“It is well known by peace-loving people the world over that the Soviet Union has never wished for war, and that only a madman would even consider nuclear war a viable policy option in our modern world of overkill, fallout, and ‘nuclear winter.’ ”
“Damn,” muttered AP bureau chief Patrick Flynn. The Soviets scarcely acknowledged “nuclear winter” and had never mentioned the concept in so formal a setting. His antennae were already twitching at whatever there was in the wind.
“The time has come for substantive reductions in strategic arms. We have made numerous, serious, sincere proposals for real arms reductions, and despite this the United States has proceeded with the development and deployment of its destabilizing, openly offensive weapons: the MX first-strike missile, so cynically called the ‘Peacekeeper’; the advanced Trident D-5 first-strike sea-launched ballistic missile; two separate varieties of cruise missiles whose characteristics conspire to make arms control verification almost totally impossible; and of course, the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative, which will take offensive strategic weapons into space. Such are America’s deeds.” He looked up from his notes and spoke with irony. “And through it all, America’s pious words demand Soviet deeds.
“Starting tomorrow, we will see once and for all if America’s words are to be believed or not. Starting tomorrow we will see how great a difference there is between America’s words about peace and Soviet deeds for peace.
“Tomorrow, the Soviet Union will put on the table at Vienna a proposal to reduce existing arsenals of strategic and theater nuclear weapons by fifty percent, this reduction to be accomplished over a period of three years from ratification of the agreement, subject to on-site verification conducted by third-party inspection teams whose composition will be agreed upon by all signatories.
“Please note that I say ‘all signatories.’ The Soviet Union invites the United Kingdom, the French Republic, and”—he looked up—“the People’s Republic of China to join us at the negotiating table.” The explosion of flashbulbs caused him to look away for a moment.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please—” He smiled, holding his hand up to shield his face. “These old eyes are not up to such abuse as this, and I have not memorized my speech—unless you want me to continue in Russian!”
There was a wave of laughter, then a sprinkling of applause at the jibe. The old bastard was really turning on the charm, Flynn thought, furiously taking notes. This was potential dynamite. He wondered what would come next, and he especially wondered what the precise wording on the proposal was. Flynn had covered arms talks before, and knew all too well that general descriptions of proposals could grossly distort the nuts-and-bolts details of the real issues to be negotiated. The Russians couldn’t be this open—they just couldn’t be.
“To proceed.” The Foreign Minister blinked his eyes clear. “We have been accused of never making a gesture of our good faith. The falsehood of the charge is manifest, but this evil fiction continues in the West. No longer. No longer will anyone have cause to doubt the sincerity of the Soviet people’s quest for a just and lasting peace.
“Beginning today, as a sign of good faith which we challenge the United States and any other interested nation to match, the Soviet Union will remove from service an entire class of nuclear-powered missile submarines. These submarines are known to the West as the Yankee class. We call them something else, of course,” he said with an ingenuous grin that drew another wave of polite laughter. “Twenty of the vessels are presently in service, each carrying twelve sea-launched ballistic missiles. All active members of the class are assigned to the Soviet Northern Fleet based on the Kola Peninsula. Beginning today, we will deactivate these vessels at a rate of one per month. As you know, complete deactivation of so complex a machine as a missile submarine requires the services of a shipyard—the missile compartment must be physically removed from the body of the vessel—and so these vessels cannot be fully disarmed overnight. However, to make the honesty of our intentions undeniable, we invite the United States to do one of two things:
“First, we will permit a selected team of six American naval officers to inspect these twenty vessels to verify that their missile tubes have been filled with concrete ballast pending removal of the entire missile rooms from all of the submarines. In return for this, we would require that a comparable inspection visit by an equal number of Soviet officers to American yards would be allowed at a later date to be agreed on.
