Nation: SALT: A Season for Reason

IF all goes well, within the next few months negotiators from the U.S. and the Soviet Union will start preliminary discussions that will lead to one of the most auspicious developments in more than two decades of the cold war: strategic arms limitation talks, already known by the odd acronym SALT. The aim of SALT is to slow down the ever more costly investment by both superpowers in nuclear weaponry that is increasingly sophisticated and deadly.

What will happen when the two sides finally get down to setting a date to begin the talks? First, the U.S. and the Soviets must take stock of just where they stand. In existing offensive weapons delivery systems, both sides have intercontinental bombers, land-based ICBMs and atom-powered submarines with sea-launched nuclear missiles. The U.S. has 510 B-52 and 80 B58 jet bombers as against 150 turboprop Soviet TU-95 Bears. There are 1,054 Minuteman and Titan II U.S. ICBMs, v. about 1,000 Russian ICBMs in the SS series. Undersea, the U.S. has 41 Polaris submarines, while the Soviets are adding twelve a year to their present fleet of nine; both U.S. and Soviet submarines carry 16 missiles each.

That much is already in the inventory. Where the real uncertainty comes—and where each side is likely to be guarded in revealing its plans—is in two new-generation weapon systems now under development. One is offensive, the other defensive. Offensively, the U.S. has already tested its Hydra-headed MIRV (for multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicle), which enables one launcher to drop separate nuclear warheads on widely scattered targets. The Soviets are working on the same weapon, though the U.S. is generally thought to be ahead. Defensively, the U.S. Safeguard antiballistic-missile system has just narrowly won Senate approval; the Soviets already have 67 relatively unsophisticated Galosh ABMs dug in around Moscow, and the U.S. fears that they may begin putting ABMs into the so-called Tallinn Line in the western U.S.S.R.

Should the Americans and the Russians conclude that they already have achieved a balance of destructive capacity, then one possibility for SALT would be an agreement to freeze weapons on both sides exactly as they are now and abandon any further development. Present spy satellites and other snooping devices would be adequate to reassure each side that the other was keeping its word. Beyond a mere freeze, there is at least a theoretical chance that the two adversaries could decide to cut back their arms stockpiles and actually initiate partial disarmament. TIME’S Pentagon correspondent, John Mulliken, suggests several hypothetical cutback scenarios:

> Both sides maintain their present 1CBM inventories but reduce other parts of their arsenals. Under this approach, the U.S. could agree to scrap ten of its Polaris submarines, while the Russians would be permitted to build up their fleet to parity with the U.S. at 31 boats. The U.S. would phase out all of its B-52s and B-58s while building enough FB-111s, the strategic fighter-bomber version of the swing-wing F-111, to match the Soviet TU-95s in numbers. The U.S. would abandon Safeguard ABMs, the Russians would dismantle or neutralize the Galosh network and the Tallinn Line. Both sides would agree not to install operational MIRVs.

> All ballistic-missile submarines, bombers and ABM systems are abandoned, with all nuclear weapons removed from fighters based on land and on aircraft carriers. Each side retains 1,000 ICBMs with MIRV warheads, thus achieving a precisely even face-off.

> Most drastically, each country is allowed only 20 Polaris-type submarines carrying 16 MIRVed missiles apiece; no other nuclear weapons—ICBMs, bombers, nuclear-armed fighters or ABMs—are permitted, and hunter-killer submarines that could attack and cripple the Polaris boats are also banned. Again a balance is struck, but at a much lower level of destructive capability.

Tidy and appealing as such hypotheses may seem, enormous obstacles stand in the way of their becoming reality. For example, even on the point of a mutual moratorium on further MIRV testing there is disagreement within the Nixon Administration itself: the Pentagon strongly wants to press ahead with MIRV, while Gerard Smith, who has been designated the chief U.S. SALT negotiator, made it known last week that he thinks a MIRV test ban should be the first item of business with the Soviet Union. Secretary of State William Rogers put it mildly last week when he said: “There may be slight differences of opinion.”

The U.S. has progressed far enough with MIRV that it is now practically operational. That will make reaching an agreement with the Russians vastly more difficult. The Soviets will almost surely want to delay serious dealings until they have caught up with the U.S. MIRV as an accomplished fact also complicates inspection of the opponent’s arsenal, since there is no way that a spy satellite can tell whether an ICBM in its concrete silo is MIRVed or not. As Averell Harriman recently noted, “It is more difficult for us to come to an understanding this year than it was a year ago.”

The Administration originally expected a SALT go-ahead from Moscow by mid-August. That has not been forthcoming, perhaps because the Kremlin has had more pressing preoccupations with the Chinese border disturbances and the Czech invasion anniversary. One encouraging sign was a report last week that the Soviet Union will shortly join the U.S. in putting before the 25-nation Geneva disarmament conference a draft treaty limiting military uses of the ocean floor.

In any case, progress in U.S.-Soviet military agreements is never rapid. It will probably be even slower in the monumental matter of arms limitation than it was with two earlier and less audacious agreements: the 1963 test-ban treaty and the nuclear nonproliferation treaty initialed in 1968. Each required more than four years of hard bargaining before final agreement was reached, and neither one even began to approach the complexity of the issues on the table for SALT.