CONTROLLING DEADLY WEAPONS

The Gorbachev Offensive Colin S. Gray

'e can envy Soviet leaders who know that no matter

w how outrageous their arms control position may be, some Western politicians and many Western media pundits will herald the breaking o f a new dawn for arms control and, by alleged extension, for stability and peace. There is something of a convention among commentators on arms control to the effect that particular designs for restraint, great or otherwise, may be criticized, but not the arms control process itself. However, the arms control process does not, indeed cannot, exist and have meaning apart from the political circumstances and dynamics of superpower rivalry. As Soviet commentators are wont to observe, it is no accident that the arms control process persistently generates outcomes that both disappoint American liberal opinion and alarm American conservative opinion. The arms control process, in historical fact, is structurally unsound from the perspective of Western defense communities which aspire to achieve enhanced security through the judicious melding of the paths of negotiation and competitive military endeavor. Western politicians, sincerely or to pander to ignorant publics, invest the arms control process with a significant potential for international stability and peace that it does not possess. As a general rule, a democratic society is at a permanent disadvantage when participating in an arms control process with an authoritarian state. Since Soviet negotiators seek to promote political dissension, to gain military advantage, or to preclude military disadvantage, arms control provides a near-perfect vehicle for the prosecution of political struggle. This has always been the case, but never has it been more true than at the present time with the political theater that is being played out in Geneva. During his first term ot office President Ronald Reagan "failed" to register any progress in negotiated arms control. With. key elements of his strategic modernization program under political pressure from the Left and the Center, Reagan granted a grudging practical authority to

the unratified, and much vilified, SALT II treaty. Under political pressure from the Right, the president told much of the truth about Soviet noncompliance with arms control agreements, but he declined to draw some of the more obvious conclusions from those findings, let alone to proceed to outline a sanctions policy. Rhetorically, the Reagan a d m i n i s t r a t i o n a t t e m p t e d n o t h i n g that w o u l d diminish expectations of arms control. On the contrary, the president staked out positions in 1981-82 on intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) and strategic nuclear forces (in START, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) that apparently would have required a heroic measure of self-sacrifice on the Soviets' part. The United States method was to pursue the path of unequal reductions (in favor of the United States) for equal results.

Reagan and Arms Control In 1981, the Reagan administration misread somewhat the strength and character of its mandate to rebuild the United States defense posture. Learning from the perceived errors of President Carter, the new administration believed both that the arms control process was relatively unimportant and that the United States/NATO bargaining hand would be far stronger were the Soviet Union to see visible m o m e n t u m toward strategic modernization, across-the-board, prior to the resumption of formal negotiations. Reagan's protracted delay in assembling either an arms control team or, in part as a consequence, an arms control policy story, suggested to many nervous Americans and Western Europeans at the outset of his first term that the United States chief executive was not as concerned about the dangers of nuclear war as he should be. This public misperception was fed by some injudicious presidential remarks on the possibility of a limited nuclear war and by a flow of press reports alleging a new United States determination to plan and prepare for the achievement of victory in nuclear war. As early as 1981 in Europe, and by 1982 in the United

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States, public suspicion that Reagan was not really serious about pursuing arms control, began to imperil nuclear modernization plans. The zero option and the convening of talks on INF late in the fall of 1981 were designed, on the United States/NATO side, to quiet the European critics who alleged that the United States was reneging on the NATO dual-track decision of DecEmber 1979--to plan to deploy new INF by late 1983 and to seek through negotiations to limit or even eliminate the need for NATO to proceed actually to deploy the new weapons. This position was intended to demonstrate the United States commitment to arms control (and hence, in the public mind, to peace). The reconvening of the SALT process (the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), renamed START on the United States side, in the spring of 1982, similarly was intended to quiet critics at home and in Europe. In START, as in INF, the United States position truly was a radical one, particularly with reference to the reductions required of Soviet MIRVed i n t e r c o n t i n e n t a l ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Critics at the time, and since, have waxed eloquent on the technical deficiencies and liabilities of nonnegotiability that attended the United States position on INF and in START in the period 1981-83; but generally they have neglected to notice the severity of the barrier to progress that was presented by Soviet grand strategy. From the beginning of his first term in office, through to the point in September 1984 when the Soviet Union recognized the inevitability of another Reagan electoral victory, the political prerequisites for progress in arms control were missing. Ostensibly, Moscow was campaigning and "negotiating" to impose a zero option on United States groundlaunched cruise missiles (GLCMs) and Pershing H intermediate-range ballistic missile deployments in Europe and was holding the START discussions hostage to progress in INE Behind the campaign against INF was the illdisguised purpose of attacking the internal cohesion of NATO. Keys to the Soviet campaign against NATO cohesion were the propositions that the military alliance with the United States was dangerous to the survival of Western European societies, and that the new INF were being foisted upon vulnerable allies by a United States that was prepared to wage a nuclear war limited to Europe. The obtuse illogic of this argument really did not matter, since the various European peace movements were not well peopled with the strategically literate. Fundamental to the Soviet political assault upon NATO cohesion was the assertion that Reagan was an irresponsible ideologue with whom the Soviet Union could not conduct serious business. In such a political environment, and given the Soviet policy goals of the day, arms control agreement--on INF, START, or Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions ( M B F R ) - - w a s not merely unlikely. It was plainly impossible. The Soviet Union had some reasonable grounds for hope that West Germany, Belgium, and Holland, although probably not Britain or Italy, would permit them-

