Disarmament: SALT Up to Date

ACROSS broad conference tables in Helsinki and Vienna, U.S. and Soviet negotiators have faced each other 68 times since the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks began 18 months ago. Last week the two sides permitted themselves a change of scene. As guests of the Austrian government, 146 delegates and wives set out from Vienna for a spring weekend in the historic province of Carinthia aboard a special train complete with private compartments, dining cars and a dance band.

Superficially, at least, the most important disarmament negotiations in history have come to resemble that eight-hour round-trip train ride: they have covered a lot of ground without really seeming to get very far. Though the talks began with hopeful signals, the only thing the two sides have definitely agreed on to date is the need to improve the Washington-Moscow hot line to enable officials to find out quickly whether an unidentified missile has been fired accidentally by the other superpower -- or deliberately by China. Reflecting concern about the future of the talks, the cooly patient U.S chief negotiator, Gerard C. Smith, will fly to Washington this week for White House-level consultations on where SALT goes next.

Pretty Good Idea. The chief worry is that if there is no progress, the rough equilibrium in nuclear weapons that now exists between the U.S. and the Soviet Union will eventually be upset. Already, both sides have started running the next lap in the arms race: the U.S. has begun deploying Hydraheaded, almost unstoppable MIRV (for multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicle) missiles in the Minuteman 3 and Poseidon submarine programs, and the Soviets may be on the verge of fitting their giant S59 missiles with multiple warheads.

The basic U.S. proposal at the talks is for a flat limit on the number of nuclear delivery systems (land-based ICBMs, submarine-carried missiles, airborne bombs) that either side would be allowed to maintain. The suggested ceiling: 1,900. There would also be a "sub-limit" prohibiting the Soviets from assembling more than, say, 250 missiles in the size range of the huge SS-9, whose 25-megaton warheads can wipe out U.S. ICBMs even in the hardest silos. As part of the total U.S. package, the American delegation last year proposed that ABM systems be either banned outright or limited to the defense of Moscow and Washington.

Last month the Soviets countered the U.S. proposal with a draft treaty dealing only with ABMs. Moscow's idea was to confine the ABMs to the vicinity of the two countries' capitals, limiting each network to about 100 missiles. The Soviets had a pretty good idea, however, that the U.S. would reject the treaty; President Nixon had said in February that the U.S. believed that any satisfactory SALT agreement should cover offensive as well as defensive weapons. The Soviets have made another demand that Washington considers totally unacceptable. They want all nuclear weapons systems capable of reaching Soviet soil--including the 600 U.S. tactical aircraft on NATO bases in Europe and aboard Sixth Fleet carriers --written into any SALT agreement on offensive weapons. Yet they refuse to concede that intermediate-range Soviet missiles capable of hitting Western Europe should also be limited.

Bargaining Chip. The White House insists, for several reasons, on considering the whole mix of offensive and defensive weapons simultaneously. For one thing, many U.S. disarmament experts warn that the Soviets, by improving the radar and rocketry in the SA-5 surface-to-air missiles now located around Russia's western cities, could upgrade that anti-aircraft system into an instant ABM network. More important is the argument that an ABM-only agreement would squander a bargaining chip. That chip is the U.S.'s Safeguard ABM, now under construction at Air Force bases in North Dakota, Montana and Missouri, which could be useful in getting the Russians to agree on a limit to their SS-9s.

Moreover, if an ABM-only treaty were signed, many U.S. experts believe, the Russians might never come back to the bargaining table. Having stripped U.S. ICBM sites of their ABM protection, the argument goes, the Russians would proceed full blast with deployment of the S59 and even bigger missiles. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird recently reported that an "apparently extensive" new Soviet ICBM construction program is already in progress in south-central Russia.

Hard-liners in the Administration are convinced that the Soviets developed the S59 for one purpose: to enable the U.S.S.R. to knock out U.S. missiles in their silos, thus giving Moscow a clear first-strike capability without fear of a devastating retaliatory strike. They maintain that the Soviets see SALT not as a way to cut down a bloated defense budget, but as a means to achieve demonstrable superiority over the U.S. The kind of superiority the Russians may be trying to engineer, argues Columbia University Sovietologist Zbigniew Brzezinski, would be aimed not at winning wars so much as at prevailing in more subtle psychological showdowns, like the Cuban missile confrontation that so deeply humiliated Nikita Khrushchev in 1962.

Soviet hardliners, however, could make a comparable case. They could argue that Safeguard, which was rammed through Congress just before SALT began, may be the first step in a "heavy" system designed to make American cities safe from Soviet attack, thus opening the way for a U.S. first strike against Russia. The Russians are also distressed by the fact that even as the SALT talks have dragged on, the Pentagon has been pushing for stepped-up development of bigger and better strategic weapons. Meanwhile, the Air Force has deployed its first squadron of 50 Minuteman 3 missiles at Minot Air Force Base, N. Dak., and the Navy has sent on patrol a Poseidon-equipped submarine with 16 MIRV missiles carrying ten to twelve warheads apiece.

Missile Moratorium. Ironically, such developments have tended to weaken the Administration's already questionable case for refusing to consider the Soviet ABM-only proposal. Missouri Democrat Stuart Symington points out that Washington's stubbornness on the ABM raises suspicions about whether the U.S. ultimately wants a SALT agreement. More fundamentally, many respected disarmament experts, including Herbert F. York and Herbert Scoville Jr., argue that an initial ABM agreement would achieve an important break in the so-called "action-reaction" cycle that keeps the arms race in motion. Even if the basest motives attributed to the Soviets are correct, they argue, the U.S.'s formidable sub-launched-missile capacity alone could serve as a credible deterrent to a Soviet attack for the next decade at least.

Overall, the U.S. has a comfortable lead in strategic nuclear warheads of all kinds (5,130 v. 2,280 for the Soviets). In missile technology, the U.S. is about a year and a half ahead of Russia. While curbing the big Soviet ICBMs is still the primary Administration concern, Negotiator Smith and White House planners will be discussing a number of new proposals aimed at getting SALT moving. One of them is a ban on ABM deployment for perhaps a two-year period, during which the SALT talkers would be free to tackle the question of offensive weapons.

A possible variation would be for the U.S. to sign an ABM treaty, with the understanding that it would not be sent to the Senate for ratification until the Soviets agreed to a treaty on other weapons. Then again, some Administration SALT strategists favor something along the lines of Washington Democrat Henry M. Jackson's proposal for an experimental one-year moratorium on deployment of Minuteman 3s in the U.S., of new ICBMs of any kind in Russia and of ABMs around population centers in both countries. During the moratorium, the two sides would work toward a formal SALT treaty.

Whatever tack the U.S. decides upon, SALT does not have forever to show results. U.S. experts point out that 18 to 24 months from now the Administration will be under pressure to decide whether or not to go ahead with the undersea long-range missile systems (ULMS) and the B-1 supersonic bomber. Unless a SALT agreement is reached, still another lap in the arms race is almost sure to begin.

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