The Road to Zero

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After this first summit, Gorbachev was more impatient than ever with the diplomats of both sides who were slogging away in Geneva. He was also emboldened about his ability to compete with the Great Communicator in Washington for the hearts and minds of international public opinion. Said one of his advisers: "The General Secretary decided to take a more active, direct and public role in advancing the process. He resolved to seize the bull by the horns."

He did it in January 1986 with a bold stroke: a proposal for a comprehensive settlement that subsumed all three sets of negotiations. It was a three-stage, 15-year plan for total nuclear disarmament. The first stage called for cancellation of Star Wars, a 50% reduction in strategic weaponry and "complete liquidation" of Soviet and American INF missiles "in the European zone." In Geneva the next day, Karpov opened Round 4 of the nuclear and space talks with a verbatim reading from the eleven-page Gorbachev proposal. It was marked SEKRETNO even though virtually every word had just been distributed worldwide.

Karpov & Co. once again seemed surprised by their leader's tour de force in public diplomacy. When the American negotiators pressed them for clarification, the Soviets' answers were confused and contradictory -- particularly on the critical issue of whether an interim INF deal was contingent on U.S. acceptance of restrictions on Star Wars.

Kvitsinsky told a West German politician that Gorbachev's proposal superseded earlier Soviet willingness, enshrined only two months before in the summit communique, to settle for a separate INF treaty. An interim agreement, said Kvitsinsky, was now "impossible." Linkage was again the order of the day.

But not for long. Two weeks later Kvitsinsky was contradicted by Gorbachev himself. The Soviet leader again showed his penchant for going over everyone's head -- this time directly to influential American liberals. On Feb. 6, during a conversation with visiting Senator Edward Kennedy, the Soviet leader said an interim INF deal, independent of START and SDI, might indeed be possible. Moreover, such an agreement could be signed at a summit in Washington later in the year.

This latest play of the delinkage card brought broad smiles in Washington. The sweet smell of vindication was in the air.

Some Western analysts, however, had growing doubts about whether delinkage and the zero option would necessarily be an unmitigated blessing. A veteran intelligence official cast a pall over an interagency meeting in February by administering what he called a "heavy dose of reality therapy." Consider, he said, the danger posed by a new Soviet ICBM -- the SS-25, a mobile, three- stage, intercontinental version of the two-stage, intermediate-range SS-20. "Not a single one of the SS-20s that Gorbachev will be giving up can hit the U.S., and not a single SS-25 is affected by an INF treaty. So there's nothing to stop him from replacing every SS-20 he takes out of service with an SS-25 that can hit us easily. What's more, SS-25s can cover the same targets in Europe that the SS-20s have been covering. Given an INF agreement but absent a START agreement, we could end up having more Soviet warheads aimed against us than before and our allies could be in no better shape than they are now."