Playing for the Future

By Strobe Talbott

COVER STORY

Is the U.S. making the right moves toward Moscow in arms control?

Ronald Reagan had been beset before by political defeats and disarray, but never in such a cherished domain of his Administration. Whatever his struggles and stumbles on the economy and social issues, the President had always managed to press his program for national defense with seemingly unassailable determination and confidence. Yet last week--in Congress, public opinion and international negotiations--it was precisely his efforts to strengthen and protect the nation's military security that were in trouble.

In a stunning repudiation, the Senate Budget Committee cut in half the 10.7% real increase in next year's defense spending on which Reagan had insisted "as a minimum." The rebuff was all the more startling because eight members of the Republican majority on the committee joined the Democrats in voting against the Administration.

Nor did a rescue seem any closer for the beleaguered MX missile, a prime object of congressional skepticism and budget cutting. A blue-ribbon bipartisan presidential commission headed by Brent Scowcroft, who was National Security Adviser to President Gerald Ford, is expected to recommend this week that production and deployment of the MX proceed. But Congressmen briefed on the commission's report predicted a tough fight with no assurance that the President will win. The only slight relief the White House could find in the reaction to the MX was a decision by the nation's Roman Catholic bishops to revise a pastoral letter on the morality of nuclear weapons, dropping a specific objection to the missile and softening their implicit criticism of Administration policy. Meanwhile, a resolution calling for a nuclear arms freeze, which Reagan vehemently opposes, was expected to pass in the House.

The lawmakers seemed to be representing a growing discontent on the part of their constituents. Public-opinion polls showed that confidence in Reagan's handling of foreign and defense policies had actually fallen during his monthlong hard-sell campaign on behalf of those policies. Some White House officials privately lamented that the President's "Darth Vader" speech of March 8, in which he denounced the U.S.S.R. as an "evil empire," and his star wars speech of March 23, in which he proposed what is widely regarded as a futile campaign to develop antimissile defenses, may have backfired.

The President has sought to reassure the public by pursuing nuclear arms control with the Soviet Union, so far with scant success. Reagan's chief negotiator in the intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF), or Euromissile, talks, Paul Nitze, last week gave the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a nonprogress report. Despite Reagan's proposal for an "interim solution" in INF, Nitze held out little hope for a negotiated settlement before new U.S. missiles are scheduled for installation in Western Europe later this year. Edward Rowny was equally grim in his report to the committee on Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), for which he is chief negotiator. After sitting through Nitze's and Rowny's back-to-back appearances, Democratic Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts pronounced it "the most distressing session" on arms control he had attended in his four years in the Senate.

This week the Administration's arms-control policies will be the focus of intense debate. The immediate question on the Senate's agenda is whether, after 13 weeks of controversy, Kenneth Adelman should be confirmed as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. To many Senators, and to many citizens, Adelman's suitability to head the agency is not the main issue at all. It is symbolic of a cluster of larger and more complicated questions about the wisdom, competence and even the sincerity of President Reagan's conduct of arms control.

The Reagan Administration is by no means the first to find itself under attack on this issue. For decades--but particularly since the Watergate scandal undermined Richard Nixon's presidency and, as a byproduct, aborted the policy of detente--the U.S. has been a superpower in search of a strategy toward its principal rival. It has flailed about for the right combination of inducements and deterrents. Managing Soviet-American relations, particularly in their military dimension, is hard in itself, given the propensity of the U.S.S.R. to bully first and negotiate later, its instinctive stubbornness and its relentless arms buildup. But the task is all the harder, since any U.S. Administration must sustain support for its policies from a democratic society as well as from its politically volatile, sometimes angst-ridden allies.

As Reagan and his men have set about playing the extremely difficult and dangerous game of dealing with Yuri Andropov's Soviet Union, they have correctly insisted on these three vital points:

>There is a Soviet military menace to the security of the U.S. and the community of industrialized democracies, and it is growing.

> A nuclear arms freeze is not the solution to that problem; indeed, it would make it worse.

> There is a need for modernization of the West's arsenal generally and, more particularly, of its missile force in Europe.

But the Administration also deserves much of the criticism that it is getting at home and abroad for its overall strategy, and for its moves to date on the chessboard of nuclear diplomacy.

Arms control is inherently controversial. It always has been. On the one hand, it almost defies common sense for a nation to compromise with adversaries over the composition of its defenses. On the other hand, it comes naturally for Americans and their political leaders to try to keep a rivalry that could destroy the world from getting out of hand. Arms control appeals to a peculiarly Yankee mixture of idealism and realism--a hardheaded faith that despite ideological, political and military tensions between the superpowers, they ought to be able to reach contractual agreements on measures in their mutual interest.

In recent years, the delicate balance between idealism and realism has broken down, giving way to pendulum swings between two fallacies. There was the liberal fallacy of the early Carter Administration, when the imperative of controlling arms was seen as overriding the need for continued acquisition and upgrading of arms, when negotiation and dealmaking became the be-all and end-all of Soviet-American relations.

