(2 of 4)
The Vice President's mission—to persuade the NATO allies that the U.S. is sincere about wanting an equitable agreement with the Soviets on nuclear missiles in Europe—was clearly the most difficult. In the abstract, Reagan's zero option is a proposal that nearly everyone in Western Europe would embrace as a major step toward nuclear stability. The trouble is, the zero option has zero chance for acceptance at the INF talks. From the Soviet perspective, it ignores the 162 missiles in France and Britain and asks the Kremlin to dismantle missiles that are already deployed in return for paper reductions by the U.S.
For his part, Andropov has offered an equally tendentious deal, in which the U.S. would cancel its deployment of 108 Pershing II and 464 cruise missiles, while the Soviets cut their SS-20 arsenal to the level of the French and British nuclear forces. The U.S. has rejected this, since the British and French missiles are not under American control. The Reagan letter reinforced the impression that the U.S. is locked into the zero option, even at a time when Bush was stressing U.S. willingness to consider any "reasonable" Soviet proposals.
Undaunted, Bush faced his European challenge with all the zeal of a man who would like to be President. His well-turned speech in Berlin, stressing the "moral" value of the zero option, was a crowd pleaser, deftly designed to buttress the political fortunes of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, a strong advocate of the new U.S. missile deployments in West Germany. Kohl is facing a serious challenge from Social Democrat Hans-Jochen Vogel in the parliamentary elections on March 6.
In a hurried, 24-hour visit to The Netherlands, Bush attended a dinner presided over by Queen Beatrix, and met with a group of prominent businessmen. He spent one hour chatting with members of the U.S. embassy staff in The Hague, and thus was criticized when he claimed that he could not spare five minutes to meet with an influential Dutch antinuclear weapons lobby, the Inter-Church Peace Council. Nonetheless, Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers proclaimed that he would judge progress at the INF talks by "only one criterion: the zero option."
Bush then flew into Brussels, where security was tight and the welcome of Prime Minister Wilfried Martens was warm. The Vice President pointedly recalled that the decision to deploy the Pershing II and cruise missiles had been made in Belgium three years ago, largely at the urging of the Europeans. Their hope, Bush said, was "to restore the balance that the Soviet Union has upset by reserving unto itself a dangerous monopoly of intermediate-range land-based nuclear weapons." Bush emphasized that the Kremlin's strategy was aimed at disrupting NATO unity by exploiting European doubts about accepting the new missiles. Martens readily agreed that "the solidarity within the Alliance is of the utmost importance."