President Assails House Defense Bill as Peril to Nation

President Reagan, charging that the House-passed defense budget hands the Soviets “what they have been unable to win at Geneva” in arms control negotiations, vowed Saturday to veto the bill in its present form and to campaign against Democrats who pushed it through late last week.

The $287-billion measure authorizes Pentagon funding about $33 billion below the $320 billion Reagan wanted and also includes an unprecedented number of restrictions on Administration arms policies and on plans to test and deploy new weapons.

Reagan spoke out in his regular Saturday radio address, which had been taped Friday, before the House cast its largely party-line 255-152 vote on the bill. The speech was broadcast as Reagan was flying to his Santa Barbara ranch for a three-week vacation.

In the address, Reagan called the bill “a reckless assault on the defense of the United States,” and repeated points that White House and Pentagon spokesmen had been making all last week: that it would hamper defense planning to counter existing Soviet arms programs and undercut U.S. negotiating tactics in the strategic arms talks.

“Soviet arms negotiators must be mystified today that U.S. legislators would give away in Washington what they have been unable to win at Geneva,” Reagan said. “Soviet military planners must be astonished at the blows the House delivered this week to America’s national defense.”

Explicit on Veto

Reagan went on to make explicit the veto threats White House spokesmen had been muttering much of last week. “While it is my custom not to say whether I will veto a bill until it reaches my desk,” he said, “if the defense budget arrives in anything like the present form, it will be vetoed and national security will be the issue in 1986.”

The House acted Friday fully aware that much of the Democrat-drafted assault on Administration defense and arms control policies was unlikely to survive a conference with the Senate, where a $295-billion defense bill free of arms control provisions was passed a week earlier.

Even if some of those measures survive, Reagan would still be able to veto the whole bill without jeopardizing continuing Pentagon programs. Once the symbolic political contest posed by the House bill has been played out, Congress could do what it has often done in the past: patch together an omnibus spending bill to cover essential government operations next year and roll defense operations into it.

Singles Out Five Issues

In his broadcast attack on the House bill, Reagan listed five provisions as especially obnoxious to him--provisions against which White House and Pentagon spokesmen and lobbyists had been railing for days. They were:

--Cuts in the Strategic Defense Initiative--known as “Star Wars”--which Reagan believes has been an effective bargaining chip in arms talks and hopes can reduce the instability of massive opposing nuclear forces.

The Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan said, is not only “the great hope of this country for finding a way out of the prison of mutual terror, it is an idea that helped bring the Soviets back to the negotiating table at Geneva. To gravely underfund SDI is to place in jeopardy all our hopes for arms reduction. It is to leave America indefinitely naked to missile attack, whether by accident or design.”

--Limits on funding any strategic weapons programs that go beyond the limits imposed by the unratified 1979 SALT II treaty, which had been drafted to expire in five years. Reagan earlier this summer made further U.S. adherence to its terms fully conditional on Soviet compliance, which has recently come under increasing question.

What’s Moscow to Think?

“What message is received in Moscow when a majority of the House votes to force its own country to strictly observe an expired and unratified treaty the Soviet Union has itself undercut?” Reagan asked.

--A ban on any U.S. nuclear tests of more than one kiloton, unless the Soviets can be certified to have exceeded that level. Reagan cited the unilateral Soviet “breakout” in 1961 from a three-year testing moratorium that led to a 40-week program of tests. “It took us almost a decade to discover what the Soviets had learned from those tests, prepared in secret even as the United States relied upon a Soviet promise,” Reagan said. “We must not make the same mistake again.”

--A ban on U.S. testing of anti-satellite weapons, a field in which the Soviets are widely acknowledged to have conducted tests for several years. “It is inexplicable to me how the House could deny us the right to even test this weapon when a killer satellite weapon has long been deployed inside the Soviet Union,” the President said.

--A ban on new funding for upgraded chemical warfare weapons that the Administration believes is necessary to offset Soviet advances in this field and deter their use.

‘Threatens Our Hopes’

“Make no mistake,” Reagan summed up, “the House defense bill is a reckless assault upon the national defense of the United States. It threatens our hopes for arms control and moves us back toward an era . . . which the American people emphatically rejected in the last two national elections.”

Reagan and his party arrived in California just after noon Saturday, when Air Force One touched down at Point Mugu Naval Air Station. Reagan chatted briefly on the Tarmac with members of the Santa Barbara High School band, which played “Hail to the Chief” on his arrival.

Mrs. Reagan was to join the President at their ranch later. The First Lady flew to Phoenix on Friday to visit her ailing mother.