Wild Card on the Table

By Strobe Talbott

In the complex and contentious world of arms control, the question of the hour, and of some years to come, is about Star Wars. What does Ronald Reagan's ambitious plan for space-based antimissile defenses mean for the future of the arms race and attempts to regulate it?

That question was very much on Andrei Gromyko's mind in Geneva last week. George Shultz, who prides himself on being a straight talker, was in the awkward position of having to hedge and dodge. A Soviet official said after the meeting, "Whenever our side tried to learn about the specifics of the American space-arms program, Mr. Shultz tried to answer us with vague generalities and rather unhelpful lectures."

Shultz, quite simply, was not authorized to be more "helpful." Neither his negotiating instructions nor the existing American consensus on foreign policy provided him with the basis for a clear answer about what the Strategic Defense Initiative is really supposed to be, whether it should figure in arms- control agreements and, if so, how.

Part of the problem is that Reagan's idea of the program differs significantly from that of many others in his Administration. When the President delivered his startling speech on March 23, 1983, unveiling his hope that the U.S. might some day be able to protect itself from enemy attack, he profoundly changed the terms of reference in the national, and international, debate over nuclear war and peace.

He was suggesting that we no longer resign ourselves to the existence of 50,000 nuclear charges in the superpowers' arsenals and the perverse confidence that a balance of terror will prevent any of them from ever going off. The President imagined a time when those weapons could be rendered "impotent and obsolete" by deploying an array of kinetic-energy projectiles, lasers, directed particle beams or other exotic devices that would prevent enemy warheads from ever reaching their targets. No more threat of intercontinental mass homicide, no more superpower suicide pact, no more Mutual Assured Destruction. In place of that MADness would be pure protection: a defense that defends and a deterrence that deters by threatening to destroy weapons, not people.

Reagan called that goal a vision. His critics called it a mirage. Physicists have questioned whether Reagan's ray guns would ever work adequately; even a relatively small "leakage" through the defensive umbrella would rain down horrendous destruction. Military specialists have pointed out that there is a variety of ways the Soviets could slip weapons through even the most sophisticated, multilayered space-based defenses. Economists and politicians are aghast at the eventual total cost (some estimates range from $500 billion to a cool trillion).

Almost everyone worries about the possible Soviet response. What happens when the Evil Empire strikes back with a Star Wars program of its own? Surely the Kremlin will not sit back and wait for the U.S. to share its technological breakthroughs, as Reagan has offered. Nor are the Soviets likely to rely solely, or even mainly, on their shields; rather they will continue to amass nuclear spears. The result could be the worst of all possible worlds, one that combines imperfect defenses and escalating offenses.

That is a prospect that the superpowers faced once before and decided to avoid. They realized in the early '70s that virtually no matter what they did to defend themselves, in the end offense would always prevail. That fact seemed built into the sheer destructiveness of nuclear weapons and the relative ease with which one side could proliferate its offenses in order to overwhelm the other side's defenses.

When the two nations concluded the first round of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) in 1972, they signed a treaty limiting antiballistic missiles (ABMs). In effect, they agreed not to seek a comprehensive defense because it was at once futile and provocative; they agreed to remain hostage to each other's retaliatory forces because the nature and number of nuclear weapons in their arsenals gave them no choice.

With full-scale strategic defenses removed from the equation, it was easier to set limits on the number of weapons each side would need to assure destruction of the other and thus maintain deterrence. The result was the SALT I interim agreement on offensive weapons, which expired almost eight years ago, and the SALT II treaty of 1979, which was never ratified. The two sides have continued to abide by the main provisions of those accords informally while they have sought new agreements.

So far that search has got nowhere. In its first term, the Reagan Administration put forward proposals that asked the Soviets to reduce large numbers of their existing weapons in exchange for a partial scaling back of future American deployments. For its part, the Kremlin tried to use the negotiations to score propaganda points and exacerbate tensions in the Western alliance. Neither side's ploy worked. The arms-control process has stagnated for more than a year.

It is to revive that process that Shultz and Gromyko have initiated a new round of talks. But achieving an agreement will be especially hard now that the U.S. has reopened the issue of strategic defenses. The Soviets are all the less likely to cut back their offensive forces if the U.S. is bent on trying to render "impotent and obsolete" the ones they are allowed to keep.

In the upbeat aftermath of last week's meeting, U.S. officials like Assistant Secretary of State Richard Burt expressed the hope that the negotiators might be able to make progress in the offensive area while the defensive talks drag on inconclusively. No way, say the Soviets. The Geneva joint communique stressed that "all the questions" in the coming negotiations should be "considered and resolved in their interrelationship." Soviet diplomats say their side insisted on that cryptic phrase, and as they translate it, it means the U.S.S.R. will not agree to reductions in its offensive forces unless and until the U.S. accepts restrictions on defense.

During the months leading up to the Geneva meeting, much of the public debate and speculation centered on the question of whether Star Wars would be a bargaining chip. The implication was that the program could be placed on the table opposite piles of red chips representing Soviet offensive weapons; , then, in a series of elaborate trade-offs, components of Star Wars might be given up in exchange for reductions in the Soviet arsenal.

