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Reagan seemed also to have stolen a march on the Soviets. Leonid Brezhnev had been achieving considerable success with his "peace campaign" and his call for a moratorium on nuclear weapons in Europe. Suddenly that appeal seemed pale compared with Reagan's dramatic proposal "to get rid of an entire class of missiles," as Nitze put it.
But what was a triumph of public relations turned into a headache when Nitze and the U.S. team settled in at the negotiating table. Whatever its merits as a "going-in position," the zero option was clearly going nowhere in Geneva. It was simply nonnegotiable. The SS-20, after all, is the pride of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces. The Kremlin has sunk billions of rubles into developing it, training its crews and getting it in place. There was no way that Moscow would agree to dismantle every one of these missiles in exchange for "paper" reductions of missiles that the U.S. had not deployed and might not be able to deploy, given the turmoil in Western Europe. Besides, it goes very much against the grain of the Soviet military to dismantle even antique weapons in accordance with deals that their diplomatic comrades make with the U.S.S.R.'s principal adversaries. Only very reluctantly did the Soviets agree in SALT to tear down small numbers of some of their most outmoded strategic weapons.
Last November the new Soviet party leader, Yuri Andropov, denounced the U.S. proposal for INF as one-sided. "Let no one expect unilateral disarmament from us," he said. "We are not naive people."
The Soviets countered with a zero option of their own. Arguing that there is already a rough balance in medium-range (1,000 to 5,000 kilometers) missiles and aircraft in Europe, they proposed that each side should freeze its forces (thus ruling out the deployment of cruise missiles and Pershing IIs). By 1985 there would be a reduction from 1,000 missiles and bombers on each side to 600; the total would drop to 300 by 1990 and eventually to zero.
The Soviets' arithmetic is utterly phony. It ignores large numbers of Soviet weapons that clearly should be included. On the Western side of the ledger, it counts weapons that just as clearly do not belong in the equation. in order to make the numbers come out the way they want, the Soviets are counting some old Pershing I missiles that are in the West German armed forces, even though they do not have their own nuclear warheads (these would be supplied by the U.S. during a crisis) and have ranges shorter than a number of Soviet missiles that do not show up in the U.S.S.R.'s tally. The Kremlin gives equal weight to vintage British Vulcan bombers, which are practically candidates for an aeronautical museum, and their own Backfire, one of the most potent planes in the Soviet air force. Soviet charts also equate France's S-2 and S-3 ballistic missiles with the SS-20, which has three times as many warheads and almost twice the range.
The Soviet insistence on factoring British and French nuclear forces into their calculations is critical to their NATO-splitting strategy. Since the British and French already have more than 250 medium-range bombers and missiles, the Soviet proposal