Nuclear Test Moratorium

Carl Sagan’s plea (Editorial Pages, Sept. 30) that the United States join the Soviet Union in its nuclear test moratorium is a misrepresentation of the facts.

Sagan says, “An American seismic network is now in place near the Soviet underground test center at Semipalatinsk. It clearly demonstrates at least Soviet willingness for on-site verification.” It demonstrates nothing of the kind.

A leading member of the U.S. team has warned us that even though they have been permitted to set up their equipment in the vicinity of the Soviet test site, the U.S. team members have been given no assurance that they would be permitted to monitor tests were the Soviets to resume them.

Moreover, if they were given such assurance, it would be foolhardy to enter into a test moratorium with the Soviets, because there would be no assurance that they would not drag it out as they have their human-rights commitment, and their commitment to abolish all their biological weapons, as we did ours. This dragging out could continue until our profit-dependent arms producers were forced to dismantle and retool for other ways to make a profit, a predicament that would not arise in the Soviet nationalized industrial monolith.

What our Carl Sagans are not calling our attention to is that President Reagan has, in fact, proposed a comprehensive test ban on condition that there be concurrent and substantial arms reductions monitored by intrusive inspections. Although the President has not said so, it is reasonable to assume that he is also insisting that arms reductions be accompanied by the dismantling of arms-production facilities. Nothing less would be safe.

In his Sept. 22 address before the Unitied Nations General Assembly, the President said, “ . . . in association with a program to reduce and ultimately eliminate all nuclear weapons--we are prepared to discuss ways to implement a step-by-step parallel program of limiting and ultimately ending nuclear testing.” (One gets the impression that our Carl Sagans would rather we didn’t know he said that.)

The President has made it clear that his objective, like that of his seven predecessors, is nuclear disarmament by phased-out reductions, not arms control. He said to the U.N. Assembly, “Note that I said reduction; for this is the real purpose of arms control.” Nuclear disarmament has been the U.S. objective for 40 years; not arms control at a level that Carl Sagan once said would preserve deterrence while not threatening a nuclear winter.

The Eisenhower Administration sought in vain to achieve a comprehensive test ban looking to nuclear disarmament, but Soviet intransigence in the matter of verification prevented it. President Carter crafted a test ban treaty requiring only “voluntary” methods of verification, but abandoned it when the Soviets broke their non-aggression pledge by invading Afghanistan.

The most encouraging statement President Reagan made in his U.N. address was this: “The ice of the negotiating stalemate could break . . . if we keep the promises we made to each other last November.” Those promises led Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to announce that “The world has become a safer place,” and later to propose a 50% arms reduction verified by on-site inspections. Reagan said the two of them had agreed on “tough verification” of “offensive reductions.”

Only now has the President revealed that the price for those concessions is the shelving of “Star Wars” for 7 1/2 years, his estimate of the shelf life of a Kremlin promise.

At the coming Iceland meeting it will not be easy for either leader to remain silent on the promises they made to each other last November. Conceivably, they don’t intend to, but rather to exchange commiserations on the roughing they got from their military back home, and to plan a common strategy.

The nub of the matter is that the men of the Kremlin need not do otherwise than they are doing, as long as our Carl Sagans pressure our elected, and to-be-elected, officials into taking actions that please the Kremlin. That is what the President had in mind when he said, in condemning the House-passed spending bill, “Didn’t it ever occur to anyone what the Soviets must be thinking? They’re thinking if (they) wait long enough . . . we will do the job for them.”

Our Carl Sagans--and as of now their name is legion--are proposing that we entrust future generations to future leaders who, if the record has any meaning at all, are no more likely to honor promises they did not make than their predecessors are honoring those they did. More that test moratoriums, or even Star Wars, America needs a national sense of unity.

WILLIAM L. MOORE

Hemet