Second Thoughts on SALT I

IN Pentagonese, it would be described as "first strike" strategy. For weeks the Administration heavyweights have been out all over Washington working to head off a possibly acrimonious debate over the two agreements that Richard Nixon brought home from Moscow a month ago. They are a treaty sharply limiting defensive anti-ballistic missile sites and an agreement to freeze offensive missiles at roughly current levels for the next five years. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger has endorsed them as "without precedent in the nuclear age, indeed in all relevant modern history."

Skeptical. Secretary of State William Rogers and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird have been carrying the colors to Capitol Hill, where the White House hopes to get an increasingly skeptical Congress to approve the agreements by handsome margins.* Lately, Nixon himself has taken an active role in the lobbying. The President, who last met with newsmen way back in March, called two White House press conferences in the past two weeks. There was no doubt about what was on his mind. Nixon defended the Moscow accords as a "breakthrough." He insisted that he would not have signed them if he were not convinced that they are "in the interests of the U.S."

That, as Nixon is well aware, is the focus of a policy debate that could become as bitter as the Safeguard anti-ballistic missile flap of 1968-69. The present strategic-arms-limitation accords, which are known collectively as SALT I, are intended to be merely a first stage. They are supposed to clear the way for SALT II, a comprehensive agreement that may some day restrain, and perhaps even reduce the full range of strategic weapons maintained by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The SALT II talks are not even scheduled to begin until October, and they could go on for years --or collapse overnight. Until the main event takes place, however, SALT I will serve to rile both hawks and doves--and cast doubt on whether it can indeed bring the arms race under control.

Like arms policy itself, the budding SALT I controversy is complex and multifaceted. One complaint, mainly from liberals, is that while Nixon is hailing SALT, his Defense Secretary is pounding the corridors of Congress in search of $1.3 billion to pursue development work on costly new weapons systems, including the B-l bomber and the Trident missile submarine.

At his press conference last week, Nixon pointedly linked the new programs to his dealing with the Soviets on SALT. The U.S. would go ahead with the programs, Nixon said, because "Mr. Brezhnev made it very clear that he intended to go forward" with a Soviet weapons program. Congress was not of a mind to get in the President's way. The House overwhelmingly voted a $21.3 billion military-appropriations bill that included funds for work on the B-l and the Trident. At week's end the Senate Armed Services Committee passed a similar bill.

The controversy has largely skirted the ABM treaty, under which the U.S. and the Soviet Union have agreed to deploy only token missile defenses at just two locations in each country, with 100 missiles and launchers at each site. To be sure, congressional doves were disappointed that ABM systems were not outlawed altogether; reflecting that disappointment, the Senate Armed Services Committee last week did not grant an Administration request for authorization of a second U.S. ABM complex near Washington, D.C. Besides avoiding a horrendously costly new turn in the arms race, the ABM treaty is cheered by defense experts for the rather ghoulish reason that it leaves the U.S. and Soviet populations both openly exposed to attack--and thus maintains the postwar nuclear balance of terror.

The experts are considerably less sanguine about the agreement to freeze offensive-missile stocks for the next five years. The agreement aims to hold both sides to the numbers of ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles that existed or were under construction as of July 1. It is by no means a comprehensive freeze; it does not block the development of bombers, for instance, and it even permits extensive "improvements" to existing ICBMs, including bigger warheads and more powerful boosters.

Essentially, the freeze is an interim effort to impose at least some restraint on the headlong Soviet expansion of ICBM forces. In recent years, while the U.S. concentrated on modifying existing missiles rather than building new ones, the Soviets have been adding more than 200 land-and 100 sea-based missiles to their capability every year. By now the Soviets have a 3-to-2 lead in ICBMS, and, under the terms of the freeze, they could have a 40% edge in missile-launching submarines; those margins make conservatives fret that the offensive-missile agreement could be more of a liability than an asset for the U.S.

Critics of the plan are particularly troubled by two prospects:

THE U.S. COULD "LOSE." The conservative argument against SALT I is that the Administration was so eager to reach some sort of arms agreement in Moscow that it might have unwittingly bargained away U.S. "strategic sufficiency"--Nixon's term for mutual deterrence. Writing in William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review, Donald G. Brennan of the Hudson Institute argues bluntly that SALT I is "profoundly unwise," given the Soviet Union's lopsided numerical superiority in ICBMs.

