Troop Cuts Could Be Substance for Summit

Last November, President Reagan returned from Geneva and his first summit with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev confidently talking of two more meetings in 1986 and 1987.

But the Soviets now refuse to talk seriously about a date, and the chances of a summit this year are increasingly slim. In fact, there may not be another one during the Reagan Administration. What has gone wrong?

Gorbachev may be playing hard to get as a symbolic gesture that he has no economic or psychological need to deal with America as did the late Leonid I. Brezhnev. “In world politics one must not just restrict oneself to relations with just one country,” he said at the recently completed Communist Party Congress. “As experience shows, this only encourages an arrogant feeling of strength.”

But one needs to look at what is going on in the United States to find clues for the Soviet aloofness.

The American right wing, prominently in the person of columnist George Will, is now starting to say publicly what it has long privately advocated: that the Soviet Union is in terminal decline and that we should apply real pressure in order to hasten its demise. When the Administration steps up its efforts to overthrow a Soviet ally, as in Nicaragua, or symbolically slaps them around by conducting military missions against Libya, it sends out the signal that it has bought such arguments.

More important, the Administration continues to insist that a summit is no reason to cut the military budget. It argues, as it did before Geneva, that such an action would weaken the President’s hand, leaving the Soviets with no incentive to bargain if the United States were cutting its expenditures unilaterally.

Thus yearly summits, if they do not result in agreements, could always be used as an excuse to maintain military spending, something that did not go unnoticed by Gorbachev when he warned at the party congress: “We will not remain unconcerned if the Soviet-U.S. dialogue . . . is used for the continuation of the arms race and material preparation for war.”

A change in course is in order, but the hand will most likely have to be dealt by the United States. Reagan needs to stop his Soviet bashing, and liberals and moderates need to get together with the Administration on an arms control approach that will yield true progress.

Nuclear disarmament, the litmus test for successful summits, is almost surely unattainable. A test ban, for instance, would prohibit us from modernizing our arsenal with more reliable, and thus safer, weapons such as the single warhead Midgetman. And no U.S. President would--or should--accept a ban on applied research that Gorbachev seeks concerning Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. On the issue of intermediate nuclear missiles in Europe, the French refusal to cooperate surely makes any agreement impossible.

Considering the number of nuclear weapons already deployed, neither the danger of war nor the level of military spending is affected significantly if we reduce or increase warheads by a few thousand. Yet the liberals who dominate the arms control community continue to insist on concentrating on these symbolic and emotional nuclear issues, ignoring the fact that by placing all the emphasis on them, we are losing our chance to take meaningful steps elsewhere.

Since both countries have strong economic interests to cut military expenditures, we should be looking at the real big-ticket items--conventional forces in Europe.

This is where the real progress is now possible. Both armies--about a million each--are much too large, a result mainly of the World War II mentality of the Soviet leadership before Gorbachev. If Moscow is thinking straight, it would see no advantage in a conquest of Western Europe and should be willing to make major reductions in order to demonstrate this point.

The Reagan Administration, at the now-stalled Vienna talks on troop reductions, seems to think it can force Gorbachev to keep his military expenditures high by demanding major concessions on verification as a condition for a tiny, symbolic cut in troops--yet one that would still be more than twice as big on the Soviet as the American side.

This would mean we would get a lot of legalized spying on the Red Army without actually cutting much in our manpower or expenditures. If the reductions are symbolic, then we should accept symbolic verification. If the verification is to be real, we should be talking about demobilizations of divisions rather than a few thousand troops. “Disarmament without verification is impossible, but verification without disarmament also makes no sense,” Gorbachev has rightly complained.

The focus of arms control should be to see whether Gorbachev is serious about forces in Europe. We need to return to Vienna to explore this, and an agreement in this realm should be the subject for the next summit.