America Abroad

What was once said of Wagner's music also applies to the logic of the agreement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to stand naked before each other's nuclear missiles: it's better than it sounds. To feel safe, both superpowers must be confident they can retaliate against an attack. The more defense one side has, the more offense the other will think it needs and the greater the danger that competition will spin out of control. Conversely, only when defenses are constrained can offenses be reduced. That's the connection -- the "linkage," as the diplomats and strategists call it -- between the accord limiting antiballistic missiles (ABMs) that Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev concluded in 1972 and the treaty capping the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) that George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev signed last week.

Between those two milestones, 19 years apart, the U.S. had a President who never bought the theory of mutual deterrence or its perverse-sounding corollary, mutual vulnerability. Ronald Reagan dreamed of pure, total defense. His Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, was a testament of faith that Yankee ingenuity could produce exotic missile-killing satellites that would render offensive weapons "impotent and obsolete."

Most American scientists think an impregnable astrodome over the U.S. is sheer fantasy. Yet even a faulty SDI would force the Soviets to take costly countermeasures. Gorbachev put Reagan on notice that if the U.S. proceeded with SDI, the Kremlin would have no choice but to pull out of START. Soviet officials reiterated that warning last week.

Bush has never been a true believer in SDI, although as Vice President he paid lip service to the program as part of the catechism of the Reagan Administration. SDI is still sacred to the Republican hard right, so Bush lets his Vice President, Dan Quayle, champion the latest Star Wars brainstorm: "Brilliant Pebbles," an orbiting complex of miniaturized rockets that makes about as much sense as the name suggests. Since even the testing of space-based interceptors is prohibited by the ABM treaty and would therefore jeopardize Moscow's continued compliance with START, Brilliant Pebbles is more of a threat to arms control than to Soviet missiles.

It's fashionable these days to dismiss nuclear diplomacy as all but irrelevant, given the end of the cold war and the tumult in the U.S.S.R. But precisely because the future of that country is so uncertain, it's all the more important to make sure that one factor in the Soviet equation -- the size and composition of the Strategic Rocket Forces -- remains predictable.

There's another reason for protecting the gains of START and proceeding briskly to START II: only if the two largest nuclear powers continue to reduce their arsenals can they induce other countries to cooperate in curbing the further spread of nukes and the ballistic technology to launch them.

Yet, paradoxically, while meeting the challenge of proliferation means more stringent limits on U.S. and Soviet offenses, it may also require fewer restrictions on defense.