Arms-control frenzy.

ARMS-CONTROL FRENZY

ON THE MORNING of Friday, September 18--the last day of Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze's stay in Washington-- Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw were interrupting regularly scheduled TV programs with excited announcements of a great breakthrough in arms-control negotiations. Dan Rather told his viewers that there was "good news' from Washington, and in Moscow the headline of Izvestia read: "Good News from Washington.'

It was "something of a historic morning,' said Peter Jennings. "Truly historic,' said White House Chief of Staff Howard Baker. "A tentative agreement has been reached on a treaty,' said Dan Rather. "Agreement in principle was reached to conclude an INF treaty,' said President Reagan. "I want to congratulate Secretary Shultz and Foreign Minister Shevardnadze.'

Sam Donaldson asked Reagan about the Soviet shooting of an American soldier in East Germany, just then reported.

"The Secretary has already launched a protest,' said Reagan.

The stone-faced Shultz was nearby and ready with the comment that the shooting was "unacceptable behavior.'

A reporter asked Reagan what he thought about the previous day's Senate vote (58 to 38) to restrict the U.S. interpretation of our obligations under the ABM treaty to one that was more or less the same as the Soviets' interpretation.

"You just spoiled my day,' said the affable President, seeming to bask in his new role as media hero. He added that "foolish things are being attempted when members of the Congress start to get into where they can interfere with what we're trying to negotiate.'

That morning's banner headline in the Washington Post read: U.S., SOVIETS AGREE ON MISSILE TREATY OUTLINE.' The New York Times' headline triumphantly proclaimed: "MAJOR OBSTACLES TO MISSILE TREATY REPORTED CLEARED.' You had to read the Times story all the way through to realize that (with the exception of a reference to some obsolescent missiles owned by West Germany) these "major obstacles,' now "cleared,' were not identified. When Secretary Shultz was asked what the big breakthrough had been, he said, "I think this has been a process that has been going on for a long time.' The "biggest breakthrough' had been achieved at Reykjavik, said the somber Secretary.

"We've got arms-control feeding frenzy,' an aide to Congressman Jim Courter told me later that morning. He also pointed out an interesting sentence in the Times story. According to a "senior Administration official,' unidentified, "work remained to be done on verification procedures and on setting a schedule for dismantling Soviet and American missiles in Europe.' The agreement, in short, was still only an agreement "in outline,' or "in principle,' but that outline and that principle had already been agreed to weeks earlier by the Soviets. The "outline' was that the U.S. and the Soviet Union should eliminate all their intermediate-range nuclear missiles, including the Soviets' SS-20s (supposedly there are 441 of them, each with three warheads) and, on the U.S. side, 224 ground-launched cruise missiles and 108 Pershing II missiles. The U.S. first proposed such a "zero option' in November 1981. The Soviets agreed to it this summer--in principle. And then, on September 18, by skillful State Department news management, we were told the same thing again: We had an agreement--in outline.

If we had been told that Reagan and Gorbachev had agreed to world peace "in principle,' but that the details were still to be worked out, surely not many people would have been impressed.

Likewise, arms control is in the details, and by contributing to a euphoric sense of "breakthrough,' Reagan and Shultz were in effect putting pressure on themselves, and were certainly putting pressure on U.S. negotiators still grappling with these details in Geneva, to move closer to the Soviet position; not to hold out too rigidly for well-defined language; to accept "bridging language,' as legally imprecise phraseology is called at the State Department; in short to throw in the towel, lest the boss be disappointed and his place in the history books jeopardized; or, even worse, lest they create worldwide concern that the cold war was still with us after all.

AS FOR THE Senate's vote to interpret the ABM treaty so as to restrict Strategic Defense testing, and thereby bring the U.S. closer to the Soviet negotiating position, "it was the Senate's boldest challenge thus far to Reagan on arms-control policy,' Helen Dewar wrote in the Washington Post. True, a Reagan veto could perhaps be sustained, but the President "faces more trouble, including complications for future arms agreements, and the possibility of deep new cutbacks in proposed spending for SDI research, if he persists in maintaining his position,' she added.

In short, the Senate is threatening to make Reagan's by-now-well-known treaty hunger work to the Soviets' advantage, promising to hold arms-control treaties hostage until Reagan adopts something closely resembling the Soviet position; namely, the position that the safest course for the U.S. is to not defend itself against Soviet missiles. Unfortunately, Reagan's newfound enthusiasum for arms-control negotiations goes some way toward legitimizing the Democrats' position and undercutting Republican supporters of Strategic Defense. For if, as Reagan now seems to believe, Soviet missiles can indeed be negotiated away, what do we need Strategic Defense for? Doesn't it make more sense, and entail less risk and expense, to use diplomats to get rid of Soviet missiles rather than using laser beams and space platforms to do so?

