February 1, 1973
Page 3013
MUTUAL AND BALANCED REDUCTIONS
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, I welcome the beginning of preparatory talks in Vienna on mutual and balanced force reductions in Europe. These talks will be difficult and may take several years to complete. Nevertheless, we must begin to work energetically toward the mutual withdrawal of both NATO and Warsaw Pact troops from Central Europe. I hope that the President will in fact make these talks a "front-burner" issue in 1973, along with other European issues, as he suggested in yesterday's news conference.
I ask unanimous consent that the articles on this subject be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the articles were ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
[From the New York Times, Feb. 1, 1973]
EAST AND WEST OPEN TALKS FOR PARLEY ON FORCE CUT
(By Drew Middleton)
VIENNA, January 31.– Twelve countries from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and seven from the Warsaw Pact met here today to begin preparation for a conference later this year on the withdrawal of forces from Central Europe.
Two procedural disputes threatened to delay such a conference as the first informal meeting was held.
The Soviet Union, over strong NATO opposition, wants to widen the conference to include not only Rumania and Bulgaria, which have no forces in Central Europe although they are Soviet allies, but also European neutrals. The Russians are also insisting that the conference deal with the "mutual reduction" of troops and not the "mutual and balanced force reductions" that the West wants – the word "balanced" meaning that the Soviet Union should withdraw more troops, since it has more in the area.
In addition, the West points out, the Soviet Union is closer geographically to its troops in Central Europe than the United States is to its forces in West Germany.
Rumania and Bulgaria did attend today's meeting, but in Western eyes their status at future sessions is undecided. The other East bloc participants were the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
The West was represented by the United States, Britain, Canada, West Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, which all have forces in Central Europe, and by five so-called flank countries. These are Norway and Denmark, on the northern flank, and Greece, Turkey and Italy, on the southern.
Jonathan Dean, the chief American delegate, said that NATO had been "pressing" for the conference for a long time and that "we are going to do our best to give it a constructive outcome."
Oleg N. Khlestov, head of the Soviet delegation, described the talks in a statement to the press as dealing with "mutual reduction of armed forces and armaments in Europe." He is head of the judicial and contract department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry.
Later a Soviet diplomat objected strenuously to the initials MBFR on the badges issued by the Austrian Press Bureau to newsmen. Thereafter, "mutual and balanced force reductions," were eliminated from the badges.
NATO wants the talks focused on Central Europe, where there is the largest concentration of forces. The Soviet Union and its allies have a ratio of 1.7 to one in the manpower, 3 to 1 in tanks and 2 to 1 in aircraft in that area.
The Soviet Union has 20 divisions, with about 225,000 men, in East Germany. There are about 185,000 United States army troops in West Germany. There are also five Soviet divisions in Czechoslovakia, two in Poland and four in Hungary, with about 120,000 men.
On the southern flank, the three NATO allies, Greece, Turkey and Italy, have a slight edge in manpower over Rumania and Bulgaria and NATO has a larger number of warships and aircraft.
The NATO flank countries are to be less than full participants but more than observers. Plans call for them to speak and circulate papers at meetings, but not to vote. Soviet sources said that a similar status would be a minimum requirement for Bulgaria and Rumania.
The seven NATO states with forces in central Europe were named by NATO to represent the West in negotiations. NATO took the initiative on force reductions in a communique issued after a ministerial conference at Reykjavik, Iceland, in June, 1968.
France, which has two divisions in West Germany, has opposed the talks since they were first proposed.
The Soviet Union in its note of Jan. 24, suggested not only the inclusion of Rumania and Bulgaria but also countries outside of both alliances such as Sweden and Yugoslavia.
One diplomat said the West's basic reaction to the inclusion of neutrals is: "We can't have the Maltese or the Swedes telling us where we should deploy our forces."
[From the Washington Post, Feb. 1, 1973]
EAST-WEST TALKS ON FORCE REDUCTIONS OPEN IN VIENNA
(By John M. Goshko)
VIENNA, January 31– Representatives of 19 countries met here today to formally open the long-awaited talks on the possibility of negotiating a reduction of the military forces poised against each other in central Europe.
These negotiations – referred to in diplomatic parlance as mutual and balanced force reductions or MBFR – represent what is potentially the most significant step so far in the movement toward an East-West detente in Europe.
If successful, they would mean a big start on dismantling the NATO and Warsaw Pact military machines that have faced each other across the Iron Curtain since the beginnings of the Cold War.
The talks are especially important to the United States, which has been the prime mover in the long struggle to launch force reduction negotiations. The Nixon administration views force reduction talks as the best solution to the problem of maintaining a safe military balance in Europe while satisfying congressional pressures for bringing home substantial numbers of the American troops stationed on the continent.
For this reason, Washington is very anxious that the talks now beginning here, which are characterized as "exploratory" in nature, will lead to full fledged negotiations sometime this fall.
As Jonathan Dean, chief of the U.S. delegation, said today: "We have been pressing for this for a long time. We are going to do our best to give it a constructive outcome."
