The Road to Zero

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On a number of occasions in the 1950s and '60s, the U.S. and its allies had installed American missiles in and around Europe as equalizers, to make up for the Soviet Union's geographical proximity and the numerical superiority of the Warsaw Pact over NATO. In each case, some combination of American ambivalence, West European anxiety and Soviet neuralgia led to eventual withdrawal of the U.S. missiles. For example, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Khrushchev demanded the removal from Turkey of American Jupiter rockets (ancestors of the Pershing II) in exchange for his agreement to take Soviet SS-4s and SS-5s (ancestors of the SS-20) out of Cuba. Says one of Gorbachev's advisers: "The resolution of the Caribbean crisis established the principle that we would not threaten you with nuclear weapons from within the western hemisphere. But another principle was established too: We put you on notice that forever after we would regard American land-based missiles on the periphery of the U.S.S.R. as an unacceptable threat to our security."

The INF treaty that Gorbachev will be signing with Reagan this week will leave the U.S. without any ground-based missiles in Europe capable of hitting Soviet territory -- and without the right to deploy any such weapons in the future. That is every bit as much a mission accomplished in Soviet policy as the accompanying elimination of the SS-20s is a consummation of Reagan and Perle's original zero option.

The bottom line of the INF treaty in 1987 is Brezhnev's Tula line of 1977.

No Right, No Blessing

It has already become part of the U.S.-fostered mythology of INF that the Kremlin had to be dragged kicking and screaming into eventual acceptance of the zero option, that it was not until earlier this year that Gorbachev finally seized the long-standing American proposal and made it his own. Here, too, the history is more complex. On Nov. 23, 1981, five days after Reagan first unveiled the zero option, Brezhnev on a trip to Bonn proposed the eventual elimination of all medium-range weapons "directed toward Europe," plus the elimination of all shorter-range missiles.

For Brezhnev then, just as for Gorbachev now, what mattered most was U.S. missiles in Europe that could reach Soviet territory. For two years, from late 1981 until the end of 1983, Soviet negotiators hammered away at the unacceptability of any new American deployments. The head of the Soviet delegation at the talks in Geneva, Yuli Kvitsinsky, then a bright young star of the Soviet diplomatic corps, declared that the U.S. had no "right" to deploy missiles in Europe and the U.S.S.R. would never "bless" the stationing of even a single cruise missile or Pershing II east of the Atlantic.