East-West Battle of the Bean Counters

The Western alliance had been waiting for the decision. After a lengthy and bitter debate that almost split Chancellor Helmut Kohl's ruling conservative coalition, West Germany last week finally closed ranks with its allies and endorsed Mikhail Gorbachev's "double-zero" proposal to eliminate both long- and shorter-range intermediate nuclear forces from Europe. Bonn's decision will permit NATO Foreign Ministers, meeting this week in Reykjavik, to give U.S. arms negotiators an unambiguous go-ahead for an INF agreement with the Soviets. Suddenly, the much-discussed superpower summit this fall -- at which Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan would sign an INF deal -- is beginning to look possible.

Such an accord would represent a historic arms-control breakthrough. For the first time, both sides would be compelled not only to slow the arms race but to junk hundreds of newly deployed missiles. But despite official NATO support for an INF deal, many Western leaders fear that double-zero could turn into double jeopardy for the alliance. According to the proposal's opponents, pulling those missiles out of Europe would put NATO at the mercy of superior Warsaw Pact conventional forces.

For nearly 40 years, standard military wisdom in the West has held that Warsaw Pact armies so outnumber and outgun NATO that only nuclear arms could redress the balance. This conventional forces "gap" has legitimized NATO's reliance on nuclear weapons, which in turn has allowed the alliance to hold down its spending on nonnuclear forces. Now, however, with NATO's nuclear inventory likely to shrink, fears are surfacing that decades of nuclear dependence may have left the alliance with insufficient conventional clout to keep the peace.

Alliance military commanders claim that the conventional balance is tilted heavily against them. "Every year," says NATO Supreme Commander General Bernard Rogers, "we find the gap continues to widen." Rogers warns that "within days" of a Warsaw Pact invasion, he would be forced to seek permission to use tactical nuclear weapons to halt an otherwise unstoppable advance. Once NATO crossed that threshold, however, escalation to full-scale nuclear war might be impossible to stop. The grim joke in NATO military circles is that its defense strategy consists of "fighting like hell for three days and then blowing up the world."

To help raise the nuclear threshold, NATO defense ministers agreed last month to strengthen their conventional forces through a 3% boost in defense spending. Yet most NATO governments have consistently failed in the past to fulfill their military spending commitments. Moreover, with the Gorbachev peace offensive in full swing, it will be difficult to win public support for military budget increases. In West Germany, for example, 72% of respondents in a U.S.-sponsored survey registered approval for Soviet arms control diplomacy, compared with only 9% for U.S. efforts. Says Eberhard Schulz, a West German Sovietologist: "Gorbachev's propaganda has really reached people."