Pulling Plug on Arms Control

President Reagan has retraced his steps on arms control, returning to the point where he started five years ago when the policy was: Not interested.

Reagan has talked in recent years as though he wanted an agreement. He has exchanged proposals with Moscow. He has sent negotiators to Geneva. He has made it sound as though he wanted to curb nuclear weapons as desperately as anyone.

But Tuesday’s announcement that he no longer feels bound by the ceilings on nuclear weapons that were negotiated under the 1979 SALT II agreement strikes at the heart of arms control.

The announcement cited “grievous” Soviet violations of the treaty as the reason for what one White House spokesman called a “sea change” in the Administration’s nuclear policy. Three charges of cheating stand close inspection: One involves a radar station that is a clear violation not of SALT II but of an earlier treaty, the anti-ballistic missile treaty. A second is that the Soviets transmit data from their missile tests to Earth in code. A third is that the Soviets have tested and are starting to deploy a missile, the SSX-25, forbidden by the treaty.

Even conceding the latter two violations--and not all defense analysts do--they do not break through the negotiated ceilings that have kept both the United States and the Soviet Union from building every new missile that came to mind for the past seven years. Reagan’s announcement says that he intends to do just that.

Optimists will argue that the President’s announcement will give him and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev something serious to talk about at their next summit meeting. There is always the hope that the President is setting up something that he talked about after the last summit meeting when he said that U.S.-Soviet relations would depend on deeds and not words. There was a hint of that from a White House spokesman--that from now on arms control would be based on “mutual restraint.”

But mutual restraint must be measured by some yardstick on which both parties agree. If the overall ceiling on nuclear weapons is wiped out, as Reagan threatens to do, mutual restraint will depend on how each side defines restraint, and that would set arms control back to the sparring in the dark of the 1960s.

It is possible that the President doesn’t mean it, that he simply wrapped his scrapping of two Poseidon submarines in tough talk to keep peace between those in his Administration who want to pound the sluggish Soviet economy into the ground with a new arms race and those who want an arms-control agreement.

But keeping peace at home risks letting it slip away elsewhere. The Soviets surely will growl to the world that Americans are warmongers. But what will they growl to themselves? Nothing in their history says that they know how to say uncle. Whatever their public response, it is likely that they would respond in kind. And, ready or not, the President would pass from his phase as a riverboat gambler pushing up the budget deficit to the dangerous life of a galactic gambler pushing up the risk of confrontation between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.