What the ABM Treaty Means

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For a U.S. Senator, Sam Nunn is unusually laconic. Last week, to make matters worse, he was suffering from laryngitis. But the Georgia Democrat, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, had a lot to say, so he stocked up on throat lozenges. In a series of speeches in the Senate, he addressed one of the most important arms-control questions today: Does the 1972 Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty permit the U.S. to develop and test a space-based Star Wars system?

The Reagan Administration, eager to move ahead with its Strategic Defense Initiative, says yes. Last week -- at great length, his voice often cracking -- Nunn said no. The Administration's claim, he concluded, was based on a "complete and total misrepresentation" of key parts of the historical record, especially its ratification by the Senate.

Since the treaty was signed in 1972, the nuclear peace has rested on the superpowers' willingness to forgo large-scale strategic defenses, lest the accumulation of shields on one side provoke a proliferation of nuclear spears on the other. Secretary of State George Shultz and his chief arms-control adviser Paul Nitze got President Reagan to declare that the SDI program is a research program permitted by the ABM treaty. But in 1985 other officials -- particularly Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle and State Department Legal Adviser Abraham Sofaer -- launched a campaign to "reinterpret" the pact. According to them, nothing in the treaty impinges on the right of the U.S. to go beyond research and actually test space-based systems.

The history of the treaty seems to support Nunn's rejection of the "broad interpretation." If the two nations had agreed in 1972 merely to limit the ground-based interceptor missiles that existed at the time, the treaty would have become meaningless as soon as scientists invented new missile-killing technologies. For just that reason, the Nixon Administration debated how to limit what were then called "exotics" -- such as laser and particle beams.

National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger wanted to ban testing and deployment of exotic systems, but not research and development. He argued that it was impossible to verify a ban on research taking place in a laboratory -- and besides, it would be good to have an R. and D. program as a hedge against what the other side might do. The U.S. military, meanwhile, was conducting secret experiments with ground-based lasers, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff insisted that this program be exempt from any ban on development and testing. So in August 1971 the U.S. negotiating team proposed a ban on developing and testing "systems based on other physical principles." The only exception was for fixed, land-based systems.