Nuclear Arms Issue Towers Over Others

When President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev meet here at the summit Tuesday and Wednesday, one issue will tower over all others--the nuclear arms race.

Dwarfing human rights, regional conflicts and other sources of tension, it is the single issue that rivets the attention of the whole world, has the potential to split the Western alliance and poses major political and economic problems for Washington and Moscow alike.

And for once in the tortuous quest for control and reduction of nuclear arms, the differences separating the superpowers appear on one level to be tantalizingly small. In the weeks before the summit, Washington and Moscow set forth detailed formulas for engineering deep cuts in their offensive nuclear arsenals, and both now have powerful reasons of self-interest to seek relief from the relentless pressures of the arms race.

Strewn With Difficulties

Yet, the path to meaningful arms control is still strewn with difficulties made almost insurmountable, at least for the present, by Reagan’s fundamental distrust of the Soviet regime and Moscow’s similar distaste for the conservative U.S. President, who once called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”

“The notion that a meeting . . . would fundamentally alter the situation is a very superficial notion,” a senior Reagan Administration official told reporters last week.

At best, U.S. officials hope the summit will conclude with agreement on a statement of general principles that would give a “new impulse” to the Geneva arms control talks, which have been deadlocked for a year.

However, no guidelines are likely to blunt the stark and fundamental differences that continue to separate the two sides: the U.S. determination to reduce the overwhelming Soviet lead in gigantic land-based missiles and the Soviet goal of blocking Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, a proposed space-based anti-missile system popularly known as “Star Wars.”

This summit, a senior U.S. official said, should be seen largely as reopening a dialogue after a hiatus of six years now that a new, young Soviet leader is in power. A mere agreement to continue the dialogue within an established framework should make this summit a success, he said.

“Life does not end in the middle of November,” Secretary of State George P. Shultz said after meeting with Gorbachev at the Kremlin two weeks ago. The overriding question on the eve of the summit, which is now expected to end without so much as a joint declaration of accomplishments, is how much will begin after the middle of November.

Beyond the arcane realm of nuclear strategy itself, a variety of forces are pushing both Moscow and Washington in the direction of an arms control accord.

Foremost among them is domestic economics. After five years of leadership changes in the Kremlin and economic doldrums in the country, Gorbachev has promised a better standard of living: a near-doubling of the economic growth rate (from 3.2% to 5% annually) in a few years and a 60%-to-80% increase in per-capita income by the end of the century.

In his new five-year plan, to be presented to a Communist Party congress next February, he must make hard choices on allocating resources between the civilian and military sectors. He also has raised expectations of a political relaxation by choosing to convene the congress on the 30th anniversary of the denunciation of the Josef Stalin dictatorship by Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Further, to make good on his plans for economic improvement, U.S. analysts believe, Gorbachev needs greater access to Western markets and a respite in the Soviets’ ever-rising defense budgets--in short, a breather in U.S.-Soviet hostility, if not a new period of outright detente.

“Those same people who look at domestic priorities would like to see him come home able to divert resources into those areas,” a senior Administration official said.

Economic forces are at work on the United States as well. Reagan needs improved relations with the Soviets if he is to accept cutbacks in defense budgets as part of the effort to reduce $200-billion-a-year federal deficits. Congressional opponents of the Strategic Defense Initiative will become increasingly active if Soviet opposition to it appears to be preventing a new arms control agreement and overall improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations.

Ties With Military

In addition to the economic factors generating pressure for progress on arms control, Reagan will be negotiating with a Soviet leader who seems less beholden to the military than his predecessors--and who may be marginally less influenced by the military’s view on arms agreements. His Politburo, for the first time in more than a decade, does not include the Soviet defense minister.

Moreover, both Reagan and Gorbachev have studiously refused to allow the minefields of recent international incidents--the return home of a KGB agent who had apparently defected to the United States, the furor over a Soviet sailor who jumped ship near New Orleans and was returned to his vessel by U.S. officials, the charge that the Soviets used a chemical tracking agent on U.S. diplomats in Moscow--to blow up their path to the summit. Both are expected to declare the summit a success, whatever its meager outcome.

For all these positive factors, however, the stark differences between the two leaders and the two systems of government may pose barriers too steep to surmount, at least in the immediate future.