At the other extreme is the conservative fallacy: the tendency to blame arms-control measures of the past for the military dilemmas of the present, and the attempt to solve those dilemmas with highly unrealistic arms-control proposals aimed at the future. Ronald Reagan personifies that tendency.

The liberal and conservative fallacies have one thing in common: they both exaggerate what arms control can accomplish, loading it down with burdens of hope or blame it cannot bear and expecting it to work wonders by itself.

In fact, arms control cannot work wonders at all, least of all on its own. It can be useful only if it is a component of sound national-security policy and of a larger strategy for managing Soviet-American relations. It is neither a substitute for, nor a competitor of, defense. It is defense conducted by other means.

Those means are diplomatic: the pursuit of mutually agreeable rules of the road in the arms race--rules that will make the competition somewhat more predictable, that will set limits on the most dangerous kinds of weapons and help avert the sudden appearance of new weapons systems that might upset the balance. Arms control is a way of bounding the twin threats of Soviet aggression and nuclear war--but not, alas, of ending them. Many skeptics about arms control argue that one cannot trust the Soviets. But it is not a matter of trust or of relying on the good will of the other side. It is a matter of mutual self-interest.

The need to pursue bilateral arms control hand in hand with unilateral defense has been part of the Soviet-American rivalry for at least 20 years. The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 provided an impetus to both parts of that paradox, and on both sides.

The humiliation of being backed down from the brink of war by an American ultimatum spurred the Soviets to embark on a sustained proliferation of every category of weaponry: conventional and nuclear, battlefield-range and globe-spanning, tanks, aircraft, surface ships, submarines, but most important, rockets. Through history, as the defenders of a land power, Russian generals have worshiped artillery as the god of war. For Soviet generals, ballistic missiles are the artillery of the nuclear age.

One limit on the Soviet acquisition of raw power has been internal. The military-industrial complex of the U.S.S.R. (which is far more pervasive than anything Dwight Eisenhower warned against in the U.S.) is made up of what the Soviets themselves call "metal eaters," which devour resources that might otherwise feed the anemic, crippled economy. Another limit is the fear of the Kremlin leaders that if they go too far, they might even provoke a military reaction by their enemies, particularly the U.S.

But a third restraint on Soviet military programs has been arms control with the U.S. The close call over Cuba spurred the U.S. and U.S.S.R., together with Great Britain, to conclude a limited Test Ban Treaty ten months later, in August 1963. The treaty banned nuclear explosions aboveground, under water or in outer space. It was a fitting, almost mythological metaphor for nuclear weapons themselves: if man insisted on perfecting the things, he would have to confine his experiments to the underworld; before setting them off to make sure they would work, he would have to bury the weapons that could bury him. On the American side there was another impulse for the Test Ban Treaty. People were growing anxious not only about the threat of a catastrophic war but also about the danger that atmospheric testing was harmful to their health. Partly as a result of living through the suspense over Cuba and worrying about strontium-90, a radioactive isotope in fallout that was poisoning milk, the American body politic acquired a deep, visceral attachment to the idea of arms control. Then as now, public-opinion polls showed a widespread yearning that the leaders in Washington and Moscow keep up the search for ways to regulate military competition.

For the White House, such polls are an important gauge of the incumbent Administration's standing with its constituents. For the Kremlin, by contrast, Soviet public opinion is virtually irrelevant, while public opinion in the West is a target of opportunity for propaganda. The Politburo need canvass only itself and listen respectfully to the general staff of the Soviet armed forces. The Soviets are driven only by self-interest, and not always of the most enlightened kind.

Late in the Johnson Administration, at the Glassboro summit, Robert McNamara patiently tried to persuade Premier Alexei Kosygin that it was in the interests of both countries to forswear large-scale antiballistic missile (ABM) defenses, since a defensive arms race would only escalate the offensive one already under way. Each side would feel compelled to increase the number and destructiveness of weapons with which to "penetrate" the defenses of the other. Eventually, in the first round of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) during the first Nixon Administration, the Soviets agreed to limit ABMs.

Meaningful limits on offensive weapons proved more elusive. The Soviets were not about to consider such a thing until they felt they had caught up with the U.S. and "liquidated" the massive inferiority that had exposed them to the humiliation of the Cuban missile crisis. By the early '70s, they finally could, and did, claim military parity with the U.S., and they were ready to negotiate seriously about offensive weapons.

They did so partly for reasons of their own psychology. The Soviet regime is justifiably insecure about its legitimacy, in the eyes of both its own people and the rest of the world. For the men in the Kremlin, the very assertion of equal status with the U.S. was its own reward. Its value increased manyfold when the U.S. was willing to enshrine the magic word equality in the communiques issued at summits and the prologues to SALT treaties and accords that Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter signed with Leonid Brezhnev between 1972 and 1979.

Arms control made the Soviets feel more secure in concrete ways too. Long before a freeze became fashionable in the U.S., the Soviets were pushing their version of the concept. No wonder. Given their belief that more is better and most is best, since the late '60s they have tended to lead in gross numbers and would naturally like to see their quantitative advantage frozen. The SALT I Interim Agreement on Offensive Weapons, a five-year companion to the ABM Treaty of 1972, held the U.S. to 1,710 launchers for intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (ICBMs and SLBMs). That was about 700 fewer than the U.S.S.R. already had in place.