selves to be intimidated by Soviet threats, as well as by domestic disorder, from adhering to long-established schedules for INF deployment. The existence of an INF negotiating forum served both as a stage for propaganda and as an alibi for those European politicians who might wish to endorse delay on deployments now, pending progress in negotiations tomorrow. From 1981 to 1984, Moscow would have undercut the first priority of its grand strategy--to divide the NATO alliance--had it negotiated an INF agreement. The protracted succession crisis in the Soviet Union probably had less of an impact upon Soviet arms control policy than popularly has been believed. Given the political stresses that were self-inflicted by NATO as a result of its dual-track INF decision, it is not likely that any Soviet leader could have resisted the temptation to play out the INF issue for all that it might be worth in the realm of American-European estrangement. Enter the S D !

By late 1983 or early 1984, it must have been unmistakable in Moscow that the policy of the previous three years had failed. The political campaign against NATO's INF had not been an unmitigated failure. Long latent anti-Americanism in Europe had been stirred and rendered active, particularly among the young people who had not known war or economic hardship and who, previously, had regarded "peace" as their birthright. NATO had weathered the storm. The deployment of GLCMs in Holland and Belgium remained uncertain, but clearly the issue effectively was resolved, in the Soviet disfavor, in the country that really mattered, West Germany. The Soviet Union was obliged to break off the INF and START negotiations late in 1983, both in order to save face, since it had stated unambiguously that actual INF deployment would remove the basis for negotiations, and to reconsider its policy options. Subject to some uncertainty through the spring and summer of 1984 concerning Reagan's electoral prospects, it must have been evident in Moscow that the agenda for arms control business had been altered significantly, indeed probably overturned, by the reemergence in the United States of commitment at the highest level to the idea of strategic defense. Reagan presented his vision of strategic defense, in the barest and most elevated of moral and philosophical terms, on March 23, 1983. For at least a year after that date, and probably much longer, Soviet observers of the American defense scene must have been as uncertain, if not confused, as to what had changed, or might change, in United States strategic policy, as were officials and commentators in the United States and in NATO-Europe. Since Moscow needed, in 1984, to permit some time to elapse between the INF and START process of 1981-83 and whatever might follow, to wait out the electoral process in the United States, and to see how the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) played in American and European politics, the feebleness of Chernenko's brief period

