The Bumpy Road to SALT-II
HOPKINS, MARK
A TEST FOR DETENTE The Bumpy Road to SALT-II by Mark Hopkins Moscow It was nearly four years ago that Soviet Party Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev met with President Gerald R. Ford in Vladivostok to...
...Two heart attacks have made it necessary for him to wear a pacemaker installed by a French surgeon...
...A TEST FOR DETENTE The Bumpy Road to SALT-II by Mark Hopkins Moscow It was nearly four years ago that Soviet Party Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev met with President Gerald R. Ford in Vladivostok to hammer out guidelines for a second strategic arms limitation agreement...
...Soviet leaders have made it abundantly clear that they regard Carter's human rights policy as a direct threat to their nation's internal security...
...Second is the human rights policy...
...The single most important dissident left in the Soviet Union is Andrei Sakharov, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize...
...trade expert put it, "The bloom is off the rose...
...Third, Soviet targets like Ethiopia...
...His wife Yelena Bonner, a long-time human rights activist-thinks the KGB is trying to trigger a second and fatal heart attack by steadily harassing him physically and psychologically...
...He is believed to suffer from hypertension, gout and emphysema, and has been taking drugs for a jaw or tooth malady...
...His theme was more raw materials, including gas and oil, and more manufacturing from Siberia...
...The minority view is that U.S...
...Some western diplomats and journalists think the KGB would welcome his departure, provided he left voluntarily and there could be no charges of forced exile, as with Solzhenitsyn...
...In Brezhnev's speeches the phrase about "making detente irreversible" has been replaced by denunciations of Washington...
...One diplomat here speculated: "I think someone like [Politburo member and ideologist Mikhail] Sus-lov might just say, 'Let's shoot the son-of-a-bitch and be finished.'" That may be an extreme prediction, yet it suggests the hardening of the Kremlin position...
...But in this country of 260 million, the people are still shoddily clothed, nurtured on bland diets and live in cramped housing...
...and Western European publicity, let alone White House warnings about Shcharansky, may have had a negative impact...
...What preoccupies them, therefore, is the fact that the costly agricultural system works poorly, that consumer manufacturing is drained by military-oriented heavy industry, and that an energy shortage may be dawning...
...While the Soviets will buy the agreed minimum of 6 million tons of grain to offset last fall's disappointing harvest, the odds of any dramatic reversal in the generally depressing trade picture are slim...
...inflation, unemployment, racial discrimination, and militarist, capitalist backing of warlike Pentagon budgets...
...This, however, is all for public consumption...
...can slow down the arms race...
...One Western intelligence Mark Hopkins, a past contributor to these pages, is a specialist in Soviet and East European affairs...
...Her two children-a grown daughter and a son to whom Sakharov is attached-have been allowed to emigrate, and she wants her husband to do the same, before the KGB does something to him or he falls seriously ill...
...American diplomats claim that in private Soviet officials seldom if ever mention the neutron bomb...
...But the idea is alive, and if it pans out, Japanese and American firms would sink billions of dollars into pipelines and equipment...
...It is questionable whether he is even up to taking on arduous summit meetings to promote salt-II-not to mention countering tensions exacerbated by the Soviet military buildup in Europe, by Soviet intervention in Africa and by the toughened Soviet stand against dissidents at home...
...The single major project on the horizon involves the USSR's old friend, Armand Hammer, head of Occidental Petroleum...
...Thus, in alloting his remaining energies, Brezhnev decided it was important to travel some 5,000 miles by train across the Soviet Union for two weeks in April to give pep talks to local Party government and worker collectives...
...As one U.S...
...The Soviets would supply the labor, and the first tankers would be loaded by the mid-1980s...
...Thus salt has come to be regarded in this capital as a test of whether the aging Brezhnev regime and the young Carter Administration can revive the faltering spirit of detente...
...But they do mention salt, and they are riled at the White House's focus on human rights violations in the USSR...
...Another is that unlike the ups and downs that began with the first Brezhnev-Nixon summit in 1971, Soviet-American relations seem to be entering an altogether new phase...
...No solid assurance exists that it is economically feasible to extract gas from Eastern Siberia, pipe it to Russia's far eastern coast, then liquify it there for shipment to Japan and the United States...
...Despite the maximum sentence handed down last month to physicist Yuri Orlov, head of the group monitoring Soviet compliance with the Helsinki agreement, most observers here speculate that Shcharansky will receive a short, speedy trial on the propaganda charge, not on the espionage, sentencing and then exile...
...Soviet officials, who in the Nixon-Kissinger era talked cheerfully about global cooperation, today speak defensively...
...And one would have to go back to the days of Harry Truman to find a time when the Soviet press vilified an American President by name the way it has been vilifying Jimmy Carter...
...Through his small Moscow apartment, protests are funneled to foreign newsmen...
...In the Nixon-Kissinger years, stories applauding such joint economic projects used to fill the Soviet media...
...Since then, despite numerous high-level discussions on the subject-Including those held during Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance's visit here last April -a treaty has not only failed to materialize but also, as negotiations have dragged on, Soviet-American relations have steadily deteriorated...
...The Kremlin is aware of this revised list of priorities, of course, and for physical reasons alone the 71-year-old Brezhnev must be concerned about having to deal with the new situation...
...Moscow continues to denounce the Jackson-Vanik Amendment that has denied Russia American credits and the lower favored-nation import duties...
...Having done that, Brezhnev trained south to Vladivostok to stand on the deck of a Soviet cruiser and tell the Carter Administration how urgent it is to finish another Soviet-American strategic arms accord...
...These statements then go out on the West's news wires, and within hours are broadcast back into the USSR by radio...
...Now, the press and radio offer instead hardline commentary on everything from Carter, to American violations of human rights and the "barbaric neutron bomb," to the traditional favorite targets—U.S...
...An American diplomat here broadly outlined the shift: "The main thing is the Carter Administration's view that we should not make the Soviet Union the keystone of our foreign policy...
...Following up on a March meeting in Moscow, representatives of his company and of El Paso Gas met in Tokyo last month with Japanese entrepreneurs and Soviet experts to nudge along a multibillion dollar natural gas project...
...Economic relations are badly in need of attention, too...
...Trade between the two countries dropped by 30 per cent last year compared with 1976, and at the present rate it could drop another 30 per cent this year-from about $620 million to around $400 million...
...Unfortunately, Sakharov's health has been declining since his heart attack several years ago...
...The consensus is that the prospects are bleak...
...prognosis gives him two more years at the most...
...In generally poor health, he had a bout with influenza this winter that forced him to abruptly postpone a planned Bonn trip until last month...
...As with many men his age, Brezhnev's hardening arteries and overworked respiratory system make him a good candidate for a fatal stroke or heart attack...
...Western Europe comes first...
...They are particularly irked at the attention being paid to 30-year-old Ana-toly Shcharansky, arrested last year on charges of espionage and antistate propaganda, whose fate seems to have become linked to whether the Soviet Union and the U.S...
...Others maintain that Sakharov's central role in the 1950's development of the Soviet hydrogen bomb makes him enough of a security risk to the Soviet military for it to oppose his ever being let out...
...One reason for this is that Brezhnev now apparently feels he must continuously explain to his domestic political establishment what has gone wrong with detente...
...This would save face in the Kremlin, the analysis goes, while avoiding a storm of western, particularly American, protest...
...Given the strain the treatment of dissidents has placed on U.S.-Soviet relations, it may seem strange that except for Sakharov few are widely known...
Vol. 61 • June 1978 • No. 12
