What the Abm

By Strobe Talbott

For a U.S. Senator, Sam Nunn is unusually laconic. Last week, to make matters worse, he was suffering from laryngitis. But the Georgia Democrat, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, had a lot to say, so he stocked up on throat lozenges. In a series of speeches in the Senate, he addressed one of the most important arms-control questions today: Does the 1972 Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty permit the U.S. to develop and test a space-based Star Wars system?

The Reagan Administration, eager to move ahead with its Strategic Defense Initiative, says yes. Last week -- at great length, his voice often cracking -- Nunn said no. The Administration's claim, he concluded, was based on a "complete and total misrepresentation" of key parts of the historical record, especially its ratification by the Senate.

Since the treaty was signed in 1972, the nuclear peace has rested on the superpowers' willingness to forgo large-scale strategic defenses, lest the accumulation of shields on one side provoke a proliferation of nuclear spears on the other. Secretary of State George Shultz and his chief arms-control adviser Paul Nitze got President Reagan to declare that the SDI program is a research program permitted by the ABM treaty. But in 1985 other officials -- particularly Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle and State Department Legal Adviser Abraham Sofaer -- launched a campaign to "reinterpret" the pact. According to them, nothing in the treaty impinges on the right of the U.S. to go beyond research and actually test space-based systems.

The history of the treaty seems to support Nunn's rejection of the "broad interpretation." If the two nations had agreed in 1972 merely to limit the ground-based interceptor missiles that existed at the time, the treaty would have become meaningless as soon as scientists invented new missile-killing technologies. For just that reason, the Nixon Administration debated how to limit what were then called "exotics" -- such as laser and particle beams.

National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger wanted to ban testing and deployment of exotic systems, but not research and development. He argued that it was impossible to verify a ban on research taking place in a laboratory -- and besides, it would be good to have an R. and D. program as a hedge against what the other side might do. The U.S. military, meanwhile, was conducting secret experiments with ground-based lasers, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff insisted that this program be exempt from any ban on development and testing. So in August 1971 the U.S. negotiating team proposed a ban on developing and testing "systems based on other physical principles." The only exception was for fixed, land-based systems.

The cryptic and cumbersome phrase "systems based on other physical principles" (the inevitable acronym: OPPs) was coined by Nitze, then the Pentagon representative at the talks, and a Soviet scientist, Alexander Shchukin. They wanted a catchall term that would apply even to future systems so exotic that they were not yet a gleam in scientists' eyes. After some weeks of haggling, the two sides agreed "not to develop, test or deploy ABM systems or components which are sea-based, air-based, space-based or mobile land- based." An ABM system was defined as one "to counter strategic ballistic missiles or their elements in flight trajectory, currently consisting of" ABM interceptor missiles, launchers and radars.

The word currently was inserted by a U.S. delegate at the time, Raymond Garthoff, who is now at the Brookings Institution. Without the key adverb, the treaty might have been interpreted as applying only to systems then in existence. Garthoff was underscoring that the treaty covered all systems -- both those systems that were "currently" in use as well as any future ones. He emphasized that point in 1971 to his Soviet counterpart.

The Soviet representatives professed puzzlement and annoyance over how a treaty could ban "things that did not exist." They seemed in part to be trying to smoke out details of the U.S. laser program that were being shielded by the proposed language. But over time it became clear that they understood perfectly well what the U.S. had in mind -- the Kremlin too wanted to develop a fixed-site, land-based facility to test large lasers, and it has since done so at Sary-Shagan in central Asia.

The U.S. negotiators were determined to prevent the loophole for fixed-site exotic ABMs from becoming a loophole for space-based systems. So they worked out a footnote, known as Agreed Statement D. It said that if "ABM systems based on other physical principles . . . are created in the future, specific limitations on such systems and their components would be subject to discussion." In other words, if any breakthroughs occurred in the permitted area of fixed, land-based ABMs, there would have to be new negotiations. But the treaty still banned development and testing of other systems, including space-based ones.

At a "working group" in September 1971, one of the Soviets, Victor Karpov (who remained a fixture in the arms talks until late last year), acknowledged in a statement, which became part of the classified negotiating record, that he understood what was being banned -- the development, testing and deployment of futuristic systems except for fixed, ground-based ones -- and that his government agreed to such a ban.

There was no murkiness about this in the U.S. Senate during the ratification debate. The late Henry Jackson, the hawkish Democrat of Washington, pressed Administration witnesses hard to make sure that fixed, land-based ABM projects were indeed exempt from the ban on space-based and other programs. Senator < James Buckley, a Conservative-Republican from New York, voted against the treaty on the ground that "it would have the effect . . . of prohibiting the development and testing of a laser-type system based in space."

Thus when it voted 88 to 2 to give the treaty the status of law, the Senate knew what it was doing: ratifying an explicit ban on the development and testing of space-based, exotic ABMs -- precisely the type of SDI system that the Reagan Administration now argues it can develop and test under its broad interpretation of the treaty. If the Administration persists in its policy, Nunn warned, it risks a "constitutional confrontation" with the Hill and a congressional "backlash" against funding for SDI.