Preview of the SALT Debate

"Killer amendments "ahead?

After Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev sign the SALT II treaty next week, it goes before the Senate for a ratification debate that will range over the whole relationship between the world's two superpowers. To help clarify some of the complex issues, TIME last week convened a panel of experts for an all-day conference in Manhattan. Among them were two of the key Senate staff members now polishing arguments for the showdown on the floor: Richard Perle, 37, a former consultant to the Defense Department, adviser to SALT Critic Henry Jackson of Washington and widely considered to be the best informed opponent of SALT in Senate staff circles, and Larry Smith, 43, for four years a strategic affairs specialist on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee and now administrative assistant to SALT Supporter Gary Hart of Colorado. Their forceful views suggested an important conclusion: instead of a simple either/or verdict, the Senate outcome may well turn on whether amendments can be devised that will allay the doubts of skeptical Senators without wrecking ten years of negotiations with the Soviets. Perle himself made it plain that the foes of SALT are likely to use amendments as the primary way to attack the treaty, with a reopening of negotiations as the ultimate goal. A summary:

Perle: We're Falling Behind. The principal worry about SALT, Perle repeated over and over, is that the treaty as now drafted would permit the Soviets to continue their menacing strategic-arms buildup, while lulling the U.S. into a false sense of security that would prevent it from spending enough on defense. Said he: "In the last decade the Soviets have spent on strategic forces roughly $100 billion more than the U.S. has spent. We have seen an enormous shift in the strategic balance. In virtually every category in which the Soviets were behind a decade ago, they are now ahead." SALT II, he believes, would do less to limit than to legitimize that buildup: "While it is true that the Soviets will in certain particulars be constrained from doing things that they otherwise would be free to do, there is enough freedom in the treaty to let them continue to invest in strategic forces at the rate at which they have been investing."

On the U.S. side, he contends, "the legalistic interpretation of the treaty that says that all of our research and development programs can go forward misses the fundamental point. They are not going to go forward. We can't go to the country and ask for the kind of increase in effort that is required, after having gone to the country to explain that this arms-control agreement is going to stabilize U.S.-Soviet relations and bring the strategic competition under control."

Perle found fault with many specific provisions of the agreement. On the key issue of verification, he complained that the Soviets could get away with various kinds of cheating: "There is a limit of 600 km on the range of ground-and sea-launched cruise missiles. We simply do not know how to verify the range of those missiles." On a more important point, he contended that it would be difficult to tell whether the Soviets are complying with the treaty's restrictions on introduction of new types of ICBMS (SALT II limits both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. to one each) without the aid of listening posts in Iran, now closed by the revolutionary government.

In Perle's mind, however, the danger is less that the Soviets will get away with secret weapons development than that the treaty allows too much Soviet development in the first place. Perle finds the restrictions on new missiles all but meaningless, since a missile is defined as new only if it differs by more than 5% from an existing missile in a few readily measurable ways--length and weight, for instance. The Soviets, says Perle, "can deploy a missile that uses a new fuel, that has a new booster employing new metallurgy, new alloys, with a new MIRV device, with new warheads, new rocket engines; indeed, it could have not a single part in common with a predecessor missile, and yet if it were roughly the same size and had three or four other similarities, it would not count as a new missile."

Perle's greatest fear, however, is not even the treaty itself but the political spirit in which it has been negotiated. During the ratification debate, he says, "the Administration will inevitably become an apologist for the Soviets. The most benign possible interpretation will be put on Soviet behavior in order to provide a climate for approving the treaty." And if SALT II is ratified, "the last thing we will want to do is complain about post-treaty Soviet behavior."

For all that, Perle insists, the skeptical Senators he advises will not try to defeat SALT II outright; rather they will propose amendments. His nose count: "The skeptics in the Senate number more than 34 [the one-third needed to defeat the treaty] but probably fewer than 51 [the simple majority needed to pass amendments]. The result is that the skeptics will be unable to amend the treaty without at least some minimal acquiescence from the Administration, but the Administration will be unable to ratify the treaty if it forces the 34-plus skeptics to the last resort" --i.e., a straight yes or no vote on the treaty, unchanged.

Perle suggested three possible amendments: 1) declaring that nothing in the treaty would prevent the U.S. from deploying a mobile missile system after 1981, shuttling a missile between different silos; 2) lifting the 600-km limit on ground-and sea-launched cruise missiles, which Perle thinks would permit the U.S. to exploit its technological advantage; 3) counting the Soviet Backfire bomber as a potential strategic launcher, subject to SALT II's restrictions on launchers.

