Seize the Moment
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Third, the permitted number of “nondeployed” missiles should be reduced. Each side produces more missiles than are put on active duty. Most excess systems on the U.S. side are consumed in test flights. But there is substantial evidence, including statements by top Soviet military leaders, that the Soviet Union produces more missiles than needed to fulfill testing requirements. That raises concerns about the possibility of a covert Soviet strategic capability, a danger accentuated with the advent of road- and rail-mobile Soviet ICBMs. The only difference between a deployed and nondeployed mobile ICBM is whether it has been loaded onto its trucklike or railcar launchers. Without much tighter limits on nondeployed missiles, START offers no guarantees of enhanced strategic stability.
Fourth, perimeter-portal monitoring should be established around all plants producing first-stage rocket motors for mobile ICBMs. While limits on silo-based ICBMs can be verified with a high degree of confidence through satellite reconnaissance, monitoring mobile ICBMs represents a very difficult challenge. The only way to be confident about the estimated number of such systems, both deployed and nondeployed, is to monitor at the factory gate the total output of first-stage rockets, which are the critical component that gives the missiles an intercontinental range. Moscow rejected perimeter-portal monitoring of those facilities, and the United States erred by accepting such verification only at mobile-missile final-assembly plants. But the Soviet military can—and has in the past—married the first-stage rockets to the other missile components at locations other than the assembly plants.
Until stable democracies emerge in the former Soviet Union, deterrence and strategic stability will remain critical priorities. The hysterical fears expressed by many observers about the possession of nuclear weapons by newly independent republics of the former Soviet Union are misplaced. A democratic Ukraine with nuclear weapons is less of a threat than the nuclear-armed Soviet Union was for four decades. The real danger is that former Soviet nuclear experts will be hired by states like Iraq and Libya.
As we look beyond START, we must also address the issue of the role of strategic defenses. In 1972, I signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which sharply restricted the deployment of ground-based and banned space-based defenses against ballistic missiles. While the agreement suited our interests at the time, it is time to renegotiate its terms. A comprehensive nationwide defense against nuclear attack remains unfeasible. But a limited defense of our command and control systems and nuclear forces and a “thin” defense of the country as a whole—such as President Bush’s proposed Global Protection Against Limited Strikes system—would significantly strengthen strategic stability. Moreover, the United States could offer eventually to extend these defenses to protect all nations—including the republics of the former Soviet Union—from limited ballistic missile attacks.
In addition, as more third world states acquire ballistic missile capabilities, the United States cannot afford to remain defenseless against them. Today, fifteen developing nations have such capability, with three more expected to join the club before the year 2000. It is only a matter of time before rogue states such as Iraq or Libya acquire missiles with intercontinental ranges. Iraq has already developed a ballistic missile with a range of 1,250 miles—enough to reach Stavropol, Gorbachev’s original Communist party base. While Gorbachev showed some signs of flexibility on renegotiating the ABM Treaty, the new noncommunist governments in the former Soviet Union might be more interested, especially since those countries technologically closest to acquiring nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles are geographically closer to their territories than to the United States.
Some observers contend that because of the democratic revolution in the Soviet Union, arms control has become passé. After all, they argue, democratic nations have seldom waged aggressive wars. While we welcome the democratic revolution in the former Soviet Union, we must recognize that its success has been partial and its longevity is far from certain. We must base our defense policies on a potential adversary’s capabilities, not his presumed intentions. We have had an era of new thinking in military policy under Gorbachev. We now need an era of new actions in defense policy under the new noncommunist leadership.
We must seize the moment to reduce the burden of arms in a way that will serve the interests of the newly independent Soviet republics as well as ours. It is obscene that the former Soviet Union should be spending so much on arms even when it faces absolutely no threat from a major power abroad.
Bludgeoning Eastern Europe’s economies. Since the anticommunist revolutions of 1989, Gorbachev retaliated by waging economic war against the new Eastern European democracies. He orchestrated a two-pronged assault—extorting high prices for Soviet raw materials and shutting off Soviet markets to East European exports. He inflicted more damage through his policies than we could offset through our aid programs. With the new leadership in Moscow and the former Soviet republics, we should find ways to reverse this destructive process, increasing trade and stimulating both economies.
During its forty-five years of domination, Moscow made Eastern Europe dependent on Soviet raw materials, particularly energy. In 1988, Poland bought 80 percent of its energy resources from Moscow, while Czechoslovakia imported 95 percent and Hungary 90 percent. These imports were purchased at negotiated prices well below world market levels and paid for in the soft currencies of the Soviet bloc. When the East Europeans won independence, that changed. Gorbachev demanded payment in hard currencies for goods, thereby adding $20 billion to Eastern Europe’s energy bill overnight, an increase four times greater than the one the United States experienced in the 1973 oil shock.
