Best Chance Yet for Arms Control : Gorbachev Seems to Mean Business, Reagan Shifting Too

One has a choice of metaphors for the superpowers--two scorpions in a bottle, elephants mating or warring, high-wire artists working without a net. Each image captures the danger in the relationship but the tightrope metaphor has the advantage of implying a prescription: Weave a net.

The net-makers of Washington and Moscow are struggling with the task. Premature stresses (Afghanistan, the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, the Daniloff controversy) keep tearing holes in it. Yet weavers Ronald Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev now have the best chance in history to tie off a few critical strands when they meet in Washington.

It is nearly certain that the two leaders will come together in a second summit and that they will have substantial business to transact. The biggest deals are not yet ripe for settlement, but the two governments are at last straining toward each other on key issues. It would take ineptitude of rare degree to blow the summit opportunity.

Recent commotions over the accused Soviet spy and the American journalist suggest that both sides may be capable of such ineptitude. A Soviet operative who invests years and money in an immigrant student who might someday get a job in a firm that might have national security connections, which might give him access to classified information--the scenario conjures up less anxiety about the threat to U.S. security than reassurance that would-be spies are wasting resources on such inconsequential long shots. And our own Administration has had to scramble awkwardly to escape the ire of those more eager to exploit the Daniloff affair as an obstacle to any bargain with Moscow than they are to ease the reporter’s path home.

The “I-told-you-so” factions in both regimes have had a field day painting the other side as irredeemably hostile, but they are not likely to prevent a summit.

This is because the basis has now been laid for a truly productive meeting. The Soviet leader has shown extraordinary flexibility on key disputes. He has insisted that the next summit be more than a mere photo opportunity, yet has made only modest demands, indicating that even agreement on a single element of the arms-control agenda would justify the meeting. Western visitors have come away from discussions with Gorbachev impressed that he means business and that he wants to do business. Significant shifts in Soviet negotiating positions suggest a genuine search for common ground on several contentious matters.

After years of haggling over intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF), the Soviets seem prepared to destroy most of the SS-20 missiles that they have deployed and to accept a token number of INF warheads in Europe equal to those fielded by the United States. They have relaxed their demands for counting and constraining British and French forces in these totals. West Germany’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and Gorbachev’s principal Americanist, Anatoly Dobrynin, reportedly share the view that INF is now the prime candidate for major achievement at a Reagan-Gorbachev summit.

Gorbachev has also won credibility in Europe by his self-imposed moratorium on nuclear testing. While careful not to criticize Reagan directly, Chancellor Helmut Kohl has made a point in recent months of restating Bonn’s interest in progress toward a comprehensive nuclear test ban. Kohl declares that verification problems should no longer be the main obstacle to further limits on such tests and has urged compromise.

Moscow’s proclaimed readiness for on-site verification, which the United States has long insisted was the prerequisite for a comprehensive test ban, has put Washington on the defensive on this issue. Indeed, Gorbachev is reaping such a political harvest on this front that he could be tempted to resist lesser bargains, such as a quota on tests.

Reagan, meanwhile, has also shown movement from some of his initial positions. He has come off the so-called zero option for INF. The President is apparently prepared for a reasonable accommodation that would provide equal Soviet and American INF warheads in Europe and match the Soviet intermediate force in Asia with a similar number of weapons held in the United States for possible deployment to the region, if necessary.

Reagan is under tremendous pressure from Congress to modify his stance on several issues--nuclear testing, his plan to abandon the SALT II restraints, his assertion that the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty can be interpreted to condone his Strategic Defense Initiative. Cutbacks in Reagan’s defense budget leave no doubt that he is unlikely to gain greater leverage with the Soviets during his last two years in office than the recent defense buildup already affords. If he intends to strike a bargain, the question becomes: if not now, when?

While Reagan remains adamant against a nuclear test moratorium, there are hints that he is amenable to a quota on tests, perhaps linked to some gradual reduction in the current ceiling of 150 kilotons of yield. He also has moderated his demand for immediate agreement on a 50% reduction in strategic nuclear weapons. The two sides’ proposals at Geneva now fall within a few hundred weapons of each other--in the 7,500 to 8,000 range--as the target for initial reductions. Although many analysts are skeptical, there is reason to believe the two sides can now close the gap on the several sublimits being negotiated, particularly those affecting ICBM warheads and cruise missiles.

There has even been slight movement on the stickiest subject of all, the sharply opposed views on the future of strategic defense. Reagan has offered modest assurances that the United States would extend the ABM treaty’s requirement for notice of withdrawal from six months to several years. The offer is largely meaningless, since the United States could not usefully break out of the treaty before the 1990s anyway. But it has opened the way for serious give and take on safeguards to give both sides confidence that neither will breach the treaty at an early date. Gorbachev has now responded on this point and bargaining can begin. It could be protracted.

On the matter of balancing offense and defense, Reagan and Gorbachev need to find wisdom in different insights. The President has to know that, whatever the eventual chances of greater reliance on strategic defense, the most that he can do to enhance his successors’ options is to contain the growth of the offensive threat. Gorbachev, on the other hand, needs to understand that the Soviet Union’s best insurance against a massive American SDI program is an agreed program of reductions in offensive forces. Few in the West would wish to jeopardize continuing implementation of a reductions agreement by embarking on a unilateral, unregulated program of defenses of uncertain value.

Resolving the offense-defense equation will take more time than is available for a summit this year. But the outlines of that encounter grow clearer. An INF agreement is virtually in hand. A compromise on nuclear testing has become more plausible. A broad understanding on a strategic-warhead ceiling, comparable to the Vladivostok agreement capping strategic launchers but requiring real reductions, may be in sight. As a European diplomat put it, “Both Reagan and Gorbachev are hungry for a summit, and they have quite a menu from which to choose.”