Playing Nuclear Poker

The stakes get higher and higher in the showdown over missiles in Europe

The Year of the Missile is barely a month gone, yet already the sense of urgency is intense, the diplomatic activity frenzied. French President François Mitterrand and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko were on missions to Bonn last week, and Vice President George Bush will arrive in the West German capital next week. In Britain, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher set forth her position in the House of Commons; in Rome, the Pope outlined his in an address to the Vatican diplomatic corps. With pressure building on all sides, President Reagan defended his record on arms control at an impromptu press conference and held a publicized meeting the next day with his chief negotiators. “Arms control is the next big issue,” said a senior White House aide. “It has to be faced.” If anything, he was understating the case.

The issue of such rising prominence—and potentially deadly consequences—hinges on two related enterprises: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s beleaguered plans to deploy 572 new American missiles in Western Europe, and the superpowers’ deadlocked negotiations on Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF). Barring a breakthrough in those talks, which resume this week in Geneva, NATO is committed to begin deploying its missiles by the end of this year. If it fails to meet that deadline, the Western Alliance will have demonstrated to itself and to its adversaries that it is incapable of carrying out the most important collective decision it has made in many years.

Nothing would please the Kremlin more. The single highest priority of Soviet foreign policy in the months ahead is to stop most if not all of the new American weapons from crossing the Atlantic. Toward that end, the Soviets might, if necessary and if possible, cut a last-minute deal with the U.S. on INF. But they have at least as much hope for success through a campaign of pressure and propaganda directed at the Europeans.

Gromyko’s four-day visit to West Germany marked yet another Soviet pitch to European public opinion. His timing was no accident: West German parliamentary elections will be held on March 6 (see box), and the arms-control issue may swing the outcome. The election results, in turn, could determine whether the American missile deployment proceeds on schedule, not only in West Germany but in the other NATO countries as well. Gromyko strove to be dovish in Bonn, though he did drop an occasional note of menace. “We cannot ignore the fact,” he warned, “that the Federal Republic is the only state due for deployment of Pershing II rockets, which can reach strategic targets deep in the Soviet Union in a few minutes.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, Reagan complained at his press conference that to the Soviets, “promises are like piecrusts, made to be broken.” Be that as it may, it is clear that the Soviets’ skillful propaganda—stressing their peaceful intentions, their willingness to reduce their numbers of missiles aimed at Western Europe and their flexibility at the bargaining table—has convinced many Europeans that the Soviet disarmament goals are genuine. The U.S., known for its Madison Avenue genius, has been put on the defensive. Acknowledging as much, the White House last week announced the formation of a task force that will try to get America’s arms-control message across to the Europeans. Heading the task force: former West Coast Advertising Executive and present Ambassador to Ireland Peter Dailey.

Bush’s trip represents another facet of the belated U.S. public relations counteroffensive. At every stop during his two-week, seven-nation tour, the Vice President will emphasize America’s commitment to peace and to reducing nuclear weapons. He will assure the allies that the Administration is serious about trying to reach a negotiated settlement, pointing out that one will not be possible unless the West Europeans stand firm on deployment. “His intention,” says his chief of staff, Admiral Daniel Murphy, “is to listen to just what is on their minds and how they see the problem.”

As so often in Soviet-American relations, the superpowers are playing a form of poker. The U.S. is trying to use the threat of new missiles in Europe as a bargaining chip to force the Soviets to discard the most powerful and modern of their intermediate-range missiles already in place. The prospective U.S. arsenal includes 108 Pershing IIs, all bound for West Germany, to replace the shorter-range Pershing Is that have been there since 1969, plus 464 Tomahawk ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) that are earmarked for Britain, Belgium, Italy and The Netherlands as well as West Germany. The Pershing IIs would arc-up to the edge of space and unleash earth-penetrating warheads that can destroy concrete-reinforced bunkers 100 ft. underground; the slow but elusive cruise missiles home in on their targets with pinpoint accuracy (see box).

Together, the two missile systems represent the state of the art in Yankee ingenuity, the ultimate bang for the buck. But like all nuclear weapons, their purpose is paradoxical: they exist not to be employed, but to be deployed, as instruments of deterrence. The trouble is, the U.S. missiles are not only undeployed—they may be undeployable. They face technical problems on the test ranges in the U.S. and funding problems in Congress.

