Behind the 'arms limit' talks Reagan's one-sided "zero option"

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WELL in advance of this year's Halloween festivities, Ronald Reagan has been parading behind weird and uncharacteristic masks.

On two occasions in the last month, Reagan has donned the disguise of a peace-monger, making apparent concessions to the USSR in what he would have us believe to be a sincere effort to restrict the nuclear arms race.

As the winter deadline for the deployment of new US Cruise and Pershing missiles draws ever closer, and oppositic in continues at high levels thro ighout Europe, Reagan is desperately looking for a way to heap the blame onto the Soviet Union.

This is why he used his speech to the UN General Assembly on September 26 to make what were portrayed as new proposals to the Moscow leaders.

Yet at the heart of Reagan's proposals was a major confidence trick: he still persists in claiming that US/NATO deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles is motivated simply by the need to counterbalance Soviet intermediate-range SS20 missiles.

The public relations ploy is to exaggerate out of all proportion the number, newness and accuracy of these missiles, most of which are in fact deployed along the Soviet Union's eastern borders with China and incapable of striking European targets.

Deployed

The SS20s were developed in the early 1970s and deployed as long ago as 1977 - to replace their ageing predecessors, the SS4 and SS5.

Even Pentagon publications admit that the SS20 is neither particularly mobile, nor particularly accurate.

It is not - unlike Cruise and Pershing - a 'first strike' weapon. It is designed to meet the potential threat to the Soviet Union posed by NATO missiles in Europe — which include the British 'deterrent' - and by the 'independent' (but equally anti-Soviet) French nuclear strike force.

Ever since the USA began the nuclear arms race in the postwar period, the USSR has faced a superiority of nu mbers of warheads ranged aga inst it by the imperialist US and European governments.

Skimpy

Both Reagan's skimpy 'carrot' of 'arms control' and his grisly 'sticks' of an accelerating arms race focus on preserving and extending that NATO superiority.

For many months the formula used to dress up this demand was the so-called 'zero option' - by which Reagan suggested the USSR would reduce its intermediate missile arsenal in Europe to zero, in exchange for a US agreement to do the same.

But meanwhile British and French missiles would remain pointed at Soviet targets, US nuclear-armed bombers would continue to be based in Europe and on aircraft carriers within easy striking distance of the USSR, and US submarines, too, would remain outside the reckoning.

This one-sided 'zero' has not surprisingly drawn a blank -hostile - response from the Moscow leaders.

Since then Reagan has tried variants of the same deception. In April he offered to 'balance' the number of warheads held by the USA and the USSR in Europe - again deliberately leaving out the French and British Pershing missiles as well as the slower and less certain Cruise as part of any deal.

But once again the hollowness of the Reagan scheme was revealed when the very next day at the United Nations both Britain and France insisted that their bombs and missiles must not be included in* any such deal.

Margaret Thatcher, in fact, has taken a consistently harder line than Reagan, demanding that the USSR must dismantle "all its medium range SS20s"

- including those in Asia - if the deployment of the new US missiles were to be halted.

Most recently, on October 4, Reagan came out with his most baffling proposal yet. Described as the build down' plan, it suggests that older nuclear weaponry be replaced by fewer, newer weapons.

Lethal

Every two land-based missile warheads should be replaced by only one new, more lethal version, he suggested. As for submarine-launched missiles, every three old ones should be replaced by only two new ones.

This is of course no respite from the arms race: on the contrary, it means that the drive for innovation and increasingly efficient methods of wreaking death and destruction would actually increase, leaving fewer, more hideous warheads.

Meanwhile the US administration has stubbornly refused to echo Yuri Andropov's offer of a 'no first use' pledge on nuclear weapons: this is because NATO strategy for the 'defence' of Europe relieș upon a first strike with nuclear weapons.

Similarly, Reagan continues to reject Soviet suggestions of a freeze on new nuclear weapons - claiming that this would allow a Soviet superiority.

The cynical charade of Reagan's 'peace' initiatives will continue right up to the installation of the 572 Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe.

Innocence

But few will be inclined to give all that much credence to Yuri Andropov's protestations of peaceable innocence - particularly in the aftermath of Stalinism's repression of the Polish workers' movement.

The Kremlin leaders, however, unlike the imperialists, do not seek militarily to dominate the world. Their aim is to strike 'frozen' balance with the NATO rules that offers them some stability and the opportunity to focus their energies on preserving their power and privilege at home.

The main pace-setters of the arms race are the US and British warmongers: it is they who must be disarmed as a priority for the workers' movement.

Settling accounts with Andropov and his military cronies is a job for the workers and peasants of Eastern Europe - not the guns, bombs, and missiles of imperialist leaders who would like to destroy the nationalised property relations of the Stalinist-ruled states and return them to the direct exploitation of the capitalist world market. contract with the US government".

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In y Har Sloan