Call Iceland What It Was--a Trap : We Can Still Negotiate With Soviets but Not at Expense of SDI

By now it is reasonably clear what happened in Iceland.

President Reagan’s decision in 1983 to proceed with the Strategic Defense Initiative, a program to intercept the Soviet Union’s missiles, threw the Soviet military into a state bordering on panic. The Soviet general staff had concluded 30 years ago that nuclear weapons were the decisive instruments of modern warfare. Its strategy for the contingency of war since then has called for massive preemptive strikes against the U.S. deterrents, accompanied by defensive measures to protect Soviet forces and civilians from U.S. retaliation.

The development by the United States of effective strategic defenses would, with one stroke, nullify this entire strategy. Even if SDI were capable of intercepting only a portion of incoming Soviet missiles, it would make a first strike a very risky gamble. In essence SDI threatens to transform the centerpiece of Soviet military might, the Strategic Rocket Forces, from a war-winning force into a deterrent one. This would force Moscow completely to revise its planning for war and scuttle much of its weaponry.

Moscow’s reaction was to ridicule SDI as an absurd effort that it could overwhelm at a fraction of the cost. In this the Soviets were duly echoed by American liberals who apparently did not stop to ask themselves why, if indeed SDI was so futile, Moscow did not cheer on as the United States spent billions on useless defenses.

When ridicule failed to work, Moscow shifted its propaganda gears and sounded the alarm. It began to depict SDI as a most dangerous deception whose real purpose was to develop a first-strike force. Again U.S. liberals fell in step, although it should have been apparent to them that America has no need to camouflage the development of a first-strike force, should it desire one, as a defensive effort since, unlike strategic defenses, first-strike forces are not constrained by treaty.

Moscow made various attempts to abort SDI, threatening to boycott all arms-control negotiations unless Washington gave it up. None of these threats worked in the face of the determination of President Reagan, who wishes to bequeath strategic defenses as a major legacy of his Administration.

Reykjavik was another such attempt.

Moscow’s reasoning is not difficult to understand, given that its chief adviser on American affairs is Anatoly Dobrynin, an official who had spent nearly a quarter of a century in Washington and now occupies a central position in the Soviet foreign-policy apparatus as head of the International Department. Dobrynin knows that Congress and a good part of American opinion are unhappy about SDI and eager to use it as a “bargaining chip.” He also knows that elections are coming up and that they may cost the Republicans control of the Senate. Why then not give Reagan a cornucopia of offers that he cannot refuse because its riches would strengthen his political base, and then, when agreement is near, demand de facto surrender of SDI? And why not do so in the full glare of publicity, building up expectations through press leaks to the point where the President would not dare to disappoint them?

The plan worked, up to a point.

Then Moscow sprung the catch: All these goodies could be had only if the anti-ballistic missile treaty were so revised that the strategic defense program would, in effect, be aborted. It was to be all or nothing.

The tactic failed for two reasons. One was that House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., on the eve of the Iceland meeting, had given the President a free hand, which considerably relieved pressure on him. The other was that the President quickly saw through the Soviet ploy and flew into something approximating rage when he realized that he had been led into a trap. As soon as it became clear that the Soviet concessions on reducing strategic missiles were a ploy to kill SDI, the talks broke down.

What next? No “historic opportunity” was lost. If the Soviet offers were sincere, they surely can be renegotiated at Geneva. The fact that both sides are going out of their way to salvage something positive out of the Iceland summit suggests that nothing has been irretrievably lost, except the Soviet chance to steamroll the United States into surrendering strategic defenses.

How sincere Moscow is about its proposals to cut down, or even eliminate altogether, nuclear missiles is a question that cannot be answered with any certainty. Money is not a factor here, because even though Moscow desperately needs to reduce military expenditures to improve its economy, missiles constitute a relatively small fraction of the defense budget. One cannot also help but wonder whether the Soviet Union is really prepared to limit itself to 100 warheads against China, as it would under the Reykjavik proposals, given the sharp ideological, territorial and racial differences it has with that nuclear power.

It would be best for well-meaning Americans to cease exerting pressure on the President to come to terms with Moscow at almost any price, including SDI. It is, after all, SDI that brought the Soviets to Reykjavik and made them agree to far-reaching compromises.

In any event U.S.-Soviet tensions are not caused by weapons; the weapons are the result of tensions. Reducing nuclear stockpiles certainly is a worthwhile undertaking, but it can neither eliminate the danger of nuclear holocaust, given the fact of “overkill,” nor fundamentally improves U.S.-Soviet relations. The Soviet Union justifies its mammoth military program with the argument that, unlike the United States, it is surrounded by enemies. This fact tells us a great deal about the Soviet regime and the impossibility of attaining better relations with it by the kind of quick fixes that were attempted in Iceland.