Breaking the Ice : With Daniloff Done, How Do We Read Reykjavik?

The resolution of the Daniloff case was a classic example of American diplomacy during the Reagan years--tough and uncompromising in public, ready to cut a deal in private. First we got the American journalist Nicholas S. Daniloff, then they got a convicted Soviet spy, then we we got two Soviet dissidents and finally both sides got a two-day pre-summit mini-summit next week in Iceland. Did anyone come out ahead in this whirlwind diplomatic scrimmage?

In Washington they’re busy adding up the score cards and the early count looks like this: Ronald Reagan had to do something he said he’d never do--trade their guy for our guy (score one for Mikhail S. Gorbachev), but the Soviet Union had to sweeten the deal with Yuri F. Orlov and his wife, Irina L. Valitova (one for Reagan). Reagan wanted to meet later rather than sooner (one more for Gorbachev). On a deeper level, we stumbled badly when we tried to scare some caution into the Soviet espionage apparatus attached to the United Nations in New York by arresting one of their low-level operatives. If anybody is sucking burnt fingers from this affair it’s the FBI, not the KGB (score two for Viktor Mikhailovich Chebrikov, the chairman of the KGB).

The wild card in the deal--worth 10 points at least, if we can decide who wanted it most--is the long-debated, oft-postponed meeting of Reagan and Gorbachev which the two leaders promised to hold “next year” when they first met last year. Does the Iceland meeting count? It’s hard to say--both sides insist it’s not a summit, but only preparation for a summit. Will the fact it’s scheduled to take place only three weeks before the election put pressure on Reagan to come up with some sort of agreement on arms control--which Gorbachev insists is the price for a genuine summit? Or will it give Reagan a public-relations boost and let him put off till next year the hard decisions he must make before any sort of agreement can be reached--assuming he wants one? Finally, are the two sides just going through the motions, or is a significant new Soviet-American understanding struggling to be born?

The open questions surrounding this summit-by-another-name are not idle ones. The arms race and Soviet-American relations through the end of the century both hang on the outcome. This was easy to forget during the Daniloff affair, a characteristic “crisis” of the Reagan years. Most have been symbolic clashes over minor matters, noisy while they last but quickly forgotten, like the invasion of Grenada, the Soviet shoot-down of a Korean airliner, the bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut, the U.S. air raid on Libya. Reagan has been the luckiest of Presidents and in some respects his six years in office have been like a glorious Indian summer. His admirers would probably say, “Of course the sailing has been smooth--his enemies don’t dare mess with him.”

Perhaps there’s something to this, but real crises come from something harder to predict--the ferment of history. At the moment a potentially king-sized crisis is coming to a boil: The bitter six-year-long war between Iran and Iraq could spill out of its battlefield at the head of the Persian Gulf and threaten the oil states with a fundamentalist Islamic revolution. This is not the sort of thing Reagan might resolve with tough words, Hollywood charm or quiet promises of big money, and it’s highly unlikely the Soviets would let him solve it by force. The Middle East is only one of several arenas where the Soviets and the Americans could be nose-to-nose between one day’s newspaper and the next. Reagan has had no experience with serious crises and the rest of us, basking in the warmth of Indian summer, have forgotten how common they are. Soviet-American relations are better than they were a few years ago when the President was calling the other side an “evil empire,” but they’re pretty dismal all the same. This is a serious matter; in a crisis a reservoir of trust and good will--or the lack of them--could make all the difference.

This point seems to have been forgotten in the long period of maneuvering for a new summit, as if the meeting itself were only a formality, like two boxers shaking hands before the bell. The biggest problems facing the two sides can only be solved, if they are to be solved at all, by agreement. At the top of the list is arms control because a long period of growing danger is about to get a lot worse. An entire era in East-West military competition is coming to an end--the era of modernization in which the basic delivery systems for nuclear weapons (aircraft and missiles) have been modified to take advantage of the computer revolution, vastly increasing their accuracy and versatility. The first missiles for example, had about a 50-50 chance of landing within five miles of the target. That was good enough for cities, but hopeless if the target was a hard one like a missile silo. The newest missiles have a 50-50 chance of landing within a couple of hundred feet of the target, which means that Americans and Soviets alike can be reasonably certain of destroying anything in a known location on or near the surface of the earth. Further improvement in missile accuracy would be academic, just as further increases in the numbers of missiles would be superfluous: Both sides can already destroy whatever they like, whenever they like.

But of course neither side feels safer. In fact, modernization of offensive weapons has made the world a much more dangerous place, for the simple reason that it has made both sides jumpy, nervous and uncertain who would come out ahead--”prevail,” in Caspar W. Weinberger’s word--in a major war. Fifteen years ago a sneak attack by either side would have failed to have much inhibiting effect on the victim’s capacity to retaliate--nothing was to be gained by striking first. This is no longer so certain. A first strike now would have a good chance of destroying all land-based weapons while crippling the victim’s ability to communicate. This means there is now something to be gained by striking first, and even more to be lost by getting caught on the ground. Defense professionals have a phrase for this--they call it “crisis instability,” and they’ve been worrying about it for years without being able to do very much about it.

The quick-and-dirty way to deal with the sitting-duck problem is to make weapons systems more “responsive”--that is, quicker off the ground in an emergency--by reducing warning times and accelerating the alerting process. Both depend heavily on computers and tighter “loops” between warning and reaction. These systems often fail in peacetime; the consequences of failure during a crisis could be catastrophic. Americans and Soviets both recognize the inherent dangers of this situation, and are looking for a way out of the corner which we’ve printed ourselves into.

The American solution is “Star Wars”--space-based defense systems which would encourage an attacker to think twice by making it hard for him to predict the results of his attack. It’s hard to be sure how the Soviets look at this problem because they don’t argue these matters in public. But they say the only practical answer is arms control--negotiated limits on offensive weapons which would reduce the first strike problem, coupled with a “Star Wars” ban that would preserve deterrence and save zillions of rubles. Do the Soviets really mean it? There’s no way to find out until we’re ready to cut a deal.

These questions are not going to be answered in Iceland. At best we might get an agreement to keep talking--the same thing we got last time around. But Indian summer can’t last forever. Seven years have passed since the last Soviet-American arms agreement. If we go on playing hard to get, waiting for the perfect deal, we may find we’re only talking to ourselves.