Back on Speaking Terms

By Kurt Andersen.

In nature, when masses of ice begin to melt, then fissure, they can make a sort of thunder, a great bass popping that echoes for miles. It is a startling noise. In Washington and Moscow last week there was a similarly surprising noise that sounded, just maybe, like the first tremors of a thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations. It came Thanksgiving Day, with officials in each country reading identical statements to reporters. At the White House, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane delivered the tidings deadpan. "The United States and the Soviet Union have agreed to enter into new negotiations," he reported, "with the objective of reaching mutually acceptable agreements on the whole range of questions concerning nuclear and outer-space arms."

One year after the Soviets abandoned parallel sets of negotiations in Geneva on strategic arms (START) and intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF), they have decided to come in from the cold. On the first Monday in January, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Secretary of State George Shultz are to sit down together in Geneva and begin working out the basic ground rules and agenda for a whole new set of weapons talks. Said a senior Western diplomat in Moscow: "There are powerful interests on both sides in having these negotiations succeed."

It is just a beginning, a first step toward determining how substantive arms-control talks might proceed. All the hard parts come later. When the two sides get down to particulars, they might again find themselves in a deadlock, the Soviets as intransigent as ever on the issue of medium-range Euromissiles, the Americans as uncompromising as before on land-based missiles. Declares one Administration arms-control advocate: "What is important is the details, the specifics of approach from January on. What is the U.S. ready, willing and able to put on the table?" A moderate colleague is also pessimistic. "Reagan wants to see it as a thaw," he says of the Geneva get-together, "but unless we can show them we are serious about the arms-control process, then this isn't the beginning of anything." In fact, the Reagan Administration is profoundly divided over how to handle arms talks, and has not yet fashioned anything like a clear and coherent negotiating strategy. That process is complicated by a furious debate within the Administration over Soviet compliance with existing arms treaties (see following story).

Nevertheless, the Shultz-Gromyko meeting, with its explicit goal of getting arms control back on track, is the single most hopeful bit of progress in U.S.-Soviet relations since the now moribund START discussions got under way more than two years ago. When President Reagan was told about the Geneva plans last Monday at his Santa Barbara ranch, recalls McFarlane, his response was simple and apt. "This is good news," Reagan said.

Indeed, for the President the news should be especially welcome, since it seems to vindicate, for the moment, his 1984 hard-liner-turned-peacemaker approach. The Kremlin had declared repeatedly that unless newly deployed Pershing II and cruise missiles were removed from Western Europe, there would be no further Soviet participation in nuclear-arms-control talks--period. Despite the threat, however, nearly 100 of the NATO missiles have been installed this year, and deployment continues. Says Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle: "The Soviets made the key concession by returning to negotiations without preconditions."

Their return required a semantic sleight of hand. The Soviets would not simply rejoin the suspended Geneva talks, so last week's announcement very carefully called the impending talks "new negotiations." What about START and INF? "As far as those negotiations go, the situation has not changed," said Soviet Foreign Ministry Spokesman Vladimir Lomeiko at his Moscow press conference. "They are only possible given the removal of the American missiles." He was emphatic. "This is not a renewal of negotiations. These are absolutely new talks." Explains a U.S. official: "The Soviets had painted themselves into a very public corner. We wanted to give them an easy way out." Not that the Soviets have crumpled. In the past year they have deployed almost 100 SS-20s, capable of hitting targets throughout Western Europe.

Nuclear weapons are the central fact of the U.S.-Soviet relationship. But incipient entente, although modest, is also showing up elsewhere. Mikhail Gorbachev, heir apparent to Soviet Leader Konstantin Chernenko, will visit Britain for a week in December (see box). As Shultz arrives in Geneva in January, a U.S. Commerce official will be in Moscow for quieter talks about how to expand U.S.-Soviet trade. This week Soviet Minister of Agriculture Valentin Mesyats will begin a twelve-day tour of the American heartland; aside from Gromyko, no Soviet minister has visited the U.S. since 1979. Last week Pop Singer John Denver embarked on a concert tour of the Soviet Union, the first by an American entertainer in years. When Denver appeared at the U.S. Ambassador's Thanksgiving dinner in Moscow and sang We 're All in This Together, one Soviet guest, Foreign Ministry Official Alexander Bessmertnykh, sang right along.

