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By mid-1981 the Administration was convinced that it had to make at least the appearance of a serious quest for progress on the negotiating track laid down in 1979, or the allies would exercise their veto and derail the deployments for good.
As the Administration buckled down to the task of designing a proposal for the INF talks, the most influential figure—more so than anyone at the White House, in the Cabinet or even at the sub-Cabinet level—turned out to be Richard Perle, 41, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy. A longtime aide to Democratic Senator Henry Jackson of Washington and a vigorous opponent of SALT on Capitol hill, Perle quickly established himself as the Administration's most tenacious, articulate hard-liner as well as one of its most skillful bureaucratic infighters.
Perle championed what became known as the zero option (or zero-zero proposal, as the Administration came to call it) for the negotiations on INF. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger followed Perle's lead in making the case to the White House.
Originally a European idea, the zero option would require the Soviets to remove the SS-20s with which they were threatening Europe, as well as their older SS-4s and SS-5s, if NATO called off its planned deployment of the Tomahawks and Pershing IIs. As refined by Perle, the zero option was extended to all SS-20s throughout the U.S.S.R., including those in Asia. Since they are mobile, he argued, they are a potential threat to Europe even if aimed at China.
Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Richard Burt, who was then the director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs, argued for a more modest trade-off that would have allowed the Soviets to keep a reduced force of SS-20s, while NATO deployed enough of its own missiles to establish equality in warheads.
After months of fierce intramural combat, Perle won. President Reagan, who paid little attention to arms-control policy and was annoyed by the esoteric complexity of past agreements, liked the boldness and simplicity of the zero proposal. It dramatized his proclaimed goal of achieving sweeping reductions in arms control rather than the mere limitations imposed by SALT. Also, the proposal unabashedly required the Soviets to accept drastic cuts in existing forces in exchange for the U.S.'s holding back on future deployments. Reagan endorsed the notion that the Soviets should be forced in arms control to pay a penalty for having moved dangerously ahead of the U.S. in overall military power, an alarming judgment that many experts do not share with the President.
Paul Nitze, the veteran U.S. arms-control negotiator, liked the zero option too, at least as a starting point. As he told TIME last week, "It was essential that we have a going-in position which was concise, which could be expressed in a single paragraph in a speech and would have an impact at home and abroad."
Reagan unveiled the zero option in an address broadcast live to Western Europe on Nov. 18, 1981, and the initial reaction from across the ocean was relief and applause. With one stroke, Reagan seemed to have outflanked the unilateral disarmament movement. Even British Labor Party Leader Michael Foot, who opposes the stationing of any U.S. missiles in Britain, was forced to concede: "It seems at least [that