The Road to Zero

Monday, Dec. 14, 1987 By STROBE TALBOTT

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Kvitsinsky's American counterpart was Paul Nitze, 80, a grand old man of American nuclear strategy. In 1982 they engaged in an extraordinary, one-on- one mini-negotiation -- the so-called walk in the woods -- that resulted in a tentative deal that would have sacrificed the Pershing II but allowed the U.S. a stripped-down deployment of cruise missiles to counter a residual force of SS-20s. Cruise missiles fly subsonically at low altitudes and are vulnerable to enemy air defenses. The Pershing II ballistic missiles arc to the edge of space and can strike targets inside western Russia in a matter of minutes. The deal was repudiated by both men's home offices. It was shot down in Washington (particularly by Perle) because it meant giving up the Pershing II, and in Moscow because it meant allowing even a few U.S. cruise missiles in Europe.

The first American missiles arrived in Europe in late 1983. The Soviet gerontocracy had painted itself into a corner, leaving no alternative but to walk out in Geneva. There was a widespread assumption in the West, encouraged by Washington, that the battle was over. The U.S. and NATO had won. The Soviets now had to accept the new reality of modern American missiles on European territory.

Not so, says a Soviet official with close ties to the military: "Our generals were more determined than ever to get the American missiles out and to keep them out. The general staff concluded that Brezhnev really blew it by provoking the U.S. into installing the Pershing IIs in the first place and then not having the wit to make a deal to get rid of them."

First, however, there had to be a successor who could do something.

Chess and Poker

Shortly before Reagan's second Inauguration, in January 1985, Secretary of State George Shultz met Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in Geneva and agreed to get negotiations started again. They settled on a formula for three sets of talks -- INF, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, and a new negotiation on defense and space, focusing on the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars. But the Soviets insisted, and Shultz agreed, that the three sets of issues would eventually have to be resolved "in their interrelationship." The Soviets said at the time that this phrase meant hard- and-fast "linkage": there could be no separate deal on INF or START without American concessions on Star Wars. The Americans pressed from the outset for an INF deal that did not require concessions on Star Wars.

At the first session of the talks in March 1985, the chairman of the Soviet delegation, Victor Karpov, a bluff, crusty veteran of SALT, trotted out virtually all Moscow's old demands and added some new ones for good measure. He went out of his way to stress that his plenary statement had been approved "at the highest level" -- by Mikhail Gorbachev, who had become General Secretary one day before.

It was the toughest opening bid that experienced Americans could remember. There were dark jokes about canceling hotel rooms and packing for home. However, the head of the U.S. delegation, Max Kampelman, had just the opposite reaction. He could see that he and his colleagues were in for a long haul, but he did not mind. "We'll be talking for a long time," he told Shultz.