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of nominal leadership probably was of little consequence for arms control. The shape of things to come was heralded plainly, if generically, through 1984, as Soviet spokesmen warmed to the theme of denouncing the SDI. The linkage that previously had been asserted by Moscow between INF and reductions in strategic offensive arms, now was applied as between strategic offensive and defensive arms. In September 1984, recognizing that Walter Mondale's bid for the presidency would fail, the Soviet Union indicated that it would be prepared to resume the formal arms control process, albeit on terms and conditions that reflected its concerns about the SDI. The critical concession was offered by the United States in January 1985, when Secretary of State George Shultz agreed that INF and strategic nuclear offensive forces would be discussed in the context of space defense weapons, or what Soviet officials were beginning pejoratively to call space strike weapons. From 1983 until the spring of 1985, the Reagan administration gave the appearance of floundering over the implications for strategic policy of the SDI. The president had sketched a moral vision on March 23, 1983, the Fletcher Commission examined the technological prospects, and sought to identify research strategies, but the strategy and policy story long remained exceedingly uncertain. There was no shortage of strategic policy speculation, but what was lacking was a truly authoritative statement. The United States government at last assembled a coherent policy story in support of strategic defense, in the form of a "new national security concept" that was explained by the elder statesman of United States strategic policy affairs, Paul Nitze, in the spring of 1985. Nitze envisaged a three-phase process of transition from offense dominance to defense dominance in the strategic balance. In phase one the superpowers would effect a radical scale of reduction in strategic offensive armaments; in phase two new strategic defenses gradually would assume the deterrent duties formerly assigned to the offensive arms that were being withdrawn from the arsenals; and in phase three the superpowers, and others, would approach achievement of the president's vision of a world liberated from nuclear dread. Stripped to its essentials, the new United States national security concept indicated an arms control negotiating position that would license strategic defenses to run free, or as free as the political traffic would bear, while strategic offensive forces would be subject to radical and rapid rundown. Above aII, in the official United States view, the process of determination of whether or not new strategic defenses may be feasible and affordable, could not be subject to legal restraints in addition to those already embodied in the antiballistic missile (ABM) treaty. Plainly, the United States and Soviet arms control positions in the spring and summer of 1984 were fundamentally in opposition. The United States government was still in the process of building domestic and allied constituencies for strategic defense, and was (and remains) con-

vinced, rightly or wrongly, that arms control worthy of the name would be achievable and sustainable only through the agency of new defensive deployments. The Soviet government, with a stagnating economy, an enduring problem of competing adequately with the United States in the field of high technology, yet with a satisfactory report sheet for the strategic competition on current terms, was not about to license a knight's move in the arms race that could have the functional impact of British launching of the all-big-gun Dreadnought in February 1906. The Gorbachev Touch In the Soviet perspective, the SDI poses both problems and opportunities. With respect to opportunities, the SDI is an issue virtually made in heaven for political exploitation. The SDI is scientifically, economically, politically, and strategically controversial within the United States; its proponents often describe its aims in contradictory terms; and, above all, it is a United States military-technical initiative that potentially poses an unusual, even unique, challenge to the basis of confidence among the Western allies, since it could alter the terms of deterrence. In this situation, Soviet officials can play back and feed evidential support to the arguments of the Western critics of the SDI, The Soviet Union has to recall its failure to arrest the deployment of GLCMs and Pershing IIs, notwithstanding the promising, even gullible, political material in Western Europe with which it could work. The joys of political posturing in and about Geneva, in a campaign to embarrass the United States over its inflexibility on strategic defensive weapons development, are obvious to Gorbachev. Nevertheless, unlike the challenge plausibly posed by INK the SDI represents a prospectively deadly threat to the military integrity of Soviet strategic war plans. In short, the SDI is not a fit subject for strictly propagandistic exploitation; it is, or may be, serious business indeed. Gorbachev's policy ambition cannot be simply to reap ephemeral public relations advantage from an endeavor to show that it is the United States that is most responsible for the absence of progress in Geneva. Sooner or later, Soviet arms control policy will need to address the Soviet military need to slow down or canalize the United States SDI program. Soviet definition of Soviet security requirements will insist that some measure of Soviet control be exercised over what otherwise could be an open-ended threat to the Soviet strategic offensive arsenal and to the strategy expressed by that arsenal. Western critics who allege that the SDI is incompatible with progress in arms control could not be more w r o n g - provided the SDI can achieve an accelerated political mom e n t u m and a highly plausible cost-effectiveness rationale. For several years to come, it is more likely than not that the Soviet Union will choose to feed domestic American and European critics of the SDI with supportive arguments, rather than seek to come to terms with the renewed United States c o m m i t m e n t to defense. For a time. at least, Gorbachev can hope that the SDI is more of

