Edging Toward Normality

...Paradoxically, the Soviets are given numerical superiority in the name of parity...

...With their larger stockpile of launchers and the technical capacity to eventually place mirv tips on them, they may now have a passport to nuclear supremacy...

...Prevention of incidents between the two navies on the high seas is politically more interesting, an open admission that this grim game is hardly worth the effort now that both sides can play it on nearly equal terms...

...He speaks, in addition, of developing Soviet vested interests in mutually profitable contacts that would then operate in the Kremlin's decision making process to inhibit hostile policy choices...

...this explanation, for they regarded the action as a major political attempt to show China and others that America is irrelevant in Asia...

...Patolichev, who does not rank at the bottom of the Kremlin totem pole, knew that those at the top wanted nothing to interfere with the scheduled talks...

...True, the Soviet leaders have not visibly responded to the stepped-up U.S...

...Even as Nixon packed his bags, the word was spread that he could not afford to be clinking glasses with the men in the Kremlin as their tanks broke into Hue, and he would leave the Soviet Union if the imperiled city fell...

...Indeed, the premise that U.S...

...And so the historic meeting was held—despite Soviet ships being trapped in Haiphong harbor or diverted to Chinese ports, and with Hanoi screaming in protest against piracy on the high seas and barbarous bombing...

...Consequently, the paramount U.S...

...AFTER THE SUMMIT-2 Superpower Politics BY HANS J. MORGENTHAU The President has signaled that he will keep his eye on the development of a new Soviet-American relationship in its entirety and will not tolerate Soviet deception...

...In summoning the Central Committee at the last moment to gain its formal backing, Party leader Leonid Brezhnev also made it appear that the climactic nature of the upcoming meeting called for collective responsibility...

...It is a matter of so far, so good—but how far...

...But the Soviet Union has acknowledged its awareness that this must be done within limits of behavior acceptable to the United States if it is not to lose the many advantages of at least partial cooperation...

...and the USSR throughout the postwar period have not been misunderstandings but serious clashes of outlook: If the Kremlin is now undergoing a change toward moderation, one is entitled to more proof than a spectacular conference and another set of principles...

...Yet once Moscow chose to swallow the response Nixon felt compelled to make, the Administration saw no reason to stress Soviet complicity...

...In this regard, exorcising the Kremlin's Cuban trauma would be a giant step toward normality...

...The U.S...

...and the answer will define what it means...

...The advances of the salt arrangements are mainly political and psychological...

...Hair-raising confrontations between the U.S...

...Faced with objective problems in a changing world, it may see the need for redefining its relations with the U.S...

...They do not stop the arms race, let alone disarm the U.S...

...But the extent to which they will indulge a temptation to seek tactical advantages will depend largely on their assessment of the U.S...

...The third hypothesis, combining the other two, is that the Kremlin may be temporizing...

...Moscow has not proposed?before, during or since the summit?that it was concluding an ideological peace with the non-Communist world...

...In the Middle East, the Soviets have reaffirmed their strong—and potentially much more dangerous—commitment and recently expanded their influence in Iraq...

...He had weighed and accepted the probability that Moscow might retaliate by withdrawing its invitation, at the very least, but to his happy surprise it did not...

...Soviet leaders asserted in private that setting the stage for the summit, toning down anti-American propaganda and giving Hanoi only the thinnest lip service had been difficult...

...According to one story, the Kremlin was furious with Hanoi for launching an offensive at such an inopportune moment...

...What they hammered out is not a good-faith arrangement, but rather one that is possible only because it can be monitored by the greatly expanded craft of intelligence using such technical means as satellites...

...Any conclusion must be tentative...

...Taken literally, these words would mean the millennium...

...That Nixon had this in mind is indicated by his very deliberate pace on the European Security Conference...

...The Russians, for their part, have done about as much as they can to insure that they will be dealing another four years with this President, whom they evidently feel can be relied upon to give quick and determined responses...

...If one of the root causes of Soviet militancy in the past has been a siege mentality inspiring an offensive defense (Livy said the Roman Empire conquered the world in self-defense), this may have been altered by the new constellation of the 1970s, in which the Soviet Union is a superpower—the military equal of the United States, vastly superior to China, and the center of a political bloc with global interests...

