DEFENSE: Second Thoughts on SALT I

IN Pentagonese, it would be described as "first strike" strategy. For weeks the Administration heavyweights have been out all over Washington working to head off a possibly acrimonious debate over the two agreements that Richard Nixon brought home from Moscow a month ago. They are a treaty sharply limiting defensive anti-ballistic missile sites and an agreement to freeze offensive missiles at roughly current levels for the next five years. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger has endorsed them as "without precedent in the nuclear age, indeed in all relevant modern history."

Skeptical. Secretary of State William Rogers and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird have been carrying the colors to Capitol Hill, where the White House hopes to get an increasingly skeptical Congress to approve the agreements by handsome margins.* Lately, Nixon himself has taken an active role in the lobbying. The President, who last met with newsmen way back in March, called two White House press conferences in the past two weeks. There was no doubt about what was on his mind. Nixon defended the Moscow accords as a "breakthrough." He insisted that he would not have signed them if he were not convinced that they are "in the interests of the U.S."

That, as Nixon is well aware, is the focus of a policy debate that could become as bitter as the Safeguard anti-ballistic missile flap of 1968-69. The present strategic-arms-limitation accords, which are known collectively as SALT I, are intended to be merely a first stage. They are supposed to clear the way for SALT II, a comprehensive agreement that may some day restrain, and perhaps even reduce the full range of strategic weapons maintained by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The SALT II talks are not even scheduled to begin until October, and they could go on for years —or collapse overnight. Until the main event takes place, however, SALT I will serve to rile both hawks and doves—and cast doubt on whether it can indeed bring the arms race under control.

Like arms policy itself, the budding SALT I controversy is complex and multifaceted. One complaint, mainly from liberals, is that while Nixon is hailing SALT, his Defense Secretary is pounding the corridors of Congress in search of $1.3 billion to pursue development work on costly new weapons systems, including the B-l bomber and the Trident missile submarine.

At his press conference last week, Nixon pointedly linked the new programs to his dealing with the Soviets on SALT. The U.S. would go ahead with the programs, Nixon said, because "Mr. Brezhnev made it very clear that he intended to go forward" with a Soviet weapons program. Congress was not of a mind to get in the President's way. The House overwhelmingly voted a $21.3 billion military-appropriations bill that included funds for work on the B-l and the Trident. At week's end the Senate Armed Services Committee passed a similar bill.