In preparing ourselves for Geneva, I thought it would be useful to put
ourselves in the Soviets’ shoes. Accordingly, before leaving for my
wedding in Rome, I asked my Soviet experts to do a mock memorandum from
Gromyko’s own experts to him
on strategy for the Geneva meetings. Attached is the result of this
effort. I have had a chance to review and comment on it, and have added
my own comments. I believe you will find it both informative and
entertaining.
In the package of draft talking points for Geneva that we provided prior
to your departure for California, you have a set of contingency points
for responding to arguments and proposals that Gromyko may advance.3
Attachment
Mock Memorandum for the Soviet Minister of
Foreign Affairs4
“Moscow,”
December 31,
1984
SUBJECT
With Comrade Chernenko’s
November proposal,5 we have abandoned
our policy of shunning dialogue with the United States on the
central arms control issues and made a strategic decision to
reengage the Americans in negotiations. Our earlier policy, while
administering the necessary shock treatment to some forces in the
West, did not prove effective enough to halt the deployment of new
US missiles in Western Europe.
Having regained the initiative on Soviet-American arms control
negotiations, we are now better positioned to achieve our objective
of blocking US efforts to reverse
the trends in the correlation of military forces and achieve
superiority through the deployment of a large-scale, space-based
ABM system.
The fact of Soviet-American negotiations has already raised
expectations in the West of early progress, and this will by itself
lead to Allied and Congressional pressures on the US Administration to adopt realistic
positions in the talks. Our policy should therefore proceed, as in
the past, on two tracks: using active measures and diplomatic
contacts with healthy forces in the West to reinforce these
pressures; while at the same time making a serious test in the
negotiations themselves of US
readiness to move toward mutually acceptable agreements.
As is well known, the Americans have proven extraordinarily skillful
these past four years in using propaganda as a device for avoiding
realistic negotiating positions and for sustaining funding for new
weapons programs. Thus we must be vigilant in guarding against any
repetition of our experience of 1981–1983, in which the Americans
used the facade of the Geneva negotiations to implement the
deployment of new missiles in Western Europe. In concrete terms,
this means that the USSR should
resist the opening of formal negotiations unless and until
[Page 1264]
there is concrete
evidence that the Americans are prepared to address our concerns in
a serious and equitable manner.
As their response to our June 29 Vienna Talks proposal illustrated,
the Americans’ priority objective at Geneva will be to reach
agreement at the earliest possible date on renewed talks in separate
fora on strategic and medium-range nuclear forces. They will try to
avoid any commitment to serious negotiations on space weapons, and
to steer the agenda of any space forum away from discussion of their
“Star Wars” defense system toward, at best, cosmetic constraints on
anti-satellite systems. Your goal is to foil this strategy, and
specifically:
—to secure US agreement to
negotiations on space arms whose “subject and objectives” are
consistent with our concept of preventing the militarization of
outer space;
—to consent to new talks on offensive nuclear arms only after
having received satisfaction on space weapons;
—to determine, once and for all, whether the Americans are
prepared to accept a ban on space-strike systems or, at a
minimum, a ban on anti-satellite systems;
—to ensure that new negotiations on offensive nuclear arms take
place in a forum or fora clearly distinct from the previous
Geneva talks, and with an agenda that has been altered to take
into account the deployment of new US medium-range missiles and our own
counterdeployments;
—to determine whether the US has
abandoned its pursuit of unilateral Soviet nuclear disarmament
and does, in fact, have new proposals consistent with the
principles of equality and equal security;
—to ensure that the responsibility for a possible failure to
reach agreement at Geneva on the subject and objectives for new
negotiations clearly lies with the US.
Setting
Your meeting follows a year in which, on the one hand, American
propaganda and diplomatic statements have claimed that the US favors arms control, while on the
other hand, the pace of the US
military build-up has continued to accelerate: Pershing II and
GLCM deployments continue to
proceed in the UK, FRG and Italy; the first of thousands
of long-range ALCMs have begun to
be deployed on US heavy bombers,
while work proceeds on the B–1 and “Stealth” bombers; despite
Congressional pressures, the MX
program continues, and new first-strike missiles (Midgetman, Trident
II) are in active development; and hundreds of nuclear-armed SLCMs have begun to enter the US naval fleet.
Most importantly, despite US denials,
it is clear from the US defense
budget that President R.
Reagan has decided to lay the basis for deployment of
a large-scale ABM system in space.
To camouflage US intentions, the
US has launched a hypocritical,
slanderous campaign regarding alleged “violations” of existing
agreements by the Soviet Union.
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In his meeting with you in September, and in his letters to Comrade
Chernenko, President
Reagan has sought to put
a positive face on these contradictory actions, resorting to the
traditional “positions of strength” logic of the arms race. It is,
of course, possible that his expressions of interest in reaching
arms control agreements are sincere—most American Presidents want to
leave a “peacemaker” legacy for the historians. Moreover, in his
meeting with you he seemed to have a greater grasp of arms control
issues than we anticipated.