Although the 74-year-old Reagan has only the three years before his term ends to secure an arms accord with the Soviets, Gorbachev, at 54, can look forward to decades of power.

With time on his side, the Soviet leader can play a waiting game, trying to split Reagan from his Western allies and feed Administration critics in the United States who are convinced that the President’s long record of anti-communism makes it impossible for him to accept a new arms agreement. In the view of some Western analysts, Gorbachev will find it easy to portray himself as the peace-seeker, Reagan as the obstacle--an image Moscow could intensify by making some gestures on human rights at the summit.

The Kremlin has already tried to defuse the human rights issue by permitting the emigration to the United States of 10 Soviet citizens, including eight married to American citizens and long separated from their spouses.

Even the Soviet economic predicament may not be the force for peace that U.S. officials expect. Official Soviet commentators note that recent crackdowns on absenteeism and alcoholism have already wrung considerable slack out of the Soviet economy and boosted annual economic growth from 2% in 1983 to 3.2% now. If necessary, they say, the Soviet people could be squeezed harder to ensure that the United States does not achieve clear-cut military superiority.

Above all else, though, is the intense, decades-old distrust between East and West.

Hidden Agenda Perceived

Robert S. McFarlane, Reagan’s national security adviser, who sat at Shultz’s side for the pre-summit session with Gorbachev two weeks ago, reported to the President that the Soviet leader views the Reagan Administration as dominated by a small circle of influential advisers who have an “overriding anti-Soviet” attitude and a hidden agenda for regaining U.S. military superiority.

Reagan grew angry at that characterization, according to a senior U.S. official who had attended the meeting with Gorbachev. The Soviet view, this official said, is little more than a stereotype “not founded on fact or accurate reading of his attitudes.”

Stereotype or not, however, it probably represents an accurate reflection of the way Gorbachev sizes up the men who will sit across the table from him during the summit.

And the Kremlin holds no monopoly in its suspicion of its opposite number. If the Kremlin has called Reagan officials “liars” and “cannibals,” Reagan in turn has accused the Soviets of cheating on more than a dozen existing arms control treaties. Neither takes at face value anything the other says.

The arms control issues that will confront Reagan and Gorbachev would be daunting enough even if the two sides trusted each other. A vast gulf has historically divided the two superpowers in their efforts to achieve their own concepts of nuclear deterrence.

To be sure, the Soviets and Americans in recent weeks have made proposals that seem to cut through many of their deep-seated differences. Both sides offered 50% reductions in offensive nuclear weapons, and only a gap of 600 warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles--the Soviets proposed a limit of 3,600, the United States called for 3,000--separates them in this most crucial category.

However, the Kremlin’s offer of a 50% arms cut was conditioned on Reagan’s agreement to abandon the “Star Wars” program. Reagan has reserved the right to pursue research and testing of the missile defense system.

And more than that, a senior U.S. official, speaking not for attribution, complained that Gorbachev does not understand the fundamental arms control doctrine of deterrence--the notion that neither side will start a nuclear exchange if it realizes that the other possesses an arsenal so large that it would survive a first strike and wreak utter devastation on the aggressor.

Thus Gorbachev, in this view, fails to see why the huge Soviet lead in land-based missiles--the only kind believed strong and accurate enough to wipe out the other side’s heavily fortified land-based missiles--provoked Reagan to embark on his huge military buildup and seek a missile shield in space.

The United States has about 1,030 intercontinental ballistic missiles, which carry 2,132 warheads. The Soviets have 1,398 ICBMs, which carry 5,800 warheads.

Because these missiles are sufficiently accurate that two of their powerful warheads are very likely to be enough to destroy an enemy missile silo, the Soviets have enough warheads to wipe out nearly every U.S. silo and have enough left over to threaten to annihilate American cities if the United States retaliated. The United States does not the same capability.

In fact, most authorities believe that a Soviet first strike could wipe out about 90% of U.S. land-based missiles in their silos, the seaports where about half of U.S. missile-carrying submarines are usually berthed and all bombers except those on alert status that are “flushed” into the air at the first warning of attack.

