Doomsday Doctrine

President Reagan’s decision to scuttle the SALT II nuclear-arms-control treaty is not going down at all well in Europe. If the President gets what he deserves for turning his back on the only agreement with a prayer of limiting nuclear weapons, it will not go down well with Americans in November’s Senate and House elections, either.

For five years Reagan talked a good enough game on arms control to create the illusion that he was also playing a good game. That changed with last week’s announcement that the United States is no longer bound by the SALT II treaty. It kept changing with Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger’s casual rejection on weekend television of a Soviet proposal to extend and strengthen a 1972 treaty limiting missile defenses.

The Administration’s new policy looks more every day like a calculated decision to scuttle nuclear-arms control altogether and try to exhaust the Soviet Union in an arms race. If the President stands by the decision, the new policy will be the most serious mistake that Reagan has made.

For example, lifting the lid on the controls imposed by SALT II could hurt the United States far more than the Soviet Union. The Soviets can stay in a race just by putting more warheads on their biggest missiles. The United States must build new ones. If the 14-year-old ABM treaty is to go by the wayside, too, it would take the Soviets only a couple of years to spread to other parts of the country a missile defense system already in place around Moscow. The United States has no operating missile defense system, and could not possibly match a Soviet defensive buildup.

The best that Reagan’s supporters can say of his abrupt and dangerous change of course is that it may bring the Soviet Union to the bargaining table. One way to guess whether that makes sense is to imagine Reagan’s reaction if Moscow had been the first to announce that it was going to break through the SALT II weapons ceiling.

If the November elections turn out to be a referendum on an arms race, Reagan will have to persuade Americans that they need more nuclear weapons and should pay a steep price for them. Despite his great personal popularity, he has never had to tackle a political challenge like that. In fact, his most severe political challenge so far has been to persuade Americans to take a cut in taxes.

To maintain his position on arms control, he will have to turn around an electorate in which four of five Americans favor arms negotiations over an arms buildup. According to a Time magazine poll last November, the number of Americans who considered the Soviet Union a very serious threat had dropped in two years from 52% to 32%. To turn that around, he would have to persuade them that the billions of dollars that his Administration has spent on defense did not change anything. And he would have to be more convincing than he was last week in explaining why the time has come to punch through negotiated limits on nuclear-warhead launchers.

Standing logic on its ear, Reagan said that one of the most fundamental flaws in the SALT II treaty was that it encouraged an arms buildup instead of mandating an arms reduction. His cure would be to break through the very ceilings that he complains are too high. Americans are accustomed to nonsense in their political campaigns, but that would be stretching their credibility to a breaking point.

The reaction to the President’s coming out of the closet on arms control as the election year progresses is not likely to be a partisan reaction. Senate Republicans did not vote to cut his next defense budget as sharply as did House Democrats, but they voted to trim it substantially.

With his new position, Reagan also can count on losing at least some support for the “Star Wars” project that he keeps insisting will put a nuclear-proof umbrella over the United States. Few people actually believe that Star Wars technology can be perfected within two or more generations. But those who do generally think that defenses make no sense unless both nuclear superpowers sharply reduce the number of nuclear missiles that each has aimed at the other.

The line of reasoning that led Reagan to his decision is a puzzle. So is the line of reasoning that might get him out of it. Only one thing is certain: His strongest opponents can take no particular pleasure in his predicament. He has painted an entire nation into the corner with him.