Far more serious, the U.S. missiles must wend their way through a withering, and growing, barrage of political opposition in Western Europe. The difficulties stem from December 1979, when the Carter Administration agreed to put in new missiles by 1983 while promising to conduct arms-limitation talks with the Soviets in the meantime, in the hope that the deployment would not be necessary. That “two-track” approach was supposed to demonstrate the ability of NATO to respond in a forceful yet reasonable way to new Soviet military challenges.

The result may be just the opposite. First Leonid Brezhnev, then his successor Yuri Andropov, dangled the possibility of substantial missile reductions, thus fanning public opinion in Western Europe against deployment and increasing the likelihood that it will be delayed or even blocked. Every week there is new evidence that, the West European leaders might be wavering, or at least worrying about how long they can resist popular and parliamentary hostility to the stationing of new U.S. weapons on their soil.

West Germany is the linchpin. As Gromyko implied, it is missiles there that worry and provoke the Soviets more than those anywhere else. Partly that is because West Germany is closer to the U.S.S.R. than other NATO member states in Central Europe. Also it is because Germany alone is scheduled to receive both the Pershing IIs and the cruise missiles. The Pershings can theoretically hit targets in the western U.S.S.R. less than eight minutes after their liftoff.

Additionally, Germany frightens the Soviets because it is Germany, with all its ghosts of past scourges. Soviet propagandists have been quick to dub the GLCM the “German-launched cruise missile,” even though it will be stationed at U.S. military bases that already house nuclear weapons.

In order to head off protests from the militant left, the pro-U.S. Bonn government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl has kept under wraps the exact sites at which the Pershing IIs will be stationed. If the Kohl coalition were to fall in the elections or get cold feet about the missiles, it is nearly certain that the other European countries would follow in domino fashion. As NATO Secretary-General Joseph Luns said last week, “Germany is crucial.”

Britain is an uneasy home for the Tomahawk cruise missiles too. On the one hand, it has the closest ties with the U.S. of all the allies, and its Conservative government is ideologically compatible with the Reagan Administration. Prime Minister Thatcher has been a stalwart supporter of Reagan’s zero-option proposal, under which he would cancel the planned U.S. missile deployment if the Soviets would agree to dismantle the missiles they already have in place (333 SS-20s plus 280 SS-4s and SS-5s). But last week Thatcher indicated less resolution than she has in the past. “One hopes to achieve the zero option,” she told the House of Commons, “but in the absence of that we must achieve balanced numbers.” The opposition Labor Party in Britain is vocally anti-deployment. Thatcher may call a general election in October, two months before the first Tomahawks are due to arrive at Greenham Common, 52 miles from London, where a group of women is conducting a round-the-clock “peace camp” against the deployment. Just the remote possibility that a Labor government could come to power is a nightmare for Washington.

Despite its reputation for political chaos, Italy has been remarkably serene and sure about accepting its quota of 112 Tomahawks. Part of the reason is that the powerful Italian Communist Party is trying to project a moderate image and demonstrate its independence from Moscow. The Vatican has been generally tolerant of deployment, despite strong opposition to nuclear weapons from U.S. bishops. Said Pope John Paul II recently: “Dialogue calls for reciprocity. . . in the progressive reduction of armaments, nuclear or conventional, the parties must be equally involved and together travel the various stages of disarmament.” Two other countries slated for Tomahawk cruise missiles, Belgium and The Netherlands, have imposed so many conditions and left themselves so many loopholes that it is highly uncertain what they will do in the crunch.

France has played its usual role of NATO’s proud and somewhat haughty odd man out. The French have their own nuclear deterrent, and they are not part of the military structure of the alliance. But they are extremely concerned about Soviet superiority in the region and are keeping their fingers crossed that, come the moment of truth at the end of the year, their neighbors do not back away from deployment. Last week brought the extraordinary spectacle of France’s Socialist President François Mitterrand delivering a tough and gutsy speech to the West German Bundestag, urging his audience, but especially his fellow Social Democrats, to rebuff Gromyko by showing their support for the firm missile stand endorsed by Chancellor Kohl, a Christian Democrat. Said the French leader: “Whoever gambles on the decoupling of the European continent from the American continent would call into question the maintenance of equilibrium and thus the maintenance of peace.”

Many French military analysts feel that a partial deployment—say 50 American missiles after a Soviet reduction in SS-20s—would be preferable to Reagan’s zero option. This way the Soviets would know that an attack on their part would be met by at least some retaliation. “Deterrence,” says Pierre Hassner, a foreign policy expert at the University of Paris, “is a state of mind.”

