Schmidt fails to convince Brezhnev that the U.S. wants serious arms talks
The conversation in the grand, neoclassic Beethoven dining room of Bonn's 18th century Redoute palace hushed as the ailing, 74-year-old guest rose ponderously from his chair. While his host, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, unceremoniously popped a stick of chewing gum into his mouth, Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev began to deliver his first public statement since President Ronald Reagan offered to cancel deployment of new U.S.-built nuclear missiles in Western Europe if the Soviets would dismantle the counterparts in their growing arsenal.
Brezhnev, who in previous weeks had artfully presented the Soviet Union as the superpower genuinely interested in peace, was expected by some to use the banquet at the Bonn summit to present a new idea to encourage the antinuclear weapon movement that has mobilized millions of Western Europeans in opposition to the deployment of U.S. Pershing II and cruise missiles. Holding the sheaf of white pages far from his body so that he could read the large-type Cyrillic characters without his eyeglasses, Brezhnev at first seemed to confirm his audience's suspicions by announcing in his heavy, measured monotone that he had come to Bonn with a "new, essential element" in the Soviet position. Then he said, "In the course of genuine negotiations with the U.S., we would be ready to reduce [mediumrange weapons] not by the dozens but by the hundreds. I repeat: by the hundreds."
The assembled ambassadors, ministers and government officials could barely conceal their reaction. Dramatic as the proposal may have sounded to a layman, it was nothing more than a dusted-off version of an idea Brezhnev first offered in a speech in East Berlin more than two years ago when he was still trying to thwart NATO'S decision to install new weapons in response to the Soviet buildup of SS-20 missiles aimed at Europe. Brezhnev, who was making his first trip to the West since the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, had been successfully upstaged by Ronald Reagan. Concluded a State Department official: "The Soviets found themselves playing catch-up."
The three-day Bonn summit came on the eve of the opening this week in Geneva of a new round of U.S.-Soviet arms talks devoted specifically to the problems surrounding medium-range missiles. Launched largely at the instigation of NATO's European members, these negotiations will seek to find ways of reducing the numbers of, if not eliminating altogether, the 250 Soviet SS-20s and 350 older SS-4s and SS-5s already trained on Western Europe, and the 572 U.S. Pershing II and cruise missiles scheduled to be deployed by 1983 in West Germany, Britain, Italy, Belgium and The Netherlands.
Hoping to encourage Soviet cooperation in Geneva, U.S. officials greeted Brezhnev's proposal in Bonn politely. "They've got an interest and a stake in legitimate negotiations, and we're going to pursue that as far as we can," Reagan said in an interview with ABC-TV. Said Secretary of State Alexander Haig: "Our message is going through." But, speaking privately, U.S. diplomats saw no great change in the Soviet approach.