But the fact remains that the US
Government is deeply divided, and that the competing schools of
thought documented by American journalist S. Talbott in his book Smertel ’niye Proiski remain entrenched in
the Departments of State and Defense.6 There
is no evidence that the President has decided to overrule the
opponents of arms control headed by C.
Weinberger and R.
Perle in favor of the realistic forces headed by
G. Shultz and R. Burt. If anything, the evidence
points the other way:
—Although R. Reagan, in
his meeting with you, broached the idea of an interim agreement
that would constrain ASATs
while beginning a process of reducing nuclear arms, this
proposal was not reaffirmed in subsequent communications with
Chairman Chernenko, and
seems to have been contradicted by US public statements since then.
—Despite repeated hints since your Stockholm meeting with
G. Shultz that the
US has “new ideas” on
strategic arms reductions, these ideas have never materialized.
According to S. Talbott, the President’s approval for the
so-called “framework” proposal—which might have provided the
basis for an agreement—was rescinded after Stockholm once the
Pentagon discovered the State Department’s gambit.
—Recent efforts at manipulating the US press by a “senior Administration official” (R.
McFarlane), as well
as speeches by C.
Weinberger and others, have conveyed the clear
message that the US is committed
to deployment of its “Star Wars” defense system, and is not
prepared to put it on the bargaining table in new
negotiations.7
—Perhaps most importantly, despite encouraging rumors that
circulated in Washington immediately following the US elections, there have been no
personnel changes in the arms control policy apparatus. Among
the President’s senior arms control advisors remain R. Lehman, formerly R. Perle’s senior deputy, and
K. Adelman, who has just
published a notorious article advocating “Arms Control Without
Agreements.”8
Your interlocutor at Geneva, G.
Shultz, is a man of good will, according to
Ambassador Dobrynin, but we
should not overestimate
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the differences between his views on dealing with the USSR and those of President Reagan or C. Weinberger. In any case, his
flexibility is likely to be severely constrained, as the entire
“Senior Arms Control Policy Group” will be traveling with him to
monitor his behavior. Moreover, Shultz has appointed P.
Nitze as a Special Advisor on arms control: while
Nitze was an energetic
and intelligent interlocutor for Comrade Kvitsinskiy in the medium-range
missile negotiations, he is also the spiritual father of the
infamous Committee on the Present Danger and, as such, close in
outlook to the Pentagon.
Thus, the prospects for the Geneva meeting are not bright. You should
be prepared for hard bargaining over the subject and objectives of
new negotiations. It is very possible that the Americans will not be
prepared for talks on terms that we can accept, and therefore that
we will not be able to announce agreement on the opening of formal
negotiations at Geneva. Given the Reagan Administration’s demonstrated capacity to
hoodwink the American public and its overseas allies as to its true
aims and purposes, it is not advisable to exclude the possibility of
another meeting at foreign ministers’ level sometime in the future.
But you should be prepared to defer agreement on a date for another
meeting if you judge the American position to be wholly without
substance.
Our Strategy
Lack of progress at Geneva may work to our advantage: If we can
convince Western publics and US
Allies that the US refused to follow
through on its November 22 commitment to begin serious negotiations
on space arms,9
then pressures will grow in the weeks following Geneva for the
US to take a more reasonable
stance. In fact, it is possible that the US Congress will do some of our work for us, curtailing
funds for ASAT and SDI, as well as MX and other strategic programs.
To ensure that this is the case, we should coordinate the efforts of
our propaganda apparatus and those of the fraternal countries in
order to expose the duplicitousness of US policy and to refute the likely charges that the
USSR has set preconditions for
beginning talks. (The Warsaw Pact summit in Sofia, now scheduled for
the week following the Geneva meetings, will provide an occasion to
set forth the agreed line we expect our allies to follow.)
At the Geneva meeting itself, this means that you should take a
resolute stance at the level of principle, while showing just enough
tactical flexibility to keep the onus on G. Shultz to come forward with
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ideas that meet our
concerns. Thus, your position should be based on the following
elements:
—The central message you will want to get
across is that the Soviet Union is now ready for serious
negotiations, that we have made a forthcoming gesture in proposing
the Geneva meetings, and that it is therefore incumbent on the
United States to make the first move on substance.
—As your basic themes, you should stress how
US plans to deploy a space-based
ABM system are the principal
threat to peace and strategic stability, that preventing the
militarization of outer space is the most urgent question before us,
and that US refusal to negotiate
seriously on space arms will render pointless efforts to negotiate
reductions in nuclear arms.
—On outer space arms, you should press for
acceptance of the goal of banning all space-strike systems, and
denounce US attempts to establish a
more vague or narrowly-focused agenda as inadequate, and as a
cynical scheme to deceive public opinion.
