TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081291/0812106.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.6 KB | 119 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 27

AMERICA ABROAD

A Defense We Can Live With


By Strobe Talbott


    What was once said of Wagner's music also applies to the
logic of the agreement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to
stand naked before each other's nuclear missiles: it's better
than it sounds. To feel safe, both superpowers must be
confident they can retaliate against an attack. The more defense
one side has, the more offense the other will think it needs and
the greater the danger that competition will spin out of
control. Conversely, only when defenses are constrained can
offenses be reduced. That's the connection -- the "linkage," as
the diplomats and strategists call it -- between the accord
limiting antiballistic missiles (ABMs) that Richard Nixon and
Leonid Brezhnev concluded in 1972 and the treaty capping the
Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) that George Bush and Mi
khail Gorbachev signed last week.

    Between those two milestones, 19 years apart, the U.S. had a
President who never bought the theory of mutual deterrence or
its perverse-sounding corollary, mutual vulnerability. Ronald
Reagan dreamed of pure, total defense. His Strategic Defense
Initiative, or Star Wars, was a testament of faith that Yankee
ingenuity could produce exotic missile-killing satellites that
would render offensive weapons "impotent and obsolete."

    Most American scientists think an impregnable astrodome
over the U.S. is sheer fantasy. Yet even a faulty SDI would
force the Soviets to take costly countermeasures. Gorbachev put
Reagan on notice that if the U.S. proceeded with SDI, the
Kremlin would have no choice but to pull out of START. Soviet
officials reiterated that warning last week.

    Bush has never been a true believer in SDI, although as
Vice President he paid lip service to the program as part of
the catechism of the Reagan Administration. SDI is still sacred
to the Republican hard right, so Bush lets his Vice President,
Dan Quayle, champion the latest Star Wars brainstorm:
"Brilliant Pebbles," an orbiting complex of miniaturized rockets
that makes about as much sense as the name suggests. Since even
the testing of space-based interceptors is prohibited by the ABM
treaty and would therefore jeopardize Moscow's continued
compliance with START, Brilliant Pebbles is more of a threat to
arms control than to Soviet missiles.

    It's fashionable these days to dismiss nuclear diplomacy
as all but irrelevant, given the end of the cold war and the
tumult in the U.S.S.R. But precisely because the future of that
country is so uncertain, it's all the more important to make
sure that one factor in the Soviet equation -- the size and
composition of the Strategic Rocket Forces -- remains
predictable.

    There's another reason for protecting the gains of START
and proceeding briskly to START II: only if the two largest
nuclear powers continue to reduce their arsenals can they induce
other countries to cooperate in curbing the further spread of
nukes and the ballistic technology to launch them.

    Yet, paradoxically, while meeting the challenge of
proliferation means more stringent limits on U.S. and Soviet
offenses, it may also require fewer restrictions on defense.

    Six months ago, the world watched as Iraqi Scuds hurtled
down on Israeli and Saudi Arabian cities. American Patriot
antiballistic missiles foiled many of those strikes. Now a
standard feature on the TV evening news is the cat-and-mouse
game that Saddam Hussein is playing with international
inspectors looking for evidence of his Manhattan Project.

    Imagine a more adroit Saddam armed with an
intercontinental version of the Scud, and you've got the stuff
of which a new nightmare is made. Arms control should make an
attack by a Third World country on the U.S. less plausible
rather than more so. To fend off scores or even hundreds of
warheads, the U.S. needs not SDI but a network of ground-based
interceptors at perhaps three to five sites. The ABM treaty
allows only one site, but it could be amended to permit more.
At the same time, the ban on testing and deployment of
space-based systems should be strengthened, since those are what
could undermine the purpose of the treaty and the viability of
deterrence itself.

    For 2 1/2 years Sam Nunn, the Democratic chairman of the
Senate Armed Services Committee, has been advocating what he
calls a "limited-protection system." Last week the Senate
endorsed that goal. The gung-ho SDI enthusiasts don't like the
scheme because they believe, correctly, that Nunn doesn't want
Brilliant Pebbles to get off the ground. On the other side are
arms-control purists who see the ABM treaty as holy writ and
fear it can't survive any tinkering.

    That ought not to be true. As one of its original
negotiators, Sidney Graybeal, notes, "The treaty was meant to
be a living document, therefore subject to updating as the world
changes." And the world has indeed evolved in ways the Soviets
surely recognize. While Saddam and Bush are at the top of each
other's hate list today, Iraq is geographically much closer to
the U.S.S.R. than to the U.S. So is China, which has a sizable
arsenal, much of it aimed at Soviet targets. So is Pakistan,
with its own nuclear ambitions.

    As they made clear last week, Bush and Gorbachev already
realize that their countries have a lot more to worry about than
each other. Perhaps, before their next summit, they could
acknowledge a shared interest in easing the terms of the ABM
treaty while preserving its essence.