PUBLIC SPEECHES, PRIVATE WHISPERS : Negotiating Arms Control While Debating Prisoners

The Daniloff case has been a wild card played in an already complicated and confusing game of arms-control negotia tions. Last week was a time of conflicting signals for U.S.-Soviet efforts to reach agreement on nuclear weapons. Early in the week, the United States and the Soviet Union signed their first arms-control agreement in seven years, a modest but useful step relating to notification and inspection of troop movements in Europe (see related story by Don Cook, page 2). In midweek speeches to the U.N. General Assembly, both President Reagan and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze held out hopes for more far-reaching agreements. Yet at the same time the Soviet Union continued to hold American reporter Nicholas S. Daniloff under charges of espionage, thus endangering prospects for the summit meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, originally expected to occur late this year. Just what is going on?

No one knows for sure why the KGB arrested Daniloff shortly before he was due to leave Moscow, but it seems likely that they planted incriminating evidence and arrested him in order to bargain for the release of Gennady F. Zakharov, an apparently minor Soviet spy who had been arrested by the FBI in New York. Under increasing pressure from conservative supporters, the Reagan Administration has refused a straight Daniloff-Zakharov swap and has been searching for a diplomatic formula to extricate Daniloff without appearing to accept the equivalence of the two arrests. What the Administration tells the people and what it tells the Soviets, however, may mark the difference between public posture and negotiating progress.

Similar differences between announcements and potential agreements also affect arms-control efforts. Last May when Reagan announced his intent to stop observing the terms of the unratified SALT II treaty, he raised a political furor. Polls showed that American public opinion oscillates between twin fears of nuclear war and Soviet expansion. Since the 1960s, these contradictory attitudes have been reconciled by hopes that arms-control agreements would gradually lead to a safer world. Arms control was the glue that held the central position together.

In the early 1980s, this glue began to come unstuck, initially because of worsening U.S.-Soviet relations and non-ratification of SALT II. The new Reagan Administration added fuel to the gathering fire with loose statements about prevailing in a protracted nuclear war. Many of the Reagan advisers also made it clear that they regarded arms control as part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Arms control was charged with lulling the public. The new Administration was in no hurry to return to the bargaining table.

The quick growth of the nuclear freeze movement in the United States and the burgeoning of peace movements in Western Europe were signs of the public’s apprehension of a greater nuclear threat. The unilateral military posture of the Reagan Administration could not sustain public support without some element of arms control diplomacy. By November, 1981, the Reagan Administration rediscovered the rhetorical power of arms control. But its early proposals and the Soviet counterproposals seemed aimed more at the grandstand than at reaching agreement--more public rhetoric than reality. A new Soviet offer at Geneva last June created the first real optimism that a deal on strategic arms might be possible. By dropping their insistence that American missiles and aircraft based in Europe be counted as strategic weapons, and by hinting at a separate agreement for intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe, the Soviets brought the two sides’ proposals much closer together. Further, by relaxing their call for a total research-ban on “space strike weapons,” they removed an absolute impediment to progress in discussing limits for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

Basically the Soviets proposed to link offense and defense. They advocated a cut in offenses for both sides, roughly 25% in nuclear warheads and 30% in strategic launchers. Regarding strategic defense, both sides would agree to abide by a strengthened Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty for 15 years and to limit research on missile-defense to the laboratory. In a sense, the Soviets were offering to restore symmetry between offensive and defensive limitations--the foundation of the original SALT Agreements in 1972, but later eroded by the growth of offensive systems. Optimists spoke of the possibility of a “grand compromise.”

In July, the United States offered not to deploy strategic defenses for 7 1/2 years if the Soviet Union would agree to reductions in offensive weapons. More recently, American negotiators in Geneva are reported to have privately proposed a limit of 1,600 launchers and 7,500 warheads on ballistic missiles and air-launched cruise missiles, with a sub-limit of 3,300 warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles. While many details remained to be worked out, it seemed as if the two wides were coming closer together. Arms-controls optimists hoped that a general framework for strategic weapons control might be agreed to at a fall summit.

Even before the Daniloff arrest created a new imbalance, skeptics were not convinced that progress on strategic arms would be sufficient to justify a summit meeting. Gorbachev had said he would not attend another “empty” summit in which the only product was good will rather than concrete agreements. If the Soviets agreed to a summit, the skeptics believed it would have to be justified by modest agreements on confidence-building measures (such as nuclear risk-reduction centers) and an interim agreement to limit intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe and Asia.

Why are the pessimists skeptical about the prospects for a more ambitious strategic grand compromise? Part of the reason is the hard bargaining that remains over the details of the limitations and verification on the defense side. But even more important is the SDI, which could be part of the solution but is also part of the problem. There is little doubt that the threat of accelerated American technological military progress in space is one of the incentives for Soviet movement at the arms-control talks. But to reap that benefit requires a flexibility that some within the Reagan Administration resist. Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, for example, responded to the Soviet proposal in June by stating: “Extending the ABM Treaty, or doing anything that would prevent our doing all of the things we need to do to develop a Strategic Defense Initiative, is something obviously we would be very much opposed to.”

The dilemma, however, need not be so sharp. SDI does not have to be treated as sacrosanct nor as a bargaining chip to be traded away. In a sense, there are two SDIs. The first is the President’s publicly announced vision of a near-perfect shield that would replace nuclear deterrents with defense. The second is the less-heralded project for an imperfect defense to enhance rather than replace deterrents. The technological prospects for both are highly uncertain, but since the President’s vision involves technology that will not be available until well into the next century, SDI is relatively easy to reconcile with a proposed 10-year reaffirmation of the ABM Treaty and laboratory-based research programs. In other words, it is possible to negotiate an agreement that would allow the President to protect his long-term vision, but only if he pulls his Administration together and refuses to allow proponents of partial defense to use his vision as a stalking-horse for a short-term program that would inevitably erode the ABM Treaty.

In short, the President need not forgo the real political benefits of negotiated reductions. Indeed, he needs something along the lines of a compromise to protect his vision and to maintain the current lull in storms of public concern over the future of nuclear deterrents. For this, Reagan will have to overcome his own ambivalence and control the opponents of negotiated arms control within both his Administration and party. If he fails, his legacy will be greatly diminished.