The Road to Zero

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But, as before, it remained for Gorbachev to make the next move. In February of this year, over a Friday dinner, Vorontsov dropped a hint to Kampelman that he expected new instructions to arrive soon from Moscow. The next day Kampelman was receiving one of the steady stream of congressional delegations that came through Geneva to look in on the talks. Emerging from a long lunch with the visiting legislators at the U.S. mission, Kampelman found a message from Vorontsov. The Soviet diplomat gave Kampelman a copy of a major statement by Gorbachev that would be released later that evening.

As expected, Gorbachev delinked the INF deal once and for all from the issues of SDI and START. In order to achieve the basic Soviet goal of keeping American missiles out of Europe, he was willing to accept a separate INF agreement along the lines of Washington's original zero option.

For its part, the Reagan Administration became resigned to making the best of the zero option and accepting yes for an answer. Despite the qualms of many about entirely eliminating America's nuclear-missile deterrence in Europe, Reagan remained just as attracted as ever to the "elimination of the entire % class of land-based missiles." That bold and simple idea was far more compelling to him than recondite concerns over "coupling" and "extended deterrence," just as it had been when he originally proposed the zero option in 1981.

But there was still much work to be done. "Gromyko used to be fond of saying that the last 20 minutes of a negotiation are the most important," Kampelman told Shultz after Gorbachev's February announcement. "Well, we're entering the last 20 minutes." They lasted nine months.

Kampelman's toughest job was persuading the Soviets to accept a global zero-zero plan: no SS-20s or shorter-range INF missiles anywhere in the U.S.S.R. He explained how such a treaty would help eventually with the politics of ratification in the U.S. Senate. "A big concern of the Senators," said Kampelman, "will be verification. It will be far easier to verify a treaty that achieves a global zero outcome than one that leaves some missiles in Europe or Asia. What we're now talking about would be clean, crisp and far more verifiable than the interim agreement." To underscore the political obstacles that Reagan could face at home, Kampelman showed Vorontsov a newspaper article by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger that was highly critical of the prospective treaty.

During a Shultz visit to Moscow in April, Gorbachev made an important concession: shorter-range INF missiles would indeed be eliminated throughout the U.S.S.R. As usual the Soviet team in Geneva was slow to catch up with its home office. Vorontsov at first said that his government was prepared to "zero-out" shorter-range missiles only in Europe. It took some weeks for him to bring his delegation's position into line with what Gorbachev had already told Shultz in Moscow.