Flexibility, too, is a state of mind, and it is one that the chief U.S. negotiator on INF, Paul Nitze, has been trying to encourage in Washington and communicate to the West Europeans. After meeting with Reagan last Friday, Nitze said that while the zero option remains the Administration’s position, the U.S. might consider some compromise if the Soviet Union showed “give” on its own part.

Nitze knows that American stubbornness does not translate into allied firmness. Quite the contrary. And with every crack in NATO unity, the credibility of his negotiating position is diminished; the threat of deployment looks more like a bluff; and the vicious cycle takes another turn for the worse. The Soviets have less and less incentive to give up anything in the negotiations. As the American hand gets weaker, the stakes get higher. For the Soviets, the winner’s pot includes the possibility of seriously, perhaps irreparably, dividing NATO.

However, if for any reason the new American missiles fail to arrive in Europe by the end of the year, the military consequences would not be nearly so dire as President Reagan suggested last week. The collapse of the deployments, he warned, would leave Europe with “no deterrent on our side.” But even without the Tomahawks and Pershing IIs, NATO has a panoply of American nuclear weapons—shorter-range missiles, fighter-bombers, carrier-based planes aboard aircraft carriers in the Sixth Fleet—plus the independent nuclear forces of the British and French. Together these weapons still pose a formidable threat of retaliation.

In fact, there could be a severe political cost if NATO overcomes its internal resistance and moves ahead with the deployment plan. If hundreds of thousands of demonstrators try to block the installation of the missiles, the trauma could leave lasting scars on the already battered body of transatlantic solidarity. The U.S. would be blamed for having pitted allied governments against large portions of their own constituencies. It would be that much harder to make a decision, not to mention implement it, the next time an escalation of the Soviet military threat required a unified response by NATO.

Actually, the West Europeans have themselves partly—and the Soviets largely—to blame for the whole dilemma. The rhetoric of the building European anti-nuclear movement has absurdly cast the U.S. as the imperious, imperialist villain who is thrusting upon the peace-loving West Europeans weapons that they neither want nor need. It is one of the many ironies of the whole episode that it was the West Europeans who originally asked for a NATO buildup, and that the U.S. agreed to proceed with the deployment program despite strong misgivings about its military and political rationale.

The U.S. had stationed long-range missiles in Europe two decades ago, but they were soon removed because they seemed redundant and excessively vulnerable, given the ability of the U.S. to hit any target in the U.S.S.R. with intercontinental ballistic missiles, bombers based in the U.S. and missiles launched from nuclear submarines. These weapons constituted the U.S.’s central, or strategic, arsenal—the triad. Then one of West Germany’s brightest up-and-coming defense intellectuals and politicians, Helmut Schmidt, argued strenuously in the Bundestag that America’s own deterrent of last resort constituted a nuclear umbrella of “extended deterrence” for Western Europe, sheltering NATO’s first lines of defense on and around the Continent.

But this was in the days of the U.S.’s uncontested strategic nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. in the late ’60s and early ’70s, that comfortable margin in intercontinental weaponry gave way to parity, or rough equivalence. At the same time, the Soviets continued their buildup in military manpower and conventional forces within Europe until the Warsaw Pact had a considerable numerical edge over NATO.

European and American defense planners alike began to worry about : the concept of “extended deterrence” breaking down and the defense of Europe becoming “decoupled” from that of the U.S. Imagining future crises, they feared that the Soviets might be able to use their by now vast strategic power to hold America’s central forces in check while they advanced bishops and knights against weaker NATO pieces on the European chessboard.

Was it any longer plausible that a Soviet armored blitzkrieg into West Germany would trigger a U.S. retaliatory blow from North Dakota, since that in turn might trigger a counterretaliation against the U.S.?

Would an American President risk New York in defense of Hamburg?

Enter the SS-20. It was first deployed early in 1977. It was a replacement for the SS-4s and SS-5s, with which the Soviets had been menacing Europe for decades. The SS-20 was therefore not a new threat in that its targets more or less matched those of the old SS-4s and SS-5s that were destined for retirement. But the SS-20 is an immensely more capable weapon. It is mobile, highly accurate and dauntingly destructive, with three independently targetable warheads. (SS-20 is its NATO designation. The Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces innocently dubbed it the Pioneer, in honor of the U.S.S.R.’s version of Cub Scouts and Campfire Girls.)

