The Height Of Irresponsibility

For a few days recently President Reagan's budget-cutting plan and the war in El Salvador were edged out of the headlines by a new round of developments in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. It all began when Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev decided to counter the increasingly tough Cold War rhetoric of the U.S. with the one kind of Soviet threat that Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig don't know how to deal with. He threatened to negotiate.

Brezhnev's "threat" came in his speech at the Soviet Party Congress in late February and was repeated in a series of articles in the Soviet press and in a personal letter to all the western European heads of state. In these statements Brezhnev called for a summit meeting between himself and Reagan, the reopening of the SALT talks, and a moratorium on the deployment of new medium-range missiles in Europe.

All of Brezhnev's proposals reflected Soviet self-interest. The Soviet economy cannot afford to keep up with another major round of military escalation, and at a time when events in Poland and Afghanistan have the USSR standing very low in world opinion there is a great deal of propaganda value to be had in appearing to be the superpower that wants peace. But even assuming the worst about Brezhnev's intentions, the Reagan administration's non-response has been disturbing.

Reagan has flatly rejected the call for a summit, saying that any such meeting could only be held after the Soviets change their policies regarding Afghanistan, Poland, Africa, and Central America.

Brezhnev's offer to reopen the SALT talks represented a direct reversal of previous Soviet policy, but it too seems to have fallen on deaf ears. It is the Reagan administration's stated policy to postpone any arms control talks until the U.S. has begun a massive military buildup. Toward this end Reagan has so far failed to appoint a head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and has cancelled a long-scheduled March meeting with the Soviets to discuss compliance with already existing arms control treaties because U.S. officials were unprepared.

The most complicated part of Brezhnev's flurry of proposals was his call for a moratorium on new missiles in Europe. Under this plan the Soviet Union would refrain from adding more SS-20 missiles to its stockpile of 200, and the U.S. and NATO would stop their plans to deploy Pershing II and cruise missiles. The moratorium would be followed by negotiations to reduce the number of SS-20s already in place.

U.S. and NATO officials have simply scoffed at this proposal. They say that it would only serve to freeze a Soviet advantage. Like much nuclear strategy, this line of thinking sounds reasonable but is based on a flawed assumption. It is true that the Soviets have a nuclear advantage in land-based missiles in Europe, but the advantage is irrelevant given the existence of NATO's submarine-based missiles and the entire U.S. strategic arsenal. U.S. insistence on the necessity of the Pershing II and cruise systems in Europe is based on the assumption that a "limited" nuclear war can be fought in the European theater without escalating to involve the superpowers' strategic arsenals.

The picture that is emerging of the Reagan administration's posture in relations with the Soviet Union is summed up by the code word "linkage." By linkage Reagan and his people mean that the U.S. will not talk to the Soviets about arms control without bringing in the whole range of geo-political grudges and points of ideological competition between the two governments.

Any critique of linkage has to begin by agreeing wholeheartedly that the Soviet Union's repression of dissidents and intervention in the affairs of other nations is immoral and unjust. The USSR is an imperialist power that subjugates the basic rights and needs of other peoples to its own real or imagined security needs, economic self-interest, and lust for power.

But we can't ignore the fact that moral outrage at Soviet imperialism has been used to blind us to the United States' very similar actions in Iran, Vietnam, Chile, and El Salvador. The fact is that both superpowers look at the world with a tunnel vision that only allows them to see the evil of the other. But in today's global politics there is no more room for a worldview that sees only "our" interests and "their" aggression. The possession of nuclear weapons makes the U.S. and the Soviet Union responsible for more than their narrowly defined security needs or spheres of influence. They are directly responsible for the fate of all humankind.

This situation makes it all the more crucial that Christians be able to step outside the self-serving claims of their particular nations and see the world through the eyes of the victims--the victims of present U.S. and Soviet militarism and the potential victims of nuclear war. When we see the world from this perspective, it becomes clear that the claims and counterclaims of the superpowers are illusions, that what is real is human life and human suffering. It becomes obvious that in a world loaded down with 50,000 nuclear weapons it is the height of irresponsibility for our president to pass up any opportunity to talk peace.

Danny Collum was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.