“Second, as an alternative should the United States be unwilling to allow reciprocal verification of arms reductions, we will permit another group of six officers to perform this service, these officers to be from a country—or countries—upon which the United States and the Soviet Union can agree within the next thirty days. A team from such neutral countries as Sweden or India would be acceptable in principle to the Soviet Union.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come to put an end to the arms race. I will not repeat all of the flowery rhetoric we’ve all heard over the past two generations. We all know the threat that these ghastly weapons represent to every nation. Let no one ever say again that the government of the Soviet Union has not done its part to reduce the danger of war. Thank you.”
The room suddenly fell silent but for the sound of motor-driven still cameras. The Western press representatives assigned to their respective Moscow bureaus were among the best in their profession. Uniformly bright, uniformly ambitious, uniformly cynical about what they found in Moscow and the conditions under which they were forced to work, all were stunned to silence.
“Goddamn,” muttered Flynn after a full ten seconds.
“One must admire your understatement, old boy,” agreed Reuters correspondent William Calloway. “Wasn’t it your Wilson who spoke of open covenants openly arrived at?”
“Yeah, my granddad covered that peace conference. Remember how well it worked out?” Flynn grimaced, watching the Foreign Minister depart, smiling at the cameras. “I want to see the handout. Want to ride back with me?”
“Yes on both.”
It was a bitterly cold day in Moscow. Snow piles were heaped at the roadsides. The sky was a frigid crystal blue. And the car’s heater didn’t work. Flynn drove while his friend read aloud from the handout. The draft treaty proposal took up nineteen annotated pages. The Reuters correspondent was a Londoner who had begun as a police reporter, and since covered assignments all over the world. He and Flynn had met many years before at the famous Caravelle Hotel in Saigon, and shared drinks and typewriter ribbons on and off for more than two decades. In the face of a Russian winter, they remembered the oppressive heat of Saigon with something akin to nostalgia.
“It’s bloody fair,” Calloway said wonderingly, his breath giving ghostly substance to his words. “They propose a builddown with elimination of many existing weapons, allowing both sides to replace obsolete launchers, both sides to reach a total of five thousand deliverable warheads, that number to remain stable for five years after the three-year reduction period. There is a separate proposal to negotiate complete removal of ‘heavy’ missiles, replacing them with mobile missiles, but to limit missile flight tests to a fixed number per year—” He flipped that page and rapidly scanned the remainder. “Nothing in the draft treaty about your Star Wars research . . . ? Didn’t he mention that in his statement? Patrick, old son, this is, as you say, dynamite. This could as easily have been written in Washington. It will take months to work out all the technical points, but this is a bloody serious, and bloody generous, proposal.”
“Nothing about Star Wars?” Flynn frowned briefly as he turned right. Did that mean that the Russians had made a breakthrough of their own? Have to query Washington about that . . . “We got us a story here, Willie. What’s your lead? How’s ‘Peace’ grab you?” Calloway just laughed at that.
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
American intelligence agencies, like their counterparts throughout the world, monitor all news wire services. Toland was examining the AP and Reuters reports before most news bureau chiefs, and comparing them with the version transmitted over Soviet microwave circuits for publication in the regional editions of
Pravda
and
Isvestia.
The way items of hard news were reported in the Soviet Union was intended to show Party members how their leaders felt.
“We’ve been down this road before,” his section chief said. “The last time, things broke down on this issue of mobile missiles. Both sides want them, but both sides are afraid of the other side having them.”
“But the tone of the report—”
“They’re
always
euphoric about
their
arms-control proposals, dammit! Hell, Bob, you know that.”
“True, sir, but it’s the first time that I know of that the Russians have unilaterally removed a weapons platform from service.”
“The ‘Yankees’ are obsolete.”
“So what? They never throw anything away, obsolete or not. They still have World War II artillery pieces sitting in warehouses in case they need them again. This is different, and the political ramifications—”
“We’re not talking politics, we’re talking nuclear strategy,” the section chief growled back.
As if there were a difference,
Toland said to himself.
KIEV, THE UKRAINE
“Well, Pasha?”