Grim Calculus

Such a strike might seem almost suicidal because the surviving U.S. submarine-based missiles and bombers would be more than sufficient to devastate the Soviet Union in retaliation. However, in an extreme crisis, some planners believe, the Kremlin might take the chance. In the grim calculus of strategic planning, the Soviets might conclude that the United States would not strike Soviet cities for fear that the Soviets would return the favor with its remaining missiles.

Far more likely, the Soviets might seek to intimidate U.S. allies by pointing out that the marginally inferior U.S. position in land-based weapons erodes the “nuclear umbrella” that has protected them from Soviet attack since World War II.

To restore the balance, the Carter Administration sought to deploy 200 MX missiles, each with 10 warheads and each mounted on mobile launchers. Reagan scrapped that basing plan and is now placing 50 MX missiles in fixed silos, where they will be just as vulnerable to Soviet missiles as the older U.S. ICBMs.

New Mobile ICBMs

Meanwhile, the Soviets became concerned that the United States, even if it lacked new land-based missiles, would have enough new and accurate submarine-launched missiles by 1990 to threaten their own land-based force. So, they have begun to deploy two new mobile ICBMs: the SS-25, a single-warhead missile transported on a truck-like vehicle; and the 10-warhead SS-24, carried in a special railroad car.

The United States is now working toward a small, mobile ICBM dubbed Midgetman, but U.S. strategists say the new missile cannot hope to match its Soviet counterpart. The cost is too great, they argue, and public opposition to nuclear missiles roaming the rails and roads prevents the degree of mobility achieved by the Soviets.

Thus, the Soviet lead in land-based missiles has not only become one great stumbling block to an arms control accord but has spawned the other great obstacle--Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.

If the Reagan Administration cannot equalize land-based forces at the bargaining table, it intends to neutralize the Soviet advantage with a defensive system.

“The Soviets have driven us to a defense against missiles,” said a senior U.S. official. “We have no alternative to defense.”

Virtually all proponents of SDI admit that, if it is ever developed, it would not be “leak-proof” for decades. However, even if imperfect, it would cancel out the Soviet advantage in ICBMs and protect against the new Soviet mobile ICBMs.

Beyond SDI’s ability to restore the nuclear balance, the U.S. official said, it would provide a hedge against the Soviets’ extensive, decade-old research program on weapons to kill missiles and satellites. And a third reason for SDI, he said, is that a missile defense system, using conventional rather than nuclear interceptors, might “provide a better basis for deterrence because it is non-nuclear and non-threatening.”

However, the Soviets, who have concentrated on offensive weapons and lag behind the United States in space-defense technology, insist that SDI, far from restoring balance, would give the United States a dangerous lead. Just as the primary U.S. arms control goal is to eliminate the Soviet edge in gigantic ICBMs, blocking SDI has become the Soviets’ chief aim.

Behind a missile shield, the Soviets argue, the United States could launch a first strike against Soviet military targets and be protected against a retaliatory strike. If the United States goes forward with SDI, they say, they will insist on retaining their entire offensive arsenal to overwhelm the U.S. defense.

Gorbachev left room for hope that an “agreement in principle” might be reached at the summit when he conceded in an interview with Time magazine in September that the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty did not bar fundamental research related to space defense.

However, in Moscow, Soviet officials insisted later that even SDI research must be banned before cuts could be made in long-range offensive weapons. This position, matched against Reagan’s stated determination to push ahead with research, would jeopardize even an “agreement in principle” that could give the summit a glow of accomplishment even if it only papered over the chasm.

While long-range offensive weapons and anti-missile defensive systems have created standoffs at the bargaining table, prospects appear brighter for negotiations over intermediate-range nuclear forces--Soviet weapons trained on Europe and U.S. missiles based in and near Europe.

Gorbachev, traveling in Paris last month, indicated that intermediate-range weapons could be discussed independently of others and that the thorny issue of whether to include British and French missiles as part of the Western force might be handled in subsequent talks between those nations and the Soviet Union.

At present, intermediate-range systems are the subject of one set of U.S.-Soviet arms talks in Geneva (the other two deal with long-range offensive weapons and space defense). Splitting off the talks on intermediate-range weapons would represent a concession to the U.S. position that agreement in one forum should not have to wait for agreement in the other two.

