Deploring deployment

Now that the Soviet Union has walked out of the Geneva arms talks, things look much brighter for world peace. The Soviet course now is to tell everyone exactly what they are going to do, whereas in Geneva they made only vague, hypothetical statements.

Whenever Russians sit around a table they tend to speak for propaganda purposes, proposing one thing while still busy doing something else.

But having walked out, they speak loudly of what they are going to do in retaliation - the things they were really doing all the time without saying so. It does seem some people have to get away from the table in order to lay something on it.

Because the Soviets had a monopoly on medium-range missiles with their SS-20, the Americans have provided Great Britain and West Germany with cruise and Pershing missiles. As a result, the powers-that-be in Moscow have announced they are going to deploy other devices in retaliation.

One hopes the first thing they will deploy is Yuri Andropov, who has been under wraps since sometime back in August. Deploying Mr. Andropov in full view of NATO would show a new, nondevious approach to the misunderstandings in Europe. He could be stationed somewhere in Moscow, perhaps near the Kremlin in a silo-type overcoat and a big fur hat just within range of press photographers.

Another new thing which Moscow now openly states it will do is to put cruise missiles on its submarines in the waters off California.

So new news is good news in this case, because they have been doing that already and haven't been telling us. It isn't a rosy picture of subs, but at least it isn't sub rosa.

The Soviet Union, however, can never achieve equality with the West in a peace initiative, until it gets a peace movement.

In the United States, Great Britain, and West Germany there are massive demonstrations against NATO missile deployment, which are more emotional than logical. This sort of thing can't happen inside the USSR, of course, but Russia will have to come up with a reasonable facsimile.

At least the Kremlin could stage a public ban-the-bomb protest in Gorky Park or Red Square against the Russian SS-20.

The world shouldn't go on thinking that the Russian people love their own bomb.