Negotiating a Build-Down

Washington works out an arms-control agreement—with itself

After months of arduous negotiations, an agreement on Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) was finally reached. All the parties involved at last accepted a radical new "double build-down" plan that would reduce the total destructive capabilities of the Soviet and American strategic arsenals as well as cut the number of warheads on each side's long-range missiles. Amid the fanfare and self-congratulations at the Rose Garden ceremony marking the agreement, it was easy to forget that the tough bargaining had taken place entirely within Washington, and that there was no sign at all that what had been worked out between the White House and Capitol Hill would be accepted by the Kremlin.

Indeed, the Treaty of Pennsylvania Avenue seemed to have followed Alice through the looking glass. Usually the White House sets U.S. arms-control policy and tries to get Congress to go along. This time President Reagan let a group of Congressmen take the lead in fashioning an imaginative initiative of their own. Even if Moscow spurns the new proposal, the unprecedented way that it evolved has changed the nature of the domestic debate over nuclear arms. "We have been able to get the Administration to adopt an arms-control approach that is genuinely bipartisan and will provide a consistent, sustainable basis for the next Administration, whatever it is, Democratic or Republican," said Congressman Les Aspin of Wisconsin, a liberal Democrat.

Reagan was amply rewarded for not standing on presidential prerogative. In the first place, he secured congressional backing for the MX missile. He is also able to present Moscow with a START proposal that enjoys strong bipartisan support. Said Kenneth Duberstein, the presidential assistant who helped to put the package together: "It gives a signal to the Soviets that we are united." Not least of all, Reagan may have been able to dispel his image as an inflexible hard-liner and defuse the arms-control issue before the 1984 elections. Said one of his senior advisers: "This is what we should have been doing a year ago."

The double build-down plan still includes Reagan's original START proposal that both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. reduce from approximately 8,500 apiece to 5,000 the number of warheads they have deployed atop long-range missiles. It incorporates the novel proposal that both sides destroy more than one old weapon for each new one deployed as they modernize their forces. Reflected too is the idea that certain weapons are more threatening, or "destabilizing," and should be discouraged. For example, large land-based missiles that carry multiple warheads have the capacity to destroy enemy missiles in a pre-emptive strike and are more susceptible to being destroyed by a first strike. Since both sides know that they may have to use such missiles first if they are to use them at all, they encourage hair-trigger reactions. In addition, the new proposal meets the Soviet desire that bombers, in which the U.S. enjoys a strategic advantage, be simultaneously placed on the negotiating table in Geneva with land-based missiles. A complex formula has been devised to measure each country's nuclear firepower on missiles, submarines and planes (see box).