SALT II PRELIMINARIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01315R000400380079-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 8, 2004
• Sequence Number: 79
• Publication Date: May 11, 1979
• Content Type: NSPR

'~:ICLE Appl~bved For PT6Ye ~bbg '1~~ IA( 1 8-!b'131)5R000
p;d PAGE 11 May 1979
etAS,o',I
SALT. I1preliinaries
The first SALT agreement of 1972 found the
U.S. Senate as agreeable as it had. been eight
years earlier to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution -
not, to be sure, a very felicitous parallel. It may
therefore seem strange that the successor agree-
ment announced this week is thought to be in
some danger of rejection.
Why this reversal of prospects? So far as.we
know, there is no clearly substantiated case of
serious "cheating" by the Soviet Union on SALT-
I; nor has there been a drastic shift in the politi-
cal alignment of the Senate. It is perhaps of
minor significance that Richard Nixon, who had
made a career of anti-Soviet "toughness," was
the sponsor of the first SALT agreement, and ae-
cordingly. assumed to be a reluctant bargainer -
as Mr. Carter has not been.
But those considerations are probably mar-
ginal. Far the most important difficulty, we sus-
pect, : is the growing worry that what the U.S.
seeks in strategic arms control and what the
Soviet Union seeks may not be one and the same.
Is SALT-II, for the Soviet Union, a valuable com-
promise or an opportunity for U.S. acquiescence
-in her well-documented buildup 'of worldwide
strategic power? Passionate views are held on
both sides of this question; they are sure to fig-
ure in the debate.
Most-of, us will, in any case, want to see and
examine the text of .the treaty, yet to be drafted,
before reaching final conclusions.
It may be, more appropriate, on the morrow of
the announcement of accord, to preview a few of
the issues likely to affect Senate deliberation
not only the political hazards for an administra-
tion that has made SALT-II the. centerpiece of its.
foreign policy; not only the .: critical pressure
points in the agreement. itself; but the assets that
may eventually weigh in favor of ratification.
If we were running the administration's politi-._
cal strategy, we would advise President Carter to
avoid several tactics with. which his "SALT-sell-
ers" already seem to be toying: the temptation to
invoke a dubious claim that the president, as a
former officer. in the nuclear navy, enjoys some
mysterious expertise in the complex field of -?
strategic weapons; the temptation to link the:
issue of national security with the issue of nu-
clear safety raised by the-Three Mile Island acci-.;
dent; the temptation to turn the Panama Canal
ratification strategy inside out, in effect, by
using the evident preponderance of public opin-
ion as a decisive argument in,the-SALT, agree- at .race.
ment's favor. (If a high percentage of those"
polled "favor" an arms control agreement, one
can be pretty sure that the sentiment rests on
the universal zeal for peace and safety far more,
than on a grasp of the technical questions).
Finally, there is the temptation to depict serious
opponents and critics as in some way animatedi
by "right-wing" or anti-peace sentiment. Some of
them may be. But what is at issue, after all, is not
the desirability of peace, nor the avoidance of
nuclear catastrophe, nor restraint and stability
in the arms race, but how best to achieve those
goals.
Certain critical points in the agreement will
predictably, weigh heavily with the Senate.
.Among these are the reaction of European allies
to the U.S. agreement to restrict cruise missile
ranges and the distribution to them of cruise
technology; the supreme issue of U.S. Minuteman
vulnerability in the early 1980s, and what the ad-
min.istration.promises, apart from the treaty, to
do about it; the issue of the ranges of the Soviet
"Backfire" bomber and the encoding of Soviet
missile test telemetry -- both of which seem to
be left to a substantial degree of self-policing
judgments by the Russians. And finally, there is
the unresolved debate about verification, with
emphasis on the importance of the lost Iranian
monitoring stations.
So far, at least,. while critics of the agreement
have advanced some telling arguments of details
no, single issue they raise has. caught fire or
clearly imperils ratification. The administra-
tion's main. task will be to ease a mood of general
suspicion, and to draw bellwethers of debate like
Henry Kissinger into its corner; and that can
best be managed by detailed' and specific an-
swers to specific questions,
Our hunch is that the-debate,will finally'cen-
ter on the question of what kind of game the.
Soviets' are up to in the. world whether their
primary loyalties are to revolutionary mischief]
sustained by nuclear blackmail or to nuclear
stability - or if divided between the two, as they
now seem, in what proportion divided.
There is evidence of this division of Soviet
loyalties=enough to make it a formidable task .1
to convince the Senate by sometime next fall..i
that the Soviet Union will be a reliable and co-
operative partner in the great imperative, which I
all of us favor, of ,stabilizing the nuclear arms ']
Approved For Release 2005/01/12 : CIA-RDP88-01315R000400380079-4