Schmidt, by then the Chancellor of West Germany and the most knowledgeable and articulate spokesman for European fears of decoupling, saw a sinister connection between the Soviet introduction of the SS-20 and what he regarded as the shortsighted, selfish American conduct of the second Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II).

The SS-20 had a range (3,100 miles) just shy of what would qualify it as a strategic weapon. Therefore it could not be limited by SALT II. Schmidt was fearful that Jimmy Carter would sign a SALT II treaty that would let the SS-20 run free while restricting the introduction of new American weapons in Europe. in order to assure Schmidt’s support for the embattled SALT II treaty and to make amends for a series of bungles on other European defense issues, the Carter Administration agreed in 1979 to the “two-track” approach. The U.S. would set about putting new missiles in Europe by 1983 unless it could reach an agreement with the U.S.S.R. in the meantime that would reduce the Soviet nuclear threat in the region, preferably by cutting the number of SS-20s.

It was, from the outset, a risky and deeply flawed concept. The next round of SALT like the previous ones, was to be bilateral, between the two superpowers, with no chairs at the table for West European representatives. The U.S.S.R. has persistently tried to include British and French nuclear weapons on the agenda, but the U.S. is just as adamant about discussing only Soviet and American forces. Unlike the US.S.R.’s Warsaw Pact satellites, the U.S.’s NATO allies are truly sovereign states, and Britain and France have refused to let the U.S. bargain with their independent arsenals.

The Soviet missiles in question are entirely in the U.S.S.R., but the American ones are supposed to be deployed on the territory of third countries. That has given those countries a de facto veto over the American negotiating position since the U.S. cannot deploy missiles without the host nation’s say-so. Moreover, it has presented the Soviets with a golden opportunity to play the U.S. off against its allies.

The Soviets have been only too eager to do so, expertly exploiting the homegrown angst and ambivalence in Europe. Much of the neutralism and anti-Americanism have been concentrated among the younger generation. Unlike their elders, they have no personal recollection of Americans as liberators of Western Europe or of Soviets as occupiers of Eastern Europe. Many of them have grown up taking their freedom, their prosperity and their American-backed security for granted.

The Reagan Administration inherited a policy and an alliance that would be troublesome even if managed with great skill and sensitivity. The Administration demonstrated neither, thereby making a bad situation considerably worse.

Following through on his campaign denunciations of SALT II as “fatally flawed,” Reagan came into office hoping that he could set arms control aside until the U.S. had a chance to rearm. He decided to leave the treaty unratified, although he reluctantly went along with the State Department and Joint Chiefs of Staff in committing the U.S. to continue abiding by its terms. So much for the West Europeans’ hope that a new round of SALT might obviate the need for new American missiles in their countries. A series of official statements, leaked documents and new Pentagon programs suggested that the Administration took more seriously than any of its predecessors the feasibility of a “limited, protracted” nuclear war. The West Europeans feared that their countries might be the battlefield. Finally, Reagan’s enthusiasm for a worldwide crusade against Soviet Communism, voiced during a trip to Europe last summer, could hardly have been less in tune with the growing nostalgia there for détente and disarmament.

By mid-1981 the Administration was convinced that it had to make at least the appearance of a serious quest for progress on the negotiating track laid down in 1979, or the allies would exercise their veto and derail the deployments for good.

As the Administration buckled down to the task of designing a proposal for the INF talks, the most influential figure—more so than anyone at the White House, in the Cabinet or even at the sub-Cabinet level—turned out to be Richard Perle, 41, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy. A longtime aide to Democratic Senator Henry Jackson of Washington and a vigorous opponent of SALT on Capitol hill, Perle quickly established himself as the Administration’s most tenacious, articulate hard-liner as well as one of its most skillful bureaucratic infighters.

Perle championed what became known as the zero option (or zero-zero proposal, as the Administration came to call it) for the negotiations on INF. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger followed Perle’s lead in making the case to the White House.

Originally a European idea, the zero option would require the Soviets to remove the SS-20s with which they were threatening Europe, as well as their older SS-4s and SS-5s, if NATO called off its planned deployment of the Tomahawks and Pershing IIs. As refined by Perle, the zero option was extended to all SS-20s throughout the U.S.S.R., including those in Asia. Since they are mobile, he argued, they are a potential threat to Europe even if aimed at China.

Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Richard Burt, who was then the director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs, argued for a more modest trade-off that would have allowed the Soviets to keep a reduced force of SS-20s, while NATO deployed enough of its own missiles to establish equality in warheads.

After months of fierce intramural combat, Perle won. President Reagan, who paid little attention to arms-control policy and was annoyed by the esoteric complexity of past agreements, liked the boldness and simplicity of the zero proposal. It dramatized his proclaimed goal of achieving sweeping reductions in arms control rather than the mere limitations imposed by SALT. Also, the proposal unabashedly required the Soviets to accept drastic cuts in existing forces in exchange for the U.S.’s holding back on future deployments. Reagan endorsed the notion that the Soviets should be forced in arms control to pay a penalty for having moved dangerously ahead of the U.S. in overall military power, an alarming judgment that many experts do not share with the President.

Paul Nitze, the veteran U.S. arms-control negotiator, liked the zero option too, at least as a starting point. As he told TIME last week, “It was essential that we have a going-in position which was concise, which could be expressed in a single paragraph in a speech and would have an impact at home and abroad.”

Reagan unveiled the zero option in an address broadcast live to Western Europe on Nov. 18, 1981, and the initial reaction from across the ocean was relief and applause. With one stroke, Reagan seemed to have outflanked the unilateral disarmament movement. Even British Labor Party Leader Michael Foot, who opposes the stationing of any U.S. missiles in Britain, was forced to concede: “It seems at least [that Reagan] has made a response which people in Europe can understand because proposals for disarmament are what the world is crying out for.”

Reagan seemed also to have stolen a march on the Soviets. Leonid Brezhnev had been achieving considerable success with his “peace campaign” and his call for a moratorium on nuclear weapons in Europe. Suddenly that appeal seemed pale compared with Reagan’s dramatic proposal “to get rid of an entire class of missiles,” as Nitze put it.

But what was a triumph of public relations turned into a headache when Nitze and the U.S. team settled in at the negotiating table. Whatever its merits as a “going-in position,” the zero option was clearly going nowhere in Geneva. It was simply nonnegotiable. The SS-20, after all, is the pride of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces. The Kremlin has sunk billions of rubles into developing it, training its crews and getting it in place. There was no way that Moscow would agree to dismantle every one of these missiles in exchange for “paper” reductions of missiles that the U.S. had not deployed and might not be able to deploy, given the turmoil in Western Europe. Besides, it goes very much against the grain of the Soviet military to dismantle even antique weapons in accordance with deals that their diplomatic comrades make with the U.S.S.R.’s principal adversaries. Only very reluctantly did the Soviets agree in SALT to tear down small numbers of some of their most outmoded strategic weapons.

Last November the new Soviet party leader, Yuri Andropov, denounced the U.S. proposal for INF as one-sided. “Let no one expect unilateral disarmament from us,” he said. “We are not naive people.”

The Soviets countered with a zero option of their own. Arguing that there is already a rough balance in medium-range (1,000 to 5,000 kilometers) missiles and aircraft in Europe, they proposed that each side should freeze its forces (thus ruling out the deployment of cruise missiles and Pershing IIs). By 1985 there would be a reduction from 1,000 missiles and bombers on each side to 600; the total would drop to 300 by 1990 and eventually to zero.

The Soviets’ arithmetic is utterly phony. It ignores large numbers of Soviet weapons that clearly should be included. On the Western side of the ledger, it counts weapons that just as clearly do not belong in the equation. in order to make the numbers come out the way they want, the Soviets are counting some old Pershing I missiles that are in the West German armed forces, even though they do not have their own nuclear warheads (these would be supplied by the U.S. during a crisis) and have ranges shorter than a number of Soviet missiles that do not show up in the U.S.S.R.’s tally. The Kremlin gives equal weight to vintage British Vulcan bombers, which are practically candidates for an aeronautical museum, and their own Backfire, one of the most potent planes in the Soviet air force. Soviet charts also equate France’s S-2 and S-3 ballistic missiles with the SS-20, which has three times as many warheads and almost twice the range.

The Soviet insistence on factoring British and French nuclear forces into their calculations is critical to their NATO-splitting strategy. Since the British and French already have more than 250 medium-range bombers and missiles, the Soviet proposal for a reduction on both sides to 300 by 1990 would leave the U.S. with less than 50 slots of its own—none of which could be filled with Tomahawks or Pershing Us, since those would be prohibited by another provision of the Soviet proposal.

