Last week Washington and Moscow finally cut the arms-control deal that everyone considered so vital just a few years ago-and except for a few perfunctory banner headlines, no one seemed to pay much attention. With the underlying tensions between the superpowers ebbing, antinuclear activists have moved on to new issues, like global warming and abortion. And the foreign-policy elite’s interest in arms control has given way to such issues as the gulf and European security. When George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev announced agreement on the landmark new START treaty at the London economic summit, many Americans who had tuned in to see it even missed the moment. Thanks to a technical snafu, Bush’s remarks unveiling the deal and a Moscow summit in late July were drowned out on U.S. television by the Soviet network’s Russian translation. Some White House aides weren’t especially upset. “You didn’t miss much,” one said. “They both did a lousy job. The way they backed into the news, you’d think they were ashamed of the deal they’d made.”
Shameful was hardly the word, but the arms deal did leave open some important questions. How much missile power do the Soviets really have left? And has the end of the cold war eliminated the need for more nuclear agreements, as some of the instant analysis concluded? In London, at least, few people were eager to address those issues as they went through the motions of the annual G-7 summit, a meeting that over the years has evolved from a secluded, strictly economic gathering to the Greatest Diplomatic Show on Earth. This year Gorbachev’s presence only added to the hype. Before his arrival to discuss the prospect of aid to Moscow, even Bush had trouble being recognized. According to The New York Times, a confused woman at a reception approached him and said, “Oh, Geoffrey, it’s so nice to see you.” “I’m George Bush,” he replied, “the president of the United States.”
If the arms-control news seemed strangely uneventful, it at least diverted attention from the fact that little else of substance was concluded at the London summit. Behind the scenes, Gorbachev did make an intriguing offer to convert Soviet defense plants to civilian use-with the help of Western investment (page 16). But on the most intriguing business of the meeting-Western aid for the ailing Soviet economy-Gorbachev and the other leaders were still far apart (page 18). As predicted, the West promised only technical assistance now, but no cash. While the Soviet leader professed to see a new “ice breaking” process of cooperation, he was clearly feeling defensive about his paltry take. At one point in his press conference he banged his fist on the table and snarled: “We are going through a difficult time now … [But] we will extricate ourselves whether you help us or not.” Letting Gorbachev down easy occupied most of the G-7 leaders’ time. The ostensible subject of their summit, better economic coordination, got short shrift.
Although they were dealt with separately in London, both sides know that the issues of aid and arms control are linked. Over the long run, Washington will be prepared to make a big investment in the Soviet economy only if it’s assured that the threat of nuclear confrontation is all but eliminated. The START accord completed last week, an eye-glazing 750-page document that only an armscontrol technician could fully comprehend, is the first treaty that actually reduces the superpowers’ existing strategic arsenals. Previous SALT agreements only “choreographed the arms race” by limiting future growth, rather than producing deep cuts, Under the START treaty, Americans will reduce their strategic nuclear arsenal from 12,081 warheads and bombs to about 10,395, and the Soviets will cut theirs from 10,841 to perhaps 8,040. The Soviet cuts will be heaviest in the weapons Washington considers most dangerous, heavy land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. The new treaty is also the first to commit the two sides to a rigorous mutual regimen of on-site inspections.
In the wake of START, the new danger is that the two sides won’t take arms control seriously enough to follow through with another treaty. Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze agreed last year on an agenda for START II talks, but Shevardnadze has since resigned. His replacement, Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, told the Soviet news agency Tass recently that START-“a fantastically complex penetration into the heart of strategic balances and technologies” -might represent the end of the arms-control road for now.
On the American side, administration officials have doubts about how much presidential-level energy will go into pursuing START II once STA is signed and ratified. When Bush was asked by reporters in London whether he was ready to go to work on the next round, he drew a blank. “I haven’t started thinking that way,” he said. “We want to get this one anchored down.” For now, at least, he and European and Soviet leaders seem far more concerned about the spread of nuclearweapons technology to Third World regimes that they consider irresponsible.