In SALT II, the Soviets relented somewhat and accepted equal ceilings, but they retained a monopoly in the largest category of missiles--the most Olympian of their gods of war--the so-called heavy ICBMs, of which they have just over 300. They also got the U.S. to accept numerical limits on air-launched cruise missiles and the bombers that carry them. Because of their technical sophistication, cruise missiles were an American military advantage and therefore a valuable American bargaining chip. Despite the Soviets' lead in numbers, their advances in the technology of warfare have lagged behind those of the U.S.

In exchange for what they gained at the negotiating table, the Soviets made concessions. In SALT I, they agreed not to count as strategic weapons the European-based nuclear forces of the U.S. and its allies, even though some of those NATO missiles and warplanes could reach the U.S.S.R. Those are some of the weapons that the Soviets are trying to restrict in the INF talks under way in Geneva.

In SALT II, the Kremlin accepted restraints on the number of ICBMs with multiple warheads, or MIRVS, and the number of warheads per type of ICBM. Those combined limits left the Soviets with an approximately 5-to-2 edge in land-based ballistic warheads. They also left them with enough of those warheads to raise the theoretical possibility of a crippling sneak attack against American ICBMs. Land-based missiles are the most menacing of all nuclear weapons because they are the most accurate and the most plausible instruments of a pre-emptive attack.

Stability and deterrence have traditionally depended on each side's having confidence that sufficient numbers of its own land-based weapons would survive an attack and be able to strike back. Each must be exposed to retaliation if it were to strike first, yet at the same time be free from the threat of a sneak attack that would deprive it of its own retaliatory forces.

The Soviets are largely to blame for casting doubt on both halves of that proposition and thus upsetting the strategic balance. The U.S. was the first to develop and deploy MIRVs (a breakthrough some of its own authors now regret), but the single most destabilizing development in the recent round of military competition between the superpowers was the seemingly open-ended acquisition of more and more MIRVed iCBMs by the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces from the mid-'70s on.

The principal accomplishment of SALT II was that it slowed that juggernaut down. At the same time, the treaty left the U.S. free to narrow the gap in land-based warheads. When the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave their endorsement to ratification of the SALT II treaty in 1979, they called it a "modest but useful step." Critics on both the left and the right were not willing to go even that far. They stressed what the treaty did not accomplish: it failed to stop, much less reverse, the arms race; it failed to close the "window of vulnerability" by eliminating the hypothetical possibility of a first strike against the U.S. More generally, the treaty entailed no accompanying restraint on Soviet adventurism and mischief making around the world.

But perhaps the greatest liability of SALT II was its sponsorship. The treaty was the fruit of three Administrations' labors. Much of its contents was the handiwork of Henry Kissinger and his colleagues. The remainder was mostly an improvement on that core. But the signature on the bottom of the last page, alongside Leonid Brezhnev's, was Jimmy Carter's. So technical an agreement dealing with such esoteric issues is especially prone to demagoguery. Insofar as SALT II was a symbol of Jimmy Carter's stewardship of American foreign and defense policy, it barely stood a chance. That was the linkage--the "fatal flaw"--that mortally wounded the treaty. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the coup de grace.

If Carter had been reelected, he might have been able to use his second honeymoon with Congress to get SALT II ratified, but he would have been under powerful pressure to begin SALT Ill with a tough proposal that had strings attached to Soviet behavior and was accompanied by major defense programs.

In the parallel negotiations on INF, Carter or anyone else would have faced an even greater problem. (The talks, then under the label of Long-Range Theater Nuclear Forces, began in October 1980, just before the U.S. presidential election.) The U.S. took the firm view that the only weapons in Western Europe eligible for limitation were American ones, not those of Great Britain and France, and there was considerable doubt that the American ones in question would ever make it from test ranges in the U.S. to deployment sites in Europe. In accordance with its so-called two-track decision of 1979, NATO was committed to begin installing 108 Pershing II ballistic and 464 Tomahawk cruise missiles later this year unless the Soviets agreed before then to an arms-control agreement that reduced their arsenal of new SS-20 missiles and thereby obviated the need for NATO countermeasures.

With the wisdom of hindsight, particularly now that the deadline for deployment is near, the alliance's decision in 1979 to pursue simultaneously disarmament and rearmament looks too clever by half. The leverage of the U.S. in the talks would always depend on the credibility of a threat that could be carried out only with the continued support of perishable governments and volatile public opinion in the five West European countries where the new missiles were supposed to be based.

As a result, the Soviet Union was at a distinct and permanent advantage. Its bargaining chips, the SS-20s, were already on the table, and its ability to play them was not subject to the veto of nervous allies. Even if the Soviets fail in their first objective, which is stopping deployment altogether, the episode will be likely to leave the alliance internally traumatized and all the more susceptible to divisive Soviet tactics in the future.

