The Road to Zero

The very title of the document is a mouthful -- Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Elimination of Their Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles. It runs to 169 single-spaced typewritten pages, with 17 articles and three annexes. Nearly every word has been haggled over for years. Some brackets in the text, indicating passages still in dispute, were finally removed only last week.

Yet reduced to its essence, this mass of legalese is one of the simplest, most radical attempts in history by the leaders of two adversary nations to resolve a point of tension between them. Never before has the word elimination appeared in the heading of a nuclear arms-control treaty. It is a dramatic example of the practitioners of nuclear diplomacy taking a sword to the Gordian knot.

There is a short, simple version of how this agreement came about: Once upon a time the man in the White House said to the man in the Kremlin, "Hey, you've got a whole category of weapons we don't like. We've got a whole category of weapons you don't like. Why don't we just wipe clean the slate?" After 72 months of contentious, suspenseful, stop-and-go negotiation, the man in the Kremlin said, "O.K. It's a deal." With that, Mr. Gorbachev comes to Washington, pen in hand.

But before the ink is dry on the last page of the treaty, new disputes are emerging. Some Senators, presidential candidates and West European strategists are saying, Granted, it's the deal we asked for, but is it the one we should have asked for? And do we want it now? Two-thirds of the Senators must in effect answer yea for the treaty to become U.S. law. Their answer will depend in large measure on their understanding of the history of how the agreement came about.

And that history is anything but short or simple.

The Genesis of Zero

Early in his first term, Ronald Reagan was preparing to give one of the most important speeches of his presidency. He had inherited from Jimmy Carter a perplexing piece of unfinished business: what to do about a new class of missiles that Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union had arrayed against Western Europe. Each was mounted on a mobile launcher and armed with three highly accurate warheads that could be fired nearly 3,100 miles. In a minor coup, Western intelligence discovered that the Kremlin's strategic rocket forces secretly referred to this formidable weapon by the innocent-sounding name Pioneer, the Soviet equivalent of Boy Scout or Girl Scout. NATO designated it the SS-20 and warned that it constituted a major escalation in the arms race.

Under pressure from its NATO allies, the Carter Administration had committed the U.S. to the "dual track" decision of 1979. The U.S. would offset the Soviet missiles by deploying a new generation of its own "Euromissiles" -- Tomahawk cruise missiles and Pershing II ballistic missiles -- while at the same time making a good-faith effort to negotiate with the U.S.S.R. a compromise that would scale back the missiles on both sides.