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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 |
| Author
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Adam M. Garfinkle
Adam M. Garfinkle is adjunct professor of political science at
the University of Pennsylvania and research associate at the
Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. He is also
a contributing editor of Orbis. |
"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
... (1996 of 32385 Characters)
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