Thus, no matter who took the oath of office on the Capitol steps in January 1981, the prospects were bleak for progress in either strategic or intermediate-range arms control. But Reagan had an opportunity to turn the situation around. Americans, allies and Soviet leaders alike were fed up with the dithering of Carter and were ready for some old-fashioned conservatism, tempered by common sense and self-confidence. Instead, Reagan made a bad situation worse with his rhetoric suggesting implacable hostility to the Soviet Union and his deep mistrust of the very idea of arms control.

The ensuing two years have seen some course correction toward the center. By the end of 1981, political pressures from across the Atlantic nudged a reluctant Administration to come forward with a proposal for INF, and by the spring of 1982 similar pressures, the freeze and antinuclear movements in particular, induced Reagan to offer an initiative on strategic weapons. But the prevailing approach in the Administration to arms-control and defense policies still seems to be guided by eight rather remarkable propositions. The U.S. has never before had a national leadership that espoused any of these ideas individually, let alone as a mutually reinforcing package. Following is an exposition and analysis of those eight underlying principles:

1. The U.S. is now No. 2 and must therefore try harder.

For more than a decade, American military planners and political leaders have worried about the loss of superiority by the U.S., the achievement of parity by the Soviet Union, and the danger that unless the U.S. improves its defenses, the Soviets will pull ahead in the future. There were analysts in the back rooms of the Carter Pentagon and members of the National Security Council staff who feared that the future had already arrived.

Never before, however, has a President made pessimism about the existing state of the military balance a basic tenet of his world view and program. Reagan has said repeatedly, including in his star wars speech last month, that the U.S.S.R. enjoys a "margin of superiority."

Such bad news would be good medicine if it were really justified. But to substantiate his claim, Reagan relies on simplistic charts and selective statistics. His foremost concerns are land-based intercontinental ballistic missile warheads that can reach the U.S. or intermediate-range ones that threaten Western Europe. In neither case is Reagan fantasizing the problem, but he is exaggerating it. The Soviet advantage in ICBMS is offset by an array of American assets: more and better submarine-launched weapons, a superior Navy and Air Force and a cruise-missile program that is much further along.

Reagan rightly attaches the highest priority to proceeding with the new deployments in NATO later this year. But by overstating and oversimplifying the Soviet problem there, he is weakening support for an American solution.

It was politically irresponsible, and factually wrong, for Reagan to say, as he has done twice in press conferences this year, that Western Europe will have "no deterrent" unless the Pershing IIs and Tomahawks are deployed. The British and French have 250-odd long-range nuclear weapons, and the U.S. has hundreds of fighter-bombers that can reach the U.S.S.R. from land bases or aircraft carriers in the European region, as well as its submarine-launched missiles.

Together, those weapons do help inhibit Soviet aggressiveness, although, to be sure, they do not compensate for the Soviet monopoly in one category of weaponry: numerous, highly accurate, land-based missiles that can reach targets throughout Europe in a matter of minutes. Therefore none of the existing Western weapons should be given equal treatment with Soviet SS-20s on the agenda of the INF negotiations. The British and French forces in particular should be left aside entirely. Mostly submarine-based, less accurate and less destructive, they have as their prime purpose to defend Britain and France alone, not the Western alliance as a whole. The U.S. cannot bargain with the independent deterrents of its sovereign allies in a bilateral Soviet-American negotiation. The Soviets, of course, know that. The real reason that they are pressing the issue is that they hope to play on British and French fears that their interests will be compromised in INF.

Some American aircraft in Europe may properly end up on the agenda of INF, but not until the Soviets have acknowledged the core problem, which is that their SS-20 program has tilted that regional balance. NATO must redress the imbalance.

There are other components besides hardware in the military equation. Each side has its political strengths and weaknesses. NATO has to worry about the leftward lurch of the Labor Party in Great Britain and the rise of the Greens in West Germany. The Kremlin has to worry about the kind of challenge represented by Solidarity in Poland. For all the fits that the U.S. and its European partners give each other, they do constitute a genuine alliance of democratic states with mutual security interests. The Warsaw Pact, by contrast, is fundamentally an instrument of imperialism and, as its very name suggests, an increasingly shaky one at that. While the Soviet army must be regarded as a potential aggressor, it must also be recognized for what it really is: a police force that occupies the "fraternal" countries of the East bloc.

As General John Vessey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quipped during his confirmation hearings a year ago, "The Soviet Union is the only nation in the world surrounded by hostile Communist neighbors." That is one reason why, speaking of his Soviet counterpart, Vessey said, "Overall, would I trade with General [Nikolai] Ogarkov? Not on your life."

Reagan has frequently stressed the intramural weaknesses in the Soviet empire. Yet, strangely, he has not factored those weaknesses into his net calculation of Soviet strength.

2. As practiced in the past, arms control contributed to American inferiority and, if continued, would lock the U.S. permanently into second place. The U.S. gave up for the sake of disarmament military options that it should have exercised for the sake of rearmament, and it compounded that mistake by letting the Soviets keep open all of their options, and all of their assembly lines.

