Upsetting a Delicate Balance

Perverse and paradoxical as it seems, the central assumption underlining attempts to keep the nuclear peace for decades has been that offense is good and defense bad. The superpowers have been deterred from nuclear war by the certainty of retribution. Safety, as Winston Churchill noted in 1955, would be "the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation." Each side had to have confidence that it could survive an enemy first strike and retaliate with a vengeance. That way, neither side would have the incentive to strike first. This principle, described sardonically as Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, was the basis of the 1972 SALT I treaty severely limiting antiballistic missile (ABM) defenses.

But now Star Wars threatens to upset deterrence and arms control alike. In his landmark speech unveiling his Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.) in March 1983, Reagan said that his goal was to make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." The Soviets read this not as a utopian dream but as an ominous threat: it was clearly their nuclear arsenal that Reagan most wanted to consign to the ash heap of history. The effect, as they saw it, would be to neutralize Soviet retaliatory forces and thereby make the U.S.S.R. a tempting target for a first strike.

When Secretary of State George Shultz met with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in Geneva on Jan. 7 and 8 to set the ground rules for next week's negotiations, Gromyko repeatedly objected to the description of space weapons as defensive. The term, he said, was meant to "camouflage" the real purpose, which was actually highly offensive in every sense of the word.

Gromyko asked Shultz to pretend that he was on top of a tower in the Kremlin so that he could see, "objectively," how threatening Star Wars looked from that perspective. Reagan has lamented the unofficial American nickname of S.D.I., insisting that its aims are entirely peaceful, while Soviet spokesmen relish using the literal Russian translation of Star Wars, partly because the phrase includes the word war. Since his meeting with Shultz, Gromyko has continued to heap contempt on the defensive rationale for Star Wars. Mixing his metaphors a bit, he has said that if the U.S. persists with the program, the world will end up "under a Sword of Damocles" and "on a tightrope over the abyss."

Shultz's reply to Gromyko, which Max Kampelman will echo to Victor Karpov next week, was that the promiscuous Soviet buildup of offensive weapons has created a "strategic environment" in which the U.S., out of simple prudence, must consider an offsetting buildup in defenses. By the Administration's reckoning, it is the U.S.S.R., not the U.S., that has sinned against the once sacred principle of MAD.