At the same time, the Soviet Union canceled thousands of orders for East European goods as economic retaliation for the political break with Moscow. Since the Kremlin had forced the East Europeans to meet its requirements since World War II, all were acutely dependent on Soviet markets. After the revolutions in 1989, Soviet trade officials made the rounds of Eastern European capitals canceling long-standing export orders, unceremoniously telling the Czechoslovakians, for example, that Moscow no longer wanted any more of “your damn tram cars.” Gorbachev’s overnight cancellations and refusal to pay for goods under contract—causing East European exports to fall to one-quarter of their previous level—severely undercut their ability to earn the funds needed to purchase raw materials, as well as triggering massive unemployment in districts geared for production for the Soviet Union.
Backing third world totalitarian regimes. Before we consider helping the former Soviet Union, its leaders should help themselves by terminating their aid to their brutal client regimes abroad. In 1990, Gorbachev budgeted $6 billion for Cuba, $2.5 billion for Vietnam, $3.5 billion for Afghanistan, $1.5 billion for Syria, $1 billion each for North Korea, Angola, and Libya, $500 million for Ethiopia, and $50 million for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua—a total of over $17 billion, which could have bought 22 million tons of grain or retrained 11 million workers with skills needed in a market economy.
The case of Afghanistan is particularly galling. For thirteen years, the Kremlin has propped up the cruelest tin-pot totalitarians in the third world. When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he authorized an escalation of the brutality of the Soviet military campaign in Afghanistan and gave the go-ahead for a terrorist campaign in Pakistan, which eventually killed 5,000 civilians in 4,500 bombings. In addition, strong circumstantial evidence implicated Moscow in the August 1988 assassination of Pakistani president Zia ul-Haq.
In a desperate effort to find a winning formula, Moscow had traded one Afghan ruler for another until choosing President Najibullah, who earned his stripes as head of the KhAD, the Afghan KGB, where he personally oversaw torture and mass execution of suspected opponents. It is ironic to note that when I visited Moscow in March 1991, KGB chairman Kryuchkov brazenly described the Kremlin’s designated killer as “being too humanitarian.” Incredibly, some U.S. journalists subsequently swallowed this propaganda line in referring to Najibull
ah as a “moderate.”
The new governments in the former Soviet republics should take decisive action. Since the Soviet withdrawal in early 1989, Gorbachev has obstructed U.S.-Soviet talks to devise a just political settlement of the conflict, while keeping Najibullah’s government alive through $300 million in aid each month and thousands of Soviet advisers who not only provide the regime’s backbone but also man the SCUD missile bases around Kabul. The U.S.-Soviet agreement to cut off military aid to both the Kabul regime and the resistance and to hold U.N.-supervised elections is flawed. Kabul has stockpiled at least two years of arms and ammunition, while the resistance scrapes by from day to day. A just settlement can only be assured if the elections are preceded by the removal of Najibullah from power and the creation of a neutral transition regime, headed by the former king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, that would take full control of the state—including the armed forces and security services—and that would conduct the elections for the new government.
The new leaders of the former Soviet Union—particularly in the republics—should have a natural sympathy for the plight of the Afghan people. The courage of the Afghan resistance was a major factor in precipitating the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. When the Soviet army failed to win decisively in Afghanistan, the peoples of satellite states recognized that their historic opportunity had arrived—that the Kremlin lacked the will to pay the price of empire. Within two years, Soviet democrats had won the same battle. As a spark that started the process, the cause of the Afghan people should receive top priority in our new relationship.
As Yeltsin put it, “Moscow can’t afford foreign charity.” The recently announced pullout of military and intelligence personnel from Cuba and cutoff of economic and military aid does not go far enough. Much of Moscow’s assistance to Castro has come not through grants but subsidized trade deals in which, for example, the Soviet Union purchases Cuban commodities at prices far above the free-market levels. It is time to let Castro sink or swim—something which thousands of Cubans trying to escape from the last bastion of communism in the western hemisphere have tragically been forced to do.
Escalating espionage and active measures. If the cold war has ended, Gorbachev never got the message to the KGB under Kryuchkov. The carefully cultivated international image of a kinder, gentler Soviet Union is starkly contradicted by the escalation of hostile intelligence activities directed at the United States and our allies in recent years. Every great power needs an intelligence service capable of clandestine collection of information about actual and potential threats to its security, but the KGB’s activities—both in scale and type—extended far beyond the legitimate requirements of a normal country.
Like the Soviet military, the KGB appears to operate outside any budget constraint. The entire U.S. intelligence community—which includes not only the CIA but also the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, parts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other agencies—employs approximately 35,000 people. The ranks of the KGB and the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence service, number over 900,000. Moreover, according to Western intelligence services, the level of Soviet espionage activity has gone up, not down, in the Gorbachev years, despite the reduction in international tensions.
