A Call to Slow the Costly Race

On his Western trip last week, Henry Kissinger hammered out the urgent message: The alternative to a new SALT deal is an expensive and wasteful nuclear arms race that will not improve the security of either nation and might even make a nuclear war more likely.

His talks with Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev were intended to wrap up the broad agreement between President Ford and the Russian leader at Vladivostok in November 1974 to limit each side to 2,400 long-range missiles and bombers. Of this number, only 1,320 could carry MIRVs--clusters of independently aimed warheads. Kissinger brought home proposed compromises on most of the unsettled issues, but they satisfied none of his critics. Said Richard Perle, a foreign policy adviser to Scoop Jackson: "He gave everything away."

The critics' two main contentions:

P: The new Supersonic Soviet Backfire bomber would not be counted under the proposed SALT ceiling on weapons systems. The Soviets maintain that the bomber is not a long-range weapon because it cannot fly farther than 7,000 miles. Pentagon strategists argue that Backfire should still be included under the proposed SALT agreement because if based in the Arctic or refueled in midair, the bomber could reach the U.S. To allay Pentagon fears, the Soviets offered to limit the number of Backfires and restrict their mid-air refueling and Arctic basing capabilities. Reflecting Pentagon suspicions about Russian promises, a U.S. strategist called the Backfire proposal "nonsense."

P: Development could be held back on the new U.S. cruise missile, a jet-propelled bomb that can be launched from a plane or sub and has a range of 1,400 to 2,300 miles. Reason: the proposal would count any bomber carrying cruise missiles against the 1,320 MIRV limit set at Vladivostok. As a result, the U.S. would have to give up some existing MIRVed missiles, such as land-based Minuteman Ills or submarine-based Poseidons--a sacrifice that the Pentagon is unwilling to make.

Kissinger regards the Pentagon arguments as faulty. For one thing, the Backfire can reach the U.S. from Arctic bases without mid-air refueling only if it conserves fuel by flying at subsonic speeds. Asks a senior U.S. official: "Why would the Russians develop a supersonic airplane to fly subsonic missions?"

Moreover, although Kissinger originally supported the cruise missile as a bargaining chip in arms negotiations, he now sees it as a Pentagon fixation, a nostrum advanced by the generals, in the senior official's facetious words, "as a cure for everything from cancer to the common cold."

Kissinger also points out to associates that the proposed SALT agreement would force the Soviets to give up several hundred high-performance nuclear weapons systems in order to get under the Vladivostok ceiling. Moreover, as a further concession to the U.S., the Soviets have offered to lower this limit by a few hundred, possibly to 2,200 missiles and bombers. The U.S.S.R. now has 2,530 long-range missiles and bombers; in contrast, the U.S. has 2,160. Says the senior U.S. official: "Whatever else happens, a reduction is better for us."

In San Francisco last week, Kissinger claimed that if SALT fails, the U.S. will have to boost its spending on nuclear armaments by $20 billion over the next five years. Pentagon and congressional critics protested that he overstated the price. Still, without an agreement, pressures for even more exotic weapons systems will grow. As Kissinger put it, "In the nature of things, if one side expands its strategic arsenal, the other side will inevitably match it."

Kissinger argued further that passing up a SALT treaty "would be a tragically missed opportunity." If the arms race again accelerated, he said, "tensions are likely to increase; a new, higher baseline will emerge from which future negotiations would eventually have to begin." On the other hand, remembering that in foreign policy "what is attainable falls short of the ideal," he said that the pact will move the U.S. and Soviet Union into "the difficult but promising beginning of long-term strategic equilibrium at lower levels of forces."

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