America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

Except for the presence of a visitor, it was just another dry run for doomsday. A captain and a first lieutenant of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces simultaneously turned two keys that would, in wartime, send hurtling toward the U.S. an SS-19 ballistic missile with six independently targeted thermonuclear warheads. Watching from a corner of the cramped underground control center was a tall, droll Yankee naval officer who describes himself as a "country boy from Oklahoma": Admiral William J. Crowe, 64, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and the highest-ranking American military official ever to visit the U.S.S.R.

He was on an exchange program of sorts: his former counterpart, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, came to the U.S. last summer. Akhromeyev, now a close adviser to President Mikhail Gorbachev, accompanied Crowe on an eleven-day, nine-stop tour that stretched from Murmansk in the far north to Sochi on the Black Sea. Last week Crowe was summoned to the Kremlin for an audience with Gorbachev. The Soviet leader used the occasion to compliment the man who had appointed Crowe Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 1985: "Former President Reagan saw the way things should go and turned the situation in the right direction."

As Crowe knows, past protestations by the Kremlin of its peaceful intentions have been belied by the size and menace of its war machine. Soviet strategists have traditionally stressed that the best defense is a good offense. To the outside world, the result has often looked more offensive than defensive. Gorbachev and Akhromeyev tried to convince Crowe that something fundamental has changed. "Nonoffensive defense" is a key part of the vocabulary of Soviet "new thinking," and it was a major theme of Crowe's tour. The U.S.S.R. would launch its missiles, he was told, only in retaliation, never in a first strike. Near Minsk he observed an armored unit practice "tactical withdrawal" (i.e., retreat) in response to an enemy attack. At the Voroshilov General Staff Academy in Moscow, where senior officers play war games on huge maps, an instructor stressed that for the past two years, the scenarios have $ always begun with the other side shooting first. Neither host nor guest was so rude as to make the obvious point that in almost all cases, the "other side" could only be the U.S.

Toward the end of Akhromeyev's trip to the U.S. last year, he remarked privately that the experience had convinced him that the U.S. would never start a war. The Soviets clearly hoped Crowe's return visit would inspire a reciprocal conviction. But Crowe was not willing to go quite that far. He left for home, he said, "understanding emotionally what I'd only understood intellectually before: the vastness of the real estate for which the Soviet armed forces are responsible, and the historical vulnerability to invasion. That's something hard for Americans to conceive of. After all, we don't remember being invaded by Mexico or Canada."

Nonetheless, he cautioned, what matters most is "whether a country has got more men and weapons than it needs for defense alone." The Soviets still have a 3-to-1 advantage in tanks and up to a 7-to-1 advantage over the U.S. in artillery. Crowe headed home believing that Gorbachev's reforms and U.S.-Soviet arms-control agreements may chip away at those adverse ratios over time. But he still sees a very real Soviet threat, not in the intentions of the current leaders but in the capabilities that may be available to less benign ones in the future.