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a one-president excursion from affinity for the offense, than a sea change in United States strategic philosophy. He can also harbor aspirations that both crude and sophisticated offensive countermeasures--technical and tactical--will deny the United States SDI that plausible cost-effectiveness rationale that it requires. Gorbachev can hope that the politics of the deficit in the United States will render SDI weaponization unaffordable, even if it should prove to be cost-effective in some oersoectives. The Soviet perspective on the SDI, and hence their approach to arms control at the present time, is as obvious as it would seem to be ill-appreciated in the West. The Soviet Union is hostile to the SDI neither because they oppose strategic defense in a nuclear age nor because they are fearful of what are known as crisis instabilities. Instead, the SDI is a menace in Soviet eyes because it has removed, or realistically threatens to remove, the pace of development of strategic defensive systems from Soviet control; because it will have, as regulators of its progress, scientific and engineering skills and methods that are in short supply in the Soviet Union; because it threatens not so much to remove the American people from a hostage status but, rather, the military utility of Soviet long-range ballistic missiles (in short, it threatens central tenets of the Soviet "doctrine of war")" because it has some promise of restoring military, and hence political, utility to United States strategic offensive weapons (although this is not the expressed United States intention); and because it should have some military-technical growth potential eventually to function as a sword as well as a shield. The last two reasons do not involve areas being pursued by or in the context of United States policy, but in the Soviet world view a superpower does not disdain to exploit available advantage. They fear that unilateral advantage may be available to be exploited should new United States defenses promise to cope far better with a Soviet offense than would Soviet defenses with a United States offense. The Soviet Union is not at all opposed to the defense of the Soviet homeland, but it is strongly hostile to the United States' defense of its own homeland, particularly if Soviet scientists and engineers are likely to be left trailing in the competition for defensive competence. It is improbable that Gorbachev will offer any terms soon in Geneva that would ease the domestic and interallied path of the SDI. Two arms control/disarmament demarches of 1985-86, with which the new leader in Moscow gladdened the hearts of those people in the West whom Lenin so characteristically and accurately termed "useful idiots," illustrated all too clearly the argument developed here. In October 1985 and January 1986, Gorbachev sought to take the moral and political high ground of professed good intentions away from Reagan. At the same time, since neither piece of political theater was intended to be negotiable, he sought to lay the groundwork for labeling the United States commitment to the SDI as the villain that precludes a historical achievement for stability and peace. Some Western politicians and many commentators were excited by the apparent novelty of Gorbachev's pre-

summit deep-cuts proposal of October 1985 (Gorbachev I). Soviet officials were proposing truly deep cuts and spoke soothing words on the subject of the importance of verification. The United States counterproposal in November (a close variant of its March 1985 proposal) had some prominent albeit superficial similarities to the new Soviet position: the United States proposed a ceiling of 6,000 total nuclear force loadings (ICBMs, submarinelaunched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), heavy bomber weapons of all kinds); ceilings of 4,500 for long-range ballistic missile warheads, 1,250 to 1,450 for ICBMs and SLBMs, 350 for heavy bombers, 3,000 for ICBM warheads, 1,500 for cruise missiles, and of 50 percent of the strategic forces' throw weight of the side with the greatest amount of throw weight (that is, the Soviet Union, at 5.7 million kilograms, compared with 2.7 million kilograms for the United States). The United States proposal was silent on the subject of restraints upon strategic defenses additional to those in the ABM treaty. Politely, but firmly, the Soviet government explained that progress toward negotiated reductions in offensive arms was contingent upon United States agreement to the stated prohibition in the area of "space strike weapons." Generally, although not invariably, Soviet spokesmen insisted that all research upon the SDI must cease. From time to time, inconsistently, they would "clarify" their position by explaining that the prohibition should apply only to "purposeful" research--that is to say research conducted for the purpose of proving the principles pertinent to development of a weapon system. Since the distinction between purposeful and nonpurposeful research presumably lies in the realm of motives, it could be difficult to separate one from the other. Aside from the nonnegotiable item of SDI research and development, Gorbachev I was marred fatally by its chosen principle of assay. Under the proposed Soviet counting rule for "strategic" systems, the United States had 3,360 strategic nuclear delivery vehicles (SNDVs) and the Soviet Union had 2,500. The Soviet plan for reductions, in effect, required the United States to choose whether to reduce drastically its central systems, its systems for regional defense (the Soviet Union proposed that all nuclear-capable forward-based systems, including carrier-based attack aircraft, be counted), or to strike a balance of relative weakness between the two. Yet another item in Gorbachev's October surprise package that was designed to stake out a position far removed from contemporary official United States thinking, was the proposal to ban the testing and deployment of antisateltite weapons. Little has been said thus far on the subject of compliance. Lurking in the wings of the Geneva stage is the major political issue of the repeated finding by the Reagan administration that the Soviet Union is not in compliance with existing arms control treaties and agreements. The United States problem in this policy realm is two-fold and systemic. It is two-fold in that it is comprised of issues of verification and compliance. The two are not synonymous. The arms control record of recent years