Neither half of this proposition stands up. The U.S. preserved, in SALT II, the right to develop a supersonic successor to the B-52 bomber (the B1, which Carter canceled but Reagan has resurrected), a radar-evading "Stealth" aircraft, a ten-warhead successor (the MX) to the triple-MIRVed Minuteman III ICBM, a new, superaccurate SLBM (the Trident II), and a whole new species of weapons, cruise missiles. Far from "sitting on its hands" during the years of Soviet buildup or, for that matter, the years of SALT, the U.S. MIRVed its ICBMs and SLBMS, outfitted its bombers with short-range attack missiles, started construction of ten new Trident submarines and undertook an array of other steps to "modernize" its deterrent.

For the Soviets' part, in addition to accepting a numerical cap on their MIRVed ICBM force, they gave up in SALT II their only existing mobile ICBM (the SS-16) and agreed to limit themselves to one new type of ICBM. Critics of the treaty, who are well represented from the President on down in the Administration, dismiss those concessions as phony. The SS-16, they say, was technically flawed; the Soviets were probably going to junk it anyway. As for the limit of one new type of ICBM, that is all the Soviets were planning in any event.

However, recent activities at a test site near the White Sea raised fears in Washington that the Soviets may in fact be getting ready both to revive the SS-16 program and to proceed with more than one new type of missile. Some Pentagon officials have privately accused the Soviets of violating SALT II. These are the same officials who denigrated the treaty as imposing no meaningful limits on Soviet programs. What is more, given Reagan's refusal to send SALT II to the Senate for ratification, it is difficult for his Administration to be a stickler about whether the Soviets are complying with its rules.

When challenged about recent missile tests, Soviet diplomats take an obviously smug pleasure in pointing out that they were prepared to be legally bound by the treaty four years ago, and they are not responsible for its being in limbo now. They also claim their latest test involved a modification of an old missile.

3. Because the U.S. is behind, and because arms control is partly to blame, the best course would be to suspend bilateral bargaining and concentrate on a unilateral American rearmament. Once the U.S. has re-established equality or, better yet, a "margin of safety, "it can resume talks and negotiate from strength.

Reagan campaigned on a Republican platform that explicitly called for the restoration of American military superiority. A year after the election, in November 1981, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger still termed a buildup "a necessary prerequisite" to negotiations. The idea of "negotiating from strength" is sound, and there is a superficial logic to the Weinberger position. But aside from its debatable starting premise that the U.S. is now inferior, that position spells trouble on two counts. First, regardless of what "net assessment" he or any military analyst might make about the Soviet-American balance, Weinberger's Soviet counterpart, Dmitri Ustinov, is never going to accept the notion that the Soviets must sit on their hands while the U.S. catches up.

One superpower's margin of safety is the other's sense of being inferior and threatened. There can be no such thing as a one-sided buildup. One way or another, there will be competition. The only question is whether the competition will be ameliorated and regulated by arms control.

If the Soviets keep building, the U.S. must play catch-up to a certain extent, both to prevent the Soviets from monopolizing certain categories of weaponry (as they have with the SS-20) and to remain within what might be called negotiating distance of them. Yet the Kremlin will hardly be in a negotiating mood if the U.S. sets as a precondition for agreement the requirement that the Soviets engage in what to them looks like unilateral disarmament. The middle ground is for the U.S. to show that it is willing to rearm when and where necessary, but to engage in bilateral arms control when and where possible.

In his distaste for bilateral efforts to manage the superpower rivalry and his instinctive predilection for unilateral ones, Reagan is counting on American technological and economic predominance to prevail in the end. The most striking, and questionable, theme in his star wars speech was his apparent belief that the U.S. could mobilize its scientific community and its economic resources in quest of an impenetrable antiballistic-missile shield over the entire nation without triggering perilously destabilizing countermeasures, both offensive and defensive, on the part of the U.S.S.R.

Reagan's views notwithstanding, there is little reason to hope that the many handicaps of the Soviet economy will be decisively advantageous to the U.S. in the long run, allowing the U.S. to "beat" the U.S.S.R. in an arms race. There is no question that the Soviet economy is in crisis, but it is a permanent, institutionalized crisis, with which the U.S.S.R. has learned to live without stinting on the priority of guns over butter. And guns may be bazookas, missiles or space-based antimissile lasers.

There is a second problem with Reagan's and Weinberger's preference for building now and talking later. West European allies tend not to share the American disillusionment with detente, and Americans tend not to share the Administration's distaste for traditional arms control.

4. If forced by political expediency to make proposals and engage in negotiations, the U.S. must insist on drastic cutbacks in the most modern, potent Soviet weapons already deployed; no comparable reductions are required, nor should they be considered, in existing American forces.

The logic of that unabashedly one-sided objective is that if the U.S. is not going to build up to a position of strength from which it can negotiate in the future, then the Soviet Union must build down to a position that the U.S. recognizes as equality.

So far, that approach has failed to convince the Soviets or, more important, West Europeans and Americans, of the Administration's seriousness. Reagan's original zero option for INF, which he unveiled in November 1981, was intended more to score propaganda points with the allies than to win concessions from the Soviets. Not even key officials in Washington who designed the zero option thought there was any chance that the Soviets would ever agree to dismantle their entire SS-20 force, from one end of the U.S.S.R. to the other, in exchange for U.S. cancellation of deployment of its Pershing II and cruise missiles in Europe.