A key focus of Soviet espionage has been the theft of Western technologies. In the 1930s, the Kremlin sought to boost the Soviet economy by stealing scientific knowledge and technologies—from basic research to blueprints for turnkey factories—through spies. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet intelligence services returned to this practice with a vengeance, targeting not only military and dual-use but also nonmilitary technologies. The CIA reported that in the early 1980s Soviet intelligence services targeted 3,500 items annually. The KGB’s Directorate T, which specializes in acquiring scientific and technological data, orchestrated efforts that secured about one-third of these items every year. In the Gorbachev era, intelligence officers in Directorate T were not furloughed but rather worked overtime.
In addition, the former Gorbachev government continued a vigorous program of so-called “active measures,” covert political activities such as disinformation designed to advance Soviet foreign policy. The KGB has become expert in the use of forgeries to discredit Western governments and in planting false stories in the world’s newspapers. One current line of disinformation, which has surfaced in the news media throughout the third world, claims that the AIDS epidemic started after the virus was created by Pentagon experiments to develop new biological weapons. Another widely disseminated KGB fabrication asserted that the United States systematically buys Latin American babies for use in medical experiments and for organ transplants. With the KGB now controlled by Yeltsin’s Russia, we can expect a rapid termination of Moscow’s disinformation and espionage campaigns.
These are the most important changes that we must insist upon. While we can pursue far more ambitious initiatives with the new commonwealth than was possible when Gorbachev ruled the Kremlin, the new post-Soviet leadership must overhaul its military and security structures from top to bottom so that they will uphold rather than subvert democracy.
All of these practices must stop before we can forge ahead in a wider cooperative relationship with the new leaders in Moscow and the former Soviet republics. Yeltsin and the democrats around him will not need a hard sell. They have already begun to implement many needed changes and will be receptive to our suggestions. But we should not provide any economic assistance until their foreign policy has made an irreversible break with the past.
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Once the problems of the past are cleared from the agenda, we can turn to the opportunities for wider cooperation for the future. In light of the dire crisis in the former Soviet Union, Western assistance to the newly independent republics must be the initial focus of our partnership.
We must understand when such aid would help and when it would hurt. Under Gorbachev’s previous government, Western aid would have undercut, not bolstered, the prospects for reform. Western proposals for unconditional aid or for incremental assistance linked to partial reforms were totally counterproductive, encouraging Soviet policymakers to lobby Western leaders rather than get on with the business of radically reforming their own economy.
In my conversation with Gorbachev in 1991, I discovered that he retained his steadfast faith in the flawed tenets of Marxism-Leninism. I had noted his observation in Time magazine in May 1990 that “as we dismantle the Stalinist system, we are not retreating from socialism, but we are moving toward it.” I had assumed, however, that his thinking had grown as the Soviet economy had shrunk. I was thus surprised by how adamantly he defended the Soviet Union’s socialist system. He argued that Soviet society was profoundly “different” from those in the West and that the tradition of “communes” in rural Russia had created a setting conducive to state-directed economic life. He made no bones about his intention to hew to the straight-and-narrow path of socialism. The sad truth was that a college freshman who passed Economics 101 knew more about the workings of the market than the former president of the Soviet Union. While Gorbachev was a brilliant politician, he knew very little about economics—and what he did know was wrong.
His economic mismanagement brought catastrophic consequences upon the Soviet people. Industrial production fell by 20 percent in 1990 and an estimated 40 percent in 1991. Total GNP declined approximately 15 percent in 1991—worse than that of the Great Depression in the United States. Inflation, which exceeded 20 percent in 1990, soared to over 100 percent in 1991 on the heels of a 300 percent increase in the money supply. The 71 million Soviet citizens who lived on $15 per month or less were pushed to the edge of destitution. The monetary “overhang”—the pool of pent-up buying power spawned by inflated wages and the absence of goods to purchase—mounted to an estimated 450 billion rubles. The red ink of the state budget ballooned to 10 percent of GNP in 1990, more than double the level of the U.S. federal deficit. Over 50 percent of
record Soviet food harvests were wasted, either rotting in the fields and in transport or stolen outright.
The reason for the failure of Gorbachev’s economic reforms can be summarized in two words: half measures. For seven years, he futilely searched for a workable halfway house between the free market and state socialism. No one can fault him for a lack of ingenuity. On twelve occasions—nine during the last two years alone—Gorbachev and his advisers tabled a new proposed economic plan to rescue the Soviet system. But Gorbachev was tilting at windmills. He was trying to revive an economic system that was dead beyond resurrection. Rapid and self-sustaining economic growth has occurred only in countries that respect the right of individuals to own private property. Yet as late as mid-1991, he continued to denounce private property, remarking in an interview, “People do not want to work in the factory whose owner has accumulated money in some unknown way. Small private property might be allowed in trade.”
In working with the new noncommunist leaders in Moscow and the former Soviet republics, we should not allow the euphoria of their political victory to cloud our judgment on the issue of economic reform. Along with Western Europe and Japan, the United States should provide economic aid once needed reforms are in place. But we should stipulate clear conditions that must be met before major aid could be considered, both for our sake and for that of the reformers in the former Soviet Union. A banker does a borrower no favor by making him a bad loan.