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If the trip produced no breakthrough, it served a positive purpose in exposing the aging Soviet leadership to some realities. The leaders of West Germany's four largest political parties, including Social Democrat Willy Brandt, the former Chancellor who has encouraged the peace movement, told Brezhnev that they stood behind the Schmidt government's decision to allow the installation of 108 Pershing II and 96 cruise missiles in their country. The lower-level Soviet officials and newsmen who preceded Brezhnev's party were treated to demonstrations different from those shown on television back home. In Bonn's cobbled Marktplatz, peace demonstrators called for the removal of Soviet as well as U.S. nuclear weapons. One young protester held a placard showing a caricature of Brezhnev astride an SS-20. Along Bonn's main street, some 40,000 demonstrators marched to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The summit also confirmed to Western diplomats that whatever they may be saying in public, the Soviets appear intent on negotiating seriously in Geneva. The main reason is that they are genuinely worried about NATO's proposed new missiles, the first weapons that would be able to strike deeply into the Soviet Union from Western Europe. The Pershing IIs would need only five to eight minutes to reach targets in the Soviet Union; the ground-hugging cruises are slower but capable of slipping through Soviet air defenses. The Soviets argue that these new weapons would not only destabilize the global balance of forces, but make accidental war more likely. Says a Soviet diplomat: "If you launched your [U.S.-based] Minuteman missiles, we would still have nearly 20 minutes before we had to launch our own missiles. Our leaders would have time to grab the hot line and ask, 'Is this a real attack or a mistake?' Once the Pershing IIs are based in West Germany, this margin of safety would be wiped out."
As the Geneva talks begin, Moscow's opening position is expected to be far from Washington's "zero option," which would cancel the planned U.S. missiles and remove the existing Soviet arsenal. The U.S. counts only the Pershing IIs and cruises as medium-range weapons, but the Soviets include nuclear weapons that can be launched from "forward-based" U.S. submarines and aircraft in the Atlantic and Mediterranean as well as independent nuclear forces in France and Britain. Said a Soviet diplomat: "Zero cannot just mean zero for the Soviet Union."
Reagan's plan, Brezhnev argued, would give the U.S. a 2-to-l advantage. "The Soviet Union will never agree to such a version," he declared. To strengthen their hand, Soviet diplomats have started dropping a new and disconcerting hint: that they could decide to station SS-20s in Cuba if the Geneva talks fail.