Straight Talk on Arms Control

As most Americans heard it, President Reagan promised in 1983 that his research program would lead to a leakproof shield against nuclear weapons over the United States. Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger went even further than the President.

But so far, there is nothing in the Strategic Defense Initiative research program that was not there long before Reagan’s “Star Wars” speech except more money. And few scientists who have looked carefully at the research believe it can ever lead to a defense tight enough to render nuclear weapons, as the President put it, “impotent and obsolete.”

That creates a dilemma for Reagan. He cannot have his negotiators at Geneva seem willing to bargain away something as marvelous as a leakproof defense system just to get arms control talks rolling. Nor can he simply say to Americans that he misunderstood back in 1983 and the best they can hope for, even with the expenditure of billions of dollars, is a defense system that would let some missiles through.

In a recent interview, excerpts from which appear elsewhere in these pages today, Henry A. Kissinger makes a strong case that the President has no choice but to discuss defensive weapons along with offensive weapons. He also shows a way out of the dilemma--talk about it quietly and, preferably, not at Geneva.

What is required, Kissinger said, is “a conceptual discussion with the Soviets, in which we try to discuss with each other what we are trying to achieve before we start throwing numbers and weapons systems at each other.”

The present U.S. position is that defenses can be discussed after some years of research that will permit someone to draw a working diagram of a defense system, something that does not now exist. Nobody knows what “Star Wars” would look like.

That, Kissinger says, would create a nightmare at Geneva during the years it took for “Star Wars” to take shape because any negotiation would be in a vacuum.

What Kissinger proposes is allowing negotiations themselves, in effect, to shape the design of any defensive program that may come of “Star Wars” research. “Our position should be that defensive deployments will be related to offensive deployments,” he said. The United States should say, “We are prepared now to accept limitations on defense, provided there are to be limitations also on offense.”

The Kissinger approach makes far more sense than what now is going on, with the United States saying it will not discuss “Star Wars” until the research is done and the Soviet Union saying it will not discuss anything else until the United States drops its research program.

It would mean abandoning the President’s vision of a system that would hold the United States harmless from intercontinental missiles. But scientists and engineers are already doing that, piece by piece, anyway.