New Talk About a Walk

By John Kohan

West Germany renews interest in a disavowed missile compromise

Half the women were draped in body-length black cloth, the other half in white. Some of them carried hand-made crosses, others beat drums and pounded 10-ft.-tall bamboo poles in time with their slow march. The 150 women, who had walked more than 200 miles from Dortmund, West Germany, led a 1,000-strong parade near NATO's Brussels headquarters last Saturday to mark the 38th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. But many of their banners also bore slogans that reflected a more immediate concern: FOR A EUROPE FREE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS. NO PERSHING IIS. NO CRUISE MISSILES. The protest was a harbinger of what Europeans predict will be a "hot autumn" in which millions of people will take to the streets to protest the imminent deployment of new U.S. nuclear missiles in Western Europe.

Under the plan agreed to by NATO's 15 members four years ago, the first of 108 Pershing II ballistic nuclear missiles will be installed in West Germany beginning in December if the U.S. and the Soviet Union fail to agree on limits to the number of intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe. At the same time, some of the 464 ground-launched cruise missiles scheduled for deployment in five West European countries will be moved into place in Britain and Italy. Although the missile question has provoked the most heated opposition in West Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl vigorously reaffirmed, in recent meetings with President Reagan and Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov, that his government was committed to the NATO decision no matter how many people demonstrated this fall.

Since then, to Washington's dismay, the West German government has caused confusion in Western ranks by hinting that it is interested in the revival of a compromise plan that U.S. Negotiator Paul Nitze and his Soviet counterpart Yuli Kvitsinsky worked out during a stroll in the Jura Mountains above Geneva last summer. The walk-in-the-woods proposal, as it came to be called, was disavowed by Washington and Moscow. But West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher seemed to resurrect it last month when he told a reporter during a visit to Bulgaria that "the closer we come to the resumption of talks between the U.S. and the Soviet Union after the summer recess, it will be all the more useful to think along the lines of the agreement worked out on that walk in the woods." Five days later, Kohl further fueled speculation that Bonn was shifting its position when he said bluntly that the walk-in-the-woods idea "must be examined further in Geneva."

Although there has been controversy about what took place during and after the stroll in the woods, the basic provisions of the unofficial proposal are now well known. The U.S. would forgo the deployment of all 108 Pershing IIs in West Germany and install a total of only 300 cruise missiles, instead of 464, in Western Europe. The Soviets, in exchange, would reduce the number of SS-20 missile launchers aimed at Western Europe from 250 to 75. This would give them 225 warheads, creating a rough parity in the number of intermediate-range weapons on each side. In addition, the Kremlin would freeze the number of its SS-20s in Asia at 90 and dropped its demand that the 162 missiles in the independent British and missiles in the independent British and French nuclear forces be limited under the agreement.

In the view of some analysts, the compromise would have been militarily favorable for the West, since the potential targets of the Pershing II in the Soviet Union can be covered by longer-range strategic weapons based in the U.S. or on American submarines. If there were no political considerations in putting U.S. ballistic missiles on European soil, the sacrifice of the Pershing II, according to this view, might have been an acceptable price to pay for a 70% reduction in the SS-20 threat to Western Europe.

Each side accuses the other of having first rejected the proposal. The fact is, the U.S. and the Soviet Union turned down the package almost simultaneously. During a meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in New York last September, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz indicated obliquely that the Reagan Administration found the plan inadequate. Gromyko made no response. The next day, Kvitsinsky signaled to Nitze in Geneva that the Kremlin had rejected the proposals.

U.S. officials are perplexed and angered by the West German efforts to revive interest in the walk-in-the-woods formula. Their main fear is political: if the plan to install Pershing IIs were abandoned, West Germany would move from the head of the line of countries deploying new missiles to near the end, since it would receive cruise missiles only after Britain, Italy and Belgium. Any sign that West Germany was weakening its commitment might unleash doubts among other NATO allies, not just about West German but also about American resolve, thereby threatening the entire missile deployment scheme. Washington will not have to worry about Britain. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is so committed to the NATO decision that she will deploy cruise missiles at the end of the year, even if the West Germans drag their feet.

West German officials tried last week to temper their earlier statements on the walk-in-the-woods package. While Kohl vacationed in Austria, a government spokesman emphasized that the Chancellor and the U.S. were "in complete agreement that NATO'S decision would have to be followed and that, failing a solution in Geneva, both missile systems would have to be deployed." After visiting Kohl in Austria, Genscher appeared on television to say that "the question of the weapons mix has played a greater role in the past few days than it in truth deserves." The Foreign Minister explained that the walk-in-the-woods plan showed that it was possible to come up with an agreement that did not include the independent British and French nuclear forces, a major stumbling block in Geneva. Still, there may have been other motives in Bonn's renewed interest in the proposal.

One theory is that Andropov may have indicated to Kohl in Moscow last month that he might be willing to reconsider the Nitze-Kvitsinsky scheme. Officials in Bonn deny that this was the case. They note that when West German officials asked Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov about the plan, he curtly replied: "We do not want to talk about walks in the woods. We want to talk about talks at the table." Still, the Soviet strategy from the beginning has been to appear to West Europeans to be more flexible than the U.S. Soviet Foreign Affairs Specialist Genrikh Trofimenko added an element of perhaps deliberate uncertainty last week when he told a West German newspaper that if the U.S. were to present the walk-in-the-woods plan as a formal proposal in Geneva "we would discuss it."

There is similar ambiguity in the U.S. position. Officials have said repeatedly that the walk-in-the-woods package was dead and that the U.S. would never consider any compromise that required giving up the Pershing II. The President issued an order to that effect in response to the Nitze plan last year. At the same time, the Administration has denied reports that it scuttled the proposal before Nitze could even get an answer from Kvitsinsky. In testimony before the Arms Control Panel of the House Armed Services Committee, Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, who opposed the proposal last year, offered a surprisingly positive appraisal of the package. "The walk-in-the-woods formula," said Perle, "was proposed by Ambassador Nitze as a final agreement, as a bottom line, in which significant compromises were made on both sides." Trying to blame the Kremlin for its failure, Perle added, "I think it is only fair to say that the U.S. was prepared to consider it further and Nitze returned to Geneva with those instructions. There was no interest on the Soviet side." Perle's comments raised the possibility that some Administration officials may be coming around to the view that it might indeed make sense to put forward the walk-in-the-woods formula as a formal, final offer.

Kohl's revival of the proposal, on the other hand, may have been meant primarily for domestic consumption. By bringing up the rejected scheme, which has been strongly favored by the opposition Social Democrats, the Chancellor may have hoped to convince nervous West Germans that his government was doing everything possible to help the U.S. and Soviets reach an agreement in Geneva, even if that meant prodding the U.S. If Kohl succeeds and if no agreement is reached in Geneva, his gambit may have been worth whatever temporary strain it is causing in the alliance.

--By John Kohan.

Reported by Gary Lee/Bonn and Strobe Talbott/Washington

With reporting by Gary Lee, Strobe Talbott This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.