Breaking the deadlock would end nine years of haggling over a treaty that cuts U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals by about 30 percent. START looked like a done deal back in May 1990, when Bush and Gorbachev met in Washington. But the agreement went nowhere because of what a Kremlin official calls “a hundred tiny technical issues”. The two remaining issues are far from tiny. One was the issue of “downloading,” the question of how much to permit each side to achieve nuclear-warhead reductions by removing, say, three warheads from a missile capable of carrying 10, for a total of seven warheads in the treaty count. But in a crisis, it would be easy to “upload” the missile again. The other technical hurdle is “data denial,” the issue of how to make sure neither side can hide missile-test information from the other by manipulating encryption techniques.
Calculating that Gorby is desperate for a summit, the White House has taken a hard line. In early June, Baker met Bessmertnykh in Geneva and gave him a letter from Bush to Gorbachev. Following the counsel of national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft, Bush rejected Soviet suggestions to let each side download two missiles and defer the technical details of data denial. Bessmertnykh accepted the letter but to Washington’s dismay presented no conciliatory new counteroffer.
Gorbachev may be in no position to make one. He has come under attack from Soviet military leaders for allowing the breakup of the Warsaw Pact and the reunification of Germany within NATO. His government accepted disproportionately steep cuts in the treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. START, similarly, is “very much a made-in-America product,” says Richard Burt, until recently the chief U.S. negotiator for START. “The crucial question is, how long will Gorbachev be able to get his national-security establishment to make one concession after the other?”
Bush’s hang-tough stance could backfire. A week is a long time in politics, as the former British prime minister Harold Wilson used to say. An autumn summit could find Gorbachev in entirely different political circumstances - and less willing than ever to play by Washington rules.
