On Substance, Reykjavik a Step Forward

Question: Seemingly lost in the early debate on the collapse of the summit was the realization that President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev came very close to an agreement that would eliminate all nuclear weapons in the superpowers’ arsenals by 1996. Was it right to attempt such a sweeping change in such a pell-mell fashion? Could such an agreement, negotiated in haste, ever be implemented?

Answer: I consider the proposal for total elimination of intercontinental ballistic missiles, made by Reagan, and the proposal for the total elimination of all nuclear weapons, made by Gorbachev, to be essentially competitive public-relations gambits. I really do not think that either power--the United States or the Soviet Union--wishes to create a situation in which all of a sudden the real nuclear superpowers by the end of this century are China and France.

If one turns to the substantive issues, one has to concede that a great deal of progress was made. In fact, if instead of Reagan, Secretary of State (George P.) Shultz had been sent to Reykjavik, and he came back reporting that, while no final agreement was reached because of continuing disagreements over the Strategic Defense Initiative, nonetheless preliminary agreements were reached on major cuts in strategic forces and on intermediate-range nuclear forces, everyone would hail the outcome as a great success. I think, therefore, Reykjavik in real terms has to be seen as a positive step forward in the continuing U.S.-Soviet negotiating process.

Q: You were opposed to the Reykjavik summit from the beginning. Yet there are others who say that the only way the two powers can break their logjams is for their leaders to get together in this fashion. Is there anything that makes you want to reevaluate your thinking on hurry-up summitry?

A: Not really. I thought the summit was ill-advised because it was so badly prepared. And even on the issues on which genuine progress was made, the small print is still to be negotiated and many loopholes are still to be closed. Hence there is no way that the two leaders could have reached a far-reaching agreement in Reykjavik, even in the absence of the SDI issue.

Moreover, I strongly suspect that Reykjavik in part was a Soviet trap. The Soviets knew that by all of a sudden presenting a series of attractive proposals to Reagan, they would be in a position either to force him to abandon SDI and in the process to destroy his own credibility for firmness, or make him look like an international ogre responsible, because of his commitment to SDI, for the “failure” of the summit. The Soviets could anticipate that the more gullible sectors of the American mass media would swallow that line, and the best proof that they were not wrong is the incredibly simple-minded cover of this week’s Time magazine, which blames the alleged collapse of the summit in effect on Reagan’s SDI.

Q: Many issues such as human rights and regional conflicts appeared to be lost in the attempt to reach the “grand compromise” on arms control. Does this show us that the Soviets will always try to play a grand strategy in order to not have to deal with these other issues?

A: I think the Soviets are very deliberately focusing the discussion of issues almost exclusively on the arms control aspects. Obviously, from the Soviet point of view, a discussion of their aggression, and even genocide, in Afghanistan is awkward and embarrassing. By the same token, we should insist on pushing to the forefront the Afghanistan issue because it is not only a matter of human rights and of the suffering of the people involved, but it is a question that bears on regional stability of the greatest significance. The future of Afghanistan involves ultimately the future of Iran and Pakistan, and thus of Soviet access, and perhaps potentially even preponderance in the Persian Gulf region. This has enormous implications for Western Europe and for the Far East and therefore for our global position.

Q: Despite the outcome at Reykjavik, this has been quite a remarkable year for superpower diplomacy, with the Soviets appearing to be more open and bolder. How do you assess the changes within the Soviet Union, and where might they be heading?

A: I think the Soviet Union realizes that what they were predicting in the 1970s, namely the general crisis of capitalism, is not coming to pass, and that we are witnessing instead the general crisis of communism. That means that the Soviet Union has to set its house in order, pull itself together, and in that context, the wide-open, intense and largely scientific-technological competition with the United States is not in the Soviet interest.

My own view, in the light of the forgoing, is that we can be quite sanguine about the next phase in the American-Soviet negotiations. In addition to making much more of an issue of Afghanistan, because that problem truly deserves to be solved by some arrangement restoring a neutral Afghanistan, we ought to now to strive to relate the tangible preliminary agreements in Reykjavik to some longer-range regimen of strategic stability for the likely conditions of the 1990s and the 21st Century. And here, the deployment of some strategic defenses, with a simultaneous major, but not total, reduction in ICBMs, is the best way to promote both American and Soviet security.

I do not really believe that it is worthwhile to spend a great deal of time in outlining competitive visions of the total elimination of nuclear weapons or ICBMs. But a major reduction in American and Soviet arsenals, to levels below those permitting either one to undertake a first strike, and accompanied at the same time by some deployment of limited strategic defenses, would enhance the security of both. This is why I think that in addition to negotiating on those aspects that moved forward in Reykjavik, we ought to take some tangible and irrevocable steps in the direction of making a limited strategic defense a reality.

I would like to see the President begin partial deployment of some ground-based strategic defenses, and also to make it clear that any space-based defenses would be limited to only one layer--probably the early boost phase--thereby enhancing our own strategic security without menacing Soviet strategic security. Eventually, I feel quite confident we will end up with greatly reduced offensive strategic forces and with both possessing some minimum strategic defenses, each thereby gaining additional security against each other, and also against third-party threats. Such a vision I think is realistic, it is strategically compelling, and it is one to which President Reagan should now take the first irrevocable steps.