America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

What was once said of Wagner's music also applies to the logic of the agreement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to stand naked before each other's nuclear missiles: it's better than it sounds. To feel safe, both superpowers must be confident they can retaliate against an attack. The more defense one side has, the more offense the other will think it needs and the greater the danger that competition will spin out of control. Conversely, only when defenses are constrained can offenses be reduced. That's the connection -- the "linkage," as the diplomats and strategists call it -- between the accord limiting antiballistic missiles (ABMs) that Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev concluded in 1972 and the treaty capping the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) that George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev signed last week.

Between those two milestones, 19 years apart, the U.S. had a President who never bought the theory of mutual deterrence or its perverse-sounding corollary, mutual vulnerability. Ronald Reagan dreamed of pure, total defense. His Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, was a testament of faith that Yankee ingenuity could produce exotic missile-killing satellites that would render offensive weapons "impotent and obsolete."

Most American scientists think an impregnable astrodome over the U.S. is sheer fantasy. Yet even a faulty SDI would force the Soviets to take costly countermeasures. Gorbachev put Reagan on notice that if the U.S. proceeded with SDI, the Kremlin would have no choice but to pull out of START. Soviet officials reiterated that warning last week.

Bush has never been a true believer in SDI, although as Vice President he paid lip service to the program as part of the catechism of the Reagan Administration. SDI is still sacred to the Republican hard right, so Bush lets his Vice President, Dan Quayle, champion the latest Star Wars brainstorm: "Brilliant Pebbles," an orbiting complex of miniaturized rockets that makes about as much sense as the name suggests. Since even the testing of space-based interceptors is prohibited by the ABM treaty and would therefore jeopardize Moscow's continued compliance with START, Brilliant Pebbles is more of a threat to arms control than to Soviet missiles.

It's fashionable these days to dismiss nuclear diplomacy as all but irrelevant, given the end of the cold war and the tumult in the U.S.S.R. But precisely because the future of that country is so uncertain, it's all the more important to make sure that one factor in the Soviet equation -- the size and composition of the Strategic Rocket Forces -- remains predictable.

There's another reason for protecting the gains of START and proceeding briskly to START II: only if the two largest nuclear powers continue to reduce their arsenals can they induce other countries to cooperate in curbing the further spread of nukes and the ballistic technology to launch them.

Yet, paradoxically, while meeting the challenge of proliferation means more stringent limits on U.S. and Soviet offenses, it may also require fewer restrictions on defense.

Six months ago, the world watched as Iraqi Scuds hurtled down on Israeli and Saudi Arabian cities. American Patriot antiballistic missiles foiled many of those strikes. Now a standard feature on the TV evening news is the cat-and- mouse game that Saddam Hussein is playing with international inspectors looking for evidence of his Manhattan Project.

Imagine a more adroit Saddam armed with an intercontinental version of the Scud, and you've got the stuff of which a new nightmare is made. Arms control should make an attack by a Third World country on the U.S. less plausible rather than more so. To fend off scores or even hundreds of warheads, the U.S. needs not SDI but a network of ground-based interceptors at perhaps three to five sites. The ABM treaty allows only one site, but it could be amended to permit more. At the same time, the ban on testing and deployment of space- based systems should be strengthened, since those are what could undermine the purpose of the treaty and the viability of deterrence itself.

For 2 1/2 years Sam Nunn, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been advocating what he calls a "limited-protection system." Last week the Senate endorsed that goal. The gung-ho SDI enthusiasts don't like the scheme because they believe, correctly, that Nunn doesn't want Brilliant Pebbles to get off the ground. On the other side are arms-control purists who see the ABM treaty as holy writ and fear it can't survive any tinkering.

That ought not to be true. As one of its original negotiators, Sidney Graybeal, notes, "The treaty was meant to be a living document, therefore subject to updating as the world changes." And the world has indeed evolved in ways the Soviets surely recognize. While Saddam and Bush are at the top of each other's hate list today, Iraq is geographically much closer to the U.S.S.R. than to the U.S. So is China, which has a sizable arsenal, much of it aimed at Soviet targets. So is Pakistan, with its own nuclear ambitions.

As they made clear last week, Bush and Gorbachev already realize that their countries have a lot more to worry about than each other. Perhaps, before their next summit, they could acknowledge a shared interest in easing the terms of the ABM treaty while preserving its essence.