Arms Test Won’t Hurt Talks, Tower Says : Negotiator Sees Soviets Focusing on Interests, Not ‘Incidents’

U.S. negotiator John Tower, shrugging off Soviet complaints, predicted on Sunday that U.S. testing of anti-satellite weapons will have no impact on the arms control talks scheduled to resume in Geneva next month.

Tower, chief of the U.S. delegation dealing with long-range nuclear weapons in the three-pronged negotiations that include medium-range missiles and space weapons, predicted that the Soviets will act in what they consider their own best interest regardless of anything Washington might do or refrain from doing.

“I think that the arms talks, the progress of the talks, the ultimate outcome is going to be driven by both sides’ perception of their national interest,” Tower said. “That’s going to be the determining factor, not incidents that may occur along the line.

“The ultimate outcome will depend largely on the extent to which the Soviets perceive it to be in their interest to agree to radical reductions in offensive arms,” he said.

Asked on the CBS-TV interview program “Face the Nation” if he believes that the Soviets will resume their own anti-satellite weapons testing program--suspended since 1982--in response to the U.S. announcement last week of anti-satellite testing, Tower said: “I have no idea whether they will or not. They will do whatever they conceive to be in their interest, regardless of what we do.”

U.S.-Soviet Propaganda War

Tower’s comments, less than a month before he is scheduled to resume talks in Geneva, came in the midst of a U.S.-Soviet propaganda war in which each side appeared to be trying to position itself to blame the other for failure in the arms control talks or the Nov. 19-20 summit scheduled between President Reagan and Soviet Communist Party leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

In a radio interview Saturday, Reagan said that he hopes his meeting with Gorbachev will reduce “hostilities” and “suspicions” between the superpowers. But he added that the Soviet Union is “an expansionist power” bent on spreading communism throughout the world.

Georgy A. Arbatov, the Soviet Union’s leading America-watcher and a member of the Communist Party Central Committee, said Sunday that the U.S. anti-satellite program could scuttle the entire arms control process and perhaps normal U.S.-Soviet diplomatic relations as well.

“It is a new, very dangerous step in the arms race,” Arbatov said on the NBC-TV program “Meet the Press.”

“It endangers the whole arms control process because it is part of the ‘Star Wars’ concept, and if the United States goes on with it . . . then we can very well, you know, say for a considerable future ‘goodby’ to the whole negotiations,” he said.

Asked later if he meant to imply that the Soviets might walk out of the arms control talks because of anti-satellite testing, Arbatov hedged: “You never know which straw will break the spine of a camel.”

And he added, “You (the United States) can, if you are persistent in consciously trying to torpedo the Soviet-American relations, you can make baseless everything--the talks in Geneva, or even the contacts we have in the usual diplomatic way.”

Arbatov, who two years ago said that U.S.-Soviet relations were worse than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis, said Sunday that they have gotten worse since. He described his 1983 comments as “too optimistic.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) joined Tower in minimizing the impact of anti-satellite testing on the arms talks and the Reagan-Gorbachev summit.

“I don’t think it is going to hurt and, frankly, I don’t care if it does hurt,” Goldwater said. “This is in the United States’ best interest and, frankly, I don’t care about the Soviet Union.”