Zero Option Scores A Zero

So far President Reagan's "zero option" proposal on medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe has successfully defused the issue on this side of the Atlantic. It has been hailed as a bold initiative for peace, one seemingly out of character with Reagan's earlier foreign policy posture. But in retrospect it will probably look more like a bold media coup consistent with the president's uncanny knack for selling, via television, the most disastrous policies.

This will likely be the case because it takes two to negotiate, and the Soviets see the zero option as a completely one-sided proposal for them to give up something for nothing. They simply don't consider their SS-20 missiles to be equivalent to NATO's proposed Pershing 2 and cruise missiles.

That Reagan agreed to begin the Geneva talks at all was solely due to political pressure from Europe. That, added to the fact that the chief negotiator for the U.S., Paul Nitze, is the man who created much of the present Cold War hysteria through his Committee on the Present Danger, makes it likely that the zero option will prove to be more a ploy to buy time in hopes that the European Peace Movement falters than a serious negotiating position.

In his internationally televised speech in November, Reagan laid out the rationale for the deployment of Pershing 2 and cruise missiles in Europe in a format that gave no opportunity for questions. And to this day some very basic questions about the necessity and wisdom of the missiles program still haven't been raised sufficiently in this country. They are questions that the European Peace Movement has been raising and answering for almost three years now. But the Europeans' arguments have received little attention in this country, where moderates see the movement based on alienated youth's irrational fear of the future and conservatives see it based in Moscow.

But any fear in Europe is well-founded. The alleged need for medium-range missiles in Europe capable of hitting the Soviet Union assumes a nuclear war limited to that continent. Given the powerful and accurate U.S. weapons already aimed at the USSR, these new missiles would be needed only if the U.S. hoped to use them against the Soviet Union with the idea that the Soviets would retaliate only against the European source of the attack.

This understandably disturbs many Europeans. It should disturb us all, because though it is highly improbable that the Soviets would limit their response to Europe, it will be much easier for the U.S. to push the nuclear button if there is the illusion that they might.

A great deal has been made in recent months of the need for balance in European theater nuclear forces. The U.S. has produced figures showing the Soviet Union with a six to one advantage in European nuclear delivery systems and claimed this supposed advantage as the reason for the new missiles. The Soviet Union has countered with figures showing a rough parity.

A large part of the discrepancy comes from the difficulty in counting bombers that could deliver either conventional or nuclear warheads. But the most significant difference is that the U.S. figures do not count the American and British Poseidon and Polaris submarine-based missiles assigned to NATO. Before the "need" for Pershing 2 and cruise was discovered, the NATO submarine-based missiles and the Soviet SS-20s were considered to balance each other.

The U.S. figures also do not count any of the British and French "independent" nuclear arsenals that would certainly be used against the Soviets in a war and should be part of any fair estimate. When these factors are considered there probably is a rough balance of nuclear forces in Europe today.

But in the last 10 years the overkill arsenals of the superpowers have made quantitative measures of the arms race irrelevant. The competition now centers on qualitative escalations, and qualitatively the Pershing 2 and cruise missiles are not equivalent weapons to the SS-20. They are a provocative escalation. A Pershing 2 based in West Germany could reach and destroy a target in the Soviet Union in four minutes.

The only way the Soviets could defend themselves against such a weapon would be to hit it before it is launched. This fact, another incentive for war, is the last thing Europe or the world needs. And the cruise missiles, while relatively slow moving, are reportedly able to elude all existing warning systems, raising the specter of a sneak attack. Small and easily hidden, they could sabotage any future attempts at arms control.

Even when it is admitted that the new missiles aren't really needed to counter the SS-20s, apologists for the administration's position still maintain that the deployment decision must be upheld because the Soviets must perceive the NATO alliance as strong for deterrence to work. But many Europeans have decided that nuclear weapons anywhere pose a greater threat to Europe than the territorial ambitions of either superpower. They have come to believe that disarmament and a stable system of international cooperation is the only defense for Europe.

The more visionary elements of the peace movement in Europe have begun to think in terms of a continent where mass movements in the East for democracy, like the one that continues in Poland, and in the West for disarmament could converge to loosen the grip of the U.S. and USSR, dissolve the rigidity of the NATO and Warsaw Pact blocs, and eventually create a nuclear-free zone of sanity and cooperation wedged between the two superpowers. It may seem far-fetched, but that kind of thinking is just as threatening to the U.S. government as Solidarity is to the Kremlin, and just as deserving of the support of people in this country who desire peace and justice.

The last two U.S. administrations have talked a lot about the need for the European nations to assume more of the military burden of the NATO alliance. But the real need is for us in this country to hold up our end of a new kind of North Atlantic alliance, an alliance of peoples and churches pressing for disarmament. We can begin by joining our European allies in opposing the deployment of Pershing 2 and cruise missiles regardless of what happens at the Geneva talks.

Danny Collum was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.