Way Out There In the Blue by Frances FitzGerald

Author:Frances FitzGerald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

AT GENEVA, Reagan and Gorbachev had agreed that there would be a summit in the United States in 1986, and one in the Soviet Union the following year. After his triumph at Geneva, Reagan was eager for another meeting. Gorbachev, however, had gone to Geneva proclaiming that SDI would lead to a new and more dangerous arms race and had come away without budging Reagan on the issue of restraints. Not only was he disappointed, but reaction in Moscow suggested that he had paid a political price for coming away empty-handed. On Gorbachev’s return, Vladimir Shcherbitsy, an old guard Politburo member from the Ukraine, had expressed skepticism about the results of the meeting, and Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the chief of the General Staff, made public statements raising doubts about the achievements of the summit. In December, Reagan and Gorbachev exchanged letters, but merely to restate their positions. In early January 1986, Shultz proposed through Dobrynin that Gorbachev come to Washington in June. Gorbachev did not reply immediately, but Dobrynin privately told Shultz that September would be more realistic, because of the time required to work out an agreement on strategic arms.38

On the morning of January 15 Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin telephoned Shultz and told him to expect an important announcement from Moscow that day. His deputy had just brought Shultz a letter from Gorbachev to Reagan containing an arms-control proposal, and Shultz sent it immediately to the White House. Three hours later the television-news anchor in Moscow spent a half-hour reading the same document aloud, while Tass distributed copies of it around the world. The proposal was nothing less than a schedule for the complete elimination of all nuclear weapons by the year 2000.

Administration officials were not a little annoyed. At the very moment the message reached the White House, officials were telling reporters that the Soviet negotiating position was unlikely to change until Gorbachev had consolidated his political position at the Communist Party congress the following month.39 But Gorbachev had once again done the unexpected, and once again he was appealing to public opinion over their heads.

In the 1950s, at a time when the U.S. had overwhelming nuclear superiority, the Soviets had often advanced proposals for “general and complete disarmament”—proposals which had some appeal for the non-nuclear powers but none at all for the United States, which relied on the nuclear threat to counter the Soviet superiority in conventional forces in Europe. Given the Soviet resistance to on-site verification—or to allowing Americans into their facilities—these proposals had been short on details, and they had not included any provisions for reducing conventional arms. Essentially they had been demands that the United States disarm itself. But Gorbachev’s proposal was a schedule for mutual disarmament with a great many details.

Poring over the text that morning, Shultz and Nitze found that Gorbachev had proposed to eliminate nuclear weapons in three stages, each one lasting five years. In the first stage the U.S. and the Soviet Union would cut their strategic weapons in half and eliminate their intermediate-range weapons in Europe.

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