Reforging European Security: From Confrontation to Cooperation by Kurt Gottfried & Paul Bracken

Author:Kurt Gottfried & Paul Bracken [Gottfried, Kurt & Bracken, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781000309348
Google: f02fDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 52300740
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

Status of CFE in Mid-1990

In the spring of 1990, in contrast with the rapidity of early developments in the CFE negotiations, the talks had slowed down to a walk. Of the five types of armaments agreed by both sides for reductions: tanks, armored combat vehicles, artillery, combat helicopters and combat aircraft, agreed definitions which would serve as the basis of reductions had been definitively agreed only for artillery. There were wide differences on the reduction of combat aircraft. Verification had scarcely been tackled and there were important differences. Only a few paragraphs of a possible treaty text had been firmly agreed, and the Soviet delegation appeared not to be receiving timely instructions from Moscow.

In other words, the steady stream of Soviet concessions which had provided the motive power for earlier rapid progress in the CFE talks as well as in other arms control negotiations appeared to be drying up. The negative trend continued in the unproductive discussion of CFE at the Washington ministerial session in April 1990 between Foreign Minister Shevardnadze and Secretary Baker, and again in the Moscow ministerial session of mid-May. Despite progress on START, the Bush-Gorbachev summit in Washington at the end of May 1990 brought little movement on CFE.

Many reasons for this slowdown were advanced. The difficulty of uniting increasingly independent-minded Warsaw Pact governments on a single Eastern negotiating position was an obvious and important one. Some Soviet officials and academicians ascribed the slowdown to political resistance in the Supreme Soviet to further Soviet arms control concessions. Some hinted, not without irony, that a "strategic review" of Soviet policy was underway, analogous to the protracted review of US defense policy at the outset of President Bush's administration. Officers of the Soviet general staff were becoming visibly more assertive in presenting their views on arms control issues. But it became evident that the basic reason for the slowdown was the apprehensive reaction of Soviet leaders to the collapse of the Soviet position in Eastern Europe, which in practice suddenly reversed the balance of power in Europe, leaving the Soviet Union on its own facing a NATO which would probably be augmented in potential strength by membership of a unified Germany. As a consequence, the Soviet Union would in the future bargain more tenaciously over reductions and probably would be more restrained in agreeing to asymmetrical cuts.

Moreover, the developments in Eastern Europe, which mean that most Central and Eastern European states will in practice become militarily neutral, could as a result make a first CFE agreement numerically disadvantageous for the Soviet Union. Under NATO's proposed "sufficiency rule," which seeks to limit to 60% the Soviet Union's share of total reducible armaments permitted the Warsaw Pact as a whole, the Soviet Union as such would be permitted only 12,000 tanks to NATO's total of 20,000; the remaining 8,000 tanks of the Pact's quota of 20,000 would fall to Eastern European states which can no longer be counted on to support the Soviet Union. In early 1990, following the de

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