Would the Soviets agree to a painstaking renegotiation of the treaty? Says Perle: "I rather suspect that the benefits to the Soviets from continuing the atmosphere of detente and relative restraint that the U.S. has shown over the past decade are sufficiently profound that the Soviets would prefer to keep negotiations going. If the Soviets were flatly to reject an amended treaty that provided for greater restraint, that would be a significant thing for the U.S. to know. In any case, I simply refuse to believe this treaty is beyond improvement."

Smith: Less Risk of War. SALT II, Smith insisted, will not weaken but strengthen the U.S. relative to the U.S.S.R. "The national security case is simply that the treaty bites the Soviets, and it does not bite us. They must reduce their aggregate strategic launcher force by about 10%" to get down to the treaty limit of 2,250 nuclear delivery vehicles. Said he: "It would rise without SALT probably around 25% in total nuclear strategic delivery vehicles. Further, the treaty limits the Soviet MIRV force . . . and there are a number of other particular Soviet systems that SALT will restrict. The only mobile ICBM the Soviets have available for deployment is the SS-16. They can't deploy it, they can't test it, they can't produce it" under the treaty.

In contrast, the U.S. can increase the number of strategic launchers by 190 before it bumps up against the SALT II ceiling of 2,250. Other American weapons programs, Smith asserted, also could go forward about as fast as Washington wants to push them. The treaty, "so far as I can tell, will not inhibit any U.S. R. and D. program. The Soviets tried to encumber our Trident 2 missile. We refused. The U.S. forces, our flexibility in planning them, are unencumbered."

Far from eroding U.S. will to defend itself, Smith insisted, ratification of SALT II would give political leaders a chance to reconstitute the broad middle-ground coalition--in favor both of arms control and of a strong defense--that ruled policy under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, but was torn apart by the national divisions over Viet Nam and Watergate. Complaints about national will are irrelevant to a discussion of what is in the treaty itself, he argued. Addressing Perle directly, Smith declared: "Your arguments would have more force if you could demonstrate that we were unduly restricting our own options."

Smith insisted SALT II actually will enhance U.S. security in a way that transcends numbers of warheads and launchers: "Our ability to plan our strategic force and to counter effectively the elements of the future Soviet strategic force is made much more stable and rational by this agreement. We can manage our own R. and D. programs with much more economy and effect." The prime reason for this is that U.S. planners will know with precision the maximum number of warheads and strategic launchers that the Soviet Union can deploy by 1985. They will no longer have to worry how to counter a "worst case" threat in which the Soviets would build as many rockets and warheads as they could. Said Smith: "The more grave you believe the Soviet threat to be, the more you are concerned about our solving our national security problems, then the more this treaty will help you to that end."

On verification, Smith said that though the Soviets might get away with some cheating, it would not be very important. "The Soviets have a class of sea-launched cruise missiles. They could covertly extend those missiles' range. But the significance of their being able to do that is very small. You can go down to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and see the U.S. class of cruise missiles that the Soviets have. They're like our Snarks, which are outside in the rain; we've taken them out of our force because they are inefficient.

Smith conceded that some amendments might be necessary to get SALT II ratified. His count of likely votes in the Senate differs from Perle's: "Roughly speaking there are 40 to 42 votes that you could project would be for the treaty and about 17 against. There are about 41 in between." Some "clarifying" amendments spelling out in detail what the U.S. understands by the treaty without substantively changing the treaty might be necessary to win over enough of the middle group.

But, Smith argued, the strategy of some of the Senators that Perle advises "really is to kill the treaty through amendments. Such amendments are designed to go over ground that has been negotiated for years by three Administrations, amendments designed to reverse the final compromise on a given issue. A case in point: insisting that the Backfire be counted as a heavy bomber" and thus as a strategic weapon. On the other hand, Smith said, an amendment could specify "that the U.S. has the prerogative of developing a similar bomber without having to count it against our total of strategic launchers. That's not a killer amendment, and it is one that presumably a number of the 41 undecided Senators might consider in beating an independent path to ratification."

In conclusion, Smith conceded that even with SALT ratified, "competition with the Soviet Union will be durable, difficult, varied, intractable. But SALT can maybe make the use of nuclear weapons less likely. I don't believe that conclusion can be demonstrated mathematically or through sophisticated war-game analysis. But somehow we all know, deep down in our gut, that the simple premise of SALT is the recognition by both nations, indeed the entire human race, that we have a desperate stake in avoiding nuclear war."

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