Progress in human rights may ultimately do more for real arms control than
anything we do in the arms negotiations, but our arms control efforts also
are designed to improve the prospects for change in Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union. We should do nothing to slow that process, but violent Soviet
repression could derail arms control.
Attachment
Paper Prepared by the Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency (Lehman)4
Washington, November 29,
1989
Arms Control, Political Change in Eastern Europe, and the
Malta Meeting
Two years ago, while still START
Negotiator, in a speech in Vienna I suggested that the arms control
spotlight would increasingly turn from Geneva and its nuclear talks
toward Vienna where new conventional force talks and human rights
discussions were taking place in the CSCE context. In the years ahead, we would reach the limits
of what could be accomplished in nuclear arms control without parallel
progress in the conventional arena. More significantly, progress in
human rights would be more important for the future success of our arms
control efforts than any of our current arms control negotiations. Arms
control deals only with the symptoms of East–West tension, whereas
CSCE strives to deal with the
causes of insecurity in Europe. Although we wish to avoid rigid and
arbitrary linkages, arms control and human rights issues were inherently
connected. In the end, we could not trust the regimes of the Warsaw Pact
any more than they trust their own people and are trusted by them. I
still believe this to be the case.
Political change is helping arms control
Last week I returned from a trip to Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest. Clearly,
we should do nothing that would slow the pace of political, social and
economic change in Eastern Europe. Positive political change in Eastern
Europe will enhance the prospects for arms control, and vice
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versa. Change has begun to
ameliorate the climate of distrust, increasing prospects that the sides
will be prepared to reduce and restructure their forces. Furthermore,
change is bringing greater openness. This has resulted in the East
accepting improved verification measures and has enhanced the quality of
our overall intelligence assessments and warning, thus helping also to
reduce tensions.
The effects of rapid change were quite evident at the Wyoming
Ministerial, which was the best meeting of its type I have seen. The
Soviet side demonstrated much greater common purpose than before. More
striking, however, was watching Soviet diplomats openly debate the
future of their own country in front of Westerners.
Our arms control should help political change
Such happenings should remind us that our arms control efforts have
played an important role in accelerating political change in the East. A
Soviet journalist recently told me that the Western presence in the
Soviet Union has helped to break down the “state security mentality”
within the Soviet Union. The people of the Soviet Union are now asking
of their own bureaucrats, “If you can show these things to Americans,
why can’t you show them to us?” He had in mind the Stockholm Agreement
on-site observers, INF inspectors,
Perimeter-Portal Monitoring at Votkinsk, the Carlucci visit which
included entering the cockpit of a Blackjack bomber and the like.
And we are doing more. A number of specific Western positions in CFE are
designed to enhance the security of East European
states, less against any threat posed by the West than against that
posed by some of their own allies, including the Soviet Union. These
include our approach to the sufficiency rule, stationed forces,
notifications and inspectors. Under our approach to CFE the Soviet Union could not intervene
as easily in Poland or Hungary given the new balance of forces, the
extensive notifications that would be required for movements of forces,
and the Western inspectors accompanying their troops.
In Poland, Solidarity members are just now beginning to focus on the arms
control question, but they clearly see the importance of some CFE measures as a means of guaranteeing
their political freedom. In Hungary, where leaders are undertaking a
major reevaluation of Hungary’s relationship to the Warsaw Pact, the
issue of maintaining sufficient flexibility under CFE to accommodate new relationships is
emerging. All of this, while creating greater uncertainty about the
future and bringing with it a certain amount of instability and risk,
nevertheless presents us with major opportunities and a strong position
in the CFE negotiations. These
developments will demand that we consult closely, not only with our
Western European allies, but increasingly with the more independent
Eastern European nations.
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Last year, I attended a number of working groups, conferences, and
seminars on the prospect for change in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union. If the most optimistic of those experts had been given the power
to dictate the pace of change they would have mandated far less than
what has already occurred. The pace of change in Eastern Europe is both
accelerating and spreading to more countries at an incredible rate.
While at a conference in Berlin last week, I met with the leaders of
some of the new opposition movements in East Germany. At this largely
academic conference, attended by scholars and officials of East Germany
and the Soviet Union, when observers noted that East German opposition
leaders seemed to have no concrete agenda apart from free travel and
free elections, one senior Soviet official leaned over to me and
remarked that the same had been true initially in the Baltic States. He
added that he fully expected these new German opposition movements to be
part of the government within a year.
