Former Arms Negotiators Assail Latest Reagan Offer to Soviets

Arms control supporters who helped negotiate previous U.S.-Soviet weapons agreements Thursday attacked President Reagan’s latest proposal to the Kremlin, saying that it is designed to kill the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and to legitimize Administration plans to build an anti-missile system in space.

Former Ambassadors Gerard C. Smith and Paul C. Warnke charged that Reagan’s proposal would dismantle the ABM treaty in two stages over a seven-year period by expanding the kind of work it permits from only research to “research, development and testing.” After that period, they said, it could lead to deployment of Reagan’s anti-missile system--called the Strategic Defense Initiative and popularly known as the “Star Wars” program.

View Dismissed

Smith and Warnke--members of the private Arms Control Assn.--dismissed the view that the Reagan proposal is a promise not to deploy SDI for five to seven years. No deployment is possible until 1996 at the earliest, they asserted, because a great deal of research must yet be done to prove or disprove the feasibility of a defense system in space based on high-energy beams.

Reagan’s proposal, said Warnke, who was director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Carter Administration, “is a formula for crisis and strategic instability. It would inevitably start a new, accelerated offensive arms race, as well as a race to put up inadequate missile defenses, on both sides.”

Letter Defended

Administration officials defended the Reagan letter to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev as a complex proposal in which, as one of the aides said, “where the commas are placed is crucial.” But they maintained that a positive aspect is that the President has now accepted the relationship between offensive missiles and defensive systems, making serious negotiations on both issues possible.

Meanwhile, the United States and Soviet Union adjourned talks Thursday on nuclear testing until early September after several days of exchanges among experts in Geneva.

As expected, the Soviets discussed their proposal for a total test ban, which the United States has rejected in principle, while the United States argued for improved verification provisions for two existing agreements that were signed a decade ago but never ratified. The Soviets want ratification first, improved monitoring later.