Understanding treaties.

CRITICS OF the President's Strategic Defense Initiative argue that the program would violate the 1972 treaty with the Soviet Union limiting anti-ballistic-missile systems. In response the Defense Department has issued a document suggesting that a reasonably broad interpretation of the treaty would not prohibit the research and preliminary development envisioned in the current SDI program. The critics have counter-responded that such a broad interpretation calls into question the integrity of U.S. treaty commitments and, moreover, weakens U.S. charges of Soviet violations of the treaty (in particular, the deployment of a prohibited radar system at Krasnoyarsk).

A debat such as this will rapidly sink into a legal and semantic muddle unless three key points are kept in mind.

First, the Administration has always agreed that the ABM treaty would have to be revised before full-fledged strategic defenses could actually be deployed. It has suggested that it would be in the interests of both the United States and the Soviet Union to negotiate a gradual, structured phasing in of strategic defenses on both sides.

Second, the Soviet Union has taken the broadest possible interpretation of every arms-control treaty it has ever signed; its interpretations are so broad, in fact, that only the most elegant of Marxist-leninist dialectical obfuscations can label its actions as anything other than violations. For the United States, in such a circumstance, to restrict itself to the narrowest possible legal definitions would be foolish. Soviet lawyers are trained to make the law fit the wishes of the politicians; American lawyers to treat the law as sacrosanct. Within our own borders the law should be interpreted as narrowly as possible; in treaty obligations, however, standards of compliance must be fully reciprocal. The biggest problem the U.S. has had in arms-control negotiations has been its reluctance to insist rigorously on the principle of reciprocity.

Finally, we should not forget that the United States signed the original ABM treaty on the assumption that each side would exercise restraint in the deployment of additional offensive systems. With defenses limited, neither side had justification for a further offensive buildup. Restraint on both sides was expected to pave the way for further negotiated reductions and a new era of strategic stability. But the USSR did not exercise restraint at all. It proceeded instead to undertake the most massive buildup of offensive power in the history of the world. For a full decade following the signing of the ABM treay the United States did not deploy a single new strategic nuclear system, while Moscow deployed numerous new systems in unprecedented quantities. It also invested massive amounts of resources in research and development work on strategic defenses of its own.

In the fact of such realities, the Administration's stance on the ABM treaty appears not merely technically correct, but downright restrained.