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...year after the Soviets abandoned parallel sets of negotiations in Geneva on strategic arms (START) and intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF), they have decided to come in from the cold. On the first Monday in January, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Secretary of State George Shultz are to sit down together in Geneva and begin working out the basic ground rules and agenda for a whole new set of weapons talks. Said a senior Western diplomat in Moscow: "There are powerful interests on both sides in having these negotiations succeed...
Their return required a semantic sleight of hand. The Soviets would not simply rejoin the suspended Geneva talks, so last week's announcement very carefully called the impending talks "new negotiations." What about START and INF? "As far as those negotiations go, the situation has not changed," said Soviet Foreign Ministry Spokesman Vladimir Lomeiko at his Moscow press conference. "They are only possible given the removal of the American missiles." He was emphatic. "This is not a renewal of negotiations. These are absolutely new talks." Explains a U.S. official: "The Soviets had painted themselves into a very public corner...
...under an "umbrella," implying a unified forum without separate negotiations for medium-range missiles and long-range missiles. The START talks had concerned the warheads, mostly loaded on ICBMS, that the U.S. and the Soviet Union have pointed at each other from their respective territories and from submarines. The INF talks focused exclusively on missiles based in Europe and aimed at European targets. Umbrella talks could treat those different weapons as parts of a single negotiating equation, together with emerging space-based weapons. The technical complexity of the talks would be increased, yet the comprehensive approach offers considerable advantages: negotiators...
...liners agree that no arms-control czar should be appointed. But McFarlane talked last week of finding someone "to advise, to troubleshoot and to be a designated hitter that could assure momentum is sustained." The White House favorite for the job is Paul Nitze, the chief negotiator at the INF talks. Yet he is opposed by the Pentagon hawks. In Moscow, one Soviet expert on U.S. relations smiled at the Washington jargon-czar-but said with a sigh, "When Kissinger was making these decisions in the Nixon years, then we were able to move ahead. Maybe what we need...
...later explained that these would involve lumping into a single set of talks six areas of military negotiations, some old and some new, between the superpowers. They include intercontinental ballistic missiles (the subject of the now suspended START negotiations), intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe (currently covered by the INF talks, also suspended), space weapons, chemical arms, conventional forces and so-called confidence-building measures, like the prenotification of large troop movements. That sort of comprehensive approach would let the Soviets return to the negotiating table with a minimum loss of face. They had boxed themselves in by making...