DEALING WITH A DEADLOCK : Gorbachev Concessions Real, but There Still Is Time to Act

Speaking on the last day of the Reykjavik meeting, both President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev described it as frank, useful and even friendly. However, Reagan could hardly conceal his fatigue and embarrassment and his arguments were not very convincing.

On the other hand, Gorbachev did not hide his annoyance.

It needs to be said plainly--an important and difficult meeting in Iceland has ended in failure and, as a result, the Soviet Union lost, the United States lost and the whole world lost. There is no basis for saying that it was a disaster or defeat.

The situation in the world did not become any better but it did not become any worse than it was before this summit. And the failure could be useful if the reasons for it were carefully analyzed.

The result of Reykjavik did not mark the beginning of a new era of detente, but this outcome must not be used to increase confrontation. The meeting was but one act in the long drama--which has had more than a few miscues--of cooperation and rivalry between our two countries.

It’s necessary to keep looking for an acceptable solution. There is still time to act, even though time is running short.

The announcement of the meeting in Reykjavik came as a great surprise. It’s hard to say of an unexpected event that it “did not justify the hopes which were placed in it.”

Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger noted recently that meetings of the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States should be very well prepared in advance by experts and ministers so the leaders’ main task would be to ratify agreements already worked out. But this cannot be applied as a general rule. Experts are in need of political direction, because they often show unnecessary pettiness and professional narrowness. Not every President of the United States had such a skillful assistant as Kissinger and such a weak partner as former Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev, who could not say even a simple greeting without the presence of advisers.

National leaders can have a variety of meetings--working sessions, urgent sessions and even secret sessions--without transferring the responsibility for many important talks to their assistants. Because of this, it would be unfair to declare that the meeting in Reykjavik was doomed to failure.

It is also strange to accuse Reagan of coming to Iceland with “empty hands and empty pockets,” as Gorbachev said. It was not Reagan who initiated the meeting--he only agreed, but not without doubts and hesitation, to listen to new Soviet suggestions and it was not necessary for him to fill his picket with new American suggestions.

From Gorbachev’s speeches we learned that Soviet suggestions were really constructive. They included big concessions in all spheres of nuclear weapons and verification, which the Soviet Union did not want to accept three years ago or even last summer. The Soviet proposals created the possibility of compromise and even repeated many previous American positions, such as “zero option.” But concessions should be mutual, and that’s why Gorbachev demanded that the United States live within the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty for another 10 years and limit the Strategic Defense Initiative to laboratory research. Basically, the Soviet offer was not an equal exchange of concessions but seemed more beneficial for the United States and especially for Europe.

By proposing full and rapid reductions of arsenals of dangerous arms already in existence and moving far toward recent American suggestions, the Soviet Union wanted to preserve the ABM Treaty, to slow down for a time the creation of new types of weapons that are under development or still in the minds of scientists and engineers. In fact, many Western scientists express doubt about the effectiveness and strategic expediency of such new weapons. Reagan was ready to accept almost all Soviet suggestions but he was not ready to make concessions on SDI. If he had known about the Soviet package beforehand, he would probably have refused to come to Reykjavik.

From the point of view of propaganda outside the United States, Reagan’s position looks weaker. But the problem of survival of humanity is too serious to be judged from the viewpoint of propaganda. Reagan is getting ready to break or cancel that termless ABM Treaty signed in 1972 by President Richard M. Nixon and which contains clear words: “Each party undertakes not to develop, test or deploy ABM systems or components which are sea-based, air-based or mobile land-based.” But the world is getting accustomed to breaking and cancellation of treaties that have become disadvantageous to one country or another. The Soviet Union is no exception.

Who can count how many treaties and agreements were broken with the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968? We talk and write of the huge cost of the programs of SDI, their ineffectiveness, about egoism of the military-industrial complex of the United States. America has a right to get out of the ABM Treaty. But it seems very strange to agree to destruction of the nuclear missile system in the 20th Century and at the same time to create at the beginning of the 21st Century even more expensive and complicated systems of anti-missile space defense. However, on a smaller scale, research on ABM systems is also being done in the Soviet Union. What if Soviet scientists and engineers had created, a few years ago, a cheaper and highly effective program of space-based ABMs? Would our military and political leaders have refused to develop this wonderful project, which would be able to protect the Soviet Union from all missiles and warheads of the Western countries? It is very difficult to give up real, possible or only imagined superiority.

Yet we must not see only the mountains of weapons accumulated by superpowers. During the last 50 years, military technology has developed more rapidly than other types of technologies. New systems of mass destruction are being created that no SDI can defend against. In the future, these weapons could be available to small countries and groups with evil intentions.

Every Soviet schoolchild knows a novel by the popular Russian writer, Alexei N. Tolstoy, about an engineer named Garyan who created a “death ray” and, challenging all of humanity, was almost successful. Garyan’s fantastic “giperboloid” looks like a toy compared to different kinds of modern lasers. That is why it is necessary to hurry with limitations and effective control during the time weapons are being developed. It’s necessary to look for new compromises, neither tied to the SDI nor to the principle of parity.

For the security of a country like the Soviet union, it’s not necessary to do everything that America does. Unilateral limitations could be quite effective. I would be glad if the Soviet Union would continue its moratorium on underground nuclear tests for 1987. I do not believe that with fewer missiles in the Soviet Union, American bombs will be falling on us. I do not believe that only “three layers” of ABM would save America and Europe from Soviet missiles. Both countries possess enough power and reserves for concessions and peaceful coexistence.

Now, when the concept of “mutual assured destruction” replaced the concept of “restraint” and “mass retribution” and “limited nuclear war,” the philosophy and ethic of war is changing. It is not enough to announce that we will never use nuclear weapons first. If missiles of the enemy are launched against Moscow and Leningrad, what should Soviet generals think when giving an order to destroy Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Rome, Paris and London? During an excavation of our modern civilization, who would determine whose hand pressed the button?

During the years of World War II, while throwing bombs on the cities of Europe and even atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, military leaders could think they were speeding the end of the war and reducing the total of victims. Today, for the conscience of military men, there is no such consolation. Both those of the East and the West would be called criminals, if there is a survivor who can give such a judgment.

These theses should become a postulate of the “new thinking” of the nuclear age, of which Soviet newspapers are writing so much today.

In Iceland, debates about SDI moved aside debates about human rights, to which Reagan wanted to give priority. Gorbachev announced to journalists that we should think, first of all, about people’s right to life. It would be better to talk about people’s right to a worthwhile life. Human dignity does not suffer only from unemployment, racism, misery and hunger, but also from neglect of freedom of opinion and information, from the lack of political and intellectual freedom.

Unfortunately, we find very weak flashes of “new thinking” in either West or East. The world needs both reasonable cooperation on security and on economic and humanitarian questions. We must take such a road, overstepping thousand-year-old prejudices, or humanity has no future. I am sure that in our world there is enough strength and reason to avoid a catastrophe.