START Turns to STALL

But pressure builds on the Administration to begin arms talks

Five months after Ronald Reagan took office, Eugene Rostow told Senators considering his appointment to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency that the Administration would not be ready to open strategic arms talks with the Soviets until March 1982. “It may be that a brilliant light will strike our officials,” he said, “but I don’t know anyone who knows what it is yet that we want to negotiate about.” March 1982 has come and gone, and the brilliant light has yet to strike. Indeed, the Administration’s new name for the SALT process—START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks)—might better be STALL.

Pressure to begin strategic arms talks has been building for months. It intensified last week when Henry Jackson, a leading Democratic hawk, and seven other influential Senators (Robert Byrd, Sam Nunn, Lloyd Bentsen, John Warner, Howard Baker, Richard Lugar and Wilham Cohen) circulated a bipartisan “Dear Colleague” letter, urging the U.S. to negotiate with the Soviets “a long-term mutual and verifiable nuclear forces freeze at equal and sharply reduced level of forces.” The resulting resolution, signed within hours by 24 more Senators, was designed to counter a more radical measure introduced two weeks ago by Senators Edward Kennedy and Mark Hatfield. They called for an immediate and total freeze on nuclear armaments, with no provision for equalization offerees.

With public opinion polls showing mounting concern over nuclear weapons, White House aides are anxious to portray President Reagan as deeply committed to arms negotiations. They say he was pleased with the first round of Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) talks with the Soviets on how to limit tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. Agrees a State Department veteran: “The Reagan people have discovered arms control and like it.”

The INF talks, which recessed in Geneva two weeks ago, did not progress far enough to resolve vast differences in the proposals put forth by the two superpowers. The Soviet offer would reduce the number of their intermediate-range weapons targeted at Western Europe to 300 by 1990 (current level: 900), but it would effectively prevent NATO from deploying Pershing II and cruise missiles there. The U.S. wants a “zero option” plan to eliminate all medium-range nuclear missiles. Despite the gulf between these two negotiating positions, U.S. officials came away from the meetings convinced that the Soviets no longer expect the European peace movement to halt the deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles.

The Administration was further heartened last week when the NATO defense ministers, meeting in Colorado Springs, unanimously joined the U.S. in spurning the Soviet plan. The White House now believes that the Soviets will give ground once they are convinced that deployment of the U.S. missiles is about to begin. Says an Administration official: “In the next 18 months, they will want to make a deal.” That deal would most likely include a reduction in Soviet missiles, but probably not the zero option.

One sticking point in getting the more ambitious START talks under way is the Polish crisis. The U.S. holds that Moscow-backed repression in Poland must be linked to Soviet behavior elsewhere; without a resolution of the Polish situation, U.S. leaders feel that they simply cannot bargain over strategic arms with the Soviets.

But even if conditions in Poland miraculously improved, the U.S. would be ill prepared to sit down at the negotiating table. No decisions have been made about what kinds of cuts the U.S. should seek, how deep they should be, or what “unit of account” should be used in measuring the strategic arsenals of the two superpowers. In SALT II the unit of account was launchers—missile sites, nuclear submarines and intercontinental bombers. This standard was rejected by Reagan, along with the rest of the Carter package.

Some arms experts now prefer to use throw weight, which is the amount of nuclear explosives each side can deliver. Because the Soviets have bigger rockets and warheads, they would face more reductions in their missile arsenal under throw-weight restrictions. But the U.S. would have to make more cuts in its bomber force, which can carry more nuclear cargo than Soviet planes. Limits on throw weight would not restrict separately targeted multiple warheads, so specialists are proposing formulas that would cover such factors as accuracy and number of warheads per missile.

Rivalries between the Navy and Air Force, as well as among the Pentagon, ACDA and State Department, are complicating efforts to formulate the U.S. negotiating position. The Air Force, for example, staunchly opposes reductions in its land-based ICBMS because that would enhance the importance of the Navy Trident missiles now being deployed. The White House has not stepped in to offer its own views, perhaps for a good reason—it has not decided what they are. Says a senior Defense Department official: “I genuinely do not see a White House position yet.”

Meanwhile, the Administration finds its $221 billion fiscal 1983 defense budget coming under increasing attack. Last week a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee voted unanimously to postpone production of the MX missile until the Administration selects a permanent basing system. Reagan had planned to park the MX in Minuteman silos for the interim; the subcommittee’s rejection of that plan is expected to receive full congressional support. Says a Senate aide: “They are not going to persuade people up here unless they come up quickly with some kind of survivable system.”

The popular movement against nuclear weapons continues to gain momentum. The Wisconsin legislature last week became the seventh in the country to call for a ban on the spread of nuclear arms. Wisconsin lawmakers hope to put the freeze question on a referendum ballot in November. Says State Representative Midge Miller: “People want to talk to their government about their fears.” Such expressions of concern will surely affect White House thinking. The Reagan Administration may have little taste or talent for arms talks, but it does have a solid grasp of politics. Right now, good politics means trying to control the buildup in nuclear weapons, without giving the Soviets a military advantage that could have its own doomsday implications.

—By Janice Castro. Reported by Gregory H. Wierzynski/’Washington