An East-West Cold Front

Hopes fade for a spring thaw between Moscow and Washington

It was the kind of statesmanlike undertaking that Presidents relish unveiling in the course of a televised news conference. “I have an important announcement,” said Ronald Reagan last week in the East Room of the White House. “In two weeks I will send Vice President Bush to Geneva to present to the 40-nation conference on disarmament a bold American initiative for a comprehensive worldwide ban on chemical weapons.” Just in case anyone had missed the larger message, the President added: “This latest initiative reflects my continuing strong commitment to arms control.”

The Administration’s proposal to outlaw the production and stockpiling of deadly nerve gas and other chemical weapons is just one move in a diplomatic East-West chess game that is still in its early stages. Later this month, Washington is also scheduled to endorse a new NATO proposal at the eleven-year-old negotiations in Vienna aimed at reducing NATO and Warsaw Pact troop levels in Europe. Discussions between the U.S. and the Soviets on such matters as the opening of a new consulate in each nation and resuming cultural exchanges will probably take place within a few weeks. There is even a hint of movement on the nuclear front: an Administration study group is in the process of examining potential new compromises in the stalled strategic arms talks. Says a senior U.S. diplomat in Washington: “The time seems right to move matters Soviet off dead center.”

Yet in almost every case, the White House has been able to patch together agreements between the State Department and the Pentagon only with the greatest difficulty. This bureaucratic battling has produced little that seems likely to interest the Kremlin, which wants to do nothing that might politically help the man whom one Soviet commentator called “the worst U.S. President since Truman.” The prospects for significant progress in the superpowers’ relations for the remainder of this year have rarely appeared dimmer. Said one top Reagan aide of the chances for a thaw: “I think under any scenario we’re talking about next year.”

Even last week’s initiative on chemical warfare was framed in terms guaranteed to invite Soviet objections. Because Moscow’s “extensive arsenal of chemical weapons threatens U.S. forces,” said Reagan, America must maintain “a limited retaliatory capability of its own, until we achieve an effective ban.” In fact, while negotiations proceed, Reagan plans to go ahead and modernize the U.S. chemical arsenal, which has been in mothballs since 1969. In addition, the U.S will insist on the right to inspect for Soviet chemical weapons not only on “declared sites,” where they are known to be manufactured, but anywhere it suspects they might be made. The Soviet news agency TASS immediately branded the offering “nothing short of a propaganda trick” and accused Reagan of trying to block an agreement “by making patently unacceptable conditions for ‘verification’ and ‘enforcement.’ ”

On the crucial matter of nuclear arms control, TIME has learned that the Administration has decided for now not to modify its bargaining stance on strategic weapons as an enticement to reopen the talks, which were suspended by the Soviets after U.S. intermediate-range missiles began arriving in Western Europe last November. After listening to arguments for and against offering such a carrot, Reagan told a National Security Council meeting two weeks ago, “We are not going to make preemptive concessions. I am prepared to discuss areas of possible tradeoffs. But it would not be prudent to make a change in our position now.”

Reagan’s decree seemed to reflect the tugging match between State and Defense as well as his own failure to mediate the bickering and frame a coherent foreign policy. Sighed one top White House adviser: “There is no willingness to take arms control out of the bureaucracy and get down to business.” Secretary of State George Shultz, whose efforts to lessen tensions with Moscow last year were scuttled by the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, is once again working to improve East-West relations. Shultz, said an aide, is convinced that “we need to make the push to see conclusively what can come about.” But the civilian wing of the Pentagon is determined to wait the

Soviets out—in some cases more stubbornly than the Joint Chiefs. Shrugged a Defense Department official: “The Soviets are the ones who walked out.”

Both Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger came away from the NSC meeting on arms control feeling they had won half a loaf: even though there will be no new U.S. initiative for the tune being, an interagency group was ordered to draft possible trade-off options should the Soviets come back to the bargaining table. Working with the provisions of the unratified SALT II agreement, plus each side’s final proposal in the more recent strategic arms talks hi Geneva, the group is refining what the State Department calls a “framework” approach. It would incorporate the American goal of cutting the number of warheads on large land-based missiles, which form the backbone of the Soviet arsenal, and the Kremlin’s objective of addressing the U.S. advantage In bombers and other types of launchers. Says one participant: “Neither existing proposal goes far enough to satisfy the other side. We want to broaden the scope to encompass the tomato and the tomahto.” State Department officials hope that even though the Pentagon’s stonewalling has kept the Administration from officially presenting this approach, press reports and back-channel discussions with the Soviets about it might lead to a resumption of talks.

In other areas, the Pentagon hardliners clearly have the upper hand. Soviet Party Boss Konstantin Chernenko suggested shortly after taking power in February that the U.S. show its good intentions by ratifying an agreement signed ten years ago restricting atomic tests above a certain size; the Administration is going in the opposite direction by planning to insist that the verification provisions of the pact be tightened. Reagan has also rejected the Soviet proposal for a ban on antisatellite weapons systems in space, saying that the matter is not even worth negotiating because no agreement could be verified.

Not that the Soviets have been terribly helpful in promoting a thaw. The flicker of conciliation that flashed when Chernenko first took power has long since been extinguished. The Soviet leader’s replies to two letters from Reagan seeking specific responses on various issues consisted of “puzzling vagaries,” according to a State Department official privy to the correspondence. A third letter, carried by retired General Brent Scowcroft, head of the President’s Bipartisan Commission on Strategic Forces, on a private visit to Moscow, failed to reach Chernenko because the Soviets refused to let Scowcroft deliver it at an appropriate diplomatic level. Says Harvard Professor Paul Doty, who was traveling with Scowcroft: “That was the Soviet way of saying they will not respond to an informal probe.” In addition, Moscow last week deployed more than 200 ships hi the largest war-games exercise ever staged by the Soviet navy (see WORLD).

Only on the smallest issues is progress being made. Shultz met with Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin in Washington last week, and U.S. Ambassador Arthur Hartman met with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in Moscow, to discuss possible new consulates in New York City and Kiev and the revival of cultural and scientific exchanges. Plans to open the consulates had been postponed and the exchanges halted in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Shultz, for one, hopes that these small steps will lead to greater diplomatic leaps. Reagan’s political advisers hope that they will dispel the growing perception that the President is too rigid in dealing with the Soviets and unable to choose between his feuding advisers. But the aging leaders in the Kremlin, plagued by their own internal disarray, show little desire to see these vague hopes fulfilled—at least not in a year when Ronald Reagan is running for reelection. —By William R. Doerner. Reported by Douglas Brew and Johanna McGeaty/Washington