U.S.-Soviet pressures build as SALT and a summit near
The old man's eyes are often glazed, almost as if he were in a trance. His face is puffy, possibly a sign of cortisone treatment. He grasps a pen and signs his name only with great difficulty. Still, as Soviet Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, 72, climbed the long flight of steps to the top of the Lenin mausoleum in Moscow last week, he looked healthier than he has in months. For more than two hours, he stood stolidly in a bleak drizzle, waving occasionally to the thousands of Soviet soldiers, schoolchildren and workers who marched through Red Square in the annual May Day parade.
No one was more relieved at Brezhnev's endurance than Jimmy Carter and his foreign policy advisers in Washington. Only a few days earlier they had learned from French diplomats that during President Valery Giscard d'Estaing's visit to Moscow, Brezhnev had seemed to be deteriorating badly. At the airport welcoming ceremony, he shuffled past the guard of honor, clutching Giscard's arm. He seemed alert during his talks with Giscard, but his speech was badly slurred and he had trouble breathing. At dinner he sometimes did not respond when addressed and he ate his food with a teaspoon.
The question of Brezhnev's health casts a long shadow over the nearly completed Strategic Arms Limitation treaty—and indeed over all of U.S.-Soviet relations. If Brezhnev is unable to see the marathon negotiations through to the end, a settlement and signing might be delayed for months—perhaps indefinitely. The very prospect of the struggle for succession may have been an element in the repeated delays over the Strategic Arms Limitation treaty.
In an effort to resolve the remaining differences as quickly as possible, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin met twice in Washington last week. Their urgency was a shared one; the responses to Washington from Moscow had rarely come faster. Vance and Dobrynin were expected to settle the last issue this week. It was a minor loophole in the proposed freeze on the number of warheads permitted on each missile. Vance and Dobrynin then were expected to plunge immediately into negotiating the time and place for the Carter-Brezhnev summit—probably in June at a neutral capital in Europe, such as Geneva, Stockholm or Vienna.
By now, there is little possibility that a summit can achieve much beyond the formal signing of SALT II. Said a senior Western diplomat in Moscow: "Brezhnev could attend a couple of dinners and read a paper or two, but he is in no shape to engage in real give-and-take with Carter. It will be a pro forma summit, and it would be useless to expect anything more." Though signing a SALT agreement would be very important, Carter is disappointed at the lack of prospects for going further. Said a top White House adviser: "The President really wanted to sit down and have a good exchange with Brezhnev. We might have been able to do that a year ago, when he was stronger. But it does not look like they are going to communicate at all." Accordingly, American policy planners expect a light summit schedule with face-to-face talks only in the mornings and for less than an hour each. After that Brezhnev is apt to weaken, even on his good days.