...The White House considered canceling it when North Vietnam's spring offensive threatened to overwhelm both South Vietnam and Washington's Vietnamization policy in clear, humiliating disaster...

...Whether all this is true or not, consummation of the talks seems to have been as important for Brezhnev as it was for Nixon...

...move in Vietnam, was cited as a critical showdown...

...The new strategy of narrow-gauge relaxation might be aimed at securing access to Western credits and computers while the cement of common danger holding the United States in Europe, and binding the European states, gradually disintegrates...

...movement toward the European Security Conference, one of their main political objectives, will be slow and coupled with mutual balanced-force reduction, which appeals to them considerably less...

...One is that Soviet policy has undergone a profound reexamination, as the Kremlin pointedly suggests, and is being reoriented...

...The salt agreements—the formal treaty limiting anti-ballistic missile systems, the interim executive agreement limiting offensive missiles, and the protocol fixing types and numbers —were much closer to the core of the whole enterprise...

...In fact, Minister of Foreign Trade Nikolai Patolichev, listening to the President's speech after dinner at Secretary of Commerce Peter G. Peterson's house, reportedly broke the clammy silence that followed the broadcast by calling it the statement of a reasonable man and saying he hoped for an appropriate reply...

...work on miniaturization, warhead multiplication accuracy, radar acquisition, and other refinements continues unchecked...

...they are not insensitive to change and will adjust to undeniable reality—just as the U.S., for all its greater power, has found it necessary to revise its world view...

...They imply a Soviet admission that the mad game of weapons development and deployment pursued after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 is no longer worth the candle...

...As Henry Kissinger explains, they extend the range of normal intercourse between two great powers that have had too little for too long...

...For all their broad implications, the agreements are limited in themselves...

...The meeting might well not have taken place...

...It follows, then, that the Kremlin could see the summit as a long-range tactic to gain some of what it might easily have achieved in the first few years after World War II...

...Most of the other agreements are technical and modest in scope...

...Several possibilities emerge...

...It has not solved the elementary problem of orderly political succession, and its instinct in dealing with the normal ferment of change and the irrepressible desire of human beings to lead their own lives is to sit on both...

...The apparent demotion of Pyotr Shelest, a Ukrainian hardliner who reputedly opposed detente with the West and advocated a sharp riposte to the U.S...

...In sum, the Moscow summit is less an accomplishment than a beginning, a framework that remains to be filled in by a continuing contest of will...

...Kissinger, who is not known for uncritical admiration of Soviet style or policy, wondered out loud whether the Kremlin might not now share Washington's position that the old diplomacy of striving for marginal advantage has become too dangerous for superpowers...

...In the diplomatic game—shrewdly played by the Nixon-Kissinger combination?the other side must be responsible for an irreversible hostile act...

...Political considerations have kept Moscow and its friends from attending the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm...

...At that time it rejected an invitation to join the Marshall Plan, creating instead a climate of menace that precipitated nato...

...officials were hardly appeased by Richard C. Hottelet, CBS News' UN correspondent, covered the Nixon-Brezhnev talks in Moscow...

...they have not cut into the quick of the military establishment...

...Moreover, Moscow's anxiety about China, for ideological or primordial reasons, gives it added impetus to seek peace with the West and to gain access to American technology...

...Thanks to its seriously inefficient economic system, the USSR is laboring more than the U.S...

...Moscow paid a price for the summit, though for tactical reasons the Soviet rumor mills minimized it...

...The President did not follow his initial impulse to call off the summit because reflection cautioned that this would be shooting his last political bolt, a drastic move almost certain to lock the Russians into precisely the adversary relationship he was trying to dissolve...

...to reap the benefits of a new era...

...strength assured a successful Moscow meeting justifies maintaining continued strength for later negotiations...

...Yet it has regularly ignored or violated them to suit its own purposes ever since...

...While the attack could not have been staged without massive Soviet supplies, the apologists whispered that it had actually been planned to wreck the Peking summit, but the timetable slipped...

...In short, the Soviet system too is directed by human beings...

...The agreements signed in Moscow are clearly not an adequate answer: Whatever the Russians hoped to gain in trade was referred to a joint commercial commission...

