Breakthrough or Breakout?

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The new year in Soviet-American arms control officially begins in Geneva this week. For the first time since last November, Chief U.S. Negotiator Max Kampelman is due to lead his delegation of diplomats and experts in a caravan of limousines from their headquarters across from the city's botanical gardens, up the Avenue de la Paix, through a heavy iron gate, past a phalanx of Soviet sentries and onto the grounds of the Villa Rose, which houses the Soviet mission. Kampelman will be met by his counterpart, Victor Karpov. Inside a modernistic annex to the baroque mansion, the two delegations will take their places at a long table, with Kampelman flanked by two colleagues on the U.S. team, former Texas Senator John Tower and Diplomat Maynard Glitman. After an exchange of pleasantries, the negotiators will plunge into the tedious yet vital business of seeking reductions in Intercontinental and intermediate-range nuclear arms, as well as establishing ground rules for the development of exotic antimissile devices such as those proposed in Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, plan.

Despite differences on many issues, the outlines of a potential agreement have been apparent for some time. Its centerpiece would be an "offense-defense trade-off": the Soviet Union would accept deep cuts in its most accurate, powerful offensive weapons--land-based ballistic-missile warheads--in exchange for the U.S.'s restricting SDI.

The Soviets are interested in such a trade since extensive American defenses would force them to invest in expensive countermeasures at a time when Mikhail Gorbachev wants to build up the industrial and civilian sectors of the economy. Karpov laid down a proposal in Geneva last fall under which the Soviet Union would give up half of its land-based warheads if the U.S. canceled SDI. There have been some high-level hints that the Soviet definition of cancellation would be a ban on testing and deployment but not on the research phase of the program.

Some American experts believe that the offense-defense trade-off would be a good deal: if the U.S. were less threatened by Soviet offenses, it would have less need for a massive network of orbiting battle stations to shield it from an attack. Many scientists question whether SDI will work, and the research necessary to find out is dauntingly expensive. The Administration wants $26 billion over the next five years, and deployment might cost a cool trillion or more. Especially in an era of deficit reduction and Pentagon cost cutting, there is growing resistance in Congress to funding SDI. Says New York's Democratic Senator Daniel Moynihan: "Our leverage over the Russians with this program is considerable until that day when they figure out that they can sit back and wait for us to pull the plug on it. It is a great bargaining chip until it becomes a great white elephant."