The fact remains, however, that the two countries can still blow each other up many times over-and with them, the entire world. While the treaty cuts existing arsenals of certain types of weapons, other major weapons are either exempted or reduced by a far smaller percentage. Warheads won’t be destroyed, but simply detached from their missiles and stored elsewhere. The numbers of U.S. strategic weapons designed and built over the last dozen years-the MX missile, the B-1 bomber, the B-2 bomber, the Trident submarine-are barely affected by the treaty. Nothing in the treaty prevents qualitative improvements, a sure-fire formula for continuing the nuclear-arms race on land and sea and in the air. Nor will START prevent the American Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) from extending the arms race to space.
The Soviet military is determined to keep pace in space, and on the ground. The Soviet Union maintains the largest standing armed forces in the world-4 million troops against 2 million in the United States. The Soviet defense budget still takes the largest single share by far of the nation’s economic resources; estimates by the authoritative International Institute for Strategic Studies in London range between 20 and 25 percent of Soviet GNP. The texts of the economic-reform plans Gorbachev submitted privately to the G-7 leaders pointedly didn’t contain a word about further cuts in defense spending.
During the decade that START was being hammered out, the Soviets dramatically modernized their strategic nuclear forces. While the United States was locked in debate over two mobile missiles, MX and Midgetman, the Soviet Union fielded the rail-mobile SS-24 and the road-mobile SS-25. Much of the tangled endgame in the START negotiations came from a dogged Soviet insistence on deploying the successor missiles to the SS-25, This new generation of five or six missiles is now reaching the flight-test stage.
While the West may be breathing easy, the Soviet military remains a dangerous political force in the continuing Kremlin power struggle. Ultimately it could push Gorbachev or a successor back toward coldwar policies. The Soviet generals are already angry at him for withdrawing Soviet troops from Eastern Europe–and for bringing them home without adequate housing. They don’t like his arms reductions, and they resent the liberal Gorbachev reforms that have so far led to economic decline and fed independence movements in six of the 15 republics. One minor concern lurking in the minds of Bush administration officials is that the Soviet military might decide to flight-test one of their newest ICBMs while the Senate is debating START.
In any case, the agenda for a START II is not immediately clear. In the U.S. strategic community there is a surprising consensus that the totals of warheads formally counted under START could be cut by up to half. Former Air Force chief of staff Gen. Larry Welch, for example, says the U.S. military could live with a START II that cuts the total from 6,000 to 4,000. Other figures not noted for dovishness, like Paul Nitze and Richard Perle, agree. Former defense secretary Robert McNamara, often considered the father of the U.S. strategic arsenal, now talks of moving to a “minimum deterrence” posture of no more than 500 warheads per country.
The only problem with such scenarios is that they ignore a law of diminishing returns: nations receive smaller increases in safety for larger reductions in warheads. There is no evidence that 4,000 warheads are “safer” than 6,000; fewer warheads are certainly no less susceptible to a miscalculation or accident. It’s not even clear that reducing numbers of warheads would save money, because both sides would keep large numbers of delivery systems like bombers, which are costly to operate. Faced with these conundrums, some officials in the State Department are turning their thoughts to “bite size” negotiationspiece-by-piece follow-up agreements that could be slotted into the now completed START framework. Pentagon officials are skeptical, because bite-size negotiations focusing on one weapons system at a time would preclude the cross-system horse trades that permit them to protect the weapons systems they like. (This is the way it worked in START, where the Soviets got to protect their mobile ICBMs and the United States got to protect its Stealth-bomber and cruise-missile forces.)
The bottom line is that arms control is an issue of polities dressed up as an issue of technology. The weapons themselves will not start a waronly a dramatic breakdown in U.S.-Soviet relations. Further advances in arms control will probably have to await further improvement in the underlying political relationship between the two countries. And that, amid all the inevitable photo opportunities, will be the truly important business of the next summit.