Major Step Forward

Similarly, removing the British and French weapons--primarily submarine-based missiles--from U.S.-Soviet negotiations would be a major step forward. The United States could not negotiate limits on the weapons of its independent allies, nor is it willing to count them as part of its own arsenal.

However, Gorbachev and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, meeting with Shultz in Moscow two weeks ago, did not again offer those concessions. Instead, they repeated old Soviet positions that would count not only British and French weapons in the U.S. totals but even all U.S. aircraft on all U.S. carriers, including one still being built.

And yet, there is a hint of accommodation in the air. Sitting close to Gorbachev at the Moscow talks with Shultz as well as earlier in Paris was Yuli A. Kvitsinsky, the Soviet arms negotiator who headed Moscow’s team at negotiations over intermediate-range missiles in 1982 and 1983. He and Paul H. Nitze, his U.S. counterpart during those talks, devised a clever but abortive compromise during their famous “walk in the woods” near Geneva.

That deal would have set a European ceiling of 75 Soviet SS-20 missiles, each with three warheads. The U.S. force would have been 75 cruise missile launchers, each with four single-warhead cruise missiles. Under that formula, a U.S. force of 300 warheads in the noses of slow-flying cruise missiles would have faced 225 Soviet warheads atop fast-flying ballistic missiles.

Neither Moscow nor Washington accepted the scheme, but their formula may turn out to be close to the solution in the end.

Now, Kvitsinsky is a key arms adviser to the Soviet leader, and Nitze, who has become Reagan’s chief arms control adviser, has received the Medal of Freedom from Reagan. To some politicians, at least, the moves may signal a willingness to return to the “walk in the woods” formula--in concept, if not in detail--and that in turn might provide a wedge to solve other sticky arms control issues as well.

Arms control, while the single most important issue to be faced by Reagan and Gorbachev, cannot succeed without an improved political climate. The Reagan Administration has repeatedly blamed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan for poisoning the atmosphere between Moscow and Washington and leading to the Senate’s refusal to ratify SALT II--the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, which was negotiated in 1979.

Soviet officials reject this cause-and-effect relationship. In Moscow during Shultz’s recent visit, one Soviet commentator insisted that SALT II was dead in the Senate before Soviet troops moved south. Whatever history judges on that score, there is no doubt that a new Soviet adventure in the Third World would doom any new arms agreement.

‘Regional Peace Process’

At the United Nations in September, Reagan proposed a “regional peace process” in which opposing sides would be urged by the superpowers to negotiate settlements, foreign troops would be withdrawn, foreign military aid would be stopped and the United States and the Soviet Union would “sit down together” to guarantee the peace. He cited five conflicts that could be approached in this manner: in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia and Nicaragua.

The Soviets replied that the 1972 summit between Richard M. Nixon and Leonid I. Brezhnev had already laid out “basic principles” for U.S.-Soviet behavior--called at the time a “code of conduct”--in which each side promised not to seek “unilateral advantage at the expense of the other.” The Americans countered that those principles had not prevented Moscow from sending troops, arms or surrogates into the five regional hot spots between 1975 and 1979.

With the two sides so far apart, regional concerns do not appear to be promising topics for resolution at the summit. Still, hopes for future progress on the conflicts are not absent for two reasons.

For one, these so-called “brush wars” are still not “Gorbachev’s wars,” as one U.S. official pointed out, and the Soviet leader may be more willing to settle them sooner rather than later, before he becomes personally identified with them.

And second, U.S. and Soviet diplomats have been meeting during the past year on broader regional subjects--the Middle East, southern Africa, Central America and East Asia, with an additional separate meeting on Afghanistan. Although there was no intention of seeking agreements, exploring the positions of each side is often the first step toward settlement.

Human rights is a third general issue to be discussed at Geneva, with the United States seeking a more generous Soviet policy toward Jewish and German emigration, better treatment of dissidents and religious minorities and broad compliance with the 1975 Helsinki accords, which attempted to give humanitarian concerns a greater emphasis in Soviet Bloc nations.

The Administration, in a new approach, hopes that quiet pressure will be more effective than loud publicity for such Soviet dissidents as Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei D. Sakharov and imprisoned dissident Anatoly Shcharansky.

