A Mix of Hope and Hokum

For months the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been posturing about arms control in high-visibility pronouncements to journalists and government leaders and in various public forums. There was talk just about everywhere, it seemed, except at the bargaining table in Geneva. At times the propagandizing appeared to be aimed less at reducing the arsenals of nuclear weapons than at jockeying for public support.

Last week, however, the battleground finally shifted. Victor Karpov, the chief Soviet arms negotiator, sat down at the banquet-size table in the Botanic Building, the drab headquarters of the U.S. arms-control delegation across from Geneva's tidy botanical gardens, and began reading slowly from a lengthy document. For half an hour the Soviet negotiator droned on, speaking in the argot of nuclear weaponry. His monologue was technical and arcane, yet it was immensely important. At the least, it promised to deliver arms control from the realm of rhetoric to the real business of negotiated give-and-take over numbers and weapons. After months of stonewalling at the talks that began in Geneva in March, the Kremlin had at last presented a specific offer, one foreshadowed by Kremlin Leader Mikhail Gorbachev in a letter to President Reagan a few days earlier. The prospect of serious bargaining, however, did nothing to halt the war of words. On a highly publicized visit to France, Gorbachev played the familiar Soviet game of trying to divide the Western alliance. He offered to cut side deals for weapons reductions with Britain and France and unilaterally declared reductions on Soviet missiles aimed at Europe. In a speech to French legislators, he called on the Europeans to help halt what he called "the infernal train" of the arms race. Gorbachev's exchanges with French leaders and reporters, heavily played on the nightly news in the U.S. as well as in Europe, were watched closely as a kind of dress rehearsal for his November summit with Reagan.

As portrayed by the Soviets, the proposal they offered in Geneva appeared breathtakingly simple. It called for nothing less than a 50% reduction in nuclear arms capable of hitting the territory of each superpower. But the actual details, while encouraging in some ways, were intricate and studded with traps. For those who hold out hope for a comprehensive arms-control agreement, there was some good news: Moscow's plan offers a significant reduction in the weapons that Washington considers most threatening, warheads deployed atop land-based strategic missiles. There was some bad news too: the Soviet method of counting weapons so distorts strategic realities that it is simply unacceptable to the U.S. Equally an anathema to the Reagan Administration is the continued Soviet insistence that the U.S. abandon its Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known as Star Wars.

Arms-control naysayers within the Administration scrambled to portray the Soviet offer as a non-starter. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger said that "when you start out with an asymmetrical situation and you propose equal reductions, it still leaves the gap" (see interview).