Under the terms of the freeze, the U.S. will be allowed to keep its 1,054 land-based ICBMS, plus another 710 missiles aboard 44 submarines. The Russians, meanwhile, are permitted 1,618 land-based ICBMS and another 950 missiles aboard the 62 submarines they are allowed under the agreement. (They now have 42 in existence or under construction.) The U.S. decision in the mid-1960s to perfect MIRV (multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle) warheads--still in the development stage in the Soviet Union--means that the U.S. has the edge in numbers of warheads. With as many as three MIRVed warheads packed atop each Minuteman III ICBM and ten to 14 on each Poseidon, the U.S. can deliver 5,700 separate warheads, v. 2,500 for the Soviet Union. But Brennan and other conservatives worry that the Soviets derive special advantages from superiority in numbers of missiles and sheer "throw weight," i.e. total payload, where the Soviets have a 400% advantage over the U.S. With that kind of numerical superiority, the conservative argument goes, a crisis like the Cuban missile confrontation might not play out nearly so favorably another time.

As Brennan sees it, the U.S. lag in numbers poses more tangible problems. If the Soviets could perfect their own MIRVS, they could mate them to their own much bigger boosters and quickly outstrip the U.S. in the warhead race. In theory, the huge new Soviet S59 missiles could be rigged to carry as many as 40 MiRVed warheads. Again in theory, that would give the Soviet force of about 300 SS-9s something like two or three times the punch power of the entire 1,000-missile Minuteman force.

Other analysts argue persuasively that it is useless to be as concerned about numbers as the conservatives are, simply because numbers do not mean much any more. "There is no such thing as superiority," says Adam Yarmolinsky, former Defense Department analyst. "Throw weight, megatonnage, boosters, who cares? What is relevant is that both sides now have enough deliverable damage-inflicting capacity." In this view, even the diplomatic impact of the size of a nuclear deterrent is open to question. Yarmolinsky argues that Cuba was not so much a lesson in the necessity of nuclear superiority as in non-nuclear superiority. It was a conventional naval quarantine, after all, that forced Khrushchev and Castro to back down.

THE ARMS RACE GOES ON. As even the Administration concedes, SALT I will not bring an end to the great postwar arms race. Instead, it will change the emphasis from quantity to quality and sophistication. The competition is already under way on both sides. In Moscow last May, Soviet officials made it plain to their American guests that they fully intend to go forward in categories not limited by the agreements, and few experts doubt that they can develop a full MIRV capability before the freeze runs out. By then, the Administration hopes to have a SALT II agreement that would include a ceiling on MIRVS. What if the Soviets begin to waffle on SALT II later on? The U.S. can then threaten to abandon its SALT I agreements.

For now, the U.S. is applying pressure on the Soviets mainly through a couple of bargaining chips for SALT II: the B-l and the Trident submarine. Experts agree that neither weapon is an immediate military necessity; for example, the Air Force's durable fleet of 527 B-52 bombers, which the B-l would replace, is expected to remain effective into the 1980s. SALT I thus lends support to a recent Brookings Institution forecast that the first $100 billion U.S. defense budget could arrive in 1977.

Despite its shortcomings, SALT I is so far a fairly clear plus. Though a great deal depends on how the Soviets behave, the U.S. does not appear to have lost anything of substance, at least for now. It has, in fact, scored some important gains: a stop in the recent rapid Soviet offensive buildup, including a halt in the production of the fearsome SS-9s and any later systems.

Even so, the net effect of the agreements may be, as Columnist I.F. Stone protests, merely to move the situation "from the super-crazy to the plain crazy." Yarmolinsky laments that it seems impossible to get back to the ideal situation "where, under the worst circumstances, some strategist in the Kremlin will turn to a colleague and say, 'But Ivan, if we go ahead with that plan they'll turn the Soviet Union into a large lake.' " Both sides already have the capability to carve out several large lakes. The massive commitment to offensive weapons is such that for the present each side must continually upgrade its deterrents lest the other gain a first-strike capability--the ability to strike so quickly and so powerfully as to wipe out any chance of a retaliatory attack.

* Only the ABM treaty requires formal ratification by a two-thirds vote of the Senate. The missile freeze, technically an executive agreement between Nixon and Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev, is already in force although Nixon has asked for majority approval of both houses.

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