SALT: The Race to Halt the Arms Race

AMID the baroque splendors of Vienna's Belvedere Palace, U.S. and Soviet negotiators this week will open the long-awaited Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). They are possibly the most vital negotiations between the two superpowers since Yalta; London's Institute for Strategic Studies last week called them "the most important arms conference in history." At their initial get-together, the delegates will move at a leisurely pace that seems entirely appropriate to a conference that may well continue for several years. In rooms graced by red marble columns and canvases of voluptuous nudes, they will exchange formal greetings and sample champagne and canapes. Despite the casual air, however, the delegates realize that they will have little time to waste. Unless the two nations move quickly they may very well miss an opportunity to prevent the nuclear arms race from taking a quantum leap.

No Return. The outlook is far from optimistic. Both the U.S. and Russia are conducting advanced tests of the next generation of nuclear weaponry, particularly the missile system known as MIRV (multiple individually targetable re-entry vehicles). Since each MIRVed rocket is capable of carrying a number of warheads, and each warhead is capable of being delivered to a separate target, the system vastly increases the destructive power of an individual missile. Some experts believe that the point of no return has already been reached in the eventual deployment of MIRVs. Even if the SALT negotiators were to agree quickly on a ban against their deployment, the problems of policing such an agreement would be enormous. Once multiple warheads are installed on missiles, there is no currently known way of detecting them short of on-site inspection, a procedure that the Russians have consistently vetoed.

The delegations will be led by the same men who chaired the lead-up talks in Helsinki. They are Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Semyonov, 58, the No. 3 man in the Kremlin Foreign Office, and Gerard C. Smith, 55, a Republican attorney who served as the State Department's special assistant for atomic affairs in the Eisenhower era. The two men reportedly developed a cordial, businesslike relationship during the five-week preliminary negotiations in Helsinki. After the opening session, their delegations will meet alternately in the U.S. and Soviet embassies in Vienna.

Complete Review. In the four months since the Helsinki talks ended, the Nixon Administration has undertaken a complete review of its negotiating strategy at SALT. The President has not lacked advice. Last week, for example, by an overwhelming vote of 72 to 6, the Senate passed a resolution calling on the Administration to propose "an immediate mutual moratorium" of indeterminate duration on the further deployment of all strategic nuclear weapons. The moratorium would include anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs) and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as well as MIRVs. Former Presidential Adviser McGeorge Bundy urged the President to go even farther by ordering a unilateral stand-down in MIRV and ABM deployments for a limited period of time. Perhaps most significant of all, a 14-member committee of senior statesmen and scientists, appointed by the President, reportedly recommended that the U.S. take the initiative at the talks, possibly by proposing a temporary moratorium.

Even before the Senate resolution was adopted, Nixon dismissed it as "irrelevant." White House observers are convinced that he still leans toward the wait-and-see approach of his chief foreign affairs adviser, Henry Kissinger, who is dubious of the safety of an interim MIRV ban. Kissinger maintains that the U.S., once committed, might be trapped in an unenforceable, open-ended moratorium by the pressures of domestic and foreign opinion. After a special two-hour pre-SALT session of the National Security Council last week, Nixon noted that his eventual decision will prove "tremendously important" to the security of "hundreds of millions of Americans and Russians."

The Soviets, for their part, seemed to show little hope that negotiators can keep the MIRV genie in the bottle. In USA magazine, a Russian-language monthly, International Affairs Writer Anatoly Khlebnikov argued recently that "the further stage of the arms race has already been determined" by Nixon's missile policy. He did speculate, however, that the U.S. might be continuing to develop its multiple-warhead weapons in an attempt to gain a "favorable position" at SALT. The Kremlin, for that matter, has done exactly the same thing. Only two weeks ago, the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces completed the latest tests in the northwest Pacific on the huge S59 rocket, which can carry three five-megaton warheads (making them perhaps 25 times more powerful than those carried by the American Minuteman).

Rough Standoff. While MIRV development is the single most pressing issue, SALT negotiators will be discussing the whole range of strategic weapons. What makes this task so difficult is that while each nation apparently feels that it has achieved parity with the other, their arsenals differ in important ways. The Soviets, for example, have more (an estimated 1,350) and larger land-based intercontinental missile launchers than the U.S. (1,054), but America's Minutemen are more accurate. With 41 submarines carrying 16 Polaris missiles each, the U.S. has about three times as much sub-launched missile capability as Russia, though the Soviets are expected to catch up as early as 1973. The U.S. strategic bomber force outnumbers its Russian counterpart by some 500 to 150. By the most basic measurements, the two countries have thus achieved a rough nuclear standoff in which the U.S. possesses more warheads and Russia more megatonnage.

Perhaps the most important challenge at SALT is an arrangement on anti-ballistic missiles. To a large degree, it was the appearance of that defensive system, designed to knock out enemy missiles before they reach their targets, that prompted the development of multiple warheads. MIRVed missiles, which the U.S. plans to start deploying in June, increase the chance of penetrating an enemy ABM shield. Thus, nothing would curb each side's need for MIRVs as much as an agreement that limits ABMs. The Soviet Union presently leads in the deployment of ABMs, though few experts consider its 64-silo Galosh system around Moscow a genuine threat to U.S. retaliatory power. The Russians acknowledged during the preliminary negotiations that ABMs, though defensive in function, are tied to the question of mutual deterrence and should therefore be included in SALT discussions. U.S. negotiators considered that admission an important diplomatic step.

Spokes in the Wheels. Referring to SALT in his February "State of the World" message, Nixon noted: "There is no area in which we and the Soviet Union have a greater common interest than in reaching agreement with regard to arms control." In an interview with TIME Correspondent Herman Nickel, Secretary of State William Rogers, while conceding that neither side is willing "to make any unilateral limitations based on mere hope," emphasized that "I have no reason to doubt that the Soviets are serious." Rogers added: "The futility of further competition makes the enormous costs all the more unacceptable." The vast expenditures would make things particularly difficult for the Soviets, whose economy is in such serious straits that a shake-up in the Kremlin may be under way as a result (see following story).

At the same time, neither side approaches the negotiating table with any illusions. The Soviet army newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda, recently accused the Pentagon of "trying to put spokes into the wheels of the Helsinki-Vienna Express." On the U.S. side, no less an advocate of arms control than McGeorge Bundy recently warned: "The Soviet purpose in negotiating with non-Communist powers is not always benign, and Soviet alertness for a one-sided advantage is proverbial."

In examining omens for SALT'S prospects, pessimistic observers need look no farther than the site of this week's opening ceremonies. It was from the Belvedere Palace, now an art museum, that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife set out for Bosnia in 1914 to observe army maneuvers. They made it only as far as Sarajevo, where an assassin slew them both in the incident that touched off World War I.

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