INF Treaty - 4 December 1987

A friend of mine who's in the business – and it is a business – of seeking patrons who put up money for art exhibitions decided this week there was a show in Washington at the National Gallery that he ought to see.

He telephoned one of Washington's more elegant hotels, asked for reservations and said, "I should like to have a room from Sunday through Tuesday". There was a pause. And then the voice at the other end said, "You can't be serious?"

He was about to register, high dudgeon I suppose, when the voice kindly reminded him that for the next week or so the hotel would be jam-packed with Russians. Of course! He tried several other hotels descending through the scale of elegance down to something like the imperial apartments – always a sign that the accommodation will be something less than imperial – nowhere was there a bed to be booked.

And this reminded me instantly of a previous summit, one of the earliest, in the spring of 1960, to be held in Paris. Living there at the time was an American lawyer, name of James Murphy. Mr Murphy represented the Samuel Goldwyn motion picture interests in Paris, and one day he had a call from Hollywood.

The great Goldwyn himself was on the line. "Mr. Murphy", he said, "Do me a favour! I want a suite at The Ritz for this weekend!" "Yes sir," said Murphy, "A pleasure! I'll call you right back!"

Murphy had simply forgotten about the coming encounter between President Eisenhower and Mr Khrushchev for which something like 700 or 800 reporters were flocking into the city. And The Ritz said, in effect, "You can't be serious!" So he moved on and called all the other top-notch hotels in which Mr Goldwyn might consent to rest his distinguished bones.

Murphy was reduced, in the end, to the desperation of my friend this week. He went begging for a small suite from places he'd never heard of, The Old Corner Hotel, El Flamingo, the lot. Nothing. In despair, he phoned Hollywood and regretfully told Mr Goldwyn about the summit. There wasn't a bed to be had anywhere in Paris.

There was an ominous crackling pause on the phone and then Mr Goldwyn came through. Quietly, sadly, he said, "Mr Murphy, did I ask you a favour?" "Indeed," said Murphy, "but I'm afraid, sir, it's impossible!" Another pause. "Mr Murphy," said Goldwyn, "if it's possible, it ain't a favour."

Well, summits have grown since then. If not in importance, at least in pretentiousness – I mean in the number of journalists who feel, or whose bosses feel, it's imperative they should be there. This weekend over 5,000 reporters from the press, radio, TV, cameramen, sound men, commentators, pundits and executives of newspapers, networks, magazines, believe their presence to be essential.

An old philosopher friend of mine, writing from Oxford, says, "It's the end of thinking". To which my wife added, "That's right!" All these people are there not to think but to be manoeuvred around cameras, microphones, word processors. It's dreadful to contemplate the millions of words that will be typed, spoken, flashed around the world, in the pretence of discovering the truth of a meeting which will be held in private, behind barricades of security.

I do not apologise for remaining in the comparative solitude of New York, in a room, alone. Thinking, I hope. After all, the treaty is there. It's protocol, it's memorandum of agreement. All can be read by you and me. Though the other night in a big television debate between all the declared Democratic candidates for president and all the Republicans, only one of them, Vice President Bush, startled the gathering by confessing that he had actually read the treaty.

Nobody else had done so. But its main conditions have been argued over between the Americans and the Russians for the past seven years. And it's not necessary to read the whole of the Old Testament to know the Ten Commandments.

So the treaty, the INF Treaty, on intermediate-range nuclear forces requires the Soviet Union to destroy 1,500 warheads and the United States 350 warheads on missiles based in Europe that have ranges of anything from 300 to 3,400 miles.

When these basic terms were first agreed on and published, a cry of protest went up first from the military command of NATO in Europe. And it was echoed at 3,000 miles by the conservative wing of Mr Reagan's own party.

Most of the Democrats who've been chiding the president for seven years about his inaction on any nuclear agreement, are all for the new treaty. Except for one or two of their leaders in the Senate, notably Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia who's conceded by both parties to be the Senate's expert on space and nuclear matters.

The objection, in Europe, in Washington, was much the same. The NATO allies would be deprived of the power to reach, with nuclear weapons, into the Russian heartland and would be thrown back for their defence on tactical weapons and on conventional forces – men, tanks, artillery – that are calculated to be one-fifth the size of the Soviet forces. The retiring commander-in-chief of the NATO forces saw Europe shorn of its main defensive weapon.

