Chance to Escape

For the first time in 40 years of Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union have a chance to escape their nuclear confrontation intact. They must seize the moment.

How good a chance to escape was made clear in two ways on Wednesday. The first was a remarkable speech to the United Nations by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in which a man at the top of a presumably Marxist society renounced important parts of Marxist dogma. The second was the remarkable response by President Reagan, whose political career rested squarely on fervent anti-communism; his handwritten farewell read: “We have walked a long way together to clear a path for peace.”

The immediate focus of analysis on the day’s events was the cause of the momentous change. How much could be traced to the Soviet Union’s economic shambles and what even many Soviets regard as a last-ditch effort to put it back together with a mix of market incentives and reductions in defense spending that left Gorbachev no course but to talk peace? Is there in it an element of the sentimentality of an aging actor who is nearing the end of his longest and most important run on center stage?

Those are important questions, but they are no longer the most urgent questions. They were useful for measuring the forces that moved Gorbachev to the stunning positions that he adopted before the United Nations, and moved Reagan to his response. But now the questions of merit involve not how the superpowers got where they are this week, but where they go from here.

One question, so tantalizing and so completely beyond the power of anyone except Gorbachev to answer it, is whether he meant what he said, whether the speech was an olive branch or just some old leaves to help camouflage a future battlefield. But his proposals must be seriously addressed by the United States and its Western allies.

Gorbachev did not ask the West to give up anything in return for his decision to muster out 500,000 Soviet soldiers. This means that the future is negotiable; a Soviet leader who is not prepared to bargain toward a world acceptable to both superpowers and their allies does not talk as he did on Wednesday.

Instead of the Brezhnev Doctrine of a Soviet right and duty to barge into any nation to save socialism, the world got this from Gorbachev: “Freedom of choice is a universal principle that should allow for no exceptions.”

So far there are only promises and soaring rhetoric to show for Wednesday’s events. Now comes the hard part. What steps must be taken after Gorbachev starts following through on troop and tank and fighter-plane reductions in Europe, assuming that he can and will? What will the Soviets propose on the pace of research on a “Star Wars” missile defense and production of stealth bombers, and how should Washington respond?

How can the two countries prevent cruise missiles, which so far defy the best efforts of arms controllers, from becoming a scourge as great as any ballistic missile that may be bargained out of existence? These were tough questions before the Gorbachev speech and the Governors Island summit lunch, and they still are. But the answers may come more easily because the resolve to look for them is stronger.