Missile treaty questioned

This is the time when everybody – heads of government, football managers, business leaders, diet maniacs – announce their hopes and plans for 1988.

I got a call from a journalist. 'How do you feel', he wanted to know, 'about the coming bill in Congress to protect American industries?' Well, this is not the first thing you have in mind when you're getting yourself up like a polar bear to go out in a temperature 26 degrees below freezing, or below zero, as they say in some Celsius or Centigrade countries. I fixed him. I said, 'I have no plan concerning Japan.'

There is a nasty and important row, very important to Europe, immediately head in Washington, as it basks in or recovers from the glow left by the new media superstar, Mikhail Gorbachev. I'd like to mention first a long overdue, sensible remark made by one lady and a tribute to another.

The remark came from Mickey Wright, long retired, but the best woman golfer of modern times. She hoped for 1988 that athletes salaries, rewards, would begin to match reality. 'It's ridiculous,' she said, 'that the earnings for a golfer or a tennis player should be ten or twenty times the salary of a research scientist.'

Now, the tribute. The coincidence of the New Year with Mrs Thatcher's record as the longest-serving prime minister led to the most surprising tribute from the New York Times. Surprising, because its editorial line is usually liberal Democrat, though I have to say that its regular columnists include two liberals, one humorist and, also, the quite unpredictable William Safire who, while stoutly maintaining that he's a conservative, is an unsleeping watchdog of wrongdoing in either party and has been both a fierce opponent of some of the Times's own editorials and, also, a bane to the Reagan administration, especially whenever he smells corruption in or around the White House. And the Times, also, on any controversial issue before the country, prints parallel commentaries from invited columnists who stand firmly on opposite sides.

Well, now the Times tribute, as I put it, to Mrs Thatcher. Of course, on the actual day that Mrs Thatcher set up the record, there was long, purely news dispatch from London, but on Thursday, the Times published a leader. I would have expected it to pay lip service to her version of Reaganomics, give her credit for such character traits as courage and doggedness, deplore her matriarchal style and wind up warning about the division between the opulent south and the impoverished north by quoting Disraeli's lament for the two nations.

Nothing like it! Its title was, 'Britain's Woman of the Century'. It paid brief attention to what it called the clichés that flock her around her as thickly as sparrows in London's East End, such as that she is forceful, divisive, gritty, thinks fast on her feet, and so on. What, the Times wants to know, is the secret of her election to a third term? By example and precept, it declares, she has offered a liberating feeling to millions of Britons shackled by a class system, bullying trade unions and an over-protective welfare state.

Let me throw in that in any American comment on British society, from any source, however enlightened, you can always be sure of a passing lament about Britain's – its usually 'rigid' – class structure. Though it seems to me that the loosening or unshackling of the structure has been going on at a furious rate during the past 20 years or so.

The Times concedes, without further explanation, that much of Mrs Thatcher's appeal is specifically British. But, it goes on, her success belies the view that, in democracies, entitlements – that's pensions, handouts if you will – are a one-way street, that all government agencies are immortal, that politics is the art of discovering what everybody agrees is safe.

It applauds her for redeeming the national honour by sending that fleet to the Falklands but raps her for her refusal to negotiate with a democratic Argentina. It also deplores what it takes to be her view that equates getting rich with civil virtue and reminds her that it's those on the bottom who need her encouragement most. But these are just about the only niggles.

Most surprising is the Times's applause for her conduct of foreign affairs. It says nothing about her backing for much of President Reagan's approach, but praises her for the Zimbabwe independence settlement, for giving the Irish Republic a role in British-ruled Ulster, for securing decent terms for Hong Kong's reversion to China and for being the first Western leader to size up Mikhail Gorbachev as someone the West could deal with.

It's quite a report card. If Mr Reagan has had this read to him, he must have sighed with envy. He's not getting such high marks in his own country, especially, it must really hurt him to realise, from his own, once-ardent followers on the right. Both rock-ribbed conservative Republicans and reformed Democrats who moved over to him when he chose, at the beginning of his reign, to be tough, or as they used to say stand tall, with the Russians.

I'd better say now that this grievous split in Mr Reagan's party is going to go painfully public very soon, when his old, most fervent, conservative supporters mount a campaign against him on the move which is coming up in the Senate to ratify the intermediate missile treaty signed, with such a flourish of trumpets, recently, by him and Mr Gorbachev.

As the new Congress assembles, the Democrats, who have a majority in both Houses, are tickled pink over this split. They are, I imagine, overwhelmingly in favour of ratifying the treaty and not always from the most admirable motives. No Democrat who's coming up for re-election this year – and that includes the entire 435 members of the House – is going to declare himself against the treaty because, to his voters, that would mean being against peace. It's like being against Santa Claus or Mother. Among lazy-minded Democrats, the whole problem has been simplified to the proposition that the more nuclear weapons of all kinds and sizes we get rid of, the more peace we get. And this, too, is, according to the polls, the view in the New Year of most American voters.

It's a triumph, I think, not of good sense or keen debate – the debate hasn't started – but a triumph for the image Mr Gorbachev projected here of a genial, liberal, courageous, peace-loving leader. Just what we've always yearned for in a Soviet leader, which helps us to forget or forgive the hard fact that he is a Communist and he is a dictator.

But cheek by jowl, a day apart anyway, with the Times's tribute to Mrs Thatcher, appeared a piece, a warning piece, about the much-admired INF Treaty by one of its most serious opponents. It was by Eugene Rostow, a lifelong Democrat, once dean of the Yale Law School, former under-secretary of state under Lyndon Johnson and Mr Reagan's arms control director until he was fired. Mr Rostow asks the Senate to go slow on ratification and here is the gist of his argument.

He says that no one in the West can be really confident about the aims of Soviet policy, but he believes that the neutralisation of Western Europe has been the chief strategic aim of the Soviet Union since the Second World War. He reminds us that the chief Soviet negotiator in Geneva has said publicly that the Soviet goal in the arms control negotiations is to remove nuclear weapons from Western Europe, which would lead, Rostow believes, inevitably to a neutral Europe which would also lead, automatically, to a reorientation of the policies of Japan, China and many smaller countries.

He notes that both Mr Reagan and Mr Gorbachev say that the INF Treaty abolishes an entire class of nuclear weapons. Wrong, he says, because every target they can reach can also be reached by longer-range ground-based or sea-based weapons, and to say that the treaty is a first step in abolishing all nuclear weapons is also false. Nuclear arms, Mr Rostow says, cannot be abolished. Any moderate industrial power can make them and any rich power can buy them and, in a world where predators, thugs or lunatics sometimes head governments, America cannot consider giving up its nuclear arsenal.

Mr Rostow believes that the treaty should only be ratified if it is promptly followed by agreements providing for Soviet-American equality in offensive intercontinental nuclear weapons and defensive systems. But if the Soviet Union stalls the negotiations to reduce strategic nuclear weapons and tries to preserve its present lead in long-range offensive weapons in space activities – note that, that's its own advanced Star Wars programme – and in defensive systems, then the INF Treaty could be a trap for the West, producing, he believes, the catastrophic result of encouraging some in Western Europe, China and Japan to become neutral or to accommodate themselves, which is a gentle word for giving in to what would amount to the Soviet mastery of Europe.

Mr Rostow's analysis is based on 15 years of studying arms control before and after his term as arms control director to this administration and, whatever else is to be said about its chilling thesis, it is one that people like me, provisional supporters of the treaty, must face and answer.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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