Who Won? the Pentagon

By Strobe Talbott

When the U.S. team arrives in Moscow this week, the main item on its agenda will be President Reagan's letter of July 25 to Mikhail Gorbachev. The secret missive contains a proposal for a transition to a world in which both superpowers could have large-scale strategic defenses. Under the President's timetable, the deployment of such Star Wars systems would not occur for at least 7 1/2 years. That feature was promptly leaked and widely seen as a victory for Secretary of State George Shultz and other arms-control advocates: it opened the way to "delay" deployment of SDI as part of a grand compromise that would include deep cuts in offensive weapons.

Actually, the letter represented something of a victory for Pentagon hard- liners opposed to any concession on SDI. For one thing, SDI would not really be delayed, since there is no way the program would be ready for deployment in less than 7 1/2 years. Even more important, the letter contains a new wrinkle in an old debate over the meaning of the 1972 antiballistic- missile (ABM) treaty, which restricts the development, testing and deployment of missile defense systems.

Last year hard-liners like Richard Perle asserted that SDI was exempt from the treaty's constraints on development and testing because it is based on exotic technologies unavailable in 1972. This Philadelphia-lawyerly reading was hotly disputed, not only by the Soviets but by the American negotiators who helped draft the treaty as well. It would in effect render the ABM treaty meaningless and open the way to a defensive arms race in space. That is just what the Pentagon wants and what the Soviets are determined to prevent. After & months of wrangling, Shultz persuaded Reagan to adopt a cumbersome compromise: the U.S. would claim that the Pentagon's "permissive" interpretation of the ABM treaty was correct but that it would nonetheless abide by the more "restrictive" reading that prohibits anything more than research on SDI. Uneasy with the Administration's position, Congress has demanded access to the secret negotiating record.

This esoteric but critical issue erupted again during the preparation of Reagan's letter. While the State Department wanted to reiterate the restrictive interpretation, the Pentagon was pushing its permissive one. The Pentagon won. Reagan wrote to Gorbachev that during the 7 1/2 years before deployment is allowed, the U.S. reserves the right to proceed with the research, development and testing of SDI, "which is permitted" by the ABM treaty. Earlier this year Reagan touched off a storm of protest by declaring, at the Pentagon's behest, that the U.S. would no longer be bound by the unratified SALT II limits on offensive weapons. Now he has called into question how much longer the U.S. will feel bound by the ABM treaty.