A Farewell to Arms? Gorbachev's disarming proposal

Soviet diplomats frequently call at the State Department. Particularly since the Geneva summit, there has been a great deal of mid-level diplomacy. So there was no reason to expect anything out of the ordinary when Oleg Sokolov, the Soviet chargé d'affaires in Washington, arrived early last Wednesday morning to see Secretary of State George Shultz. But when Sokolov handed him a lengthy letter from Mikhail Gorbachev to Ronald Reagan, Shultz became the first man in official Washington to be startled by a sweeping and unexpected new arms-control proposal. It was studded with ambiguities and potentially risky approaches, but it also set forth a bold schedule for making the world nuclear-free and left the Administration scrambling for a way to respond. One quick reading of the letter sent Shultz straight to the White House.

Some three hours later in Moscow, the proposal was presented to the world's public--the audience at which it was largely aimed--in typical Soviet fashion. The anchorman on the nightly newscast Vremya (Time), his face expressionless, picked up a sheaf of papers and announced, with no more emotion than he might have used to present a weather report, that he had a "statement by the General Secretary of the Communist Party." Then he droned on for half an hour as the news agency TASS distributed the statement around the world.

As many Soviet and American leaders had done before, Gorbachev called for total elimination of nuclear missiles, warheads, bombs and other weapons from the planet. But this was not presented as a vague goal for the future; he proposed a fairly detailed, three-stage timetable culminating at the end of the century. He also offered tantalizing hints about ways to break specific deadlocks. If his plan is adopted, Gorbachev grandly concluded, "by the end of 1999 there will be no nuclear weapons on earth."

Propaganda? Certainly, and very skillful propaganda too. Both its grand vision and many of its specifics are clearly designed to win Moscow public support in Western Europe and around the world while allow in to retain certain strategic advantages. The plan has a Grammsky-Rudsky appeal, decreeing a timetable for eliminating nuclear weapons the way the Gramm-Rudman Act has decreed a timetable for eliminating the U.S. budget deficit. As with Gramm-Rudman, the cuts proposed by Gorbachev seem to have an easy and automatic simplicity, but the plan ignores the hard and complex choices that will have to be made down the road to preserve the delicate nuclear balance. Indeed, the initial reductions in strategic weapons would tilt the balance dangerously in the Soviets' favor. In addition, the whole scheme appears to hang on a condition that Gorbachev knows Reagan resists: U.S. abandonment of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, whose goal is to develop a defensive shield against nuclear missiles.