Nation: SALT: A Season for Reason

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> All ballistic-missile submarines, bombers and ABM systems are abandoned, with all nuclear weapons removed from fighters based on land and on aircraft carriers. Each side retains 1,000 ICBMs with MIRV warheads, thus achieving a precisely even face-off.

> Most drastically, each country is allowed only 20 Polaris-type submarines carrying 16 MIRVed missiles apiece; no other nuclear weapons—ICBMs, bombers, nuclear-armed fighters or ABMs—are permitted, and hunter-killer submarines that could attack and cripple the Polaris boats are also banned. Again a balance is struck, but at a much lower level of destructive capability.

Tidy and appealing as such hypotheses may seem, enormous obstacles stand in the way of their becoming reality. For example, even on the point of a mutual moratorium on further MIRV testing there is disagreement within the Nixon Administration itself: the Pentagon strongly wants to press ahead with MIRV, while Gerard Smith, who has been designated the chief U.S. SALT negotiator, made it known last week that he thinks a MIRV test ban should be the first item of business with the Soviet Union. Secretary of State William Rogers put it mildly last week when he said: "There may be slight differences of opinion."

The U.S. has progressed far enough with MIRV that it is now practically operational. That will make reaching an agreement with the Russians vastly more difficult. The Soviets will almost surely want to delay serious dealings until they have caught up with the U.S. MIRV as an accomplished fact also complicates inspection of the opponent's arsenal, since there is no way that a spy satellite can tell whether an ICBM in its concrete silo is MIRVed or not. As Averell Harriman recently noted, "It is more difficult for us to come to an understanding this year than it was a year ago."

The Administration originally expected a SALT go-ahead from Moscow by mid-August. That has not been forthcoming, perhaps because the Kremlin has had more pressing preoccupations with the Chinese border disturbances and the Czech invasion anniversary. One encouraging sign was a report last week that the Soviet Union will shortly join the U.S. in putting before the 25-nation Geneva disarmament conference a draft treaty limiting military uses of the ocean floor.

In any case, progress in U.S.-Soviet military agreements is never rapid. It will probably be even slower in the monumental matter of arms limitation than it was with two earlier and less audacious agreements: the 1963 test-ban treaty and the nuclear nonproliferation treaty initialed in 1968. Each required more than four years of hard bargaining before final agreement was reached, and neither one even began to approach the complexity of the issues on the table for SALT.