Future talks could hinge on compliance with old treaties
Does the Soviet Union cheat on the agreements that Leonid Brezhnev signed with Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter during the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the 1970s? Should the Reagan Administration feel bound by those agreements?
Those questions, and their answers, are closely linked, and President Reagan must face up to them squarely—and very soon. By the end of this week, the White House is required, under a Pentagon authorization bill, to give the Senate Armed Services Committee a report on Soviet compliance with past agreements. By early next year, the Administration must decide on the second question, whether the U.S. should continue to abide by the old SALT agreements while it seeks to negotiate new treaties in the talks that Secretary of State George Shultz plans to propose to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in January.
As on most other arms-control issues, the Administration is sharply divided over what these reports should say. Hardliners, whose most determined and skillful representative is Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, are pressing for the most damning, categorical interpretation of any available evidence that the Soviets have flagrantly violated SALT. Their charges of Soviet cheating buttress their broader case that arms control, at least as practiced traditionally, is not in the national interest. Moderates, centered at the State Department, are inclined to a more equivocal—and, they believe, a more subtle and accurate—reading of the Soviet record. They tend to avoid stark references to violations and talk instead about "questionable activities." The State Department, according to one of its officials, "has been seeking a report that raises tough questions without overstating the answers."
Shultz and his advisers have an ulterior motive. They want to protect the President's diplomatic options. Reagan has said repeatedly that he hopes to reach an arms-control agreement with the U.S.S.R. in his second term. But if his Administration officially renders a guilty verdict against the U.S.S.R. on the issue of compliance, the prospects for the Shultz-Gromyko meeting and future negotiations and agreements may be bleaker than ever. The Soviets will take the accusations as proof that the U.S. is looking for a pretext to scuttle arms control once and for all, while making the Soviets take the blame. At the same time, Congress and public opinion will be extremely skeptical about the wisdom of continuing to do any business with convicted cheaters.
Caught in the middle of the intramural debate is the intelligence community. Its photoreconnaissance specialists and weapons analysts are the gumshoes who stake out the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces. But these detectives are concerned about protecting their "sources and methods" as well as catching the crooks. The CIA is anxious that the Pentagon hardliners, in their zeal to prosecute the Soviets in public, will give away sensitive intelligence secrets about how much the U.S. knows and how it knows it. Some intelligence experts also interpret the data about Soviet activities as being more ambiguous than the hard-liners want to assert.