Second Thoughts on SALT I

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The controversy has largely skirted the ABM treaty, under which the U.S. and the Soviet Union have agreed to deploy only token missile defenses at just two locations in each country, with 100 missiles and launchers at each site. To be sure, congressional doves were disappointed that ABM systems were not outlawed altogether; reflecting that disappointment, the Senate Armed Services Committee last week did not grant an Administration request for authorization of a second U.S. ABM complex near Washington, D.C. Besides avoiding a horrendously costly new turn in the arms race, the ABM treaty is cheered by defense experts for the rather ghoulish reason that it leaves the U.S. and Soviet populations both openly exposed to attack—and thus maintains the postwar nuclear balance of terror.

The experts are considerably less sanguine about the agreement to freeze offensive-missile stocks for the next five years. The agreement aims to hold both sides to the numbers of ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles that existed or were under construction as of July 1. It is by no means a comprehensive freeze; it does not block the development of bombers, for instance, and it even permits extensive "improvements" to existing ICBMs, including bigger warheads and more powerful boosters.

Essentially, the freeze is an interim effort to impose at least some restraint on the headlong Soviet expansion of ICBM forces. In recent years, while the U.S. concentrated on modifying existing missiles rather than building new ones, the Soviets have been adding more than 200 land-and 100 sea-based missiles to their capability every year. By now the Soviets have a 3-to-2 lead in ICBMS, and, under the terms of the freeze, they could have a 40% edge in missile-launching submarines; those margins make conservatives fret that the offensive-missile agreement could be more of a liability than an asset for the U.S.

Critics of the plan are particularly troubled by two prospects:

THE U.S. COULD "LOSE." The conservative argument against SALT I is that the Administration was so eager to reach some sort of arms agreement in Moscow that it might have unwittingly bargained away U.S. "strategic sufficiency"—Nixon's term for mutual deterrence. Writing in William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review, Donald G. Brennan of the Hudson Institute argues bluntly that SALT I is "profoundly unwise," given the Soviet Union's lopsided numerical superiority in ICBMs.