—We must recognize that we are unlikely to get a US commitment to stop its “Star Wars”
program in its tracks, although we should try to create as many
obstacles as possible. Thus, as a fallback, you should be prepared
to accept a negotiation whose stated objective is to ban ASAT systems (and does not explicitly
address space-based ABM systems),
but only on the following conditions:
—that the US publicly reaffirm
the commitment it made to British Prime Minister M. Thatcher that it will
continue to adhere to the ABM
Treaty and that any changes will be a matter for
negotiations;
—and that the US renounce all
plans to deploy nuclear arms in space.
—If the US is not prepared to agree
to anything but the most general formulation of subject and
objectives for space negotiations, you should withhold agreement to
beginning new offensive arms negotiations.
—On offensive nuclear arms per se, you should
stress the unacceptability of previous US proposals, and the need to respect the principle of
equality and equal security. Any formulation of subject and
objectives for offensive arms talks should at least implicitly
reflect this principle, and avoid language that would imply a change
in our principled positions on forward-based and third-country
systems, or on the geographic scope of limits on medium-range
systems.
—You should also make clear that US
Pershing II and GLCM deployments
have altered the strategic situation, and that any future agreements
should have as their objective restoring the balance through removal
of these new US first-strike
weapons; in that context, Soviet
[Page 1268]
countermeasures could be withdrawn, and
SS–20s reduced to the level of British and French systems consistent
with previous proposals. As a first step, you should propose an
immediate freeze on US deployments
and Soviet counterdeployments.
—By the same token, you should state that, absent US agreement to remove its Pershings
and GLCMs, the USSR would have to reconsider its
offer in START to reduce
strategic forces to 1800 launchers. (Ultimately, we may decide to
enter into an agreement that would formally permit some US deployments to remain; there is no
reason to reveal any flexibility on this question, however, until
there is evidence that the US is
prepared to address our concerns in other respects.)
—On format for new negotiations, the Americans will likely seek
separate fora to address nuclear and space arms; in the case of the
former, they will seek to reconstitute the Geneva “START” and “INF” negotiations that they torpedoed through
deployment of Pershing II and GLCM
in Western Europe. Your position should be that it is impossible to
treat offensive nuclear arms and space-strike systems in isolation
from one another; they are organically linked, and thus should be
addressed in a single framework.
—If, however, the Americans prove willing to accommodate our concerns
on the subject and objectives of space arms negotiations, you could
as a gesture of good will agree to separate fora for nuclear and
space arms. In this case, however, you should make clear that
agreements cannot be reached in the former absent achievement of a
ban on space-strike systems in the latter.
—You should also resist the reestablishment of separate negotiating
fora to address strategic nuclear arms and medium-range systems in
Europe. This would contradict our principled position that US deployments made the previous Geneva
talks impossible, and obscure the fact that we are commencing new negotiations.
—Again, however, if the American position on space arms negotiations
is reasonably forthcoming, you should be prepared to suggest
flexibility in fora for nuclear arms negotiations, as long as the
agreed subject and objectives make clear that the agenda is
different from that of the former Geneva talks.
In short, you will want to make clear that the
Soviet Union has made a decision to reengage the United States in
negotiations, but at the same time hold out as long as possible to
see what concessions can be squeezed out of the Americans.
Non-Arms Control Subjects
G. Shultz has suggested that
time be set aside to discuss topics other than those agreed on in
the November 22 joint statement. You have deflected this suggestion,
but he may raise it again, since he
[Page 1269]
undoubtedly feels pressure to say he has
raised humanitarian issues with you. You should make a judgment at
that time as to whether such discussion at Geneva would be to our
advantage.
—On the one hand, it is sure to be unpleasant, and the
Americans tend to advertise exchanges on such topics to deflect
attention from their unwillingness to treat the arms race
seriously.
—On the other hand, having no discussion on these topics weakens
G. Shultz
personally. Allowing relations in these areas to move forward
with some normality in fact focuses attention on the abnormal
situation in the disarmament field resulting from the American
search for military superiority.
Press Handling After the Meetings
We will want to issue a TASS
Statement providing our post-mortem assessment as soon as possible
after the meetings, since the Americans are likely to try to shape
the Western press’s accounts through a “backgrounder.” Such a
statement would emphasize that the Soviet Union came to Geneva
prepared for radical steps, but the Americans did not, and announce
whatever follow-up meetings may have been agreed.
In the event the meeting ends with matters at a complete impasse, you
might want to consider holding a press conference in order to make
clear that the failure of the meeting was the result of US intransigence, and to encourage
other western governments and publics to put pressure on the
Americans to rethink their position.
Informing the Central Committee
If you agree with the approach outlined above, we will turn the
preceding points into a memorandum to the Central Committee
informing them of the approach you intend to take at Geneva.10
