Some Americans still have doubts left over from the cold war: can we trust the Russians to answer Bush’s unilateral arms cuts in kind? The Soviets have made clear that they are ready for similar cuts. The armed forces chief of staff, Gen. Vladimir Lobov, expressed interest in scrapping tactical nuclear weapons in the European Soviet republics only days before Bush’s speech. But Lobov said this would require “negotiations” some time down the road. Bush’s proposal, by contrast, requires Soviet initiative and boldness. Is a country that is busily tearing itself apart after the August coup attempt in any shape to join the United States in a grand reordering of European and global strategy?
The short-term answer is yes. Arms control is more and more a matter of mutual interest to both nations. The verification provisions in the INF, START and Conventional Forces in Europe treaties grant each country on-site inspection rights beyond anything that either side had ever permitted before. No less important, since the failure of the coup the underlying U.S.Soviet political relationship has edged toward friendship; if the West begins sending economic assistance to the remaining 12 republics of what was once the Soviet Union, they will soon be Western clients.
The Soviets are just as interested as the Americans in tightening up their military command and control. Of the country’s 27,000 nuclear warheads, the vast majority are tactical weapons scattered throughout several republics. Most worrisome, some 86 Army divisions in non-Russian republics have battlefield nuclear weapons. The new Soviet defense minister, Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, conceded in a meeting with Secretary of State James Baker in Moscow in mid-September that keeping track of tactical nuclear weapons presents a problem.
Shaposhnikov wants to transform the Soviet military into a smaller volunteer force. Among other things, he favors reducing the term of military service for draftees from the present two years to 18 months. After the coup, key budget decisions will be up to Yeltsin and other republic leaders. They want a peace dividend to spend on their economies. The Soviets can no longer afford to spend an estimated 25 to 30 percent of their national income on a defense establishment which is, as one Western diplomat in Moscow puts it, “a military procurement system gone mad.”
Of course, there’s still no guarantee of long-term stability in the Soviet Union. Though the communist system has collapsed, freedom and democracy have hardly taken root. The new transitional State Council made up of Gorbachev, Yeltsin and leaders of the other republics has virtual dictatorial powers. Eventually the State Council will give way to a new union of sovereign states, but no one knows when, or what the union will look like. If hunger and chaos get bad enough, a right-wing backlash could yet imperil even the fragile gains made thus far. That makes it all the more imperative that Washington press the Soviets to draw down their arsenals quickly–while men of good will are still in charge.
