TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070389/07038900.052

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.7 KB | 73 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 32

America Abroad

A Yankee in Gorbachev's Court


By Strobe Talbott


    Except for the presence of a visitor, it was just another
dry run for doomsday. A captain and a first lieutenant of the
Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces simultaneously turned two keys
that would, in wartime, send hurtling toward the U.S. an SS-19
ballistic missile with six independently targeted thermonuclear
warheads. Watching from a corner of the cramped underground
control center was a tall, droll Yankee naval officer who
describes himself as a "country boy from Oklahoma": Admiral
William J. Crowe, 64, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of
Staff and the highest-ranking American military official ever
to visit the U.S.S.R.

    He was on an exchange program of sorts: his former
counterpart, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, came to the U.S. last
summer. Akhromeyev, now a close adviser to President Mikhail
Gorbachev, accompanied Crowe on an eleven-day, nine-stop tour
that stretched from Murmansk in the far north to Sochi on the
Black Sea. Last week Crowe was summoned to the Kremlin for an
audience with Gorbachev. The Soviet leader used the occasion to
compliment the man who had appointed Crowe Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs in 1985: "Former President Reagan saw the way
things should go and turned the situation in the right
direction."

    As Crowe knows, past protestations by the Kremlin of its
peaceful intentions have been belied by the size and menace of
its war machine. Soviet strategists have traditionally stressed
that the best defense is a good offense. To the outside world,
the result has often looked more offensive than defensive.
Gorbachev and Akhromeyev tried to convince Crowe that something
fundamental has changed. "Nonoffensive defense" is a key part of
the vocabulary of Soviet "new thinking," and it was a major
theme of Crowe's tour. The U.S.S.R. would launch its missiles,
he was told, only in retaliation, never in a first strike. Near
Minsk he observed an armored unit practice "tactical
withdrawal" (i.e., retreat) in response to an enemy attack. At
the Voroshilov General Staff Academy in Moscow, where senior
officers play war games on huge maps, an instructor stressed
that for the past two years, the scenarios have always begun
with the other side shooting first. Neither host nor guest was
so rude as to make the obvious point that in almost all cases,
the "other side" could only be the U.S.

    Toward the end of Akhromeyev's trip to the U.S. last year,
he remarked privately that the experience had convinced him
that the U.S. would never start a war. The Soviets clearly
hoped Crowe's return visit would inspire a reciprocal
conviction. But Crowe was not willing to go quite that far. He
left for home, he said, "understanding emotionally what I'd only
understood intellectually before: the vastness of the real
estate for which the Soviet armed forces are responsible, and
the historical vulnerability to invasion. That's something hard
for Americans to conceive of. After all, we don't remember being
invaded by Mexico or Canada."

    Nonetheless, he cautioned, what matters most is "whether a
country has got more men and weapons than it needs for defense
alone." The Soviets still have a 3-to-1 advantage in tanks and
up to a 7-to-1 advantage over the U.S. in artillery. Crowe
headed home believing that Gorbachev's reforms and U.S.-Soviet
arms-control agreements may chip away at those adverse ratios
over time. But he still sees a very real Soviet threat, not in
the intentions of the current leaders but in the capabilities
that may be available to less benign ones in the future.