Soviet Initiative Confronts Longtime Nuclear Dependence

Some arms-control proposals are serious and some are propaganda ploys. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev’s plan to rid the world of nuclear weapons by the century’s end is a serious one.

It was unveiled on the front pages of Soviet newspapers, and came artfully--or seriously, depending on your point of view--sweetened with major concessions. The first of the plan’s three stages would include a 50% reduction in strategic delivery systems, along with complete elimination of Soviet and American missiles in Europe--the Soviet SS-20s and American Pershing and cruise missiles about which so much was said and so little done a few years ago. The second stage, begining about 1990, would include a complete ban on all tactical nuclear weapons in Europe--increasingly dangerous arms with a maximum potential for sparking World War III, that have nonetheless been the backbone of NATO defense plans since the 1950s. The third, beginning in 1995, would get rid of all other nuclear weapons throughout the world.

Of course, there are sticking points--President Reagan must join a Soviet moratorium on nuclear testing, he must give up his cherished “Star Wars” plans for a space-based missile defense system and the British and French must abandon plans to triple their own nuclear arsenals, and then agree to scrap the warheads they’ve already got. These are not trivial obstacles, but they are not insuperable either, and Reagan’s first response was amazingly warm--he said he was “grateful” for Gorbachev’s plan, gave him credit (generously, but not quite accurately) for being first to propose anything so far-reaching and promised to study it carefully.

Study it will take. Grand schemes like Gorbachev’s traditionally come to grief on the same rock--the fact that we depend on nuclear weapons. We may concede they are dangerous things to have, but they are cheaper than armies, they offer small countries a way to threaten big countries and they are so destructive they make war “unthinkable.” Soviet and American political leaders have often said we’d like to control, limit, reduce or even get rid of nuclear weapons, but while the negotiators have spent decades haggling over the fine print of proposals that mostly went nowhere, the military planners of both sides have acquired tens of thousands of warheads, from back-pack munitions to intercontinental missiles. Realists tell each other it’s too late to wean the military from nuclear weapons--we might as well ask banks to give up computers.

But Gorbachev’s plan cannot be dismissed. Even grumblers in Washington concede it surrenders many long-held Soviet negotiating positions. Fifty-percent reductions represented a kind of crazy dream when George F. Kennan first proposed them a few years ago. The offer of a straight trade in European missiles is indistinguishable in all but detail from Reagan’s “zero option” proposal of 1981. The grander aspects of the plan--getting rid of all nuclear weapons after 1995--are left to last, thus opening the way to success in the more limited, but just as important, first two stages.

Gorbachev’s proposal even offers a concession on the problem of reducing conventional armies in Europe, the subject of talks--now suspended--on Mutual Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) in Vienna. Success in MBFR and the first two stages of the Gorbachev plan would dramatically reduce the world’s nuclear arsenals, all but remove the danger of nuclear or even conventional war in Europe and save vast sums of money for both sides. These appear to be things Gorbachev genuinely wants. The final proof of his plan’s seriousness is the fact that its failure would greatly complicate the Soviet position in all future talks, leaving him with nothing for his efforts--possibly not even the small coin of prestige as a man of peace.

The United States and its allies now face a supremely difficult question: Are we really willing to give up the habits of decades and abandon our plans to defend Europe with nuclear weapons? Getting rid of all nuclear weapons is a long way down the road; pulling them out of Europe is right in front of us. No high official will be quick to say no in public, but in private the notion will fill them with alarm. Since the 1950s, it has been an article of faith, signed in blood by every U.S. secretary of defense, that only nuclear weapons can defend Europe from huge Soviet conventional armies. Everyone is for peace, but in military circles the working definition of peace is a stalemate guaranteed by nuclear arms. We have got “peace,” but what will we have if we give up the bedrock on which it rests--the threat to blow invading Soviet armies to kingdom come?

Consider this threat in its concrete form. The United States maintains about 6,000 nuclear weapons in Europe of seven different types, including long and short-range missiles, conventional bombs and artillery shells. The British and French have about 1,200 warheads between them, and plans for many more. These weapons represent a huge investment over decades, supported by a vast infrastructure of laboratories to design them, factories to build them, communications centers to control them and military forces to use them. Backing up these theater forces is the whole array of American nuclear might, from bomb factories and missile fields to satellites and submarines. The Soviet infrastructure is comparably large.

Many of these institutions--and ultimately all of them--are threatened by Gorbachev’s plan. They will not lightly choose to abolish themselves. Nuclear weapons are the devil we know. The corridors of power will soon hum with cautionary maxims: Deterence works. You can’t trust the Russians. Don’t change horses in midstream. Stick with a winner. Why take chances? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The subject of arms control does not occupy a large place in the standard histories of the Cold War, not to mention histories of the century. There is not much by way of success to record. Oswald Spengler described the second Hague Conference on Disarmament in 1907 as the prelude to one war, and predicted that the Washington Naval Treaty of 1921 would be prelude to another. But it’s worth remembering that the first Hague Conference in 1899 was summoned by Czar Nicholas II of Russia, who was troubled by the warnings of his financial advisers that Russia could not afford to match Austria’s purchase of a new generation of artillery. In an official paper that all but invented the concept of disarmament, the Czar said:

“Hundreds of millions are devoted to acquiring terrible engines of destruction, which, though today regarded as the last word of science, are destined tomorrow to lose all value in the consequence of some fresh discovery in the same field. The economic crises, due in great part to the system of armaments, and the continual danger which lies in the massing of war material, are transforming the armed peace of our days into a crushing burden, which the peoples have more and more difficulty in bearing. It appears evident, then, that if this state of things were prolonged it would eventually lead to the very cataclysm which it is desired to avert, and the horrors of which make every thinking man shudder in advance.”

This was well put. World War I was everything promised and then some. Gorbachev’s plan has more meat than the czar’s, and it gets to it quicker. Perhaps we’ve reached a point where the dangers are too obvious to cite in windy preambles. It’s a good plan and a good place to start talking. Reagan was right to thank him. Its enemy will be inertia--the long habit of depending for safety on weapons too dangerous to use. If defense managers in Washington didn’t believe deterrence works, they couldn’t sleep at night. They do believe, and they do sleep.