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The Soviets, as might be expected, pulled out all the propaganda stops. Less than 90 min. after the first word of the attack, the news agency TASS flashed some vintage vituperation by Analyst Vladimir Goncharov. The U.S., he said, "has started speaking in its true tongue: the tongue of bombs, flames and death." The next day, Moscow called off a mid-May visit to Washington by Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. He had been scheduled to confer with Shultz about preparations for the summit meeting between Reagan and Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev that is supposed to take place in the U.S. this year.
The Soviets also promised last week, in a letter from Gorbachev to Gaddafi, to "fulfill obligations" to strengthen Libya's defense capability, presumably by replacing planes, spare parts and other weapons that had been destroyed by the U.S. bombing. But the Kremlin has been wary about getting too close to the unpredictable Libyan; it seemed scarcely conceivable that Moscow would risk a clash with the U.S. to defend him. In Washington, officials dismissed the postponement of the Shevardnadze-Shultz summit- planning meeting (it was not canceled, merely declared to be "impossible . . . at this time") as the minimal gesture the Soviets could make against a nation that had just clobbered a client of the Kremlin. The State Department still believes that Gorbachev will eventually show up for his second meeting with Reagan, though almost certainly now toward the end of the year rather than the preferred U.S. date of June or July. Gorbachev took care to keep the West guessing at his intentions. In a speech in East Berlin at week's end, he simultaneously charged that the raid on Libya had brought the world closer to the brink of nuclear war and made a new proposal to reduce Soviet and NATO conventional forces and tactical nuclear weapons across "the territory of all of Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals."
In any case, the Reagan Administration had decided to go ahead with the raid whatever the cost in relations with the allies and the Soviets--and, for that matter, at whatever price in an immediate spasm of fresh terrorism. Why? Of all people, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who had long been publicly dubious about military reprisals against terrorism, put the rationale most succinctly. Terrorism, Weinberger declared in a Boston speech, "is now a state-practiced activity, a method of waging war" planned and organized by governments convinced of their impunity. It will get steadily worse unless the U.S. convinces them otherwise, he said. Shultz, who for years had argued what was originally a lonely case in favor of antiterrorist strikes, developed the rationale still further. Whatever the immediate effects of U.S. action, said the Secretary of State, "if you raise the costs (of inciting terrorism), you do something that should, eventually, act as a deterrent."