The purpose, as some Soviet officials have admitted in private, is to come as close as possible to driving the U.S. nuclear presence off the Continent. “We’re Europeans,” said one Soviet official. “You Americans are not. You have no business being here with your nuclear weapons.”

Soviet negotiators had also been hinting in Geneva that if the NATO deployments went ahead as planned, they might walk out of not only the INF talks but the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), which are proceeding in parallel. The Soviet proposal in START is for reductions well below the ceilings established by SALT II. But that proposal is contingent on there being no new missiles in NATO. Last fall the Soviets seemed to be backing away from their threat of a walkout, since it conflicted with the image of infinite patience they were trying to convey.

In a televised speech on Dec. 21, Andropov offered to reduce the number of SS-20s aimed at Western Europe from the current level of 250 to somewhere around 162, equal to the number of British and French missiles. He also implied that the U.S.S.R. would take out of commission its old SS-4sand SS-5s.

The proposal was deceptive and vague. The SS-4s and SS-5s were overdue for the scrap heap anyway. The Soviets may have deployed excess SS-20s precisely so that they could negotiate away some of the surplus to prove their reasonableness. Moreover, Andropov left open the possibility of merely moving the excess SS-20s so that they were east of the Urals; from there the missiles could be put on trains and brought back within range of Europe in a day.

But Andropov’s overtures were pitched perfectly to the European public. Now the Soviets could claim to be removing from Europe as many SS-4, SS-5 and SS-20 warheads as the U.S. was planning to introduce on its cruise missiles and Pershing Us. Even better, the U.S.S.R. was conveying the impression of flexibility, in marked contrast to the U.S., which was still stuck on zero.

Andropov’s performance to date has demonstrated that the West may be dealing with a new type of Soviet leader—a poker player who handles his cards with subtlety and prestidigitation. He has been remarkably quick and shrewd in taking advantage of openings that circumstance, allied anxieties and American missteps have given him. Brezhnev was in office for a number of years before he had the confidence and the backing within the collective leadership to assume a forceful, prominent role in foreign policy. In the European nuclear debate, Brezhnev attempted a number of personal, high-visibility ploys to head off NATO decisions, but none were as successful as the way Andropov has played his hand these past two months—first, with his televised speech in December, then with tantalizing but carefully hedged hints of additional concessions to visiting West German Opposition Leader Hans-Jochen Vogel earlier this month.

All this has made it possible for Andropov to give a resounding nyet to the American zero proposal while at the same time seeming to say da to the West Europeans in their eagerness for a return to détente.

Nitze and his colleagues had expected that the zero option would run into a stone wall in Geneva. They were somewhat more surprised to discover that Washington gave them virtually no flexibility to explore compromises along the lines of what the State Department had originally favored: a reduced SS-20 force offset by a scaled-back NATO package.

Finally, last summer, Nitze took it upon himself to overcome the inertia of the American policymaking process (see box). He embarked on a secret exploratory mission with his Soviet counterpart, Yuli Kvitsinsky. The two men came up with a plan that might have broken the bargaining impasse. Nitze would have given up the Pershing II program altogether and had the U.S. deploy enough cruise missiles to offset a greatly reduced force of SS-20s in Europe The purely military rationale of the Pershing IIs had always been the object of debate and doubt. Their range would not permit them to reach Moscow, and the targets that they could hit in the western regions of the U.S.S.R. were also covered by American intercontinental and submarine-based missiles. Nitze was convinced that cutting the Gordian knot,” as he put it last week, and reaching an agreement that both reduced the SS-20s and allowed the U.S. to introduce cruise missiles was well worth the sacrifice of the Pershing IIs. However, Perle, who was once Nitze’s protégé and ally, vehemently opposed the plan. At Perle’s urging, Weinberger fought the compromise and got the President to decide that the Pershing IIs could not be sacrificed after all. The Kremlin, too, rejected the Nitze-Kvitsinsky deal probably because it calculated it could do better by holding out for no American missiles at all.

Since then, the zero option has become even more of a millstone around the Administration’s neck. Because zero is absolute, it does not lend itself to compromise, especially in an Administration where arms control is, at best, highly suspect The prevailing view, represented most forcefully in closed-door meetings by Perle, has remained that no agreement is better than a bad agreement and any agreement that leaves the Soviets with any SS-20s is a bad agreement.

