Shooting Down Arms Control

Satellite-killers were mercilessly upstaged by President Reagan’s “Star Wars” program at Geneva. But in or out of the footlights they have the power to blow up arms-control talks as neatly as they could pick off a Soviet satellite in outer space.

News accounts from Geneva seldom mentioned satellite-killers as an element of the “arms race in space” that the United States and the Soviet Union committed themselves to trying to prevent. But they are in that race as deeply as the President’s Strategic Defense Initiative. More so, in one important way. The American version is within a few weeks of being ready for final testing. Most scientists think that the President’s notion of a defense against nuclear missiles is generations away from that phase--if it ever gets to the point of testing at all.

But under present law the Air Force will be free anytime after March 1 to order an F-15 fighter plane to launch a missile at a target in space in the first real test of whether or not the United States has a working anti-satellite system.

Times reporter Robert C. Toth reported last week that the U.S. delegation told the Soviets at Geneva that the United States will show restraint on satellite-killers as long as arms talks are in progress. Restraint is one of those fuzzy words that get arms controllers in trouble all the time because it can mean different things to different people.

Congress asked the Air Force last year to restrain the program by halting further tests unless, and until, the Soviet Union resumed testing of its own satellite-killer--a system that failed as often as it functioned before the Soviets stopped testing it altogether. The Air Force lobbied itself out of the restraint by promising not to conduct more than three tests this fiscal year.

The small homing missiles that would be launched from F-15s would cripple satellites in orbit by ramming into them. The Pentagon says that it must be able to do that to blind Soviet spy satellites in times of crisis so that they cannot track ship movements. Not even the Navy 0s unanimous on that point.

Satellite-killers make even less sense when you weigh what they could do on purpose against what they might do by accident. The last thing that the world needs in relative peacetime is for one superpower to discover that one or more of its satellites is blind, and not know whether its batteries are just dead or whether it has been hit by a missile.

Although satellite-killers and ballistic missile defenses are separate systems, they overlap at crucial points. A “Star Wars” program that never achieved its own purpose might, at some point in its development, produce technology that would make a first-rate satellite-killer. By the same token, a good satellite-killer would teach its developers much about the third phase of a defense against ballistic missiles.

Congress can remove the ambiguity of the assurance of restraint with relative ease. It can reopen the defense appropriation measure of last year and go back to its original moratorium language--halting further testing of satellite-killers unless, and until, the Soviets test another of their own.

The alternative is to gamble that this country’s definition of restraint is so different from that of the Soviet Union that a test of a weapon that is not even vital to American defenses would blow up arms-control talks.