Shakespeare’s great line that “all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” will be true in spades when two great actors meet in Geneva in November. Of course, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is an actor! He’s been giving Academy Award-winning performances playing the role of an “American CEO” with a wife who is a chic Russian “Jackie Kennedy.” The French call it his “charm offensive.”
Most men of importance, at some point in their lives, are taken “up on the mountain” where the tempter can toady to his ego and try to seduce him with a prize so pleasurable at a price that seems so palatable. Only those with virtue and fortitude will respond, as Jesus did, saying “Begone Satan.”
A combination of Gorbachev, his disinformation agents, the liberal anti-Reagan media, and Mondale supporters in the State Department are now working overtime to take President Reagan “up on the mountain” to the Geneva summit and ply him with promises and paeans of praise. “If you will abandon SDI,” they say, “we’ll see that you receive the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Ronald Reagan ought to reply, “The Nobel Peace Prize is tainted money and would be an embarrassment to receive. Henry Kissinger received it for his Paris ‘peace’ agreement which turned Vietnam over to the Communists. That’s not the kind of ‘peace’ agreement I want to give to America.”
To achieve this Plan A of trying to get Reagan to abandon SDI outright, Gorbachev may even promise that he won’t build any more ICBMs or that he will “cancel” a certain number he has planned. Since the Soviets are in massive violation of SALTs I and II, there is no reason to believe him now.
In addition, offensive and defensive systems are not fungibles. It makes no sense to trade off SDI for a slight change in the number of Soviet offensive weapons.
But the tempters are resourceful. They have a variety of proposals all of which would scuttle SDI, but do this under cover of a cloak of concealment.
Plan B is to persuade the President to use SDI as a “bargaining chip” in Geneva. The fact is that SDI is a great bargaining chip only so long as we don’t bargain it away. It has already succeeded in bringing Gorbachev to the peace table, and it can continue to induce him to give concessions so long as we hang on to it. Once we give it up, it will lose its magic quality to force Gorbachev to be reasonable.
Plan C is to try to get President Reagan to “scale down” SDI so that it means “research only, not deployment,” leaving testing and development in a limbo which the Soviets can interpret to their own advantage. This would be tantamount to binding us NOT to use our own technology to defend ourselves.
America has NO defenses against incoming missiles today. Ninety percent of the American people want a defense, and we have successfully tested the technology. Reagan should say openly, “SDI is non-negotiable. We’re going to build SDI now, and we invite the Soviets to build their own.”
If Reagan won’t agree to abandon SDI directly or indirectly, the tempters will fall back on Plan D and ask him to extend the 1972 ABM Treaty for an additional ten years. Reagan should reply, “Do you mean the MAD ABM Treaty which enshrined the immoral concept of Mutual Assured Destruction?”
That 1972 MAD ABM Treaty simply assures that America will suffer the destruction so vividly portrayed in the famous ABC-TV movie called “The Day After.” It was a mistake to sign the Treaty in the first place; it is insane (MAD) to allow it to threaten our national security.
It’s time for the United States to use Article XV which grants us the legal right to withdraw from the ABM Treaty if we decide that events have jeopardized our “supreme interests.” They certainly are jeopardized by the Soviet missile force.
President Reagan should say, “Here’s the deal I offer you, Mikhail. Let’s change the arms race from a race in offensive weapons to a race in defensive weapons. That’s the way to make offensive nuclear weapons obsolete. Instead of racing for Mutual Assured Destruction, let’s race for Mutual Assured Survival.”