In addition to maneuvering Reagan into accepting the Soviet position on the ABM treaty, Democrats in Congress also want to force the Reagan Administration to continue complying with the (unratified and expired) SALT II treaty; to repudiate testing of antisatellite weapons; to discard all chemical weapons; and to limit nuclear testing. Precisely "congruent' arms-control proposals are forthcoming from Soviet negotiators in Geneva. As an aide to Congressman Courter told me, there is a chicken-and-egg problem in deciding whether the Soviets get their ideas from the Democrats, or vice versa. Reagan's negotiators--particularly, of late, Paul Nitze--are usually only too eager to accept these Democratic/Soviet notions.

Let us take a closer look at the "outline' INF treaty and its still-missing details. The Soviets supposedly will destroy all their SS-20 missiles, which, like our Pershing IIs and Tomahawk cruise missiles, are mobile. They can be driven about on trucks, making it very difficult for satellites to verify that they have been destroyed. Satellites cannot scrutinize the entire eight-million-square-mile area of the Soviet Union because there are too many directions in which to point the camera. Accordingly the U.S. is holding out for verification that is supposed to include on-site inspection, and it was this "verification package' that the Soviets still had not agreed to "in detail' when Shultz, Shevardnadze, and Reagan proclaimed a treaty at hand.

First of all, the U.S. would like to be allowed onto Soviet soil to make an initial count of SS-20s. I asked Manfred Eimer, Assistant Director of the Bureau of Verification and Intelligence of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, if we know for sure that the Soviets only have 441 SS-20s.

"No,' he said.

"Do we known how many they do have?'

"No.'

Secondly, we would like to be permitted to observe the actual dismantling and destruction of the missiles. They are supposed to be actually destroyed --not just unbolted. Are the Soviet top brass really going to permit their precious missiles to be cut up? Or are they going to try to get away with driving them over the horizon, perhaps hiding them in the Urals? Also, the Soviets have wanted to take five years dismantling their SS-20s; we are prepared to get on with the job more swiftly. It is not difficult to envision an outcome in which we will in fact dismantle ours quickly, accepting a Soviet promise to proceed at their own pace.

Henry Kissinger raised a good point when he said in an interview with Ted Koppel that by this treaty the U.S. is signaling to our European allies that our missiles, once described as indispensable, are now dispensable. Therefore it will be hard to keep them in Europe even if the treaty is not ratified. The European peace movement, Kissinger reminded us, nearly managed to keep the missiles out when we were saying, in Ronald Reagan's first term, that the fate of Western Europe hung on their deployment.

Another detail that had (apparently) not been resolved by Breakthrough Day was the fate of the warheads atop the missiles. Much was made of the U.S. arms-controllers' promise that the Soviets would be obliged to "sacrifice' four times as many warheads as we would. It was less frequently pointed out that the Soviets have so many spare warheads, and we (I was told) have so few, that the Soviets wouldn't mind giving up theirs if in so doing they could eliminate ours.

ONE OF the great fallacies of arms control is the organized pretense that the "threat' posted by nuclear weapons is somehow inherent in their numbers. Reagan himself has made the mistake of construing the "problem' of nuclear arms as quantitative rather than political. The real problem, of course, is the existence of an aggressive, nuclear-armed Communist state. The quantity of arms it possesses is irrelevant to the threat that it poses, unless nuclear arms are thought of as likely to explode accidentally (which no one believes). The British and the French both have nuclear weapons but they do not pose a "nuclear threat' to one another because both are democracies. Arms control thus misrepresents the danger of Communism as a danger of numerical excess--rather like overeating in the realm of military procurement.

It rightly worries conservatives that Reagan can have "signed on' to an error of this magnitude. In turn the President complains, according to Washington Post White House correspondent Lou Cannon, that the critics "to his right refuse to understand that improved spy satellites have made it possible to detect Soviet cheating without on-site verification.' And he wants us to know that it is he who wants the treaty, not just his wife or the State Department.

So much does he want it that the Washington Post, of all papers, sounded an editorial alarm on the day that Shevardnadze arrived in Washington, noting "a good deal of suspicion--and not only on his right--that the President could yet do something truly imprudent.' Lou Cannon wrote that the President has become an arms-control "risk-taker,' unaccustomed to "maneuvering on the left of the Republican presidential field.'

