Arms Control: Maneuvering Around Square One

"Ask Richard," snapped a U.S. official, referring to the Administration's most persistent and skillful critic of past arms-control agreements, Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, who was present in Geneva and active behind the scenes on the American side. Perle says that while he does not consider the ABM treaty a "taboo subject," he does not want to encourage the interpretation that the treaty restricts SDI.

So deep is Reagan's commitment to SDI that there was a wrangle among the Americans over whether to include the seemingly innocuous reference to the January communiqué. The reason: that earlier document proclaimed the objective of "preventing an arms race in space," and Reagan has never liked that phrase because it sounds like an aspersion of SDI.

Thus, between the lines, even some of the blandest passages of the joint statement augur not imminent accord but protracted discord, and not just between Moscow and Washington but within the Administration as well. Resolving those disputes will take time, probably a long time, and that may be where the summit turns out to have helped most. As Georgi Arbatov, the Soviet Union's best-known Americanologist, put it, "The meeting has improved the possibility that there might be real breakthroughs achieved later on."

Only a few days earlier, Soviet spokesmen were talking as though there would be no "later on." They seemed to be predicting dire consequences, perhaps even a breaking off of arms negotiations, if the U.S. failed to give ground on SDI. Arbatov and other Soviets were portraying the summit as perhaps a last chance for an offense-defense compromise, an agreement for deep cuts in missiles in return for a curtailment of Star Wars. That there is now talk of long roads ahead, despite the fact that neither side budged on SDI, is in itself significant, since deadlines have no place in superpower relations.

While Reagan and Gorbachev seem not to have succeeded in cutting any of the knots in arms control, they may have bought some more time for their negotiators to continue trying to unravel the strings. Here is where the symbolic success, and the resulting improvement in atmosphere, can be important. Now that the two smiling leaders have displayed so publicly their determination to pursue arms control, it is harder to imagine their more hard-line advisers' scuttling the process. Just as Reagan has his hawks who would like to see SDI provide a pretext for abandoning past agreements and blocking new ones, Gorbachev likewise is faced with comrades who want to hold even partial progress on arms control hostage to massive American concessions on SDI. As a result of what happened last week in Geneva--however modest that result may be in substance--those hawkish views are less likely to prevail in either capital. --By Strobe Talbott