Summit's Deadly Stakes

Beaming exultantly, Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev concluded their first summit meeting two years ago by signing a treaty that was to be a first step toward limiting the development and deployment of strategic arms. The second step has been much more difficult. SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) is the thorniest topic Nixon and Brezhnev confront. Their ability to agree on it will determine whether the U.S. and Russia will discontinue the costly and potentially dangerous search for nuclear advantage.

The major accomplishment of SALT I was its ban on widespread installation of anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) systems. Under the terms of the treaty, the U.S. and the Soviets were allowed to erect anti-nuclear-rocket defenses at only two sites--one to protect each country's capital, the other to shield an intercontinental-ballistic-missile (ICBM) launching site. So far, each nation has installed ABMs at only one site. Moscow has been ringed by the Galosh ABMs, while the U.S. has protected its ICBM launchers at Grand Forks, N. Dak.

The ban on ABM expansion spared both superpowers the cost of installing many units of the defensive systems. It also would help to deter nuclear war, according to the Strangelove theory of strategic analysts, by exposing the civilian populations in both countries to attack. This policy of "mutually assured destruction," strategists believe, has been largely responsible over the years for preventing nuclear war.

The treaty also imposed a five-year freeze on the number of offensive nuclear missiles possessed by the two powers. The U.S. was allowed 1,054 ICBMs and 710 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), while the Soviets were permitted 1,618 ICBMs and 950 SLBMS. To critics of the seeming numerical inferiority of the U.S., American officials replied that the U.S. actually retained superiority. Because of highly sophisticated, miniature computer-directed guidance systems, the U.S. has the capability of placing clusters of individually guided warheads on each ICBM. These MIRVS (multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles) contribute to the enormous U.S. advantage in warheads: 7,100 to only 2,300 for the Soviets.

Critics also complained that the Soviets would use the treaty as a means of buying time to catch up with the U.S. technologically. They did. To the surprise of most American experts, Russian technicians pushed ahead with the development of four new powerful missiles (permissible under SALT I), and last August they successfully tested their first MIRV.

Part of the argument in support of the five-year freeze was that given the state of their technology, the Soviets would not be able to test a MIRV before 1975 or 1976. The Soviet test suddenly moved up by two years the Russian timetable for deployment.

By 1977, when SALT I expires, the Soviets will not only have more missiles than the U.S. but could also be on their way to having more deliverable warheads packing a bigger wallop than U.S. MIRVS.

What gives the Soviets this ability is the greater power of their rockets. The S59 and the new SS-18 have "throw-weights" capable of launching warheads packing 25 megatons, equal to 25 million tons of TNT. The most powerful U.S. rocket, the aging Titan 2 (of which 54 are still in operation), can accommodate only a ten-megaton warhead.

If a SALT II agreement is not achieved and Russia pushes ahead on arms development, it could obliterate 90% of America's stationary land-based missile force by the end of this decade. This would leave the U.S. with only SLBMs, strategic bombers and a handful of the land-based missiles--not enough force to knock out Russia's nuclear reserves. The U.S. would then be faced with an agonizing choice: either to strike back at Soviet population centers while knowing that Moscow retained the ability to counterstrike at U.S. cities, or to make major concessions to the Soviets and avoid further endangering American civilians. As farfetched as this "worst case" scenario seems, some strategists see it as a distinct danger should the two nations find themselves locked in a major international dispute.

Worried that SALT I could enable the Soviets to attain this advantage, some Senators demanded that SALT II redress the U.S.'s numerical inferiority. With the American superiority in the number of warheads, the demand was plainly unreasonable and unrealistic; it was intended, at least by some Senators, to toughen the U.S. bargaining position. The Soviets responded with a tough line of their own. Their negotiators reportedly declared that they would agree to numerical missile equality with the U.S. only if Washington 1) removed its nuclear-submarine bases from Scotland and Spain, 2) reduced the number of its aircraft carriers and prohibited all missile-carrying submarines from operating within range of the Soviet Union, and 3) stopped further research and development on new strategic bombers, air-launched missiles and sophisticated anti-ABM devices. U.S. negotiators ridiculed the Soviet demands as "outrageous." Little progress has been made on SALT II since then.

The U.S., of course, has not marked time in weapons advances since the signing of the SALT agreement. It has moved ahead in more than two dozen areas. In June, Congress authorized the Department of Defense to improve the accuracy of its Minuteman III ICBMs and to perfect a missile warhead (called MaRV) that can be maneuvered in flight to avoid Soviet missile defenses. Such improved accuracy would give the U.S. a better chance of destroying Soviet land-based ICBMS. A danger: this first-strike capacity could upset the nuclear balance in the same way that the Soviets would if they MlRVed all their SS-9s and SS-18s. Congress also approved continued development of the Trident missile submarine and the B-l strategic bomber.

Expenditures for such developments alarm critics like University of Chicago Professor Hans Morgenthau, who voices concern about overkill: "If a country has the ability to destroy its enemy ten times over but the enemy has only the capacity to destroy that country five times over, it does not make that country superior to its enemy."

That argument gives insufficient weight to the continual breakthroughs in weapons technology. Entire weapons systems, once capable of overkill, quickly become ineffective in the face of new advances. The refinement of MIRVS, for instance, will heighten the vulnerability of land-based, stationary ICBMs to surprise attack. Thus both the U.S. and the Soviet Union feel a need to search constantly for new systems to protect themselves. This costly and potentially deadly search the SALT negotiators hope to stop by stabilizing the nuclear balance.

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