Self-determination and stability
We still hear some journalists and experts recommend that the United
States and the Soviet Union jointly manage change in Eastern Europe. It
is difficult to believe that this process of radical political,
economic, and social change, compelled in the first place by the failure
of centralized planning, would benefit from attempts at just such
management by the United States and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, we
must engage the Soviet Union on the subject or change and begin to
discuss how positive developments will alter and improve our
relationship. Our clear message to the Soviet Union, however, must be
the primacy of self determination, not simply end of the Brezhnev
Doctrine and military interference, but also the clear right of each
Eastern European nation to decide its own path and timetable for change.
In summary, we should not put ourselves in the position of telling
Eastern Europeans to slow down, even if we thought it would have any
effect. East Europeans are in a much better position to determine how
fast they can go than we are.
Rapid change always increases the chance of violence. Recently, a Soviet
official, stressing the importance of the arms control process, asked me
privately whether the use of force to deal with domestic violence in the
Soviet Union or in any of the Eastern European countries would present a
problem for progress in the negotiations. An effort was made to stress
that they had in mind police actions, brought on by intersectarian
violence. Obviously, a distinction between legitimate police functions
and political repression can be made in theory, but in the current
context, drawing such a distinction would be difficult. That the
question was asked at all suggests that the fears of greater violence in
the East are real. This is a question likely to be raised in some form
at Malta and we should be prepared to answer it.
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START needs a
boost
From a more specific arms control perspective, we should remain firm in
the intent not to let this meeting become a negotiation. However, we do
need to emphasize our commitment to concluding START as soon as possible. We should
avoid setting a deadline for this Treaty or for specific issues, but we
can increase the drum beat on our agenda.
The Wyoming Ministerial was very important for START, less because it resolved specific issues, than
because the Soviet Union recognized that verification details are the
long-pole in the START Treaty tent
and also because the Soviet Union began to clear the decks of obstacles
they had presented, namely linkage to SLCMs and a new Defense and Space Agreement.
Above all, at the Malta meeting, we should acknowledge that we are
entering the end game for START. The
two heads of state should make clear that they expect their ministers
and negotiators to step up the pace toward Treaty completion by late
1990 or early 1991. This will energize work on the myriad details
involved and serve notice that bigger issues such as ALCM counting, Mobile ICBM sublimits will have to be resolved,
probably by Ministers. We should be careful about sequencing, especially
with respect to SLCM and to Defense
and Space linkage.
Reduce linkage to START
While some would like for us to push resolution of the SLCM issue in the near term, we should
not forget that Shevardnadze put
down an important marker on this issue in Wyoming. The Soviet Union’s
willingness to unencumber the START
Treaty text of the SLCM issue and to
work it perhaps in a different forum—one which does not even exist at
this point—suggests to me that Moscow is willing to accept far less than
many people seem to think. In passing, I would note that last year,
after our meeting with Soviet Defense Minister Yazov, the Soviet side
seemed clearly prepared to retreat from its position on Krasnoyarsk.
However, in anticipation of an upcoming Foreign Ministers meeting, an
internal U.S. effort was made to come up with fallback positions on the
issue; news of that effort leaked, and the Soviet Union subsequently
stood firm. We should not make the same mistake with the SLCM issue. If we agree to a deadline for
resolving this issue, the pressure will be on us rather than on the
Soviet Union to provide a solution. The less time left to deal with the
issue, the more the final outcome will look like the U.S. position. The
same is true in Defense and Space.
Although the Soviet Union has agreed in principle to delinkage of START and Defense & Space, the
Soviet negotiators have insisted on conditions for formal delinkage and
have tried to strengthen their hand for an informal political linkage.
Gorbachev will likely
propose at Malta an agreement “simply” to seek to “clarify” constraints
[Page 400]
embodied in the ABM Treaty. There is no virtue in trying
to resolve these issues in the abstract against a timetable, especially
without having specific technologies or a specific context to
adjudicate. That effort would swiftly devolve into a negotiation of
restrictive “lists” of permitted activities or of vague codewords for
the restrictive interpretations of the ABM Treaty. The SCC
remains the appropriate forum in which to resolve specific issues and,
in the longer term, both sides anticipate holding stability talks.
