Nuclear Carrots and Sticks

A stern congressional warning, a new flutter from Andropov

It has always been an unlikely alliance: liberal Democrats joining with the Reagan Administration to save the controversial MX missile. But Congressmen Les Aspin of Wisconsin, Norman Dicks of Washington, and Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee never promised their support with no strings attached. When the Scowcroft Commission's report on strategic forces came out last April, the three were widely credited with engineering the package's major quid pro quo: congressional support for the MX in exchange for the Administration's good-faith pursuit of a U.S.-Soviet arms-control deal. So far the Congressmen have delivered on their end. Since the report's publication, the MX has survived two funding votes in the House. But as doubts about Reagan's intentions to deliver on his end of the bargain have grown, support has slipped. The most recent authorization vote in the House, in July, passed by a scant 13-vote margin.

Aspin has now publicly put the Administration on notice that it must modify its arms-control policy or Congress will begin to starve the MX. In a letter to retired Air Force Lieut. General Brent Scowcroft, made public last week, Aspin called on the commission Scowcroft chairs to formulate a new U.S. proposal for the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) and recommended that the Administration agree to substitute the commission's version for its own. The letter also outlines broad suggestions for modifying the U.S. stance at START.

Aspin made clear that his vote and those of other pro-MX Democrats hinge on arms-control progress. Said he: "People aren't about to be snookered." That message is not new. Aspin, Dicks and Gore sounded the same warning in early August at a private White House meeting with National Security Adviser William Clark. But the pressure is being turned up at a time when both the START talks and the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) talks in Geneva are in a deepfreeze.

For its part, the Administration can certainly point to some signs, however slight, of an increased pace in the dialogue with Moscow. Last week both countries signed a multiyear grain pact, and the U.S. ended its restrictions on the sale of pipelaying tractors to the Soviets. Most intriguing of all was an offer from Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov. He seemed to suggest, for the first time, that the Soviets might now be willing to destroy 81 of their 243 SS-20s in Europe so as to equal the number of British and French missiles targeted at the Soviet Union. He said the U.S.S.R. "would liquidate all the missiles to be reduced."

Even if the latest Andropov statement means what it seems to, it will hardly bridge the gap between the superpowers' positions in Geneva, since the U.S. refuses to count the British and French nuclear forces in the INF talks and since the Soviets are making their offer contingent upon the cancellation of all new Pershing II and cruise missile deployment. Moscow's central purpose is almost surely to impress West Europeans with its flexibility and thus to encourage opposition to the installation of those new American missiles, due to start later this year.

The White House is mindful of the potential 1984 election benefits of progress in arms control. But it insists that the MX is an essential bargaining lever to achieve that goal. Still, the growing congressional pressure is sure to widen the already existing split between the Administration's moderates, who favor an arms-control agreement in part to help re-elect Reagan, and its hardliners, who remain deeply suspicious that the Soviets will ever negotiate seriously. The key defense appropriations votes in the Senate could come very close to the scheduled resumption of the START talks in early October. sb This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.