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Immediately upon taking over from Brezhnev, Andropov seized that policy and made it his own. He issued a series of proposals that were almost Reaganesque in the alluring way in which they combined simplicity and ingenuity. He played numbers games with the European nuclear balance, promising subtractions from the Soviet side if the U.S. would cancel the addition of its own missiles; he offered an equation that was supposed to yield equality, but in fact would have left the Soviet Union with a significant advantage in key categories of weaponry and would have succeeded in keeping the U.S. from deploying any offsetting weapons of its own.
In short, Andropov applied his considerable skills to the task of repackaging the hard line, not to softening it. His cleverness failed about the same time as his kidneys. The Euromissile deployment went ahead on schedule at the end of 1983, just as Andropov was becoming a disembodied voice communicating to the world and to his own people through ghostwritten Pravda "interviews."
Just as Andropov assumed Brezhnev's stonewalling position on the Euromissiles, Gorbachev has inherited Chernenko's adamancy on the central arms-control issue of today: space weapons and strategic defenses. The Soviets are just as determined to block the U.S.'s Star Wars program as the Reagan Administration is determined to see that it goes forward. There is no reason to expect that Gorbachev will be more yielding than Chernenko. In his inaugural speech last week, Gorbachev stressed his opposition to "the development of ever new weapons systems, be it in space or on earth."
The Soviets have a number of reasons for opposing Star Wars. They are fearful of American technological prowess and they are prone to dote on worst-case scenarios. Reagan's dream of space-based battle stations that could zap missiles out of the sky is a Soviet military planner's nightmare. In order to counter such a U.S. capability, the Soviets would have to expand and overhaul their entire offensive arsenal and probably undertake a huge defensive buildup of their own. The mega-rubles involved would have to be diverted from the nonmilitary sectors of the economy, where Gorbachev faces so many challenges.
In much the same way that his mentor and predecessor Andropov was a skillful conductor of the anti-Euromissile campaign, Gorbachev is likely to be a deft opponent of Star Wars. Once again, the campaign will be pitched largely to the West Europeans who are skittish about the possibility that Star Wars research will lead to testing and deployment of systems that will provoke a new, extraterrestrial arms race.
On that issue, as on others, Gorbachev will be a more effective front man for Soviet policy than Chernenko was, or than other members of the Old Guard would be. In that respect, he will be a more formidable adversary. Insofar as he really does bring to the top level of the Soviet leadership more dynamism and pragmatism, he will put those qualities to work in the service primarily of competition, not conciliation. Yes, he is someone with whom the West can do business. But it is the same tedious, difficult, sometimes dangerous business as before--the business of managing a rivalry with a country that is too powerful to fight but too inimical to appease and often too insecure to accommodate.