The Negotiator

“Ah don’t always agree with mah friend John Cormack but, hell, this is America and I’ll flatten any man who says he doesn’t have the right to speak his mind.”

And it worked. The combination of the arrow-straight New Englander, with his powerful and persuasive delivery, and the deceptively folksy Southwesterner took the vital black, Hispanic, and Irish votes and won. Since taking office Cormack had deliberately involved Odell in decision-making at the highest level. Now they sat opposite each other to discuss a treaty Cormack knew Odell disliked profoundly. Flanking the President were four other intimates: Jim Donaldson, Secretary of State; Bill Walters, the Attorney General; Hubert Reed of the Treasury; and Morton Sta

On either side of Odell were Brad Johnson, a brilliant black man from Missouri who had lectured in defense studies at Cornell and was now National Security Adviser, and Lee Alexander, Director of the CIA, who had replaced Judge William Webster a few months into Cormack’s incumbency. Alexander was there because, if the Soviets intended to breach the treaty terms, America would need rapid knowledge through her satellites and intelligence community with their in-place assets on the ground.

As the eight men read the final terms, none was in any doubt that this was one of the most controversial agreements the United States would ever sign. Already there was vigorous opposition on the right and from the defense-oriented industries. Back in 1988, under Reagan, the Pentagon had agreed to cut $33 billion in pla

The difference was, as Cormack stressed repeatedly, that the previous growth cuts had not been pla

In land forces, the U.S.S.R. agreed to cut her standing army in East Germany-the potential invasion force westward across the central German plain-by half of her twenty-one combat divisions in all categories. They would be not disbanded but withdrawn back beyond the Polish-Soviet frontier and not brought west again. Over and above this, the U.S.S.R. would reduce the manpower of the entire Soviet Army by 40 percent.

“Comments?” asked the President. Sta

“For the Soviets this is the meat of the treaty, because their army is their senior service,” he said, quoting directly from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but not admitting it. “For the man in the street it looks fantastic; the West Germans already think so. But it’s not as good as it looks.

“For one thing, the U.S.S.R. ca

“But if they’re back inside the U.S.S.R.,” countered Johnson, “they can’t invade West Germany. Lee, if they shifted them back via Poland into East Germany, would we fail to spot it?”

“Nope,” said the CIA chief with finality. “Apart from satellites, which can be fooled by covered trucks and trains, I believe we and the British have too many assets in Poland not to spot it. Hell, the East Germans don’t want to become a war zone either. They’d probably tell us themselves.”

“Okay, what do we give up?” asked Odell.

“Some troops, not a lot,” Johnson replied. “The Soviets withdraw ten divisions at fifteen thousand men each. We have three hundred and twenty-six thousand perso

“Yes,” objected Sta

“Cost savings, Hubert?” asked the President mildly. He tended to let others talk, listen carefully, make a few succinct and usually penetrating comments, and then decide. The Treasury Secretary supported Nantucket. It would make balancing his books a lot easier.

“Three-point-five billion the armored division, three-point-four billion the infantry,” he said. “But these are just start-up costs. After that, we save three hundred million dollars a year in ru

“But Despot is the best tank-busting system in the world,” protested Sta

“To kill tanks that have been withdrawn east of Brest-Litovsk?” asked Johnson. “If they halve their tanks in East Germany, we can cope with what we’ve got, the A-ten aircraft and the ground-based tank-buster units. Plus, we can build more static defenses with part of the savings. That’s allowed under the treaty.”

“The Europeans like it,” said Donaldson of State mildly. “They don’t have to reduce manpower, but they do see ten to eleven Soviet divisions disappearing in front of their eyes. It seems to me we win on the ground.”

“Let’s consider the sea battle,” suggested Cormack.

The Soviet Union had agreed to destroy, under supervision, half its submarine fleet; all its nuclear-powered subs in classes Hotel, Echo, and November, and all the diesel-electric Juliets, Foxtrots, Whiskeys, Romeos, and Zulus. But as Sta

Still, he conceded, 158 submarines were a lot of metal, and America ’s Anti-Submarine Warfare targets would be drastically reduced, simplifying the job of getting the convoys to Europe if the balloon ever did go up.

Finally, Moscow had agreed to scrap the first of its four Kiev-class aircraft carriers, and build no more-a minor concession, as they were already proving too expensive to support.

The United States was allowed to keep the newly commissioned carriers Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, but would scrap the Midway and the Coral Sea (destined to go anyway, but delayed to be included in the treaty) plus the next-oldest, the Forrestal and the Saratoga, plus their air wings. These air wings, once deactivated, would take three to four years to bring back to combat readiness.