Nation: Superpower Smoke Signals

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Messages about budgets, bombs and civil defense

A hot line links the White House to the Kremlin for nearly instantaneous communication. But the two superpowers often prefer to conduct their strategic discourse by less direct means. Such an exchange seems to have been under way last week, when both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. took a number of actions or made statements bearing on the balance of nuclear power. Exactly what, if anything, they were saying to each other was unclear.

The most surprising development was the disclosure that the Soviets had, in the past month or so, delivered 20 MIG-23 Flogger jets to Cuba. One version of this plane can deliver nuclear weapons. If this is the model now in Havana's hands, the U.S.S.R. has seriously violated the 1962 Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement that ended the Cuban missile crisis. The Soviet leader pledged not to give Cuba offensive weapons.

Washington responded cautiously.

Jimmy Carter merely ordered resumption of high-altitude SR-71 reconnaissance flights over Cuba; he had stopped these missions after taking office because they had irritated Cuba's Fidel Castro. From the SR-71 's photos, experts will be able to determine whether Cuba's Floggers can carry a nuclear payload. Meanwhile, a group of U.S. Senators visiting Moscow asked Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin about the MiG-23s, noting that their presence in Cuba might hurt the chances of the Senate's ratifying a strategic arms limitation treaty. Kosygin snapped at his visitors that he "didn't need a lecture" on the U.S. political system and that the planes were only defensive weapons.

The following day, the Senators met with Soviet Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev. During a 50-minute monologue, the aging leader ritually declared that the Soviet Union is interested in peace. He then added that both he and Carter had such power that in "just a couple of minutes [we could] let the missiles fly." If the U.S. ever did, he warned, "we can still destroy the U.S."

This friendly host then surprised his guests by disclosing that the U.S.S.R. had tested a neutron warhead "many years ago [but] never started production." U.S. experts agree that the Soviets have the ability to develop such a weapon, but there is no way to confirm tests because they would have been held underground. The Carter Administration is still considering whether the U.S. will produce neutron warheads; they could provide NATO with a devastating defense against Soviet tank attacks. It is perhaps for this reason that Moscow has been waging a worldwide propaganda campaign against U.S. development of the weapon. Brezhnev also discussed the strategic arms talks. Complaining about U.S. critics of SALT, he told the Senators that, while he was willing to meet Carter any time and any place, he could not do so until there would be "a new SALT agreement we could sign."