“Comrade General, we truly have a man’s work before us,” Alekseyev answered, standing at attention in the Kiev headquarters of the Southwest Theater.
“Our troops need extensive unit training. Over the weekend I read through more than eighty regimental readiness reports from our tank and motor-rifle divisions.” Alekseyev paused before going on. Tactical training and readiness was the bane of the Soviet military. Their troops were almost entirely conscripts, in and out in two years, half of whose uniformed service was occupied just in acquiring basic military skills. Even the noncoms, the backbone of every army since the Roman legions, were conscripts selected for special training academies, then lost as soon as their enlistment periods ended. For that reason, the Soviet military leaned heavily on its officers, who often performed what in the West was sergeants’ work. The professional officer corps of the Soviet Army was its only permanent, only dependable feature. In theory. “The truth of the matter is that we
don’t know
our readiness posture at the moment. Our colonels all use the same language in their reports, without the slightest deviation. Everyone reports meeting norms, with the same amount of training hours, the same amount of political indoctrination, the same number of practice shots fired—that is, a deviation of under three percent!—and the requisite number of field exercises run, all of course of the proper type.”
“As prescribed in our training manuals,” the Colonel General noted.
“Naturally. Exactly—too damned exactly! No deviation for adverse weather. No deviation for late fuel deliveries. No deviation for anything at all. For example, the 703rd Motor-Rifle Regiment spent all of last October on harvesting duty south of Kharkov—yet somehow they met their monthly norms for unit training at the same time. Lies are bad enough, but these are
stupid
lies!”
“It cannot be as bad as you fear, Pavel Leonidovich.”
“Do we dare to assume otherwise, Comrade?”
The General stared down at his desk. “No. Very well, Pasha. You’ve formulated your plan. Let me hear it.”
“For the moment, you will be outlining the plan for our attack into the Muslim lands. I must get into the field to whip our field commanders into shape. If we wish to accomplish our goals in time for the attack west, we must make an example of the worst offenders. I have four commanders in mind. Their conduct has been grossly and undeniably criminal. Here are the names and charges.” He handed over a single sheet of paper.
“There are two good men here, Pasha,” the General objected.
“They are guardians of the State. They enjoy positions of the greatest trust. They have betrayed that trust by lying, and in doing so, they have endangered the State,” Alekseyev said, wondering how many men in his country could have that said of them. He dismissed the thought. There were problems enough right here.
“You understand the consequences of the charges you bring?”
“Of course. The penalty for treason is death. Did I ever falsify a readiness report? Did you?” Alekseyev looked away briefly. “It is a hard thing, and I take no pleasure in it—but unless we snap our units into shape, how many young boys will die for their officers’ failings? We need combat readiness more than we need four liars. If there is a gentler way to achieve this, I don’t know what that might be. An army without discipline is a worthless mob. We have the directive from STAVKA to make examples of unruly privates and restore the authority of our NCOs. It is fitting that if privates must suffer for their failings, then their colonels must suffer too. Theirs is the greater responsibility. Theirs is the greater reward. A few examples here will go a long way to restoring our army.”
“The inspectorate?”
“The best choice,” Alekseyev agreed. That way blame would not necessarily be traced back to the senior commanders themselves. “I can send teams from the Inspector General’s service out to these regiments day after tomorrow. Our training memoranda arrived in all divisional and regimental headquarters this morning. The news of these four traitors will encourage our unit commanders to implement them with vigor. Even then, it will be two weeks before we have a clear picture of what we need to focus on, but once we can identify the areas that need buttressing, we should have ample time to accomplish what we need to accomplish.”
“What will CINC-West be doing?”
“The same, one hopes.” Alekseyev shook his head. “Has he asked for any of our units yet?”
“No, but he will. We will not be ordered to launch offensive operations against NATO’s southern flank—part of the continuing
maskirovka.
You may assume that many of our Category-B units will be detailed to Germany, possibly some of our ‘A’ tank forces also. However many divisions that fool has, he’ll want more.”