Options for disarmament
Bohdan Nahaylo
Only days after the conclusion of the world chess championship another in ternational contest requiring just as much skill, caution and patience from the players opened this week in Geneva. But the outcome is of infinitely greater importance, for the pieces are no mere rooks and bishops, but SS 20 and Cruise missiles, key weapons in nuclear arsenals whose destructive potential defies human imagination. Ironically, as the negotiators get down to business after more than two years of bitter USSoviet wrangling, they have both had to open with gambits aimed at securing some form of a draw.
The Geneva negotiations — which are about limiting the number of mediumrange missiles based in, or directed at, Europe — were preceded by sustained psychological warfare designed to weaken the respective bargaining positions of the adversaries. For a considerable period, the Soviet Union enjoyed remarkable success as President Brezhnev's peace offensive found favour with mass protest movements throughout Western Europe. The Reagan Administration was crudely branded as a bunch of irresponsible warmongers with no scruples about turning Europe into a nuclear battlefield. While focusing on NATO's decision at the end of 1979 to deploy Cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe beginning in December 1983, the Soviet media carefully glossed over the crucial fact that this programme was intended either to offset Soviet advantages gained by the deployment of the highly mobile and more accurate SS 20 missiles and the Backfire bombers, or to bring the Soviets to the bargaining table.
Recently, however, some of the wind has been taken out of the sails of the Soviet propaganda drive. At the end of October, Moscow was embarrassed by the hitherto unprecedented spectacle of a Warsaw Pact leader breaking rank and calling for all nuclear weapons to be withdrawn from Europe, including those of the Soviet Union. In two interviews for West German newspapers, President Ceaucescu of Romania directly challenged Soviet armament policy by insisting not only on the 'stopping of the deployment of those missiles produced by the US' but also on 'the withdrawal of Soviet missiles'. This line was spelt out even more bluntly in the Romanian press which implicitly contrasted the US missiles still to be sited in Europe with the already deployed Soviet ones. The Romanian leader's decision to launch his own peace offensive on the eve of President Brezhnev's visit to West Germany could hardly have come at a worse time for the Soviet Union.
Almost simultaneously, Moscow suffered another setback. The credibility of the Soviet peace drive, particularly President Brezhnev's proposals for a 'nuclear-free' zone in northern Europe, was undermined when an apparently nuclear-armed submarine ran aground in a restricted military area within Swedish territorial waters. Following the delivery of a strongly worded message to Moscow protesting against what the Swedish foreign minister Ola Ullsten described as 'an unusually crude violation of Swedish neutrality', the inhabitants of this and other neighbouring countries can hardly have been reassured by a predictable reply from the Kremlin that 'the Soviet submarine had entered Swedish territorial waters unintentionally, and that its entry did not in any way affect the security interests of Sweden' (Tass, 11 November).
Ignoring these reverses, the Soviet media busied themselves preparing the psychological groundwork for Brezhnev's trip to West Germany — his first visit to the West since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. For weeks beforehand, it was obvious that the chief purpose of the Soviet leader's 'mission of peace' was to secure support for the Soviet campaign to deter NATO countries from modernising their 'theatre' nuclear weapons, or Intermediate Nuclear Forces, as the Americans now prefer to call them. With only a few days remaining before Brezhnev's departure, however, President Reagan's 'zero option' offer to Moscow not only upstaged the Soviet leader but also deprived him of the propaganda advantage. In a major policy speech on 18 November, broadcast live by satellite to an estimated 200 million people around the world, the American President announced that the United States was prepared to abandon present plans to install 572 Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe if the Soviet Union would dismantle the equivalent SS 20, SS 4 and SS 5 missiles in its arsenal. By finally seizing the initiative after months of bungling by his Administration on the nuclear arms issue, Mr Reagan successfully shifted the focus of attention away from American intentions and towards the Soviet missiles already deployed in Europe.
Clearly infuriated by the stealing of its thunder, the Soviet Union responded by dismissing Mr Reagan's 'zero option' proposal as a cheap propaganda ploy. Sergei Losev, for example, claimed in lzvestia on 19 November that the 'US President's proposals are only outwardly of a peace-loving character, while in fact being aimed at a quest for unilateral military advantages and ensuring military superiority over the USSR and the Warsaw Pact .member-countries'. The President's address, he added 'was designed to impress on uninformed people the idea that the present US Administration has all of a sudden "developed" a peaceful initiative'. On arriving in Bonn, however, the Soviet delegation found to its dismay that the West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt had little sympathy for such an attitude. The visitors put on a brave face but their stay in West Germany was far from being the 'great success' claimed by the Soviet press. Not surprisingly, for the guests had hardly departed when their host was publicly announcing that he had made it abundantly clear to President Brezhnev and his colleagues that the 'zero option' was originally not an American proposal at all, but a German one.
Confronted with a resolute West German leadership, the Soviet delegation attempted to salvage something from their visit. At a Bonn banquet on 24 November, President Brezhnev offered to remove (though not dismantle) 'not dozens, but hundreds' of Soviet medium-range missiles if the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles was abandoned. By adopting this more accommodating attitude President Brezhnev was forced implicitly to concede the validity of NATO's anxieties underlying its decision in 1979 to install sophisticated intermediaterange missiles in Europe. This breakthrough, a personal triumph for Chancellor Schmidt, has raised hopes for the Geneva arms reduction talks.
Until now the Soviet leaders have banked on the growing strength of the peace movement in Western Europe. What they did not seem to have taken into consideration, however, is the emergence of an antinuclear weapons movement in Eastern Europe. Now, for the first time, a nuclear disarmament movement, albeit an officially orchestrated one, has appeared within the Soviet bloc in Romania. Other voices have been heard from inside Eastern Europe expressing their concern about the nuclear militarisation of the USSR, notably those of the 'father of the Soviet atomic bomb', Dr Andrei Sakharov, and Czech dissenters polemicising with E. P. Thompson in the pages of the New Statesman. If, as seems likely, the Geneva talks turn out to be long and arduous, the Soviet Union may itself be forced to take account of opposition in Eastern Europe to its nuclear armament policies.
Previous page
