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Troubling Questions Over Forgotten Negotiations
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11375 |
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Current Issues
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11 / 1986 |
5,312 Words |
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Adam M. Garfinkle
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"A real downer"--that was the pithy phrase Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Director Kenneth Adelman chose last February to describe the desultory adjournment of the recent winter session of the Vienna-based U.S.-Soviet negotiations on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) in Europe. The Western nations made a significant concession to the Soviet side on December 5, 1985, when they agreed to drop their demand for "prior data exchange," a position to which they had clung tenaciously for a dozen years, Adelman said. In return, all the Soviets could bring themselves to do was to repeat the same old tired positions, thereby dashing hopes in the West of a new flexibility on arms control in general, and verification problems in particular, from the current crop of Soviet leaders. The consequences? A shadow has been cast over our expectations for a change in Soviet arms control positions; most likely, the Soviets will persist in using arms control negotiations of various kinds, especially Intermediaterange Nuclear Force (INF) negotiations, to test the West's resolve and alliance cohesion, all the while endeavoring to tip the military balance further in their favor by dint of quiet, unimpeded unilateral deployments.
There is considerable skepticism in some circles whenever the Reagan administration makes such noises--as was the case, for example, when the administration justified rejection of Soviet invitations to join in a mutual test ban moratorium by arguing that the Soviets had recently completed a series of tests and were just trying to pin the onus of continued testing on the United States. And, of course, when administration spokesmen insist that, as far as they are concerned, no arms control agreement is better than a bad or a merely cosmetic agreement, critics read into it instead that the only good arms control agreement is a lapsed arms control agreement, fearing for what has become of SALT II and what may become of the ABM Treaty in the near future.
Despite the widespread unpopularity of the administration's arms control demeanor and its consequent political vulnerability at home and within NATO, the president and his spokesmen are basically correct, at least on the larger points. With respect to MBFR, anyway, it is true that the concession NATO made on December 5 was a major one and equally true that the Soviet response was uncreative, to say the least. But, well,...so what? Who cares about MBFR--without question the longest, dullest, most forgettable series of arms control negotiations ever hatched? MBFR is such a loser of a negotiation that no one has bothered to make a pronouncable acronym out of the letters--though, admittedly, it isn't easy--and one U.S. head of delegation actually tried to get himself taken off the job to relieve the tedium. MBFR just does not generate the passion or the interest that nuclear-edged negotiations do. Every current U.S.-Soviet arms control negotiation has its optimistic, well-known proponents and its vocal, fearful skeptics--except MBFR. But that does not mean that a bad MBFR agreement is inconsequential; in this case what you don't know or don't even care about can hurt you. Presently, only a handful of State and Defense Department officials and a few European bureaucrats seem even to remember that the talks exist--at least on the Western side. But that may change in a hurry, because MBFR is probably the "most likely to succeed" of all arms control efforts currently afoot.
Fortunate blunder
That is precisely what some U.S. national security analysts
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