Gromyko's threat to SALT treaty

It's usually a good sign when the President of the United States announces he's going to take a holiday even though, at best, it will be a three or four-day holiday. It means that while Congress and the newspapers may be viewing with alarm and discovering crises every other day, one man in power is keeping his head.

I remember what a tonic thing it was during the worst days of the Second War, the worst days for Britain, with the south coast fortifying itself against a German invasion, to read that Mr Churchill went to bed at 10 p.m. as usual, woke at five, zipped up his siren suit and said, 'Where are the Narzies?'. 

Now surely no one would begrudge Mr Carter a holiday after an exhausting summit in Vienna and a frustrating summit in Tokyo. He would, he said, stop off on the way home and spend three carefree days and nights in Hawaii, which is one of the most majestically beautiful of all the states. 

When this holiday was announced, I leapt on it as an opportunity to talk about the joy, the useful safety valve, if you like, of summer games. Wimbledon in England, the baseball season getting into high gear in the United States, the happy convention in most countries around the world at this time of the year, whereby tired politicians and anxious businessmen and even factory owners and shop stewards slump by the telly in the evenings and watch the only simple heroes left – the superstars of the cricket field, the baseball diamond, the tennis court, the racetrack. 

A correspondent feels more grateful than most men for these breaks because, for the one and only time, he can say,' Well, if the President of the United States is surfing in Honolulu or working on his back swing in the Rockies, surely you don't expect me to be worrying you with talk of SALT and OPEC and VAT?' However, this happy prospect was very short-lived. 

On Thursday Mr Carter announced that his holiday was off after the petroleum exporting countries jacked up the price of oil. All along, the administration had been saying what it desperately wanted to believe, that the OPEC countries would probably raise their price from $14 a barrel to, say, about $16 or $17 and that Saudi Arabia, the biggest exporter of all, would very likely refuse to go along with any increase at all. Consequently, the jump from OPEC from $14 to $23.50 dollars was a shocker. And even while President Carter and Mrs Thatcher and the others were beginning to agree about conserving oil, the Saudi Arabian price was jumping by 24 per cent. 

Now, you know, wherever the president goes, he's paced, surrounded and harried by a team of aides, secretaries and technicians. The moment he arrives in the guest suite of some statesman's house or in a hotel, he finds that the telephone has already had its dial implanted with a circular disc saying 'The White House'. The diplomatic cables come pouring in, holiday or no holiday. The hotline, several hotlines, have been linked to his bedroom, to Moscow, to Washington, to the underground headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Omaha, Nebraska. There's always, never more than ten seconds away, the anonymous man who carries the day's variation of the scrambler code that can signal, in a flash, the war alert to bases on land or sea and missile silos around the world. 

What Mr Carter didn't expect – and what he got this time – was a threat from the OPEC nations to ease the oil bill of importing nations by forcing down the international value of the dollar. What he didn't expect was an explosion of anger in the Senate over Mr Gromyko's threat to abandon the SALT treaty if the Senate dares to amend it. What he might have expected, but not so soon, was a firm recommendation by his chief foreign policy men and defence aides to begin strengthening American naval and air forces in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf partly to protect America's main sources of oil from the spreading Soviet presence in the Middle East, not to mention the worsening news about violence and strikes at petrol pumps across America. 

And if he still meant to go ahead and loll in Honolulu, he heard at the beginning of the week about a Soviet underground nuclear test set off last Saturday which, in the view of his scientific advisers, exceeded the 150 kiloton limit to which both countries agreed in the first SALT treaty. Although, at this moment, we've not had the official Russian answer to this complaint, it seems to be wildly improbable at the moment that the Senate's telling Mr Gromyko to mind his own business and Senator Goldwater was inviting him to go to hell, improbable that Moscow would come back with an apology and a prayer to be forgiven. 

I think that must have done it. Anyway, Mr Carter decided to get back to Washington and face the music. The hullabaloo of discordant sounds that batter the White House and make you wonder why anyone in his senses would ever think of running again next year for president, which Mr Carter undoubtedly means to do.

By the way, the Democratic National Committee has just voted to hold its 1980 nominating convention once again in New York City where, three years ago, Jimmy Carter was received in rapture as the man best able to lead us into a life of peace, prosperity and simple dignity.