That image is somewhat misleading. It may eventually be possible to use Star Wars for some kind of bargaining leverage, but exactly how is difficult even to imagine at this point. Star Wars is not a single new weapon like the MX, the controversial supermissile that the Carter Administration might have traded away in exchange for a ban on comparable new Soviet missiles but chose not to. Nor is Star Wars merely a technological innovation, like the ability to put multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) on missiles, which the Nixon Administration might have traded away in the '70s before the Soviets caught up with the U.S. in that particular skill. Nor is it just a category of weapons, like cruise missiles, the highly accurate jet- propelled drones that have figured so prominently and problematically as bargaining chips in past negotiations.

Rather, Star Wars is a dream of total safety, of a world without missiles and MIRVs. Dreams are not the stuff of which bargaining chips are made, especially when what is envisioned is an all-or-nothing objective. In contrast to offensive weapons, which exist in grotesque surplus, all the various pieces of hardware that would go into a space-based defense would presumably be necessary to make it truly comprehensive and impenetrable; remove any of its components and the umbrella springs leaks. Therefore no single component could be traded away at the bargaining table.

An increasing number of the technicians and theoreticians who are charged with implementing Reagan's Star Wars plan have questioned the feasibility of building a system that could defend the entire U.S., not to mention its allies overseas, and thus obviate the need for weapons of mass destruction. Instead, they hint that the result of their endeavors will be something more practical but nearly as controversial: a high-tech system for protecting American military installations, such as missile-launching silos, bomber bases and command-and-control facilities. In other words, a latter-day version of the ABMs of the late 1960s and early '70s.

What has changed since then is not just the prospect of new means for intercepting weapons but the development of huge, high-speed computers that will make it possible to process vast amounts of information in order to detect enemy launches, discriminate live warheads from decoys, and coordinate a defense. The U.S. and Soviet Union are roughly even in research on death rays; the U.S. is way ahead in information processing.

Advocates say that a system to protect the U.S. offensive arsenal would enhance deterrence because it would increase Soviet uncertainty about whether enough of their missiles would get through to their targets. Critics warn that the Soviets will inevitably develop strategic defenses of their own, throwing into doubt the reliability of the U.S. deterrent, and build up their offensive arsenal to be sure of penetrating U.S. defenses. The result could be that same "offense-defense spiral" that the two sides foreswore in the 1972 ABM treaty.

Some defense advocates reply that high-tech ABMs (which now go by the new initials BMD, for ballistic missile defense) might be limited in future arms- control agreements just as the old ABMs were limited, not eliminated, in SALT I. The 1972 treaty allowed each side to keep two systems; later that was cut back to one. The Soviets still have an ABM defense around Moscow; the U.S. had one around a missile field in North Dakota, although it has been deactivated since 1975. Some officials hope that the talks that began last week might end in a similar deal, whereby the superpowers would agree to reduce their offensive strength and protect their remaining forces with limited defenses.

That is an intriguing possibility, but it is not what Reagan was proclaiming as his goal in March 1983. Nor, according to close aides, is it what he believes in today. The President is still pushing for Star Wars in its original, grandiose and fundamentally nonnegotiable form. As he said in last Wednesday's press conference, "Our ultimate goal, of course, is the complete elimination of nuclear weapons."

If Reagan holds firm on Star Wars, he might as well abandon his pursuit of drastic reductions in existing Soviet weaponry. The best he could hope for would be an interim agreement that somewhat lowers existing ceilings on strategic weapons and perhaps imposes some new subceilings to cover shorter- range weapons. There is no guarantee that the President would approve such a plan. It would mean siding with State Department moderates against Pentagon hard-liners. The plot would thicken further, since there are divisions within the State Department as well. Paul Nitze, who is Shultz's special adviser on arms control, has tended to oppose temporary agreements in principle since they induce both sides to have plenty of new weapons in the pipeline for the day that the agreement expires.

The Soviets, for their part, might go for such an accord because it would bear a strong--and, for the Administration, somewhat embarrassing--resemblance to the much maligned SALT II treaty and also to the counterproposal that the Kremlin put forward three years ago in the stalemated Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START).

The virtue of an interim deal would be that it might tide the arms-control process over its current crisis. It would be a way of buying time and improving the atmosphere for East-West diplomacy. Also, America's allies would be mightily relieved and more likely to follow U.S. leadership on steps to strengthen the alliance, such as a buildup in conventional forces. Congress and U.S. public opinion would be similarly reassured, and similarly more inclined to support Administration defense programs.

But the deal would still be only a stopgap, and it might come a cropper under the pressure of the ongoing competition in offense and defense alike. Better would be an agreement of indefinite duration that could, if necessary, involve tradeoffs between offense and defense. A limited defense protecting offensive missiles, as opposed to a comprehensive "astrodome" defending the entire population, might serve as a genuine bargaining chip. By trading away all or part of such a system, it might be possible to reach an open-ended agreement of the sort that some members of the Administration seem to be interested in but that the Administration as a whole has so far been unable to propose, much less negotiate. Sooner rather than later, and preferably before Shultz and Gromyko--or their negotiators--meet again, the U.S. must decide what kind of antimissile defense, if any, makes sense.