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In 1982 Reagan hoped to improve on SALT in what he called the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks. But after 18 months of mutual stonewalling in Geneva, those negotiations collapsed a year ago when the Soviets went home and refused to set a date for resumption. With START stalled, the interim restraint has turned out to be open-ended, and it may have to last for a long time to come—well beyond the expiration of SALT II—if arms control is to survive. Some hard-liners seem to be hoping that a tough compliance report this week will set the scene for an Administration recommendation in February not to abide by SALT.
There is good reason to worry about what will happen to the military balance if that view prevails. The Soviets have shown a menacing eagerness to accelerate the buildup of their own arsenal when the arms-control process breaks down. Since leaving START, they have deployed new long-range and intermediate-range weapons against the U.S. and its allies. Whether those deployments prove irreversible or whether they turn out to be bargaining chips that might be traded away in future negotiations, they have complicated the prospects for arms control.
Also, the Soviet Union, like the U.S., is bumping its head against an important SALT II ceiling. Each side is allowed under the treaty 820 launchers for ICBMs with MIRVs. The Soviets have 818. Their new ten-warhead SS-24 may be ready for deployment next year. There is concern among American planners over whether the Soviets will put the SS-24 in existing underground silos, replacing the older ones already there, as SALT II requires, or whether they will keep all their old rockets and build new launchers for the new missiles. They could also deploy their other new missile, the smaller SS-25, by building new launchers for it rather than retiring older missiles. They would be doing so in defiance of SALT but gaining a major military advantage in the process. These would be classic cases of breakout. The Congressional Research Service, which supplies members of Congress with background reports and analysis on policy, has estimated that with SALT still in force, formally or otherwise, the Soviets would have increased their strategic weapons from about 10,000 today to about 14,000 by 1994 while without SALT they could have about 30,000. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that the breakout figure would be closer to 40,000.
Soviet decisions could depend in part on American ones. The U.S. is continuing with a number of military programs that the Soviets regard as extremely threatening. One is the Trident submarine program, of which the Alaska is the seventh boat in an open-ended series. Another is the President's Star Wars plan for a space-based system to defend the U.S. against a Soviet nuclear attack. The Administration has said that it will accelerate its research on Star Wars in a way that does not contravene the 1972 ABM treaty, which is the only strategic arms-control agreement still formally in force. But that treaty prohibits the development as well as the testing and deployment of space-based defenses. The chief Soviet negotiator in START, Viktor Karpov, complained to his American counterpart, Edward Rowny, last year that the very announcement of the Star Wars program was a violation of the spirit of the ABM treaty.