A Rational Approach for Geneva : ‘Star Wars’ Jitters Suggest a Useful Concept for Arms Talks

The Reagan Administration, which has had a hard time getting its act together for next week’s meeting in Geneva between Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko, has come up with an initial negotiating position that makes sense. The question is whether Moscow--and President Reagan, for that matter--will give it a decent chance.

The talks between Shultz and Gromyko are supposed to be exploratory. They are aimed at establishing an agreed-upon agenda for talks on limiting nuclear arms.

But the Kremlin’s major purpose is to stop the U.S. anti-satellite and anti-missile programs in their tracks. Otherwise, the Soviet leaders indicate, there is nothing to talk about.

This suggests that the President’s Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as “Star Wars,” could be a potent bargaining chip in pursuing Washington’s goal of significant reductions in offensive missiles.

But the idea of throwing space weapons onto the bargaining table runs head on into the President’s deep attachment to the vision of a world in which defensive systems have rendered offensive missiles obsolete, thereby saving mankind from the nightmare of nuclear war.

The internecine battle of recent weeks has pitted the State Department, which wants to use the initiative as a bargaining chip, and the Defense Department, which does not. This internal disagreement had to be resolved, or credibly papered over, if Shultz and the United States were to avoid looking foolish in Geneva.

Adding the pieces together, the bureaucratic head-knocking seems to have had surprisingly positive, though possibly fragile, results.

Keep in mind that the “Star Wars” program, unveiled by Reagan in March, 1983, is really a long-range research-and-development effort aimed at providing the basis for a decision as to whether a strategic defense system is feasible. Reagan will be out of office before an actual decision on deployment could be made.

But the President clearly believes that the answer will be yes. Aided and abetted by Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, he has insisted that the goal of the program is a system capable of intercepting attacking missiles before they could hit American population centers.

To accomplish that goal, however, a defensive system would have to be substantially leakproof. And almost no experts in or out of government see how that can be done.

There is a broad consensus, though, that it is probably possible to build a less perfect defensive system capable of intercepting enough of an attacking missile force to create great uncertainty in the minds of the Soviets, thereby keeping them deterred.

The cost of even a limited system would be enormous. And there is the question of whether the Soviets’ response would be to reduce their reliance on missiles, as “Star Wars” supporters believe, or to build still larger offensive nuclear forces, as critics predict.

Whatever the case, the Soviets, who have been doing “Star Wars” research of their own for years, are anxious to avoid an expensive, all-out race in an area in which the United States is well ahead in most relevant technologies. The question has been whether the Administration could agree on a position that would take advantage of the leverage thereby created.

Despite the seeming confusion of statements out of Washington, it appears that a rational approach has been hammered out.

Weinberger and ranking “Star Wars” scientists now say what most insiders insisted was the case all along: The initial purpose of “Star Wars” research is to develop a limited system capable of defending U.S. missile silos and other strategic targets with a sufficient degree of efficiency to deter a Soviet attack. The vision of building a leakproof umbrella has not been abandoned, but has been deferred to the distant future.

This public adjustment to reality was accompanied by statements that space weapons would indeed be on the bargaining table in negotiations with the Soviets.

But the Administration, it seems clear, is still not prepared to bargain away its R&D; work on missile defenses. It is willing, even anxious, to draw the Soviets into serious discussion of the relationship between offensive and defensive missiles--something that hasn’t happened since the anti-ballistic missile treaty was signed in 1972.

The goal would be a negotiated mixture of offensive and defensive missiles that would be more stable and less threatening than the undiluted reliance on “mutual assured destruction” that now exists.

A “senior Administration official,” later identified as Reagan’s chief national-security adviser, explained the kind of trade-offs that might ultimately evolve. A nation with an effective missile defense system, he said, would not be permitted to maintain as many offensive missiles as a country without such a system.

This approach sounds strikingly similar to the modified “build-down” concept that has been suggested by a number of people in the strategic community.

The approach makes a lot of sense from the Western perspective. It recognizes that both the United States and the Soviet Union have large ongoing research programs in missile defense, and that a prudent America must guard against a Soviet technological breakthrough, agreement or no agreement. It offers an approach to nuclear stability at a much lower level of nuclear weapons than now exist. And it could avert an uncontrolled race in anti-missile and anti-satellite systems.

There are pitfalls, however.

For the record, at least, Reagan is sticking to his original version of “Star Wars.” This, together with the way in which Weinberger veers all over the lot on the negotiability of the “Star Wars” program, makes you wonder how much flexibility U.S. negotiators will have in the end.

Even if the Administration sticks to the script, the Soviets may not be prepared to engage in give-and-take on offensive and defensive trade-offs if their own decision-making apparatus is in disarray because of the uncertain leadership situation in the Kremlin. They may not be willing to accept a genuine nuclear balance, especially when Congress and budgetary pressures threaten Reagan’s strategic buildup anyway.

If the Geneva meeting and subsequent talks show that to be the case, the arms-control process as we have known it may be at a dead end. Even so, all would not necessarily be lost. As two high-ranking arms-control officials in the Administration argue persuasively in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, it may be that more progress could be made if there was less emphasis on formal negotiations and more on quiet consultation and parallel acts of “unilateral” restraint.

But that’s another story.