Nation: Danger: Killing SALT Forever

The SALT II treaty has been in legislative limbo since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan last December, but in the past week its fate has become one of the most heated and important disagreements between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Carter wants to save the treaty, Reagan wants to kill it. As TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott reports, the issue has grave implications:

There is a political and historical irony in the positions of the two candidates on SALT II. Reagan proposes to scrap the present treaty and reopen negotiations with the Kremlin. His goal: a new agreement that would substantially reduce the Soviet arsenal of intercontinental missiles and thus blunt the danger of a surprise attack against the American rockets. Reagan hopes to induce the Soviets to go back to the bargaining table by threatening a new arms race.

In its broad outlines, Reagan's plan is almost identical to Carter's at the beginning of his presidency in 1977. Carter had inherited from Gerald Ford a SALT II agreement that was nearly complete, but Carter wanted something better, a "real arms control" treaty of his own that would roll back, rather than merely slow down, the Soviet weapons program.

Carter then, like Reagan now, wanted to protect U.S. missiles against the theoretical possibility of a Soviet pre-emptive strike. Carter then, like Reagan now, told the Kremlin, in effect, either make more concessions or face new and bigger U.S. missiles.

The Soviet leadership threw Carter's "comprehensive" proposal right back in his face; his ill-considered initial approach to the Soviets was one of Carter's major foreign policy mistakes. The SALT II treaty he ended up signing with Leonid Brezhnev in 1979 was based largely on the deal that Ford had struck with Brezhnev three years before, although the final agreement did contain some advantages for the U.S.

Carter rightly calls Reagan naive for thinking the Soviets can be intimidated into accepting deep cuts in their existing arsenal by the threat of a future U.S. buildup. But were it not for Carter's own similar naiveté four years ago, SALT II would almost certainly have been signed—and ratified—early in his Administration, long before its passage was "linked" to Soviet behavior in Cuba and Afghanistan. Such linkage was always dubious, since SALT benefits both sides.

When Carter made his false step with SALT II early in 1977, the SALT I interim agreement on offensive weapons still had seven months to run. Since then, the superpowers have been adhering to SALT I even after it expired, and to the main provisions of SALT II even though it remains unratified.