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That, in a nutshell, is a dilemma the Administration still faces. The report due this week is a congressionally mandated update on the one the Administration released in January. Sullivan last week warned that his patrons would not be pleased if McFarlane tried to delay the new study or "distance the President from it the way he did with the GAC report. We expect a larger menu of SALT violations than we got in January. We hope not to see a report that is watered down and full of divided opinion."
Congress requires another report from the Administration in February on the related issue of whether the U.S. should continue to comply with SALT while it tries to negotiate better agreements. There, too, opinion is divided. The hard-liners would like to see SALT dead and buried, while the State Department and its allies argue that the U.S. will be worse off, both diplomatically and militarily, if it pulls the plug on the treaty.
Both superpowers are hedging their bets by proceeding with new military programs that will confront them with stark choices about whether to maintain even the pretense of compliance. The U.S. is facing that dilemma almost immediately. The nuclear-powered submarine U.S.S. Alaska is due to be launched by the Electric Boat Division of the General Dynamics Corp. in Groton, Conn., next month; it will begin sea trials in the fall. With that boat in service, the U.S. may, for the first time, be definitively and deliberately in violation of SALT.
Among the ceilings established by SALT II is a limit of 1,200 launchers for long-range ballistic missiles with multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MlRVs). The Alaska's 24 Trident rockets, each with eight thermonuclear warheads, would put the American total of MlRVed ballistic-missile launchers at 1,214.
To avoid violating SALT II, the U.S. would have to take out of service one of its 31 older, smaller Poseidon submarines or remove some land-based Minuteman III ICBMs. In the past, as new U.S. weapons have been deployed, older ones have been dismantled or converted to other uses. For example, the five-year SALT I agreement on offensive weapons, which Nixon signed in 1972, limits the number of submarine tubes each side can have. During the 1970s, as the U.S. Navy built Poseidons, it would dismantle their predecessors and display the pieces on docks so that Soviet spy satellites could see proof that the U.S. was staying within the SALT I limits. This practice continued even after SALT I expired in 1977. The Soviets have done much the same.
Compliance with SALTII is a trickier matter for the Reagan Administration. The Senate never ratified the treaty, and even if it had done so, the pact would expire at the end of next year. Reagan campaigned against SALT II as "fatally flawed." Throughout his first term, informal observance of the expired SALT I agreement on offensive weapons and the unratified SALTII treaty was explained as an "interim restraint," a stopgap that would give the U.S. a chance to negotiate new agreements and to head off what military planners call "breakout." That is what happens when one side unilaterally declares itself no longer bound by arms control and suddenly fields large numbers of new, threatening and hitherto prohibited weapons.