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The response of West European leaders to Andropov's proposal was by turns hopeful and ambivalent. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl welcomed the latest Soviet move as offering promise for a U.S.-Soviet missile agreement this year. British Foreign Secretary Francis Pym described Andropov's remarks as "a step in the right direction. It is a very modest move; they are still taking a very hard line." French President François Mitterrand reaffirmed his nation's determination to be excluded from the Geneva talks. Said he: "This Soviet demand is very old. I will remain deaf." The Paris daily Le Monde headlined the Andropov announcement with a question: CONCESSION OR PROPAGANDA? The paper's assessment: probably propaganda.
Most Western analysts saw the continuing Soviet attempt to bring Britain and France into the negotiations as an effort to divide the alliance. Said U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle: "All the Soviet proposals have had one common characteristic—they would leave the U.S. with zero nuclear forces in Europe, and they would leave the Soviet Union with thousands of nuclear warheads on Soviet missiles." In the NATO view, a failure by the U.S. to counter the 243 triple-warhead SS-20s now aimed at Western Europe would "decouple" the U.S. and its West European allies by indicating that the U.S. would no longer risk its own cities for the defense of Europe.
Andropov's offer was seen as a response to President Reagan's interim proposal, which calls for an unspecified reduction of proposed U.S. missiles in exchange for a cut in the number of existing Soviet SS-20s. But Andropov laid out the Soviet posture so loosely that any real assessment will have to depend on how Soviet negotiators fill in the blanks at Geneva. Some of the ambiguities:
> What would happen to excess SS-20s, all mobile, now deployed in the European part of the Soviet Union if reductions were agreed upon? The Soviets have reserved the option of moving the extra missiles to Asia. The U.S., at minimum, would probably insist that they be dismantled and destroyed, so that the missiles could not be moved back to Europe in a crisis.
> Is the Soviet Union, by agreeing to count warheads, trying to prevent modernization of the independent British and French nuclear forces? By the early 1990s, Britain plans to replace its 64 Polaris missiles with 32 U.S.-built Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles with eight to ten independently targetable re-entry warheads each. The French, similarly, are in the process of replacing their 98 single-warhead missiles with weapons that can carry up to six warheads.
> Would the Soviet Union respond to the deployment of U.S. missiles by stationing new ballistic nuclear missiles in East Germany? Andropov may have been hinting as much when he singled out East Germany for participation in any East bloc "countermeasures."