Word: brezhnevs
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Last week, only two days before Brezhnev's arrival in Bonn, a West German company signed an agreement with the Soviet Union that cleared the way for the largest East-West trade contract ever concluded: the construction of a $10 billion pipeline to deliver Siberian natural gas to Western Europe. The U.S. had tried, but to no avail, to convince the West Germans that becoming dependent on the Soviets for fuel would make the country too vulnerable to political pressures...
Although the Italian press has given the impression that most of the protests are aimed at the U.S., a group of Communist youths stopped last month outside the Soviet embassy in Rome to shout, "Comrade Brezhnev, cannons are useless, revolution is made by the masses!" Many of the placards at Rome's big Oct. 24 rally carried the rhyming couplet, Dalla Sicilia alia Scandinavia, no alia NATO e al patto di Varsavia (From Sicily to Scandinavia, no to NATO and the Warsaw Pact...
...neurotic, or both. The U.S. has not helped by responding with a loud voice and a tin ear. Before President Reagan's widely hailed speech last week, his bellicose anti-Soviet rhetoric and willful insensitivity even to legitimate Western European concerns often made it easier for Leonid Brezhnev to find an audience for his siren's song...
...been on the defensive because of a deeper problem-one that has been in the background for decades but has only just come to the fore since Brezhnev lured Reagan into a public argument about the feasibility of limited nuclear war. At issue is declaratory nuclear doctrine: the official statements that the superpowers make to define the circumstances in which they might resort to the use of their ultimate weapons. On this particular grim but hypothetical topic, the U.S. is almost sure to continue taking a beating...
...with those ulterior motives that Brezhnev has recently had such a field day at Reagan's expense. He has reiterated the Soviets' longstanding protestations that theirs is a purely retaliatory, "second-strike" doctrine; he has denounced the notions both of limited nuclear war and of victory in such a war as dangerous fantasies, and he has floated a proposal for a joint Soviet-American renunciation of first use. That innocent-sounding suggestion is actually thoroughly loaded, since it would undercut the threat of first use on which Western deterrence partially rests...