A Shield Against Arms Control

By Strobe Talbott

For nearly four years, the Reagan Administration has been riven by one of the most bizarre episodes in the annals of covert operations. It has nothing to do with Iran or Nicaragua. The clandestine activity has taken place almost entirely inside the U.S. Government. The main combatants have been senior advisers to Ronald Reagan. At the heart of the struggle is one of his most cherished ideas, the Strategic Defense Initiative. But the President himself seems largely oblivious to what is going on.

In 1983 Reagan stunned the world with his dream of a missile shield that would someday render all offensive nuclear weapons, in his phrase, "impotent and obsolete." In the meantime, however, the program posed a challenge to the more mundane enterprise of arms control, which has been the object of a bitter, largely hidden conflict within the Administration. One faction, led by Secretary of State George Shultz, wants to keep arms control alive and use SDI for the leverage it gives the U.S. in negotiations with the Soviet Union. The other faction, led by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, has been trying to use SDI to drive a stake through the heart of arms control.

Weinberger's motive became more apparent last week, when he delivered a speech in Colorado Springs calling for deployment in the next few years of a rudimentary version of SDI. Weinberger seemed to have in mind a system that would rely not on Star Wars laser beams fired from battle stations in space but largely on ground-based antiballistic-missile interceptors and other "off-the-shelf" technology. The purpose would be not to render American missiles obsolete but, quite the contrary, to assure their ability to withstand an attack.

Since 1967 the U.S. has based its attempt to regulate the nuclear rivalry with the Soviet Union on the premise that large-scale strategic defenses are "destabilizing." One side's defenses tend to provoke offensive countermeasures by the other side, thus exacerbating the arms race. For just that reason, the two countries in 1972 signed an open-ended treaty severely limiting their ABMs.

In addition to being by far the most important surviving vestige of arms control, the ABM treaty is the most likely basis for a future agreement. Shultz's role in the covert struggle within the Administration has been to nudge the President toward a so-called grand compromise with Mikhail Gorbachev. Its essence: the U.S. would agree to confine SDI to research and development and forgo deployment for a significant period of time; in exchange, the Soviets would reduce their most threatening offensive weapons. Key to Shultz's argument has been the contention that a deployable SDI will not be ready until the 21st century.

On visits to the Oval Office, Shultz has been quietly arguing that the best way to assure that SDI will survive under future Presidents is to "establish it in an arms-control context" by making continued R. and D. part of a deal with the Soviets. But a prohibition against rapid deployment would have to be part of the same deal.

Meanwhile, the anti-arms-control faction has been doing everything it can to accentuate the incompatibility between SDI and the ABM treaty and to deploy something, anything, sooner rather than later. Hence Weinberger's address last week. When Shultz heard about the speech, he was, according to an aide, "livid -- but silently so." He wants to keep his side of the struggle as covert as possible, the better to influence the Dreamer in Chief.