The scene will be familiar and, partly for just that reason, comforting. The two Presidents will take their seats at a table in the St. Vladimir Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace and sign a treaty concluding a nine-year negotiation known as the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks. Television will broadcast the ceremony around the world. A sense of deja vu will sweep through the global village. The predecessors of these two men went through much the same ritual at numerous earlier summits. Here, once again, are the leaders of the "superpowers," as we've long called them, smiling, shaking hands and exchanging pens after revising the strange pact that has lasted for nearly 40 years: either we avoid going to war with each other or we blow up the world.
Yet because what is happening inside the U.S.S.R. these days is so unfamiliar, this week's signing will have about it an air not just of old business but also of anachronism. When START began in 1982, the Kremlin was under the control of Leonid Brezhnev, whose armies occupied Afghanistan as well as Eastern Europe. The tenant in the White House was Ronald Reagan, who spoke for much of the world in denouncing the U.S.S.R. as an "evil empire," led by men who "reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat." The No. 1 task of the U.S. was to prevent the Warsaw Pact from invading Western Europe and the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces from launching nuclear war against the American homeland.
Today George Bush worries less about whether the U.S.S.R. will start World War III than whether it will slide into a civil war. Even the word superpower now has an odd ring when applied to the demoralized, disintegrating state that Mikhail Gorbachev leads. Bush is the first American President to spend most of his term more concerned about the Soviet Union's weaknesses than its strengths.
Yet he and Gorbachev are not signing the START treaty just for old times' sake. As long as there is even the slimmest danger that these two nations could fire their weapons at each other, it behooves their governments to keep fine-tuning the balance of terror to make it a bit more balanced and thus a bit less terrifying.
That's what this latest treaty does. It limits, if that's the word, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. each to 1,600 intercontinental bombers and missiles carrying 6,000 thermonuclear charges. That is still a superfluity of death and destruction, but it is also roughly a 30% reduction in the overall level of the arsenals and, more important, a 50% cut in the Soviet weapons that most threaten the U.S.: giant intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with multiple warheads that could be used to carry out a first strike.
Those weapons, to be sure, are irrelevant to Gorbachev's current preoccupations and divert resources from perestroika. In fact, rather than fretting about a bolt-from-the-blue Soviet attack on the U.S., experts at the CIA and Pentagon have lately been worrying about the much more plausible danger that Soviet tactical nukes, as well as chemical and biological weapons, might end up in the hands of secessionist rebels in the U.S.S.R. or shady merchants in the international arms bazaar. Still, American defense planners cannot entirely rule out the possibility that the Strategic Rocket Forces might pose a threat to the U.S. in the future, which is particularly uncertain in the case of the U.S.S.R.