The zero option was defensible as an opening move, but Reagan stuck with it far too long. Not until two weeks ago did he advance a vague "interim solution," which also stipulates a tradeoff between SS-20s already in place and American missiles not yet deployed. That concept makes sense for arms control in Europe, since the disparity in nuclear missiles there is unquestioned. Even the Soviets cannot deny it; they can only ignore it or try to camouflage it in their propaganda. But whether such a trade-off is feasible is another question.

Last year Chief U.S. INF Negotiator Nitze thought he had the makings of a breakthrough in INF as a result of private conversations with his Soviet opposite number, Yuli Kvitsinsky. It would have involved sacrificing deployment of the Pershing II ballistic missiles, and countering a reduced force of SS-20s with slower-flying cruise missiles and with shorter-range but militarily formidable new models of the Pershing Is already in place in West Germany. But Reagan insisted on sticking with the zero option as his preferred position and on including Pershing IIs in any fallback.

No one can tell what would have happened had Reagan backed Nitze. If there is no agreement in INF, the Administration will be able to lay the blame, with some justification, on the existing imbalance in Europe, the shortsightedness of the 1979 NATO two-track decision and Soviet intransigence. But arguments over what mistakes were made and what opportunities were lost should not get in the way of NATO's installing the new missiles.

Whatever the political cost of proceeding with deployment--and it is likely to be high, to judge from the recent wave of demonstrations in Europe--the costs, both political and military, of failing to deploy would be even higher and longer-lasting. If NATO does not follow through on its resolve in this case, its ability ever again to address a common problem with a concrete collective response would be sorely in doubt.

Reagan's handling of START is harder to excuse. His record is an almost unbroken pattern of self-contradictions, unfair charges against his predecessors and unfulfilled promises. He vowed to correct the "fatal flaws" of SALT II by seeking "significant reductions" in START. Ironically, one obligation of the old treaty that the Soviets would not have to fulfill unless and until the U.S. ratified it was a requirement that they dismantle 450-odd mostly obsolescent, but still operational, bombers and missiles.

In a classic instance of making the best the enemy of the good, Reagan in effect set aside the accomplishments of SALT and sought instead extensive reductions in the Soviet arsenal, particularly in its very latest, most cost-effective and highly valued weapons. Under the terms of the proposal he announced at his alma mater, Eureka College in Peoria, Ill., last May, the U.S.S.R. would have to reduce by one-half its total number of land-based ballistic warheads.

In exchange, the U.S. was offering only the coyest of hints about possible cutbacks in its own future programs. No projected weapon system as such was put forward as a bargaining chip. The MX, Trident II missile, Bl, Stealth and a whole aviary of cruise missiles would go forward.

The proposal was designed to fit neatly around a modernized American deterrent made up of MX's and Trident IIs. Somewhat to the discomfort of the Administration, however, the fit is not so neat if it decides to proceed with numerous Midgetman mobile, single-warhead ICBMs as well as the MX, as the presidential commission chaired by Scowcroft recommends. If adopted, the plan will mean the Administration has to raise, or scrap altogether, the ceiling it has proposed in START of 850 deployed ballistic missiles.

The START proposal is also intended to force nothing less than a top-to-bottom overhaul of the Soviet strategic rocket forces. The Soviets are being told that they upset the balance of power by overbuilding and are now being penalized. Chief START Negotiator Rowny softened the message somewhat in a recent interview with TIME: "What we're asking them to do is pay now and buy later." Whether the plan is a penalty or a down payment, what the Soviets stand to get from it is a reduction in the number of submarine-based warheads deployed against them some years from now. Not much of a bargain, especially given uncertainty over whether this Administration or its successors will be able to sustain the kind of awesome rearmament Reagan wants and Rowny is threatening.

5. No agreement is better than a bad agreement, and a negotiable agreement is, almost by definition, a bad agreement.

The first half of this proposition is correct but the second half is not; and the Administration has practiced the second half even if it did not preach it. Without doubt, if anything like the Eureka College proposal were to be the basis of an agreement, it would be an improvement on SALT; it would lower, if not shut, the "window of vulnerability"; the world would be a safer place. But also without doubt, the U.S. position is utterly nonnegotiable.

It asks everything of the other side, gives practically nothing, and shows practically no flexibility.

There is a time-honored tradition--in negotiations over nuclear arms, labor contracts or divorce settlements--that both sides come in with their maximum demands, then eventually settle for something approximately halfway between. START, however, is unique in the history of Soviet-American negotiations in that the American position has become increasingly less negotiable as time has gone by. Rather than introducing sweeteners to the rather sour pot in Geneva, the Administration has added new features to its position that are even less acceptable to the Soviets than those in the original proposal.

Examples: in addition to the general ceilings unveiled at Eureka, there is now a specific requirement that the Soviets dismantle two-thirds of their cherished heavy ICBMs; an insistence that the Backfire bomber, exempted from SALT II, now count as an intercontinental weapon; and a stipulation that the Soviet Union reduce by 64% the total lifting power, or throw weight, of its missile force. This last was originally a goal for the dimly defined second phase of START. Now it has in effect been moved into the first phase.

