The Summit's Good Soldiers

Just as superpowers are doomed to coexist, every summit seems destined to produce, sooner or later, a letdown. That is because the buildup is artificial. Such meetings are, by intent, based on the conceit that relations between traditional adversaries can change profoundly for the better, that they can change quickly, and that they can change as a result of the interaction between the superleaders themselves.

None of those propositions is true. If two countries are so at odds that the world devotes millions of words and hours of live television coverage to an encounter between two of their citizens, then clearly their differences are far too great for a few days to effect that much of a change.

In the case of the Moscow summit of 1988, the feeling of mild anticlimax set in before Ronald Reagan even climbed aboard Air Force One to ride west. Part of the reason was the flip side of the good news about Soviet-American relations: this was, after all, Reagan's fourth meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, and even the amazing sight of their walking through Red Square together could hardly be considered a historic triumph.

Beyond the general sense of unfulfillment, there was something quite specific that did not happen. A number of the President's advisers had come openly hoping for a breakthrough in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks that would enable them to announce a fifth summit in the fall. Hence there was palpable disappointment when it looked as though summitry and major arms control might be over for the duration of the Administration.

The main reason for the impasse in START was also specific -- excruciatingly so: how to restrict sea-launched cruise missiles. Since SLCMs use highly sophisticated guidance systems, the U.S. has an advantage. Therefore the Soviets are trying to restrict them, while the U.S. wants virtually to exempt them from START.

This might appear to be a surpassingly arcane issue. Yet last week, while Reagan and Gorbachev were discussing global and philosophical matters, some of their key aides were locked in a passionate dispute over weapons that are almost too small, too slow and too low flying even to be considered strategic.

Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci came as close as he ever does to raising his voice when he tried to persuade Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov that SLCMs should not figure in calculations of the overall balance of destructive power. Yazov was just as adamant: SLCMs can strike deep inside the Soviet Union, he said, and thus must be limited by START.

At the state dinner Monday night, a civilian aide to Gorbachev buttonholed Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the chief of the Soviet General Staff. The General Secretary was eager for a START treaty this year, before the U.S. went through what the Soviets regard as the temporarily paralyzing and perennially mystifying process whereby it changes its leadership. Why not put the SLCM issue aside for the moment so that START can go forward? "Nyet!" boomed the marshal.