Leaving aside the difficulty of determining the whereabouts of mobile missiles by spy satellites, Reagan and many others miss the point when they talk about "verifying' Soviet compliance with arms controls. We already have verified in the past that the Soviets almost never do comply with arms-control treaties.

In March 1987, for example, "The President's Unclassified Report on Soviet Noncompliance with Arms-Control Treaties' noted violations too numerous to mention and added forlornly: "I have also expressed my personal concerns directly to General Secretary Gorbachev during my meetings with him, both in 1985 in Geneva and then again this past October in Reykjavik. Another year has passed and, despite these intensive efforts, the Soviet Union has failed to correct its noncompliant activities.'

"The Soviets cheat on arms-control treaties, let's face it,' said Kenneth Adelman, director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, at a Washington press conference when Shevardnadze was in the city. Soviet compliance is "zilch,' he added.

And so we show how unserious we are, because if we really objected to their noncompliance we would not so eagerly go back to the bargaining table for more punishment. The Soviets should have no qualms about continuing to violate arms-control agreements, knowing that we know their compliance is "zilch' and yet we blithely enter into new agreements all the same. By imposing no cost on them we invite continued violations.

A rarely noted weakness of the treaty is that the banned SS-20 missile has already been superseded by a more modern and versatile version of the same missile, the SS-25. In fact the "mutation' and "evolution' of Soviet missiles in an enviornment of arms control is worth a closer look.

The missile that preceded the SS-20 was called the SS-16, and it was of intercontinental range (it could strike the United States). From it one rocket stage was removed to create the SS-20, a move "apparently designed to circumvent SALT II,' according to Strobe Talbott in Deadly Gambits. This alteration brought its range "just shy of the highly arbitrary 5,500-kilometer range that defined an ICBM for the purposes of SALT.'

Within a year of the SS-20s' deployment (in 1977), West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt encouraged the U.S. to put in its own missiles to "counter' the SS-20s (i.e., to ensure that the U.S. remained entangled in the defense of Europe). Neither Richard Perle (then an aide to Senator Henry Jackson) nor Zbigniew Brzezinski saw the need for such a response. "I was personally never persuaded that we needed [Pershing IIs] for military reasons,' Brzezinski wrote in 1982. "I was persuaded reluctantly that we needed [them] to obtain European support for SALT.'

In other words, the then-pending SALT II agreement was used as a rationale to install a new set of arms. In the event, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Senate never voted to ratify the treaty. It has since expired, and its weapons limits have been exceeded by both sides. Thus SALT II neither limited arms (and therefore provided no safety even under the quantitative theory) nor reduced our defense budget.

Both treaties now having expired, the Soviets have gone ahead and restored the rocket stage missing from the SS-20, and turned it into the SS-25. This missile, of course, is not included in any treaty discussions. It can hit either the United States or Western Europe. Some SS-25s are even now deployed in missile bases formerly housing SS-20s. In other words, the Soviets are already treating the SS-20 as though it were obsolete, which may be why they are willing to discard it. The five-year dismantling period that they seek will no doubt be long enough to replace all the SS-20s with SS-25s, and so they could remain in compliance with no loss of firepower at all.

Meanwhile we will have removed our Pershings and cruise missiles from Western Europe, and political pressure from the "peace' movement and from Congress will no doubt be sufficient to ensure that they will not be replaced --at least not with up-to-date armaments. Indeed, it was reported on Breakthrough Day that the Strategic Air Commander, General John T. Chain, was hoping to re-equip 25-year-old B-52 bombers with conventional weapons as a way of helping defend Western Europe when the cruise and Pershing missiles are gone.

THUS AS A RESULT of arms control, while the Soviets press ahead, we take backward steps. Arms control causes excessive mutation in weapons systems, causing them to evolve unnaturally. Almost always the more primitive or otherwise deformed technology that results is more dangerous. Recent concessions by Reagan--over the heated objections of Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger--present precisely this danger. In the first place, Reagan will not permit the discarded Pershing II missiles to be used for SDI target practice. But another concession he has made may be even more significant.

New and proposed cruise missiles are so accurate that they can hit individual buildings from a distance of five hundred miles, or perhaps twice that range. Such missiles do not have to be armed with nuclear warheads. If you can strike the Kremlin directly, high explosives will do the job. New technology thus contains within itself the ideal answer to the anti-nuclear "peace' movement. The latest weapons need pose no threat to the civilian population of the Soviet Union--only to the Communist Party leadership and military establishment. Such weapons, in fact, promise to reveal whether the alleged "anti-nuclear' movement is really anti-nuclear--or pro-Communist.