The Administration has plotted its course in Geneva with two questions in mind, both, in and of themselves, perfectly valid: 1) What is in the military interests of the U.S. and its allies? and 2) What is necessary to satisfy the domestic and allied demand for good-faith American effort in arms control?

In the past, there was a third criterion, "negotiability": Was there any chance that the Soviets could be induced to accept a proposal? Negotiability ought to be a legitimate consideration in arms-control policymaking. It means simply keeping the enterprise within the realm of the possible and not wasting valuable time on mutual stonewalling. But during the first two years of the Reagan Administration, negotiability was almost a dirty word, a synonym for accommodation and pre-emptive concessions. Officials were chastised for even mentioning it in meetings.

Excessive American concern with negotiability would indeed encourage, and reward, Soviet stonewalling. But by stubbornly pursuing proposals that seem almost intended to get nowhere, the Administration has touched off a backlash, both at home and abroad, against necessary military programs. It has also, if anything, encouraged the Soviets to crank out even more weapons that will eventually have to be countered militarily or bargained over diplomatically, or both. Just as the U.S. is trying, not very successfully, to punish the Soviets for their accumulation of military power in the past, part of the Soviet strategy right now is to punish the U.S. for its policies by creating "new facts" that American generals and arms controllers alike will have to deal with in the future.

6. If deals must be struck with what Reagan has called an "evil empire," a nation that reserves "the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat," then the U.S. must insist on the most intrusive, comprehensive inspection measures to assure that the Soviets are not violating any new agreement by hiding weapons that are supposed to be limited.

Once again, negotiability be damned. In practice, this principle has meant the pursuit, in INF but more dramatically in START, of the right to carry out on-site inspection within the

U.S.S.R. The Soviets have long resisted such measures as a violation of their sovereignty and their own right to protect legitimate military secrets that the U.S. would like to probe under the pretext of arms control. SALT contains only measures that can be verified by "national technical means": spy satellites and remote monitoring stations outside the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.

For years, there have been frequent accusations, particularly from the right wing in the Senate, of flagrant Soviet violations of SALT. While the charges are numerous and persistent, none of them has stuck. The Soviets take full advantage of loopholes, and play as close as they can to the sometimes fuzzy edges of the agreements, but they have been at least as careful to abide by the letter of the nuclear arms pacts as the U.S.

In the past year or so, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and other Soviet officials have hinted at flexibility about permitting some sort of "cooperative measures," perhaps including very limited on-site inspection, in future agreements. But it is virtually inconceivable that the Kremlin would grant the U.S. a carte blanche search warrant to inspect not just launch sites but perhaps storage areas and even production facilities.

Comprehensive, intrusive on-site inspection is not only nonnegotiable, it is unnecessary. The prevailing view of experts on verification is that, thanks to recent technical advances in the U.S.'s ability to monitor Soviet activities from space and from around the periphery of the U.S.S.R., those remote means need be supplemented by only the sort of limited "cooperative measures" that the U.S.S.R. now seems willing to consider.

7. The U.S. must prepare, even in its agreements with the Soviet Union, for the possibility of a protracted nuclear war.

In START, the Administration is seeking a limit on deployed ballistic missiles (850 ICBMs and SLBMs), which could be verified by spy satellites. But it is also seeking an "inventory limit" on undeployed missiles, a measure that could be verified only by comprehensive on-site inspection, and even then there would be some question about whether the U.S. could know exactly how many excess rockets or warheads the Soviets had.

The concern here is with preventing the Soviets from having hidden caches of "refire" missiles. That is a danger that looks real only to those who believe that a full-scale nuclear war could last over a period of weeks, even months. They fear that after absorbing half a dozen or more American strikes against missile-launching silos, command-and-control bunkers, and other critical "nodes" in the network of their political and military leadership structure, the Soviets would still be able, in the jargon of nukespeak, to "reconstitute their forces" and "win" the war thanks to their inventory of initially undeployed missiles.

That is a scenario that strikes many experts as a fantasy. It is a considerable additional burden on the already creaking backs of American arms-control negotiators to expect them to achieve agreements that will not only safeguard the nuclear peace, but accommodate the more farfetched hypothetical possibilities of prolonged nuclear war as well. The U.S. can protect itself from even worst-case contingencies by the far more negotiable and verifiable measures banning the storage of refire missiles at operational launch sites and banning the development of techniques that would allow the Soviets to reconstitute their forces in a war. Such measures were already agreed to in SALT II and could be strengthened.

8. Even if a "good" arms-control agreement could be reached--one that lived up to the various desiderata of rolling back Soviet forces and allowing the U.S. to surge forward with its rearmament--there would still be reason for wariness about signing such a thing. Arms control inevitably induces a naive giddiness among Americans about the superpower relationship; it provides an alibi for not spending enough on defense. In that sense, arms control is ipso facto bad.