The protest was then muted by the thought that if both sides could agree to have inspectors permanently based on each other's nuclear plants, it might be possible to think again. But the protestors knew, thought they knew, that the Russians, who rejected nuclear inspection as long ago as 1946, would never allow it. But then, in the last weeks of negotiation, Secretary Shultz and Foreign Minister Shevardnadze did come to terms on this endlessly debated and seemingly hopeless condition of verification. Mutual inspection.

American inspectors will be allowed to monitor a plant in European Russia which assembles long-range missiles and the medium-range missiles that are to be destroyed. The Russians will have their men in a plant in the Utah desert. This agreement radically changed the attitude of the NATO leaders and of many American opponents of the treaty but not the hard-core Republican conservatives.

They're now saying that the Russians have always cheated on previous treaties, are likely to do so on this one and that no treaty should be signed before an agreement on a reduction in Soviet conventional forces so drastic that they would no longer threaten an easy invasion of Western Europe.

The feeling of the American people by the way, according to polls issued this weekend, is overwhelmingly in favour of the imminent treaty, and all for going ahead with the proposed next stage, the reduction of strategic or long-range nuclear weapons.

Well, there's no question that the treaty will be signed on the first day, in fact, that Mr Reagan and Mr Gorbachev meet. Presumably Mr Gorbachev's signature is the Soviet bond. But Mr Reagan's signature is only a statement of intention. Under the Constitution, the treaty can only come into effect with the advice and consent of the Senate. That means a debate. And it will take a two-thirds majority of the Senate, 67 votes, to ratify the treaty.

The Democrats, it now appears, will vote, almost to a man, in favour. Oddly, 4 of the 6 Republicans running for the presidency are against it. Two of them are Senators, and hope to rouse an opposition rump. Meanwhile the conservative commentators, the relapsed Democrats called the neo-conservatives and right-wing fringe groups like the so-called moral majority, the Evangelicals, are composing and reciting lamentations for a sell-out, a surrender. The entrapment of the American eagle by the Soviet bear.

To me the most hopeful thing to come out of all the thrashing arguments and studies is the fact that Mr Gorbachev, in a long television interview with an American network anchorman, Mr Gorbachev for the first time, had admitted that the Soviet Union, too, has been busy doing research on its own version of Star Wars, a strategic defence initiative in space.

Up to now, Mr Gorbachev and every other Russian spokesman has wrung his hands deploring the wicked Americans for even contemplating research, let alone deployment of Star Wars missiles. I wonder, incidentally, what the effect of this confession has been on the Russian people who saw all, nearly all, of the American television interview.

Till now, the entire population must have shared their leader's seeming despondency over the American Space initiative and his condemnation of it. But now, quite blithely the other evening he said, "Oh yes, of course the Soviet Union has had to take similar measures for its defence in space".

You'll remember that the Reykjavik summit collapsed the moment that Mr Reagan refused to shelve the Star Wars project. The Russians went home in a huff and swore never to come to the table until the Americans abandoned Star Wars. Strangely, I've puzzled over this before, Mr Reagan did not say then, "Look who's talking! They've been busy for years on their own Star Wars!"

I believe that Mr Gorbachev at some time in the past year came to the conclusion that the Russians' similar project had better be admitted. And the other night, in the most dramatic switch, very blandly expressed, he saw nothing wrong in America's going ahead with Star Wars research. It does, I think, open up the probability of a second summit on long-range weapons and possibly a third on space itself.

So, for once, I believe, though I have one or two friends curdling my blood with warnings about the Russian trap, I believe there's good cause for hope. We sit back now and watch the public performance of the beguiling Mr Gorbachev. When Mr Reagan was asked the other day if he resented Mr Gorbachev's obvious new popularity with a lot of Americans, he said, "Good Lord no! I once co-starred with Errol Flynn!"

Which reminds me of the story of the first American Jewish president. The Chief Justice administered the oath and turned to the President's mother "Mrs. Greenberg", he said, "I congratulate you on your son!" "Oh that," she said, "But my other son's a doctor!"

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