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demonstrates that the verification of noncompliance does not, ipso facto, necessarily promote compliance. In the words of a landmark article in Foreign Affairs written by Fred Ikl~ in 1961, "After Detection--What?," the problem is systemic with reference both to the United States--an open democracy that places such value in the arms control process that it is unwilling to imperil that process by taking action against a malefactor; and to the Soviet Union--a totalitarian state with a political culture that regards secretiveness and the covert securing of advantage as normal practice. On optimistic assessment, it could be argued that Gorbachev I, for all its inclusion of jokers, was designed to lay the basis for serious negotiations. The extreme elements in the proposal, particularly the prohibition on all activity that bears upon "space strike weapons" and the definition of an SNDV, are scarcely more extreme than certain United States positions--that SDI not be restrained (beyond the extant provisions, more or less generously interpreted, of the ABM treaty) and that forward-based systems, which certainly could strike Soviet soil, not be counted. In general, we could observe that the details of a Soviet going-in position do not invariably serve as a useful guide to what may, or may not, actually be negotiable. By establishing extreme positions at the outset, on this view, Gorbachev simply provided himself with a great deal of concession room. Virtually everything in the Soviet deep-cuts proposal is negotiable save for provisions that would arrest, and in effect halt, the SDI as a program of"purposeful" research and development. Gorbachev cannot be in doubt concerning the depth of Reagan's personal commitment to his SDI. It has to follow that the Soviet Union does not expect any noteworthy new constraints on ballistic missile defense (BMD) research and development to be negotiable prior to January 1989. Hence, the proximate Soviet purpose in the Geneva process is to place the United States government in a position of maximum political embarrassment vis-h-vis those Western constituencies that might do the Soviet negotiating job for them. The cancellation or slowing down of United States weapon development programs as a result of United States domestic politics, constitute free gifts to the Soviet Union as a negotiating adversary in arms control. The more radical the reductions in nuclear offensive arms that the Soviet Union proposes, the greater the political cost may be to the United States of adhering inflexibly to its program of SDI research and development. All That Glitters In terms reminiscent of Nikita Khrushchev's disarmament diplomacy of 1959 vintage, in January 1986 Gorbachev astonished official Washington, and delighted the useful idiots among us, by improving on his deep-cuts offer with a proposal for complete nuclear disarmament. Any hopes that Western officials and commentators may have entertained concerning the distant possibility that the Soviet Union was looking for some grand compromise or historic bargain in arms control should have been

settled definitively by the style of presentation and content of what may be termed Gorbachev II. Gorbachev II was the purest of scripts for political theater. It was an insult to a prudent Western model of strategic common sense, but it was greeted by a lack of political courage on the part of high personages in the United States government, who professed to welcome the proposal and believed themselves to be constrained to look for nuggets of gold in its architecture. The counterfeit quality of Gorbachev II, although plain from its content, was stamped indelibly by its mode of revelation. If the Soviet Union is serious, as the saying goes, it does not first present its ideas in public. The details of the new Soviet proposal were unimportant, since the proposal was not, and was not intended to be, in any sense negotiable. Nonetheless, at some considerable risk of dignifying the trivial, Gorbachev II proposed that all nuclear weapons, everywhere, be eliminated by the end of 1999. The process of elimination would move through three, probably overlapping, phases. As with all well-crafted proposals, Gorbachev II was not totally innocent of items that, viewed in isolation, have some appeal to the opponent. The proposal offered the elimination of all INF in Europe in phase one, suggested that French and British nuclear forces should only be frozen in phase one (with disarmament to begin in phase two), and placed unusual emphasis on the importance of procedures for verification, including on-site inspection of weapon dismantlement. Gorbachev II was a political masterstroke in that it appears to be offering what Reagan seeks through SDI research, although with none of the economic costs of defensive weapon development and acquisition and with none of the alleged perils of a lengthy period of defense transition. While Reagan has challenged the United States scientific community "to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete," Gorbachev seemed to be offering a certain, and economical, path to the very goal that the president has identified. What can be wrong with this thoroughgoing Soviet proposal? The Soviet Union has a well verified recent history of not complying rigorously with the terms of treaties; for the Soviet Union to cheat on Gorbachev II would be almost ludicrously easy; and Soviet noncompliance with phase three of scheduled nuclear arms reductions down, literally, to zero, could and not implausibly would translate into a military capability for escalation dominance and dominion over the world. The United States position is that a truly radical scale of reductions in nuclear arms, as envisaged in Paul Nitze's phase two, let alone his phase three of actual, or effectively, zero nuclear arms, could be implemented in safety only in the context of heavy strategic defensive deployments. The measure of on-site inspection that the Soviet Union might permit could not even begin to meet United States security needs. In order to verify Soviet reductions to zero, the United States would need to know, with nearabsolute assurance, exactly how many nuclear weapons the Soviet Union possessed at the outset of the reductions

