POLITICS
The excellence of disarmament for the Soviet General Staff
NOEL MALCOLM
hen Mrs Thatcher was interviewed by the BBC just after the Brussels Nato summit had ended on Tuesday, there was something curiously familiar about her tone of voice. 'This is an excellent agree- ment', she said, an excellent agreement.' Only the most elaborate research in psycholinguistics could explain why it is that whenever the Prime Minister uses the word 'excellent', and repeats it, and emphasises it, you just know that she is biting her tongue and swallowing ill will as hard as she can. Her praise, only a few months ago, for our excellent Chancellor of the Exchequer and his excellent policies, is still ringing in our ears.
The terms of the Nato agreement are not in themselves such a heavy blow for Mrs Thatcher. Paragraph 48 of the communi- que holds out the possibility of eventual negotiations for the 'partial' reduction of short-range nuclear forces: a term which the Germans can regard as a first step, and Mrs Thatcher as a last ditch. Neither side has lost the argument irrevocably. What was depressing for the Prime Minister was the discovery that Mr Bush had spent more time in the previous two weeks trying to find ways of meeting West Germany's demands than trying to back up the United Kingdom's objections.
The single most important element of Mr Bush's proposals is the new timetable for the conventional arms reduction talks, which is designed to let Mr Kohl off the hook before he is held to his commitment (which he made at the last Nato summit) to support the modernisation of Nato's Lance missiles. Mrs Thatcher has already made the scarcely veiled criticism of Mr Bush that it will be difficult to get all the conventional arms negotiations through on such a high-speed schedule. For once it seems that the Prime Minister, who is not otherwise known for her fine sense of long-term negotiating strategies, has got it right. Mr Bush is storing up trouble for himself: the closer the Lance deadline gets, the more power the Soviet negotiators will have at their disposal to extort concessions by threatening delay.
Just what those concessions might be, only the next year will show us. Some of them may take the form of raising the ceilings on different categories of manpow- er or equipment, or of allowing more proportional reductions instead of asym- metrical ones. But we should not be too surprised if the Soviet response in some areas, above all in infantry and artillery, consists of demanding much greater reduc- tions — even on both sides. Last October Mr Christopher Donnelly, a researcher at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, presented a memorandum to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee which went almost completely unreported, but which may contain the key to current thinking about disarmament in the Soviet General Staff. Modern Soviet strategists believe, he said, that anti-tank weaponry is now so sophisticated that a certain absolute density of defending forces can hold back any attacking force of tanks, no matter how great the disproportion between the two forces. What matters is not the ratio of force to force, but the ratio of defenders to space defended. So the secret of strategic superiority lies not in piling up an ever greater numerical advantage, but in per- Xuading your opponents to reduce their forces below the minimum density they need.
Somewhere in the Pentagon, one pre- sumes, there are people who understand these things. But the public at large does not understand them, and can hardly be blamed for not doing so. What it under- stands is the headlines and television pic- tures which show the great leaders of the world making historic announcements and offers and pledges. It is quite natural that Mr Bush should want to get his share of the limelight, and natural too that he should want to make it clear from the outset that he will not be nannied by Mrs Thatcher. The leaking last week of the news that Washington has been sharing nuclear weapons secrets for many years with the French was obviously a further measure designed to show the Western world that the 'special relationship' between America and Britain is not in any way exclusive. It suits Mr Bush's purposes, for the time being, to leave Mrs Thatcher looking isolatedly hawkish; but in six months' time, when papers describing the real issues of the conventional arms reduction talks are on .their desks, their underlying similarity of outlook will come to the surface again.
In the meantime, however, the Prime Minister's isolation on the international scene looks more and more politically damaging. To be at odds with the United States of Europe may (or may not) be regarded as a misfortune; to be at odds with the United States of America as well looks like carelessness. Voters may not care very much about the details of inter- national negotiations, but they like to feel that Britain holds her head high in the world and that her leader has a respected place at top table. Nowadays, however, the only international occasions on which Mrs Thatcher gains an automatic increment of prestige are her meetings with Mr Gor- bachev. And this in turn reinforces the apparent isolation of her hawkishness: when people have seen her on television smiling and chatting with Gorby, they are even less well prepared to understand her refusal to yield up Nato's short-range nuclear defences.
While Mrs Thatcher develops the sembl- ance of a special relationship with Mr Gorbachev, the Labour Party is storing up an ever greater dependence on the old special relationship with the United States. A critique of the Labour policy review document issued by CND puts it quite succinctly: 'Three years ago, Labour was prepared to place a higher priority on disarmament than on loyalty to the USA; now the position appears to be reversed.' So long as Labour pledges its continued support for Nato (which it does), some of its new policy commitments will commit it to almost nothing at all. 'Working within Nato', the policy review document says, Labour will 'strongly oppose' this, 'take active steps' to do that, and 'work for the abandonment' of the other. In other words, Labour will continue to depend, for electoral reasons, on Nato's nuclear umbrella, while continuing to register its disapproval of the principles on which that umbrella works. Of course Britain, like every other European member of the alliance, needs Nato more than Nato needs Britain. But at some time before the next British general election, Mr Bush will wake up to the fact that Nato needs Mrs Thatch- er more than it needs Mr Kinnock. From her point of view, that time cannot' come soon enough.
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