START Could End US-Soviet Arms Talks

NEXT week Presidents Bush and Gorbachev will stand in an ornate Kremlin room and put their pens to what some here believe will be the last Soviet-American arms control treaty.The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) culminates more than nine years of negotiations. But taking the failed SALT II pact into account, the two superpowers have been trying to reach an agreement on strategic nuclear weapons since 1974. While both sides have spoken of a follow-up treaty, most Soviet analysts discount this as an unrealistic proposition. "It is clear that the two countries are exhausted by the current START negotiations," comments Sergei Blagovolin, who heads military studies at the prestigious Institute of World Economy and International Relations. "I don't think another treaty negotiation now is really very important for the future of our relations." Instead, liberals like Mr. Blagovolin envision a shift away from the cold war preoccupation with preserving a balance of power to joint action, even including military cooperation. "The main idea," the expert predicts, "will be establishing a real cooperative security structure between the Soviet Union and the West." The two sides will focus more on threats to their mutual security from other sources, including "the dramatic rise of new threats from the south," as well as instability in Europe, as seen in Yugoslavia, he explains. Such Soviet policymakers want to extend the kind of initial steps away from the cold war taken during the Gulf war when the Soviet Union gave tacit support to the Western war against Iraq. The new agenda, says Vladik Zubok, an expert on United States-Soviet relations at the USA-Canada Institute, includes cooperating to limit arms transfers to third-world nations, barring the proliferation of nuclear weapons and conversion of defense industries to civilian use. "It's too early to bury arms-control summits," Mr. Zubok believes. But these discussions will no longer be a purely US-Soviet affair. Broader meetings such as the one in London last week between the Group of Seven Western leaders and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev will gradually replace bilateral summits, he asserts. This does not mean military issues will disappear from the table. From the post-cold-war point of view, the two sides might begin a discussion of a "mutually acceptable restructuring of military forces," suggests Blagovolin. Such talks could even extend to creating a future military division of labor between the NATO alliance and the Soviet Union, he adds. Such ideas are by no means confined to Soviet think tanks. Concrete proposals along these lines were contained within the detailed annex which Mr. Gorbachev attached to the letter he dispatched to the London summit. The annex provided detailed proposals for cooperation in a number of fields, of which first place was given to defense conversion. Alongside proposals for Western firms to develop civilian aircraft and other commercial products, Gorbachev suggests a number of joint military projects, all of a carefully "defensive" nature. The most striking is the idea of joint development of early warning systems "to prevent unauthorized or terrorist operated launches of ballistic missiles." The proposal is aimed at potential nuclear powers such as Iraq and echoes the idea, proposed by Blagovolin and others, of joint development of Star Wars-type sp ace-based warning systems. The Gorbachev package also suggests development of technologies to safely eliminate chemical, nuclear, and conventional weapons and to process nuclear waste, including from nuclear submarines. As part of this London package, the Soviets are looking for the US to remove the long-standing COCOM (Coordinating Committee on Export Controls) restrictions on the flow of high technology to the Soviet Union. "The COCOM limitations continue to be a serious obstacle to economic cooperation between Soviet enterprises and foreign companies," Gorbachev wrote. Observers here expect some of these ideas, particularly for defense conversion, to be on the summit agenda next week. Quite a different challenge to classical arms control comes from the other end of the political spectrum, from those conservatives who argue that the process has benefited only the West. Sources close to senior government officials predict that as soon as the START treaty is signed, a concerted campaign will begin to block ratification by the Soviet parliament of both START and the treaty to reduce conventional forces in Europe (CFE). Signs of that effort are already present. An article written by a Foreign Ministry official and published in the conservative daily Sovietskaya Rossiya July 13 has provoked considerable comment among officials. The article attacks former Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and the three treaties negotiated largely under his direction - the 1987 pact to eliminate intermediate nuclear forces, the CFE treaty signed last November, and START. The military was betrayed by Mr. Shevardnadze and his fellow liber als, the official says. "Now for many of our reactionaries in the [Armed Forces] General Staff, in the [Communist] Party structure, in military industry, it is quite clear the implementation of these treaties will mark a turning point," comments Blagovolin. It will mean a major reduction and reorganization of the military, moves which will ultimately "shatter the military-industrial complex." For these circles, "it is not a question of the security of the nation, but their own security." But the Soviet military is not uniform in its views. The final stages of START were negotiated directly by the Chief of the General Staff, Mikhail Moiseyev, whose views are considered more flexible than those of Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and Gorbachev's military adviser and former chief of staff, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev. Soviet sources say some influential officers at the level of deputy military district commanders back Mr. Moiseyev and favor far more concerted military reform. These pro-reform circles have their counterparts in the defense industry. Managers in some of the most high-technology sectors, such as the aircraft industry, are eagerly pursuing joint ventures with Western firms. They recognize the need both for opening up to the West and for sharp reductions in defense spending. Whether by necessity or craft, Gorbachev made what some think is a clever move by getting Moiseyev's imprimatur for the START agreement. By involving Moiseyev and others like him, says Zubok, "you show them they're in the loop. Sometimes that's enough."