The Road to Zero

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Burt and others pushed, over Perle's objections, a proposal for an "interim solution." Their plan would leave some American and Soviet missiles in place, just as NATO had originally envisioned in the dual-track decision of 1979. It was to be interim in name only: few strategic experts in the West expected -- or, more important, wanted -- NATO to be without any new missiles at all.

When the U.S. began deploying its missiles on schedule in late 1983, the Soviets walked out of the talks in Geneva and sulked in their tents for nearly 16 months. Haig had staged his own walkout from the Administration in 1982. As a quit-and-tell memoirist two years later, he bitterly denounced the zero option as a killer proposal, designed to be rejected. Now, as a Republican presidential candidate, he is criticizing the INF treaty as strategically unsound. All three Richards have also moved on. Allen has been succeeded by five National Security Advisers. Perle is presiding over seminars at the American Enterprise Institute and working on a novel about bureaucratic infighting over national-security policy. Burt, who will probably resemble a less than heroic character in Perle's novel, is Ambassador to West Germany.

But in the tangled, ironic and surprise-ridden history of those six years, there has been a curious constant: the zero option. The 27-word sentence that Reagan uttered in 1981 accurately presaged the treaty that Reagan and Gorbachev are scheduled to sign in Washington.

Even as it prepared to welcome the Soviet leader, the Reagan Administration could not resist the temptation to occasionally gloat over Moscow's apparent capitulation in the face of American steadfastness. Perle has been beaming with the pride of paternity and enjoying the last laugh. The Administration has convinced itself, and now wants to convince everyone else, that the INF treaty is not just an unprecedented accomplishment by the superpowers acting in concert -- the elimination of an entire class of modern weaponry -- but an unprecedented triumph of American persistence over Soviet intransigence. As Kenneth Adelman, the Perle ally who is outgoing director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, put it recently, "For once we had a negotiation, and the good guys won."

There is some truth to that claim. But it is not the whole truth, and it may not turn out to be the most important truth. The story of the INF treaty is also one of Soviet persistence, Soviet ingenuity and, yes, Soviet success. That is a critical element of any arms-control agreement: both sides must feel they succeeded. The Soviet Union set out to keep American missiles as far from its territory as possible. And this week it will sign an agreement doing just that.

The Tula Line