The allies are close to the other end of the spectrum: almost any agreement is better than none and any agreement that significantly limits the SS-20s is probably a good one or at least the best that can be hoped for, given the apparent shakiness of NATO’s resolve to deploy the Pershing IIs and cruise missiles. If the talks fail, the West European governments are going to have to be able to claim the U.S. negotiated in good faith and that the failure was because of Moscow.

American officials say privately that something like an interim solution—reduced, equal deployments on both sides with the vague, nonbinding espousal of zero as a long-term goal—might be possible later, but not now. They do not want to give even the hint of an official endorsement before the West German elections, lest the U.S. appear to be leaving Helmut Kohl, a strong public supporter of the zero option, out on a limb.

The reaction to that reasoning in Bonn: nonsense. Said one of Kohl’s closest aides last week: “The Chancellor would be delighted if the Americans shifted to a more flexible approach in Geneva, especially if it brought the two sides close to an agreement.”

There is some chance that the US might still stem the adverse trends in Europe and thus reverse the vicious cycle. The U.S. needs its allies to be more supportive of its negotiating position in order for them also to be more supportive of the deployment program. And the deployment program must appear to be on track for there to be any chance of the Soviets’ making a deal. But for all that to happen the Administration would have to make up its mind that the zero option has long since outlived whatever usefulness it once had, and that the time is overdue to propose a more realistic compromise that would induce both the Soviets and the West Europeans to accept some new missiles in Europe.

Once he gets an earful from the NATO allies Bush may counsel something to that effect after he returns from his tour of Europe. Another potentially decisive figure is George Shultz. So far the Secretary of State has not mastered the substance of arms control or asserted a moderating influence in policymaking on the subject He has put his top deputy, Kenneth Dam in charge of overseeing INF and START, but Dam, like Shultz, has yet to come to grips with the technical and bureaucratic morass. The State Department is supposed to take the lead in the work of various interagency committees charged with providing guidance to the negotiators but meetings are rarely productive. The officials involved spend hours haggling over minutiae and discussing uncontentious issues. People are afraid to speak up ” explains one regular participant. “They’re afraid of the right wing.”

Shultz partisans insist that in his own quiet, methodical, gradual way he is taking charge. They predict that in collaboration with the new director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Kenneth Adelman, Shultz will eventually not just counterbalance but replace Weinberger as the predominant Cabinet member on arms-control policy. But even if that happens, it could already be too late.

The Kremlin seems to think so. Last week TASS, the official Soviet news agency, was quick to dismiss suggestions of an interim solution as “absolutely unacceptable.” With such pro-American figures as Thatcher beginning to qualify their adherence to the current U.S. position, the Soviets probably figure they have much to gain and little to lose by holding out for their own version of the zero option: no NATO missiles at all in exchange for token reductions on their side. Reagan joked last week about that very possibility. The Soviets, he said, agreed “halfway” with his reduction proposal: “They want us to remain at zero.”

That is exactly what the Soviets want, and it is an outcome the West should certainly resist. Another, quite different “interim solution” that the Soviets might happily accept would be for NATO to suspend its deployment of the Tomahawks and Pershing IIs altogether as long as the INF negotiations continue. Some West German politicians have floated the idea of a “postponement option” along those lines.

If NATO were forced to postpone deployment, either because of the German election results or a further breakdown in NATO solidarity, then the game would almost certainly be over, and the U.S.S.R. would have won the whole pot. Its negotiators could simply settle in for an interminably long and unproductive talkathon like the Mutual Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) negotiations that have been dragging on in Vienna for almost ten years.

In preparation for the resumption of the INF talks and the Bush mission, Reagan held an hourlong meeting in the Oval Office last Friday with his top political aides, national security advisers and arms-control negotiators. The coming round” of negotiations, said a presidential statement released afterward, “is particularly important because our far-reaching proposals, combined with our defense modernization programs, provide a strong incentive for reaching agreements on lower levels of forces.”

Whether the Administration’s proposals and policies are somehow heading toward an agreement with the Soviets or whether they have pointed the US toward a major crisis within the Western alliance and a breakdown of superpower arms-control negotiations, is the question of the hour and perhaps the question of the year.

—By Strobe Talbott. Reported by Bonnie ANgelo/London, Roland Flamini/Bonn and Gregory H. Wierzynski/Washington, with other bureaus