Three bad reasons to comply with SALT II.

Three Bad Reasons To Comply with SALT II

THE ADMINISTRATION'S decision to continue complying with the SALT II treaty is inexplicable in the broader context of President Reagan's foreign policy. It is all the more puzzling given that the issue at hand was whether to dismantle a Poseidon submarine or merely dry-dock it and plug up its missile tubes.

The Administration chose the first option, thus complying with every last jot and tittle of the unratified treaty. The dry-docking option would have placed the United States in technical violation of the treaty, while manifesting a willingness to remain within the numerical limits mandated by the 1979 agreement. It would have been the mildest possible slap of the Kremlin's hands for its own massive arms-control violations.

We can think of only three reasons--all bad--why the Administration would choose to continue complying with an unratified and fatally flawed treaty.

First bad reason: politics. It is an election year, and the political types in the White House do not want to rock the boat of a booming economy and a world at peace. They fear that deliberately violating SALT II would lead to unpleasant headlines and give Democrats an issue in close congressional races.

Second bad reason: summitry shudders. The President seems oddly fixated on holding another summit meeting with Gorbachev. Insiders at the White House say this is the real reason he refused to meet Yelena Bonner (shades of the Ford-Solzhenitsyn Fiasco!). It may also account for the odd logic of unilateral compliance.

Third utterly inexcusable reason: loss of will. It would not suffice to dry-dock a submarine quietly and hope the Soviets got the message. Such a move would only make strategic sense if coupled with an all-out political offensive against Soviet arms-control violations, publicizing them mercilessly at every opportunity, and putting arms-control mythologists both at home and in Western Europe on the defensive. It would be a challenging, effort-consuming, and politically difficult campaign, and the White House staff just does not seem up to it right now. Until such a campaign is conducted, however, the illusory promises of arms-control advocates will continue to dominate the national debate on security policy.

If Walter Mondale by some freak of history had won in 1984, the Republicans would be excoriating him right now for continuing to comply with SALT II in the face of blatant Soviet violations. Ronald Reagan would lead the list of distinguished critics.