Break Open That Bottle of Whiskey : Geneva nuclear arms pact could mark an astonishing advancement

As American and Russian negotiators sat down for a grueling round of talks Monday designed to reach agreement on a historic nuclear arms control pact, the optimistic Russian foreign minister coyly suggested a little side wager with his less optimistic American counterpart. “I’m ready to bet a bottle of whiskey,” declared Andrei V. Kozyrev to U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger.

At first it looked like whiskey down the drain. The two sides seemed hung up on tough issues--on permissible Russian silos; on permissible Russian SS-19 super-missiles; on the U.S. desire to nuclearize its B-1 aircraft. But suddenly Tuesday the two sides emerged from their Geneva talks to announce agreement on the proposed text of a START II treaty, which would dramatically slash the collective doomsday machine of the Nuclear Age. Joked Kozyrev, “Eagleburger has lost his bottle of whiskey.”

The U.S. secretary of state was probably never happier to lose. This vital text now goes to the negotiators’ respective bosses--George Bush and Boris N. Yeltsin--for signing. If the two leaders approve, they are likely to meet soon at a summit signing ceremony, possibly at the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

Such an extraordinary agreement, if implemented, would return the world to the comparatively built-down nuclear state of the 1960s and early ‘70s. The negotiators’ most significant achievement, in addition to slashing aggregate nuclear stockpiles by two-thirds, is the plan to eliminate all land-based multiple, independently targeted, re-entry vehicle warheads. The MIRV was the great technological Count Dracula of the nuclear arms race. By the singular act of outfitting land-based intercontinental missiles with multiple warheads, each with its own, independent guidance, the superpowers plunged the world into a state of fear in which the mad logic of nuclear deterrence could lure one or the other side, in a crisis atmosphere, to a preemptive first strike.

Assuming that the political systems of both countries approve the treaty--in the United States that means ratification by the Senate--the world will have come a long way from the ‘60s, when John F. Kennedy, in his least endearing contribution, drummed up a phony “missile gap” in his campaign against Richard M. Nixon, and from the ‘70s, in which the Soviet Union did effect a huge missile buildup that left both sides with the technological capacity to wreak worldwide nuclear devastation.

Critics of the Bush Administration will suggest that the treaty was wrapped up at this eleventh hour because of the President’s need to carve for himself a special place in history. Perhaps so; but so what? No motive achieving this monumental result is unworthy.