Word: karpov
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...week for chess champions. As Anatoli Karpov was falling a game behind Gary Kasparov in the world chess championship at Moscow's Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, an upset of a different sort was taking place in Denver's Radisson Hotel. The world's top-ranked chess machine, a $14 million Cray X-MP/ 48 supercomputer running a program called Blitz, was about to lose the North American computer-chess championship to Hitech, a rack of custom-made silicon chips attached to a $20,000 Sun minicomputer...
Last week, however, the battleground finally shifted. Victor Karpov, the chief Soviet arms negotiator, sat down at the banquet-size table in the Botanic Building, the drab headquarters of the U.S. arms-control delegation across from Geneva's tidy botanical gardens, and began reading slowly from a lengthy document. For half an hour the Soviet negotiator droned on, speaking in the argot of nuclear weaponry. His monologue was technical and arcane, yet it was immensely important. At the least, it promised to deliver arms control from the realm of rhetoric to the real business of negotiated give-and-take over...
After presenting his plan, Karpov, in an unusual gesture, welcomed reporters to the Soviet delegation's spacious Geneva headquarters with some pointed banter. The Kremlin's offer "is balanced," the Soviet negotiator proclaimed, "as balanced as I am, standing on both my feet." He insisted that the Soviets were doing their part to ensure the success of the upcoming Geneva summit, but the U.S. had been "dragging its feet from the very start" on arms control. Quipped Karpov in the kind of Western cliche that seems to spill effortlessly from publicity-conscious Soviet diplomats these days: "It takes...
...fact, the formal Soviet proposal appeared to retreat from Gorbachev's suggestion to TIME last month that the Kremlin might at least agree to permit "fundamental" research on space-based defense systems. The Soviet proposal stipulates a prohibition on "development (including scientific research) of space strike weapons." In Geneva, Karpov did leave a little maneuvering room by stating, with studied ambiguity, that "we're not against basic research--we never were. We are against research that leads to the creation of space strike weapons." If the Soviets insist on a narrow definition of research, an arms deal could be aborted...
Perhaps, but the hints are nonetheless alluring. During the second round of the Geneva talks last summer, Soviet Negotiator Victor Karpov informally suggested that Moscow might be willing to cut its arsenal of missiles and bombers by as much as 40%, including for the first time nuclear "charges," meaning warheads. In the past, the Soviets had agreed to limit only launchers, which allowed their missiles to be loaded up with multiple warheads. The Soviets also alluded to setting a ceiling on the number of land-based missiles. The U.S. considers these big "silo busters" to be the most destabilizing element...