The Road to Zero

(4 of 13)

The game being played to a draw this week began about ten years ago, when Ronald Reagan was a radio commentator and Gorbachev was Communist Party boss for the Stavropol region. That was when the strategic rocket forces started deploying the SS-20s. But that same year, Soviet civilian leaders began to have doubts about whether more and more nuclear weapons like the SS-20 necessarily meant more security and power for the U.S.S.R. The Kremlin initiated a gradual shift in emphasis away from nuclear weaponry to conventional weaponry as instruments of Soviet influence and intimidation, particularly in Europe. In January 1977 Brezhnev gave a speech at a World War II commemorative celebration in Tula, a city south of Moscow. The Soviet leader laid down what became known in the West as the "Tula line." In that speech and subsequent elaborations, Brezhnev said nuclear superiority was "pointless," it was "dangerous madness" for anyone even to seek victory in a nuclear war, and the Soviets needed only nuclear forces that were "sufficient" to hold those of the U.S. in check.

Sufficiency was a word and a concept that had been commonplace among Western strategists for at least a decade. Soviet doctrine seemed finally to be catching up.

It was, as Soviets like to say, "no accident" that in the same month as Brezhnev's Tula speech, Nikolai Ogarkov became chief of the Soviet general staff. Marshal Ogarkov was a controversial choice among the top brass. He had been the top military representative to SALT. The civilian leadership apparently picked him because he too believed in sufficiency, parity and stalemate. He also favored Soviet-American agreements as a means of regulating the arms race.

Ogarkov, however, was no dove. The money saved by relying less on nuclear missiles he wanted to spend on advanced conventional weapons. He did not want those rubles diverted to the beleaguered Soviet consumer economy. He was finally demoted in September 1984. But the new chief of the general staff, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, was also a proponent of the idea that enough is enough in nuclear weaponry.

There was, in the Tula line, both good news and bad news for the West. A recognition of the need for nuclear sufficiency rather than superiority was welcome, especially if it meant that the Soviet Union might be coaxed into retiring some of its most threatening weapons. The bad news was that Moscow still seemed bent on increasing its influence in Europe -- and on using its huge conventional military strength to do so.

Besides, in Moscow's thinking, the partial denuclearization of Soviet military strategy required the much more thorough denuclearization of the American military presence in Europe. Moscow might be more willing to bargain away some of its own missiles, but it was more determined than ever not to sanction the stationing of new, land-based American nuclear weapons near the Soviet border.