As today's half-hour ceremonial opening in Vienna's former imperial palace, the Hofburg, made clear, a long list of technical and procedural problems must first be resolved before the participating countries can even reach the point of starting to explore whether actual negotiations are feasible.
Western delegates said afterward that there probably will not even be another formal session before Monday at the earliest. In the interim, they added, the various delegations will be occupied full time in an informal, feeling-out process.
The NATO side, under strong American prodding, has taken the position that full participation in the talks should be limited to those countries on either side that actually have forces stationed in Central Europe in order for the talks to be effective.
Accordingly, NATO has proposed that the West be represented in the talks by the United States. Canada, Britain, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands as full participants. The NATO "flank" countries with an interest in the talks – Italy, Denmark, Norway, Greece and Turkey – would take part in a limited, non-voting way and be represented on a rotating basis.
NATO further proposed that the Warsaw Pact be represented on a fully participating basis by the Soviet Union, East Germany, Hungary. Poland and Czechoslovakia. However, the pact's other two members, Romania and Bulgaria, have also sent delegations here and have been demanding that they be admitted to full participation.
So far, the West, and in particular the United States, has been unwilling to accede to this demand.
Western sources said that at today's meeting, marked by a brief ceremonial address from Austrian Foreign Minister Rudolf Kirchschlaeger, the Communist side made no mention of an earlier Warsaw Pact proposal that the talks be thrown open to all interested European governments, including neutrals. This, the sources said, led the West to conclude that the question of neutral country participation is now a dead issue.
One fundamental problem that Western diplomats had been expecting also came up today when the head of the Soviet delegation, Oleg N. Khlestov, protested the inclusion of the word "balanced" in press credentials and other documents relating to the talks.
The phrase "mutual and balanced force reductions" was coined by the West out of recognition that the Communist side enjoys substantial superiority of numbers in both men and weapons over the combined NATO forces. In addition, geographic factors would also give a natural advantage to the Warsaw Pact in any force reductions, since American troops would be withdrawn across the Atlantic while Soviet forces would only have to pull back a few hundred miles.
For these reasons, the West has always stressed the word "balanced" to emphasize that any reductions should be conducted according to a formula that would give some offsetting compensation to the West. The most commonly suggested plan has involved the idea that Warsaw Pact reductions should be greater than those made by NATO.
However, the Soviets have never used the word "balanced" and their objections today indicated that it is going to take a lot of arduous bargaining before they might be induced to accept the principle of reductions on anything other than a strict one-for-one basis.
[From the New York Times, Jan. 29, 1973]
TENSIONS OF TALKING
Negotiations are a means to an end. Serious problems can arise when nations spend so much of their creative energies on getting talks started that they grow inarticulate about how the talks should end, about the desired outcome. This is a looming danger in the twelve-nation Vietnam peace conference which the United States is moving to get under way Feb. 26. It seems already to be the fate of the long-awaited East-West talks to reduce military forces deployed in Central Europe.
The Soviet Union has formally accepted Jan. 31 as starting date for this third fixture on the diplomatic calendar, alongside the European Security Conference and the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. That was anticipated; what was unexpected was Moscow's wish to expand the number of countries participating. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was right to reject this Soviet proposal, even though the dispute may delay the meeting's opening. A rule of thumb in postwar diplomacy has been that the more nations involved in a negotiation, the less meaningful its results. For the Kremlin to try broadening the meeting now is an ominous hint that it has little serious business in mind for the present, except to test the strains inside the Western alliance.
But then how much serious business does Washington have in mind? It is almost with relief that Administration officials warn that the force-reduction talks will go on for a long, long time. One of the rewards for a leisurely pace could be an indefinite postponement of pressures from Congress for an early, unilateral reduction in the 300,000-man American garrison in Europe. The mere fact that talks are under way can be used to deflate advocates of a cutback, laying them open to the now familiar charges of undercutting the President by stealing his "bargaining chips" while he is in the midst of play.
If American critics of the military establishment are wary that the force-reduction talks are really designed to perpetuate present troop levels, European Governments are nervous at the opposite possibility: enthusiasm for detente may create irresistible pressure for cutting United States forces in Europe, if not next year then the next or the next. In the wake of withdrawal from Vietnam, Americans may move over-quickly toward withdrawal around the world. A leading British newspaper, The Guardian, scrutinized America's post-Vietnam mood and concluded: "The European commitment has been damaged – more so perhaps than most Europeans have yet realized. And the foundations of the North Atlantic Alliance, in mutual confidence between the United States and other Governments, have been severely shaken."
This is the uneasy atmosphere in which the United States and the West confront the Soviet Union on the most sensitive issue of post-World War II Europe. President Nixon has a few points to clear up inside the Western alliance before he tries anything more with the East. The Vietnam conference is bound to show up even greater diversity of goals. Negotiation among adversaries is always preferable to aloof standoff, but when the process of talking is elevated beyond a means to an end and becomes an end in itself, it can open as many problems as it can resolve.