Muted versions of this idea were born before the Reagan Administration. Kissinger feared that detente, if oversold, might undercut support for defense. He oversold it nonetheless, but the result was more the undercutting of detente itself. Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, noted in his journal in 1978 that he and Secretary of Defense Harold Brown "both worried that SALT will be used to generate such euphoria about American-Soviet relations that it will be difficult to face realistically either the Soviet military or the Soviet regional challenge."

The invidious implication is that the Soviet Union is superior to the U.S. and to the West in another respect besides the purely military; the Soviets are capable of ruthlessly self-interested arms control in a way that the West is not. The U.S. is on the losing side of a toughmindedness gap.

The historical evidence is unconvincing. At the time of the signing of SALT I in 1972, U.S. defense spending was in decline, but that was a function of disillusionment with the war in Viet Nam. During the debate over SALT II in 1979, there was a bipartisan consensus for more, not less, defense spending.

Besides, in the Reagan Administration, concern over the possible lulling effects of arms control, as expressed in closed-door meetings of policymakers, has been elevated from a cautionary anxiety to an institutionalized obsession. It reflects a basic distaste and distrust for the Soviet Union, all its works, and any dealings with it.

Taken together, these eight hallmarks of Reagan's approach hurt his efforts at arms control and rearmament alike.

In his speech in Los Angeles on March 31 defending his arms-control policies, Reagan warned that proponents of the freeze will bear a heavy responsibility if the superpowers fail to achieve an arms-control agreement.

Actually, a measure of that responsibility rests with him as well. So does a share of the responsibility for the freeze movement itself. It came about not just in reaction to the threat of nuclear war, but in reaction to Reagan's own policies.

Reagan also warned that the U.S. must not "appear to be divided" on such crucial issues as the deployment and diplomacy of nuclear weapons. Yet Reagan's own Administration is sharply divided between extreme hard-liners and embattled moderates. Policies and proposals have emerged as a result of uneasy truces, and artificial alliances among officials who have dramatically different views of the world.

The resolution of these tensions should be found in the Oval Office. But Reagan has found it extremely difficult to assert himself as either a moderator or a decision maker. A number of decisions he has announced, including the most recent INF initiative, were compromises jerry-rigged from competing options favored by the different agencies.

Reagan is interested in economic and social issues but has trouble following or even getting interested in the complexities of arms control and national security. That is one reason why he has been drawn to appealing but deceptively simple-sounding schemes like the zero option and the idea of defending the U.S. with space-based missile killers. Earlier in the year, he commented to a friend that he "sometimes wished all this nuclear stuff would go away." It will not go away in any event, but will loom all the larger.

Whatever Reagan's convictions on arms control--however sincere, however misguided--they do not amount to a grand obsession with him. That could be a blessing in disguise. It could make it easier for him to modify and moderate the policies that have been pursued in his name. At this late, though not necessarily too late, stage, Reagan could shore up his image as a statesman, and hence his appeal as a politician, by salvaging something from the wreckage of arms control on which he or his successor might be able to build.

He will have to begin right away, starting not just from Square 1, but from farther back than that. Relations with Moscow are poisonous; the Soviets have no desire to help Reagan get re-elected by allowing him to stage a summit with Yuri Andropov. Besides, even with an emergency infusion of high-level political will from both sides, the task of the negotiators in Geneva in reaching even limited compromises would be daunting.

But it would not be impossible. Angry as the Soviets are at Reagan, they are realistic enough to know that he might be around for another term and that he might yet succeed in mustering political support for much of his rearmament program--especially if he adopts an approach to arms control that is seen as designed to succeed rather than suspected of being guaranteed to fail. He does have some bargaining power, in the MX and cruise missile programs particularly. It is a question of whether he is prepared to use it realistically.

A first step--no doubt a politically painful one for Reagan--would be to set his fanciful wish list for START aside and begin negotiating, and ratifying, a quick fix of the SALT II treaty. A mounting chorus, including the voices of moderate Republicans as well as the more predictable Democrats, is trying to persuade the President of the absurdity of leaving the treaty in limbo while trying to enforce its terms in cases of questionable Soviet activity.

Many of those same voices are promoting all sorts of tantalizing new ideas for arms control: "de-MIRVing" schemes that would induce both sides to shift toward more survivable, less threatening, single-warhead missiles; plans that would require trading in two old warheads for every new one added; the notion of merging INF and START. But before bright ideas for the future can have a chance, the accomplishments of the past must be rescued from their current erosion and consolidated by being given the force of law.

The Soviets' own counterproposal in START is largely a recycled version of SALT II, although with the passage of time they have upped the ante on their side of the table. The U.S. would have to accept some new constraints on cruise missiles, but it could keep the MX, B-1 and other programs alive and use them as leverage in some follow-on negotiation later.

The most that can be hoped for in the near term is a series of measures intended first to arrest the current deterioration, then to limit the damage that has been done. Only after that can bold new ideas for arms control begin to be implemented. Even then, those ideas will be viable only if they are pursued as part of a broader strategy that entails the restoration of hardheaded detente with the Soviet Union.

In the meantime, rather than letting the best remain the enemy of the good, the U.S. should concentrate on achieving, and preserving, arms-control measures that are, in that phrase of the Joint Chiefs, modest but useful.

--By Strobe Talbott This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.