Word: sovietize
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...Soviet diplomats frequently call at the State Department. Particularly since the Geneva summit, there has been a great deal of mid-level diplomacy. So there was no reason to expect anything out of the ordinary when Oleg Sokolov, the Soviet chargé d'affaires in Washington, arrived early last Wednesday morning to see Secretary of State George Shultz. But when Sokolov handed him a lengthy letter from Mikhail Gorbachev to Ronald Reagan, Shultz became the first man in official Washington to be startled by a sweeping and unexpected new arms-control proposal. It was studded with ambiguities and potentially risky approaches...
Some three hours later in Moscow, the proposal was presented to the world's public--the audience at which it was largely aimed--in typical Soviet fashion. The anchorman on the nightly newscast Vremya (Time), his face expressionless, picked up a sheaf of papers and announced, with no more emotion than he might have used to present a weather report, that he had a "statement by the General Secretary of the Communist Party." Then he droned on for half an hour as the news agency TASS distributed the statement around the world...
...many Soviet and American leaders had done before, Gorbachev called for total elimination of nuclear missiles, warheads, bombs and other weapons from the planet. But this was not presented as a vague goal for the future; he proposed a fairly detailed, three-stage timetable culminating at the end of the century. He also offered tantalizing hints about ways to break specific deadlocks. If his plan is adopted, Gorbachev grandly concluded, "by the end of 1999 there will be no nuclear weapons on earth...
Gorbachev's first phase would also include an agreement for "elimination" of U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range missiles from the "European zone." At first glance that looks like Reagan's zero option: no U.S. missiles in Western Europe (the U.S. is deploying 108 Pershing II ballistic and 464 Tomahawk cruise missiles in five countries); no Soviet missiles targeted on Western Europe (Moscow has more than 250 mobile, triple-warhead SS-20s in place). Up until last week, the Soviets insisted on keeping enough SS-20s (roughly 140) to equal the number of missiles in the independent British and French nuclear...
...Gorbachev left it unclear whether the SS-20s to be removed from Europe would be destroyed or simply shuttled into Soviet Asia. From there they could be quickly moved back into Europe during a crisis. In addition, London and Paris are unlikely to halt the scheduled modernization of their nuclear forces...