Hopefully, we will have our new Defense and Space Treaty tabled in
Geneva soon which will provide a renewed basis for negotiating
predictability measures “delinked” from START. Most efforts to place a timetable on resolution of
Defense and Space issues works against delinkage. Our theme should be
that if the Soviet Union is truly delinking START and D&S, then we
don’t need a deadline for D&S issues
in our START workplan.
Watch out for Soviet grandstanding in Europe
With all of the press speculation over an “arms control summit” in the
context of political change in Europe, despite our efforts to keep
expectations down, there remains a prospect that a Soviet proposal to
withdraw at some point in time all foreign stationed forces from Europe
may in fact materialize. We may also see a proposal for deeper cuts in
Phase II of CFE or even in Phase I. We
must make clear to Gorbachev
that NATO exists for reasons other
than simply to counter the Warsaw Pact, and that U.S. troops must remain
in Europe for now regardless of whether Soviet troops are withdrawn from
Eastern European countries or not. The U.S. will withdraw its troops
only when they are no longer wanted or needed.
The CFE Agreement is no obstacle to
further reductions. It does not compel any nation to station forces
outside its borders nor does it require nations to maintain their forces
at the proposed ceiling. To introduce and encumber Phase I of the CFE Treaty with politically grandiose
schemes could undo the treaty and introduce instability into Europe and
panic into the NATO alliance, which is
even now struggling to deal collectively with the rapid pace of change
in Eastern Europe. Thus, a diversion to a debate over deep cuts to Phase
II levels in a Phase I agreement could cost us a treaty and an alliance.
The Soviet Union has already indicated that they will have difficulty in
reducing to the Phase I levels in the timeframe we propose. A Soviet
proposal to radically alter Phase I of CFE could signal Soviet reluctance to conclude a treaty
early. Our difficulties in negotiating with 23 nations will be made far
worse if we let ourselves get off track.
Remember the broader agenda
Much has been made of the notion that an “at sea” meeting will highlight
the Soviet public campaign for naval arms control or naval
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nuclear arms control. We
shouldn’t be too worried. We have agreed mandates in Vienna which
exclude naval forces as such from CFE
(but do include land-based naval air) and which exclude most air and
naval exercises from the CSBMs talks
(but do include those integral to land-based operations). We are in a
strong position on SLCM in START. We have the Incidents at Sea
Agreement, and we have clarified rights of innocent passage in
territorial seas. We need our navy because of geography as much as
because the Soviet Union has a huge navy, but obviously as the threat to
our vital interests and allies overseas diminish, we can reduce the size
of our naval forces as appropriate. For the time being, we have a full
arms control agenda.
Given that broader agenda, Gorbachev could well raise many other arms control
issues, some general, some specific. The Reykjavik meeting grew out of a
Soviet public campaign to draw the U.S. into a nuclear testing
moratorium. At Malta, we will be agreeing that the Nuclear Testing Talks
will soon complete the verification protocols to the TTBT and PNET.
Gorbachev could well raise
the question of “next steps,” especially in the context of the 1990
NPT Review Conference and the LTBT
Amendment Conference. We should make clear that a responsible nuclear
superpower must test its nuclear weapons.
Gorbachev will likely press for a
commitment not to produce binary weapons. He may call for a moratorium
now, or he may call for an end to production when we enter into either a
bilateral reduction agreement or the multilateral ban. Indeed, knowing
of the President’s personal commitment to CW arms control as expressed in his UNGA initiatives, but also knowing the President’s past
votes on the binary program, Gorbachev may offer a deal of deep bilateral cuts in
exchange for an end to binary production. We should make clear that we
will continue production until we have the safe stocks necessary, but we
should keep our options open until we are certain of the exact
relationship between our binary program and our CW arms control timetable.
Numerous other arms control related issues may come up—nuclear, chemical
and missile proliferation, outer space cooperation, technology transfer
controls, etc. In general, Gorbachev’s theme on these issues will stress
cooperation in a new global security environment. But on a number of
these issues, he may try to position the Soviet Union as being more
supportive of the aspirations of developing nations, even as he presses
for more open Soviet access to the economies and technologies of
developed nations.