Unfortunately, President Reagan is so eager for a treaty that he agreed to "ban' non-nuclear ground-launched cruise missiles as well as nuclear ones. The reason given was "verification.' Externally, nuclear and non-nuclear missiles look the same--and if we were permitted to deploy the one, the Soviets could deploy the other. But it is a sham to pretend that this is the real issue. Cruise missiles are small enough to fit inside large closets, and as miniaturization proceeds, even arms-controllers will have to admit the impossibility of verification.

THE REAL REASON for Reagan's concession on conventional missiles was suggested by Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times. "In any case,' he wrote, "the officials [not identified] doubted that the Russians would agree to allow them.' This suggests that, for us, the real object of arms-control negotiations is not to reduce arms but to arrive at an agreement. To achieve such an agreement, our proposals have to be acceptable to the Soviets. For this reason, the never-ending arms control talks that we now engage in turn out to be a mechanism for submitting what were once our military procurement decisions to Soviet advice and consent.

One of the greatest of all errors of arms control is that it presupposes an underlying symmetry between "the two superpowers' (as does the phrase "the two superpowers'). "Arms control serves the Soviets more than it serves us because it makes us moral equivalents,' says Ken Adelman. At every step, the arms-control "process' plays into Soviet hands by enshrining the premise of symmetry. "We want to have the right to inspect their factories? Well, we can't do that because then they would have the right to inspect our factories.' Our negotiators' craven acceptance of this kind of reasoning tacitly denies the gross asymmetry between an open, democratic society and a totalitarian one.

Congressman Jack Kemp's office points out that the greatest danger from an INF agreement is not so much the loss of our nuclear missiles in Europe as a giddy sense of "momentum' that might then propel the White House and State Department on to greater risk-taking. An INF agreement could easily be accompanied by what diplomats call an "agreed framework,' which might (for example) commit both sides to reducing strategic missiles by 50 per cent (and the Soviets' strategic missiles can now be driven about on trains and hidden in tunnels, as was the plan for our MX until Congress killed it), and simultaneously the U.S. would commit itself to complying with the ABM treaty for (say) another ten years.

One suspects that all along this has been the Soviets' goal in going along with the INF "zero option.' What they want is to kill SDI, and who better to do this for them than Ronald Reagan? Right now, Reagan has placed on the negotiating table an offer to tie his successor's hands, telling the Soviets that the U.S. will abide by the ABM treaty until 1994. The Soviets haven't accepted this only because they want the Reagan Administration on the record as opposing SDI testing, as well as deployment, during this period. So of course do the Democrats, and there is now a majority of 58 in the Senate willing to accept the Soviet position in this regard.

An INF agreement, Jack Kemp's advisors fear, could be just the occasion to append to the ceremonies-- the smiles and handshakes, the talk of a revived detente--a "framework' whereby we would agree informally to stick to the ABM treaty, perhaps for another ten years. And it is precisely here that State Department lawyers would come through with calculatedly imprecise "bridging language': imprecise enough to satisfy the Democrats, to satisfy the Soviets, to confuse the President, and to leave the American people in the dark. The President might even be allowed to claim a small victory: perhaps "some' testing would still be allowed. But the Soviets (and the Democrats) would at that point have gained effective control over the Strategic Defense Initiative. There is a 1970s Vladivostok precedent for the U.S. scrupulously abiding by such a non-binding "framework agreement.'

THERE IS little or nothing to be said for the pending INF agreement. It might, of course, put to the test Irving Kristol's thesis that our allies in Western Europe have been reluctant to defend themselves because we have been only too happy to expend our taxpayers' money for the same purpose; and that, as a result of this latest display of weakness-- gullible Americans once more falling into the arms-control trap--spines would stiffen in Bonn, Paris, and London. But it is also possible that such self-deluding and craven U.S. behavior will merely hasten the Finlandization of Western Europe.

It should be a matter of some concern to conservatives that President Reagan has decided to pursue the chimera of arms control as his price of admission to the "history books.' It should also be of concern to all Americans, because if this absurd process continues much longer our defenses could be seriously weakened. In fact, U.S. strategic defenses at present are non-existent, and the Soviet goal is to use arms control to keep them that way. In May, Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz said that "the arms-control process is corrupt at its source and corrupting, and it is putting us in deep danger.' It is fantastic to believe that Communist rulers are going to negotiate away their military strength, which is the sole source of their power. But, worse than that, arms-control deceives us into believing that Communist Party officials are our partners in the search for world peace rather than the outstanding threat to it.