Well, with apologies to OPEC, I think the main thing this week is the early damage that was done to the SALT treaty by Mr Gromyko's warning, or threat, that if the Senate, in its forthcoming debate, tried to amend the treaty there would be grave consequences and perhaps no SALT treaty at all. Certainly he said no more negotiation. Now if Mr Gromyko were a tyro, a newcomer to American-Soviet diplomacy, the scolding editorial of the Washington Post would be, I think, well taken. 

The Post said that Mr Gromyko was arrogant and had made a blunder in not leaving the selling of the SALT treaty to Mr Carter. The Post instructed Mr Gromyko about the 'double streak of deep pride in the Senate, in the United States as a nation and in the Senate as an institution. It is depressing,' the Post sighed, 'how poorly the Soviet leadership understands the US political process.' But does it? 

Mr Gromyko is not merely a veteran of Soviet-American jousting, he is, in the Soviet system, something of a marvel. He was the number two Russian at the organising conference of the United Nations in 1945. He was their chief man in the early battles in the United Nations Security Council, walking out so often by way of registering his veto that 'pulling a Gromyko' became an English idiom. And while the lords and masters of the Soviet Union died or were liquidated – or like his first chief, Molotov, were banished to oblivion in Outer Mongolia – Gromyko, with an uncanny gift for survival, has remained with us. 

Surely the longest-running foreign secretary of any nation, Communist or non-Communist, this century – 34 years. He's lived in, or visited, the United States on and off for 34 years. He cannot be ignorant of the pride of the United States' Senate or naive about the way it works. A foreign minister who'd been in Washington a couple of months would have learned that if you want the United States to come to an agreement with your country on anything, one thing you do not do is to insult or threaten the Senate. So we really have to look a little longer at Mr Gromyko's threats. 

Maybe the masters of the Kremlin don't really want a SALT agreement, not this one, anyway, but went along with the ritual of the signing till the ailing Mr Brezhnev is no longer in command. Maybe they genuinely feel that the terms of the treaty discriminate against them and are engineering a crisis which will force President Carter to go in for a round of shuttle diplomacy on the Egyptian-Israeli model. 

Whatever the explanation, it seems to me highly unlikely that Mr Gromyko didn't know what he was doing and that, simultaneously, the Soviet nuclear boys didn't know what they were doing when they set off last Saturday that underground test which was measured by Americans as 50 kilotons above the limit of an agreement that has been honoured for the past five years. 

At any rate, the Senate took the rebuff at its face value. 'Who does Gromyko think he is?’ was the instant and general response. Senator Goldwater's earthy invitation was predictable but, to us, anyway, what was not predictable was the serious reaction of the opposition leader, the Republican leader in the Senate, the one man without whose collaboration it's very unlikely that the president can swing the Senate's necessary two-thirds approving vote. 

Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee – who is, by the way, almost certain to declare himself soon as a candidate for the Republican nomination next year – Senator Baker is not a loudmouth or a flag waver or a man quick to anger. As the leader of the opposition, he's by no means bound to oppose the president. On foreign issues as serious as this one, indeed, it's normal in the American process for the president to seek out the leader of the opposition and get his support before he begins to work in private on his own party. 

Mr Carter had expected to discuss SALT with Senator Baker and see what sort of amendments to the treaty both parties could go along with. There was never any suggestion in Washington that the Senate would automatically swallow the package that was put together in Vienna. Even the Democrats' foreign affairs leader in the Senate, Frank Church, said that the Russians must understand that some amendments were bound to be made by the Senate and, I ought to say here, that nobody should presume that all the amendments will be anti-Russian in the sense of wanting to improve America’s nuclear capability at the expense of the Russians. 

There's one powerful senator from Utah, for instance, who thinks that the permissible stockpiles of nuclear arms are much too high for both sides. But Senator Baker, believing that the treaty provides a substantial superiority to the Soviet Union, says he will work diligently to defeat the treaty if these amendments are not adopted. Surely the Russians knew all this? They cannot believe that the treaty would be presented to the Senate and passed at once by a voiced vote, as no doubt it has to be by the Supreme Soviet. 

Mr Gromyko's threat seems to me to stem not from ignorance, but from deliberation. I'd be willing to bet that he's foreseen, or encouraged, what the Russians can interpret as a Senate rejection of the treaty. After that, I leave you to puzzle out the next move but two.

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.