Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, listened in silence, Reagan also launched into a denunciation of Soviet behavior as blistering as any that he used to make on the campaign trail. The President:

> Reviewed "the record of tyranny" by the U.S.S.R. since World War II and indicated that not much has changed. Said he: "Communist atrocities in Southeast Asia, Afghanistan and elsewhere continue to shock the free world as refugees escape to tell of their horror."

> Charged that "the decade of so-called detente"--a phrase that must have distressed some American allies in Western Europe--"witnessed the most massive Soviet buildup of military power in history."

> Asserted that "the Soviet Union is trying to manipulate the peace movement in the West," a movement for whose goals Reagan had earlier expressed sympathy.

> Accused the U.S.S.R. and its allies of waging chemical war in violation of international treaties. Said Reagan: "There is conclusive evidence that the Soviet government has provided toxins for use in Laos and Kampuchea [Cambodia], and are themselves using chemical weapons against freedom fighters in Afghanistan."

What does all that have to do with disarmament? Everything, said Reagan. The U.S. will insist that any arms-control agreements contain effective procedures for verification because the Soviets cannot be trusted. Without verification, said the President, "we are building a paper castle that will be blown away by the winds of war. Let me repeat: We need deeds, not words, to convince us of Soviet sincerity."

Reagan advanced one new proposal, an international conference on military expenditures that would establish a system for reporting how much major nations spend on arms. He gave this idea an anti-Soviet twist too. Said the President: "We urge the Soviet Union ... to revise the universally discredited official figures it publishes."

The President sought to balance his speech by declaring that for all their suspicion of the Soviets, "Americans yearn to let go" of their arms and are entering negotiations "bearing honest proposals." Still, the speech differed strikingly in tone from some of those that Reagan gave in Europe, notably one in Bonn during which he told antinuclear marchers that "my heart is with you." Nor was there any question who had decided on the switch. The President not only dictated the tone but personally wrote some of the more striking sections, including the "paper castle" passage, during a weekend at Camp David. Said one White House aide who helped prepare the talk: "You might say that we let Reagan be Reagan." Interestingly, when the President told NATO leaders in Bonn of his desire some day to see Soviet negotiators sitting at the table with the U.S. and its allies, talking about ways to lift the Third World out of poverty, one lieutenant had also hailed that talk as a glimpse of "the real Reagan."

Advisers saw no inconsistency in the two approaches. Reagan, they say, genuinely believes in disarmament and has shaped a wide-ranging U.S. agenda toward that purpose. The President's close friend Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt says that Reagan has shown a messianic zeal on the subject since the attempt on his life in March 1981. At the same time, aides note, the President has never wavered in his suspicion of Soviet intentions, nor in his belief that only a stern policy and a rapid American military buildup can induce the U.S.S.R. to negotiate seriously on arms control. As he put it to the U.N., "We refuse to become weaker while potential adversaries remain committed to their imperialist adventures." Having emphasized one aspect of his policy in Europe, Reagan evidently thought the time had come to stress the other side.

The President followed his speech with a tightening of the sanctions that were imposed on the U.S.S.R. after martial law was declared in Poland. To an earlier prohibition against U.S. companies making equipment for a pipeline that is to carry Siberian natural gas to Western Europe, Reagan added an order that the companies cannot permit foreign subsidiaries or licensees to do so either. U.S. officials estimated that the new ban, which is certain to rile European allies participating in the project, will delay completion of the pipeline by one to three years. Said one aide: "This action is very consistent with what Reagan said in his U.N. speech."

One reason for the harsh tone of that speech is that despite his conciliatory gestures toward the antinuclear movement, Reagan has increasingly been disturbed by the marchers' often anti-American spirit. Riots staged by left-wingers while he was visiting Berlin angered him especially. One aide quoted him as saying in private, "Can you imagine attacking policemen and overturning cars in the name of peace? It's awful!" Though nuclear protests elsewhere in Europe and in the U.S. have mostly been orderly, an aide who helped draft the U.N. speech says that Reagan "wanted to address the unilateral, accusatory tone of some of the peace groups. He is trying to say, 'Wake up, fellas. The Soviets aren't exactly the good guys. Take some of your petitions to Moscow.' " Thus Reagan firmly pointed out to the disarmament conference that "in Moscow, banners are scuttled, buttons are snatched and demonstrators arrested when even a few people dare to speak about their fears."

Individually, Reagan's other points are also well founded: the Soviet figures on military spending are indeed unbelievably low, and the evidence that the U.S.S.R. has resorted to chemical warfare is certainly disturbing. But whether the tone was the best one to adopt as START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) negotiations are about to begin in Geneva on June 29 is debatable.

Reagan's rhetoric may have cost the U.S. propaganda points at the U.N. Delegates to the disarmament conference gave the President only a cool round of handclapping after his speech. Said Reagan to aides: "That was a hard audience." In contrast, the delegates had burst into applause two days earlier at one point during Gromyko's address. That demonstration occurred when Gromyko read to the conference a message from U.S.S.R. President Leonid Brezhnev declaring that the Soviet Union "assumes an obligation not to be the first to use nuclear weapons. This obligation shall become effective immediately at the moment it is made public from the rostrum of the United Nations General Assembly." Brezhnev in his message went on to challenge the U.S. to join in a no-first-use pledge, asserting: "If the other nuclear powers assume an equally precise and clear obligation . . . that would be tantamount in practice to a ban on the use of nuclear weapons altogether." It was effective theater.