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process. In addition, the United States would require absolute assurance that the Soviet Union could not manufacture more nuclear weapons without American inspectors being aware of that fact in good time. Given the imprecision that necessarily attends the United States count of Soviet nuclear weapons--in the context of a Soviet Union that has the character of a police state and that must be motivated to cheat because of the heroic scale of the potential reward--very radical, let alone down-to-zero, nuclear reductions are totally impracticable, unless strategic defenses are deployed as a robust insurance policy. This is not to argue that a security condition with zero nuclear weapons must be a good idea, if only defenses are in place. Rather, a negotiated condition of zero, or nearzero, nuclear weapons, will be on the ragged edge of strategic feasibility only if such defenses are erected. In the absence of strategic defenses on both sides, the state that conceals ten or twenty nuclear weapons could dictate its terms of settlement in the next planned or unplanned international crisis. Gorbachev, worthy heir of Lenin and Stalin that he appears to be, cannot help but be fully aware of the arguments detailed here.

The Reagan administration misread its mandate to rebuild the United States defense posture.

By the spring of 1987, following the (Western) confusion of the Reykjavik summit, the Soviet Union appeared willing to agree to a "stand alone" deal over INE This could amount to a zero-zero arrangement for Eur o p e - n o Pershing Ils, GLCMs, SS-20s, or SS-4s--a sharp reduction in SS-20 deployment in Asia. This reversal of policy by Gorbachev constitutes a sharp change in Soviet tactics, but certainly not in Soviet arms control strategy. From 1981 until 1983, INF was the issue that was uppermost in the security politics of NATO and which the Soviet Union, understandably, sought to exploit for alliance division. INF as an issue has been replaced by the SDI. Today, by dangling the carrot of an INF agreement, Gorbachev can show how reasonable the new regime in Moscow is, can serve Soviet political-military interests, and can maximize political pressure upon Reagan to be more forthcoming in arms control--all the while conceding nothing of military significance with respect to opposition to the SDI. A zero-zero INF agreement for Europe is not in NATO's interest. NATO's INF are not being deployed directly to counter Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs). Instead Pershing H and GLCMs are being deployed as coupling instruments for an age of strategic nuclear parity (or marginal inferiority) and conventional

inferiority. Removal of NATO's INF will increase the prospects for success of the new Soviet military doctrine that calls for an all-conventional blitzkrieg on the central front that is able to unravel NATO's defenses before the cumbersome nuclear-release procedures of the alliance can be completed. The Soviet Union can cover NATO targets with deep-strike attack aircraft, with variable range ICBMs, SLBMs, and sea-launched cruise missiles, and--in some cases--with short-range ballistic missiles, which may or may not be eliminated effectively by agreement. Overall, a stand-alone INF agreement would irritate and worry United States allies; would have an important negative impact upon transatlantic strategic coupling, a concept central to NATO's theory of deterrence; would have a powerful benign effect upon Gorbachev's visible arms control credentials among strategic illiterates; would increase political pressure upon Reagan to be more flexible on the SDI; and will encourage those in the West who need such encouragement to believe that there are arms control solutions to our problems of strategic security. With one important caveat, Gorbachev may believe he is in a no-lose situation. If a zero (or super-zero, with shorter-range missiles banned also) option is agreed, the terms of deterrence should alter in favor of conventional forces--where Moscow enjoys very major advantages. If NATO rejects an INF agreement it will be embarassed by turning down its own ill-considered proposal. The caveat is that Gorbachev should be uncomfortable appearing to reward the tough bargaining position of the Reagan administration with a nuclear disarmament treaty. Soviet arms control policy is, and will long continue to be, dominated by a perceived need to minimize the threat to the Soviet expansive definition of their security requirements that resides in the potential of the SDI. Soviet policy may best be summarized as: "derail if we can, accommodate if we musty Through the remainder of the t980s, the Soviet Union will have the strongest reasons to play the arms control process strictly as political theater with the intent of influencing susceptible minds and hearts in NATO countries. Moscow seems to understand that the Reagan administration is beyond seduction with reference to compromise on the scope and pace of SDI research. It follows that control over the SDI can be secured only through the agency, or agencies, of some mix of the politics of deficit federal financing in the United States; the military-technological discouragement of the United States administration; and popular anxieties in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan over some possible negative consequences of a defense transition for stability. The Soviet arms control "proposals," labeled here Gorbachev I and Gorbachev II, were not designed to tempt Reagan directly into a near-term offense-defense deal that would prove fatal for the political (that is, budgetary) momentum of the SDI. Rather, they were designed to influence domestic constituencies with political clout in the United States, Europe, and Japan to press the administration to be more flexible. Gorbachev's American experts