...In his keynote speech at the opening banquet President Nikolai Podgorny said, "We stand for a radical turn toward relaxation of the existing tension in all continents of the world, for freeing the peoples from the heavy arms burden, for a peaceful political settlement of problems through negotiation...

...Moscow has not suggested that it wants to liquidate the war through compromise of any sort, and it continues to underwrite a Hanoi victory...

...Were the Soviet leadership really to relax in its relations with the outside world, its system of total control at home would be undermined...

...But it is easy to overestimate the practical effect of the salt agreements...

...Those who argue this maintain that no qualitative change has occurred in the Soviet system: Its intrinsic inferiority still compels it to pursue a policy of oppression at home and relentless offensive-defensive expansion abroad, because it could not survive free competition...

...and the USSR...

...Finally, it could be said that the future of the Soviet-American relationship will be determined less by the numerical balance than by the state of mind underlying the agreements...

...Cooperation in space, science, technology, medicine, and environmental protection serves that purpose...

...To the charge that it was once more falling into the old trap of "reassuring" the Russians, however, Washington could reply that the Soviet arsenal would expand even more without the agreements...

...under the load of the arms race and its attendant industrial dislocations...

...Parenthetically, it is noteworthy that salt applies to a field where the Soviet concern is greater, for U.S...

...And they may be seen as a preliminary certificate of equality from the United States—merely documenting an accepted fact, but thereby removing the inferiority complex that had spurred the Kremlin to overcompensation...

...Further, the United States is not losing its retaliatory capacity for ultimate self-defense...

...It is not totally inconceivable that for them this was the point of the exercise...

...preoccupation, Soviet numerical superiority in offensive launchers and a growing submarine missile program, is covered in the five-year interim agreement...

...Some related questions—for instance, the conversion of permanently emplaced missiles to mobile launchers—were not included in the text but were part of a unilateral prohibition by the United States...

...And Soviet jammers go on trying to blot out the Voice of America...

...aim during the Moscow expedition must have been to see whether the time had come to do so...

...The skeptics also point out that 27 years ago the Soviet Union signed the UN Charter elaborating and institutionalizing the very same basic principles of peace and security embraced at the summit meeting...

...The second possibility is that the new Soviet posture, complete with Stars and Stripes over the Kremlin, is essentially tactical...

...Here, for the first time since the peak of their anti-Hitler alliance, the superpowers appeared to share a central strategic assumption: The time has come to rein in a nuclear arms race that could lead to economic ruin or mutual annihilation...

...campaign against North Vietnam, but their restraint could be temporary...

...It is not hard to imagine that the frank, cool discussion in most intimate detail had a cathartic effect on the principals, sobering and salutary after so many years of bitter hostility...

...nonetheless, they cannot simply be dismissed...

...The question, as I mentioned at the outset, is why...

...Thus, the President on May 8 announced the mining of North Vietnamese waters and his determination to interdict the flow of Soviet and Chinese supplies to Hanoi...

...research in ABM systems has been more dynamic and is possibly closer to a breakthrough in guidance...

...determination and capacity to insist on full compliance...

...All told, the salt agreements mark little more than another step in the arms limitation process that began with the demilitarization of Antarctica in 1959, and continued with the denuclearization of the sea bed and of outer space, the partial nuclear test ban, the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and the biological warfare ban...

...So far, these critics say, there is little else...

...Neither side—notably not the American—came away proclaiming peace in our time...

...it has not renounced its right to use its full subnuclear arsenal, from "wars of national liberation" to conventional diplomacy, to get what it can...

...Laudable as they are, these compacts have been peripheral...

...The White House interpreted the conclusion of a satisfactory Berlin agreement as a Soviet down payment on serious discussions at the Moscow summit...

...Should they sense a period of confusion or weakness in the West that offered them a chance to move forward, they would hardly be stopped only by the Moscow agreements...

...The Berlin agreement, the closest thing to a substantive act, is barely in force and already subject to differences of interpretation...

...It is a superpower that cannot be sure from one year to the next of growing enough food to nourish its people...

...On the other hand, it may not want to go too far —both for domestic reasons and because it is fearful of missing a foreign dividend from its enormous investment in expansion over the past 27 years...