American officials view the pledge as phony ("unverifiable and unenforceable" is the way one State Department spokesman put it) and even potentially dangerous. The U.S. and its NATO allies have long relied on tactical nuclear weapons to counter the numerical superiority of the ground forces that the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations maintain in Europe. In the American view, a Western no-first-use pledge would remove a powerful deterrent to a Soviet attack in Western Europe, and thus increase the danger of a war that would start out with conventional weapons but rapidly escalate into nuclear conflict. The presumption: whichever side was losing the conventional arms struggle would be sorely tempted to use nuclear weapons, whatever promises it had made.

Reagan and his aides discussed on Wednesday whether to reply to the Soviet challenge and decided not to do so. The winning faction, led by National Security Adviser William Clark, felt that a reply, which could only have been a rejection, would have permitted the Soviets to dictate the terms of the disarmament debate. Nonetheless, many U.N. delegates were disappointed that Reagan did not discuss the first-use question at all.

Once START actually begins, of course, the attitude that will count will not be that of the U.N. delegates but the one adopted by the Soviet Union. Presidential aides dismiss any thought that the harsh tone of Reagan's U.N. speech would sour the negotiating atmosphere. Indeed, Reagan was not the only tough talker last week. In his speech to the U.N., Gromyko accused the U.S. of showing a "militaristic frenzy" in its arms buildup and beaming this message to the world: "If you want peace, then it's full steam ahead for war." But when Gromyko met Secretary of State Alexander Haig for a five-hour discussion on Friday, the Soviet Foreign Minister brought up again the subject of a possible Reagan-Brezhnev summit this fall. Haig's reply, in essence: maybe.

Nonetheless, TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott reports from Moscow that the Soviets seem genuinely puzzled by the mix ture of disarmament proposals and harsh words coming out of Washington these days. They recognize that Reagan's many arms-control proposals mark considerable movement from his early days as President, but are worried that the U.S. may be advancing those ideas only to calm its European allies and the peace movement. Anatoli Dobrynin, the Soviet Ambassador to the U.S., is believed to be telling his Politburo colleagues that moderates and pragmatists, mostly in the State Department, are vying with implacable hard liners, boycott in the Pentagon, for Reagan's ear as to what course to take toward the U.S.S.R. Haig is apparently hinting to Dobrynin that Soviet displays of restraint improve the pragmatists' chances.

As a result, when Kremlin officials meet visiting Americans these days, they ask anxious questions about who is up and who is down along the Potomac. Says one Soviet official deeply involved in studying U.S. policy: "It is all very perplexing. We are having a lot of discussion about what is happening in your country."

Whatever the atmosphere surrounding them, arms-control negotiations are likely to be long and difficult at best. Reagan's proposals are as tough as they are comprehensive. They now include:

> Canceling U.S. plans to deploy intermediate-range Pershing missiles and Tomahawk ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe if the Soviets agree to dismantle the SS-20 missiles in place and targeted on Western Europe, an idea already broached at talks in Geneva.

> Cutting back NATO ground troops in Europe by 91,000 and Warsaw Pact forces by 262,000, to an equal level of 700,000 (that is U.S. arithmetic; the Soviets count 125,000 fewer Warsaw Pact troops than NATO does). This idea will formally be presented at negotiations in Vienna that have been dragging on for nine years.

> Measures to guard against nuclear war starting by accident, to be officially proposed to the Soviet Union at the START meetings. In his U.N. speech, Reagan listed these steps: "Advance notification of major strategic exercises that otherwise might be misinterpreted, advance notification of ICBM missile launches within as well as beyond national boundaries and an expanded exchange of strategic forces data."

> And, finally, the centerpiece of START: a one-third cut in strategic ballistic missile warheads by both the U.S. and U.S.S.R., to an equal level of 5,000 each--with the provision that only half of these could be on missiles fired from land. That in effect would force a restructuring of Soviet strategic forces, as Gromyko complained to the U.N. last week, since the Soviet Union now puts 70% of its missile firepower on land, vs. only 20% for the U.S.

These proposals are in keeping with Reagan's often stated conviction that arms-control agreements must not merely slow down the arms race but result in actual and significant reductions in both nuclear weaponry and conventional forces. Both sides recognize that these are maximum opening positions. The questions are: How negotiable are the U.S. suggestions, and will the Soviets reply to them seriously? So far, White House aides profess optimism. Says one: "At least they haven't rejected our proposals out of hand."

The first serious test will be what counterproposals the Soviets make, if they make any, and what compromises the U.S. might then consider. Those counterproposals may be months in coming. Says Martin Hillenbrand of the Paris-based Atlantic Institute for International Affairs: "We are not yet at the stage where possible concessions are signaled and the outline of a potential agreement begins to take shape. We are still in the sparring stage -- and with the Soviets, that can last a long time." With all his bobbing and weaving in recent weeks, Ronald Reagan was serving notice that he can spar a little too. -- By George J. Church.

Reported by Douglas Brew with Reagan and Bruce van Voorst/United Nations

With reporting by Douglas Brew, Reagan, BRUCE VAN VOORST

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