At the same time, Shultz spent two hours in Moscow explaining to Soviet leaders that the emigration issue touches the American people, who, except for Indians, are all immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. The Soviets replied by noting discrimination against the American Indians and blacks, and insisting that economic rights--to a job, to health care, to housing--are more important than the individual freedoms prized so highly in the United States.

Despite the standoff during Shultz’s session with Gorbachev, the Soviets have hinted at increased flexibility by giving visas to Yelena Bonner, Sakharov’s wife, and to former dissidents following their punishment in jail or exile. There are chronic rumors that the level of Jewish emigration may rise from its present trickle of fewer than 1,000 a year to tens of thousands--its highest mark was 51,200 in 1979--if a new U.S.-Soviet rapport brings increased trade and other benefits to Moscow.

On the eve of the meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev, a senior State Department official said the Administration would move to ease trade restrictions if a “significant” rise in emigration and release of well-known dissidents followed the summit.

Finally, the U.S. and Soviet leaders will discuss 26 bilateral issues between the two nations, of which four are most important: resumption of civilian airline flights between the United States and the Soviet Union; airliner safety in the northern Pacific, where a Korean airliner was shot down by Soviet fighters two years ago; a consular agreement that would permit the United States to establish an office in Kiev and the Soviet Union an office in New York, and a cultural exchange agreement that would encompass scientific, artistic, sports and other types of reciprocal visits.

These, however, could be settled without holding the first summit in six years, without raising the expections of the dawn of a new era in U.S.-Soviet relations that would reduce the risk of global annihilation.

This summit, a senior presidential aide said recently, “is a beginning; it isn’t a climax. The success of the meeting will be measured in whether or not problems are resolved in the coming months and years,” not in how many pieces of paper are signed on the spot.

That leaves the judgment to history.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS: ARSENALS AND PROPOSALS

Glossary: ICBM: Intercontinental Ballistic Missile SLBM: Submarine-Launched Ballistic Miissile ALCM: Air-Launched Cruise Missile GLCM: Ground-Launched Cruise Missile

STRATEGIC WEAPONS * (intercontinental range)

CURRENT ARSENALS United Soviet States Union Launchers ICBMs 1,032 1,398 Submarine missiles 640 942 Bombers 263 155 Total launchers 1,935 2,495 Warheads On ICBMs 2,132 5,800 On submarines 5,728 2,500 On bombers and 3,280 420 cruise missiles Total warheads 11,140 8,720

INTERMEDIATE-RANGE WEAPONS (range 1,000 to 3,000 miles

Missiles 236 441 Warheads 236 1,323 mix) for U.S. and 140 SS-20s in Europe and 100 SS-20s in Asia for Soviet Union Bombers (U.S. count) 560 3,095 open to negotiation Bombers (Soviet count) 555 461 DEFENSIVE SYSTEMS Ground-based Missiles 0 100 Radars 5 6 or 7 Space-based active active research research

LATEST PROPOSALS United Soviet States Union Launchers ICBMs 1,450 each no separate limit Submarine missiles combined no separate limit

Bombers 350 each no separate limit Total launchers 1,800 each 50% reduction (1,680 U.S.; 1,250 Soviet) Warheads On ICBMs 3,000 each 3,600 each On submarines 1,500 each 2,400 each On bombers and 1,500 each total ban cruise missiles Total warheads 6,000 each 6,000 each ..TE: INTERMEDIATE-RANGE WEAPONS (range 1,000 to 3,000 miles

Missiles 140 U.S. Pershing No Pershing 2s, 100 Warheads 2 and GLCMs (any GLCMs for U.S.; 243 mix) for U.S. and 140 SS-20s in Europe SS-20s in Europe and 171 in Asia for and 100 SS-20s in Soviets Asia for Soviet Union

Bombers (U.S. count) open to negotiation 50% cut Bombers (Soviet count)

DEFENSIVE SYSTEMS Ground-based Missiles no limit on research; total ban offer to share technology with Soviets under vaguely defined conditions

OTHER RESTRICTIONS throw weight limit implicit throw weight of about 3 million reduction of 50% kilograms (6.6 million to 2.5 million kilotons pounds)

ban on all mobile nothing comparable missiles

nothing comparable ban on all long-range cruise missiles

ban on new types nothing comparable and modernization of heavy missiles

nothing comparable ban on all new types of systems