It is no rush of good-fellowship that has the Soviets packing for Geneva again. Rather, the past year made it plain that their attitude of aggrieved peevishness was getting them nowhere. When the NATO governments were staunch in their determination to install new Pershing II and cruise missiles, the disarmament movement in Europe withered, and with it a good part of Moscow's hopes for forestalling the deployments. The Soviets meanwhile heard increasingly come-hither talk from the President and realized by summer that his re-election was all but certain. "They faced four more years of Ronald Reagan," explains a U.S. policymaker. "So the time had come to find a way back to the negotiating table."

A few days after reelection, Reagan sent an earnest note to Chernenko. A week later, surprisingly swift for the Soviet bureaucracy, the White House received a letter from Chernenko proposing the Shultz-Gromyko conference. "There had been positive signals," says a presidential adviser, "but nothing this explicit." Perle, probably the most influential arms-control critic in the Administration, had his calculations thrown off. Said he: "I'm amazed the Soviets came back to the table so soon. I hadn't expected them until spring."

The breakthrough came after Reagan suggested vaguely, during his speech in September to the U.N. General Assembly, that new arms talks might take place under an "umbrella," implying a unified forum without separate negotiations for medium-range missiles and long-range missiles. The START talks had concerned the warheads, mostly loaded on ICBMS, that the U.S. and the Soviet Union have pointed at each other from their respective territories and from submarines. The INF talks focused exclusively on missiles based in Europe and aimed at European targets. Umbrella talks could treat those different weapons as parts of a single negotiating equation, together with emerging space-based weapons. The technical complexity of the talks would be increased, yet the comprehensive approach offers considerable advantages: negotiators would be able to barter the putative U.S. edge in space weaponry, for instance, directly with the Soviet surfeit in ICBM megatonnage.

What kinds of specific offers might the U.S. make for openers? Shultz could agree to a slowdown in the deployment of cruise missiles or a moratorium on testing antisatellite devices. The hard-liners in Washington, unwilling to forgo the U.S. buildup in either area, would merely suggest that the Soviets send monitors to watch U.S. underground nuclear tests and that an American counterpart go to the U.S.S.R.

The Administration's internal split on arms control remains so deep that significant progress may not be possible despite the President's accommodating intentions. On one side are the skeptics: Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, Perle and other Pentagon subordinates. Arrayed against them are the arms-control moderates: Shultz, his underlings and the White House staff. Even at the White House meetings last week to shape the U.S.-Soviet joint statement, admits a Pentagon official, the hawks practiced "constant skirmishing" to slow the momentum.

For their separate political reasons, the principal moderates and hard-liners agree that no arms-control czar should be appointed. But McFarlane talked last week of finding someone "to advise, to troubleshoot and to be a designated hitter that could assure momentum is sustained." The White House favorite for the job is Paul Nitze, the chief negotiator at the INF talks. Yet he is opposed by the Pentagon hawks. In Moscow, one Soviet expert on U.S. relations smiled at the Washington jargon--czar--but said with a sigh, "When Kissinger was making these decisions in the Nixon years, then we were able to move ahead. Maybe what we need is a new Kissinger."

Nixon met three times with Leonid Brezhnev, first in 1972 to sign the SALT I pact. McFarlane said it was "premature to speculate" that the January meeting might lead to a Reagan-Chernenko encounter. Before last week's announcement, Chernenko told NBC News in answer to written questions that he did not think "conditions now are ripe for a Soviet-American summit meeting." Still, U.S. officials have bandied about the idea of a summit next fall.

Before any such grand encounter can occur, though, Reagan must involve himself in the arms-control process more directly. Specifically, he will have to give Shultz and the moderates his unequivocal endorsement, or make it clear to the hard-liners that his commitment to negotiating nuclear arms reductions is genuine and urgent.

Even if the President manages to establish a single negotiating strategy for his Administration, arms-control agreements will surely be elusive. Chernenko's health and his mastery of the Soviet state remain uncertain. The Kremlin may simply want to observe the forms of negotiation for propaganda purposes. "We're not there yet," concedes a White House adviser, with epic understatement. "It may take the whole second term to get there."

In Washington, Moscow and European capitals last week, the general reaction was the same, a kind of prudent hopefulness, positive but well short of jubilant. The distance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union had become vast and worrisome. Even an uncertain plan to re-engage is better than hostile solitude. "The main thing is that the talks are taking place," sums up Sir Geoffrey Howe, the British Foreign Secretary. "But don't let's have any terrifically high expectations of sudden change. It's going to be a very long business. It will require a lot of patience from all of us."

-- By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof /Moscow and Johanna McGeary/ Washington, with other bureaus

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof, Johanna McGeary