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The current prospects for damping down these dangers seem bleak. Some of the more obvious steps have been officially rejected, or even sneered at, by one side or the other. Nonetheless, there are moves the U.S. could undertake, without violating any of Reagan's ideological convictions, to make the superpower relationship less menacing and more manageable. Among them:
> Offer to merge the START and INF talks. For the moment, the White House has decided against doing so, in the belief that the Soviets will soon resume the INF talks on Reagan's terms, namely by accepting deployment of some new U.S. missiles in Western Europe. Moscow scoffs at the idea of a merger for precisely the opposite reason. "One can only merge something that really exists," says First Deputy Foreign Minister Georgi Korniyenko.
Nonetheless, the idea has merit. The distinction between "strategic" missiles, defined by the U.S. as those with ranges of 3,400 miles or more, and "intermediate-range" weapons has always been arbitrary. Westerners remark that Soviet strategic missiles can hit London or Rome as easily as Chicago; Moscow considers any missiles capable of striking the U.S.S.R. to be strategic, whatever their range. Merging the two sets of talks would make possible more varied trade-offs between different types of weaponry.
In any merged talks, the Soviets are likely to demand concessions for withdrawing the missiles they are now installing in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. As long as intermediate-range missiles were under discussion, the U.S. would be burdened by the necessity of representing the position of its European allies, supposing those often disunited nations could agree on one. But the alternative could be a prolonged suspension of the START as well as the INF negotiations, a breakdown of what remains of the SALT treaties, a completely unrestrained arms race, and considerable damage to NATO.
> Propose measures to guard against war by accident. Reagan has suggested some, including upgrading the White House-Kremlin hot line and more comprehensive advance notification by each side to the other of missile test launches and major military maneuvers. Senators Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat, and John Warner, a Virginia Republican, advocate setting up "crisis control centers" manned by military officers of each country who could get in touch with one another immediately. Democratic Presidential Candidate Gary Hart offers a variation: a single center in Geneva or Vienna staffed jointly by the Pentagon and Soviet Defense Ministry, where each side could see pictures of what the other's satellites were showing and explain any activity that looked threatening.
At present, the political climate is so strained that the Kremlin derides even these modest "confidence-building measures." Says Arbatov: "What difference could it make if your President were to call Moscow [on the hot line] and say, 'Hi, it's Ronnie, a couple of missiles are flying in your direction