Why START Stopped

Strobe Talbott

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1988

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Summary:  Gives an account of problems encountered by START negotiators in 1988, as minor issues about particular types of weapons turned into major issues. Notes that these problems will persist post-Regan and concludes that "before a new administration can pick up where the old one leaves off in START" it should (1) impose some order in the chaos of US thinking about ICBMs (2) decide whether there is a militarily-sound mission for nuclear-armed SLCMs (3) develop a realistic plan for strategic defense R&D.

Strobe Talbott is the Washington bureau chief of Time magazine. His latest book, The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in October.

In the presidential campaign of 1980, Ronald Reagan helped make SALT a four-letter word, all but unmentionable in polite but hard-headed company. Such was his distaste for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that had been under way for more than a decade. Yet during his Administration, the quest for an agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union on the size and composition of their intercontinental nuclear arsenals has continued under the new acronym of START, for Strategic Arms Reduction Talks.

As Mr. Reagan nears the end of his presidency, an important part of his legacy is a work-in-progress: a START treaty already in the form of what diplomats call a joint draft text. But that document still contains numerous brackets that indicate points of disagreement. Soviet and American negotiators in Geneva labored hard to remove some of those brackets during this past summer. In late September, Secretary of State George Shultz and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze are scheduled to meet in New York and Washington, and START will be high on their agenda. While last-minute breakthroughs are still possible, neither side expects a completed treaty to emerge from that meeting.

Time may have run out for the Reagan Administration in arms control, though not for the enterprise itself. Both of President Reagan?s would-be successors, George Bush and Michael Dukakis, have indicated that they would build on the considerable progress that President Reagan, in partnership with General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, has made in START during the past few years.

However, in addition to inheriting an unfinished treaty, the next administration will also inherit some unanswered questions about the future of American defense programs. Further progress toward finishing the treaty will almost certainly require progress toward answering those questions.

II

When they met in Washington in December 1987, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed a pact eliminating intermediate-range nuclear missiles. The "zero solution" was stunning in its simplicity and boldness, yet it accounted for only about five percent of the firepower in the Soviet and American arsenals. Therefore, while the signing of that agreement was the pretext for the Washington summit, the main business transacted during those three days was an intensive effort to achieve progress in START, which had been proceeding in parallel with the intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) talks in Geneva.

Both leaders had strong incentives to follow up on their success in INF with a START treaty in 1988. President Reagan wanted to achieve his long-sought goal of "radical," 50-percent cuts in the most dangerous weapons on earth. He wanted to claim that the American buildup in offensive weaponry, along with his cherished Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), had served to bring the Soviets not only to the START negotiating table but to the treaty-signing table as well.

A strategic arms pact in 1988 would also have helped offset the tribulations afflicting the Administration elsewhere in its foreign policy, particularly in Central America and the Middle East. The more bad news coming out of Nicaragua, Panama, the ...

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