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will have told him that it is not "the American way" to hold for long to a steady course in its military policy. Therefore, what the Soviet Union needed, and what Gorbachev I and II provided, was an arms control/disarmament stance on strategic arms that, while usefully nonnegotiable (that is, providing no policy arguments that United States officials can deploy in support of the SDI), nonetheless would be high in moral content and popular political appeal (complete nuclear disarmament). The Soviet Union has found the policy that best suits it for the time being--a policy on which it can stand, immovably virtuous, while it waits to see if it must negotiate seriously to arrest the pace, or attempt to confine the scope, of United States strategic defensive accomplish-

ments. The INF agreement, apparently an offer in 1987, if truly negotiable--which is doubtful--is designed to be supportive of the real Soviet policy concern, which is to kill the SDI. []

Colin S. Gray is president of the National Institute for Public Policy in Fairfax, Virginia. He has taught at the univers#ies of Lancaster, York, and British Columbia. His books include Nuclear Strategy and National Style, American Military Space Policy,and, forthcoming from the University Press of Kentucky, The Geopolitics of Super Power. The arUcles in this section will appear in a book edited by Joseph E Pilat, forthcoming from Transaction Books.

Crafting a Strategic Compromise Alton Frye

he long search for negotiated restraint on strategic nuclear weapons has now reached a decisive juncture. At no time since the strategic arms negotiations began in 1969 has there been such dramatic and substantial movement in Moscow's diplomatic positions. Mikhail Gorbachev has more than matched the important changes Ronald Reagan began to introduce in American proposals in 1983. The United States and the Soviet Union have worthwhile agreements in sight--but not in hand. There are obvious pitfalls and barbs in recent Soviet proposals, just as some American proposals are, as Alexander Haig has said, clearly "nonnegotiable" At the same time the surprising surge toward an agreement on the socalled zero solution for intermediate nuclear forces (INF) is a caution against hard and fast assumptions about what is negotiable. Preoccupation with the relatively modest INF prospects should not, however, divert attention from the more compelling question: Are there fresh elements in the positions of the two sides which, blended with previously negotiated arrangements, could meet President Reagan's goal of deep cuts in offensive forces while strengthening strategic stability? There are, but it will take more creative statecraft than either government has yet shown to achieve that goal. Both governments enter this phase of negotiations with

T

a good deal of leverage--and a great many problems. United States technological prowess gives Moscow real concern about long-term trends, particularly when we recognize that excessive concentration on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) creates a relatively greater Soviet vulnerability than the United States has in its force structure. The Soviets' hot production base must concern Americans. Indeed, if they were free to multiply warheads on individual missiles they could field more additional warheads on existing launchers than the entire United States ballistic missile modernization program will provide. That would be a foolish gesture in many ways but, if the two sides enter upon a peacock game of displaying strategic potential, one may expect some rather foolish attempts at intimidation. At present, the United States and the Soviet Union are each headed toward substantially larger forces in the next decade. Unless interrupted by mutual agreement, current trends could move strategic force levels to 15,000 or more weapons on each side in the 1990s. There would be a degree of inertial stability at such force levels as neither side could expect to conduct an attack without incurring intolerable retaliation. But even if stability in the narrow sense persisted, movement toward ever higher force levels implies a degree of political tension that is itself a profound source of potential instability. It also suggests a