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"Starting tomorrow, we will see once and for all if America's words are to be believed or not. Starting tomorrow we will see how great a difference there is between America's words about peace and Soviet deeds for peace.
"Tomorrow, the Soviet Union will put on the table at Vie
"Please note that I say 'all signatories.' The Soviet Union invites the United Kingdom, the French Republic, and"-he looked up-"the People's Republic of China to join us at the negotiating table." The explosion of flashbulbs caused him to look away for a moment.
"Ladies and gentlemen, please-" He smiled, holding his hand up to shield his face. "These old eyes are not up to such abuse as this, and I have not memorized my speech-unless you want me to continue in Russian!"
There was a wave of laughter, then a sprinkling of applause at the jibe. The old bastard was really turning on the charm, Fly
"To proceed." The Foreign Minister blinked his eyes clear. "We have been accused of never making a gesture of our good faith. The falsehood of the charge is manifest, but this evil fiction continues in the West. No longer. No longer will anyone have cause to doubt the sincerity of the Soviet people's quest for a just and lasting peace.
"Begi
"First, we will permit a selected team of six American naval officers to inspect these twenty vessels to verify that their missiles tubes have been filled with concrete ballast pending removal of the entire missile rooms from all of the submarines. In return for this, we would require that a comparable inspection visit by an equal number of Soviet officers to American yards would be allowed at a later date to be agreed on.
"Second, as an alternative should the United States be unwilling to allow reciprocal verification of arms reductions, we will permit another group of six officers to perform this service, these officers to be from a country-or countries-upon which the United States and the Soviet Union can agree within the next thirty days. A team from such neutral countries as Sweden or India would be acceptable in principle to the Soviet Union.
"Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come to put an end to the arms race. I will not repeat all of the flowery rhetoric we've all heard over the past two generations. We all know the threat that these ghastly weapons represent to every nation. Let no one ever say again that the government of the Soviet Union has not done its part to reduce the danger of war. Thank you."
The room suddenly fell silent but for the sound of motor-driven still cameras. The Western press representatives assigned to their respective Moscow bureaus were among the best in their profession. Uniformly bright, uniformly ambitious, uniformly cynical about what they found in Moscow and the conditions under which they were forced to work, all were stu
"Goddamn," muttered Fly
"One must admire your understatement, old boy," agreed Reuters correspondent William Calloway. "Wasn't it your Wilson who spoke of open covenants openly arrived at?"
"Yeah, my granddad covered that peace conference. Remember how well it worked out?" Fly
"Yes on both."
It was a bitterly cold day in Moscow. Snow piles were heaped at the roadsides. The sky was a frigid crystal blue. And the car's heater didn't work. Fly
"It's bloody fair," Calloway said wonderingly, his breath giving ghostly substance to his words. "They propose a builddown with elimination of many existing weapons, allowing both sides to replace obsolete launchers, both sides to reach a total of five thousand deliverable warheads, that number to remain stable for five years after the three-year reduction period. There is a separate proposal to negotiate complete removal of 'heavy' missiles, replacing them with mobile missiles, but to limit missile flight tests to a fixed number per year-" He flipped that page and rapidly sca
"Nothing about Star Wars?" Fly