Reagan Faulted for Scrapping SALT II While Asking Arms Cuts

House Democrats upbraided the Reagan Administration on Thursday for breaching the 1979 SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union.

They said it makes no sense to ignore the pact’s limitation on nuclear arms while at the same proposing to the Soviets a significant reduction in the two countries’ ballistic missiles.

Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.), a member of the committee, made their comments to Paul H. Nitze, a senior Administration arms control adviser, as he defended President Reagan’s arms control proposals.

“People around the country are amazed,” Dicks said. “You say we want deep reductions, and then you tear off the only remaining restraint on the offensive arms race. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The criticism was aimed at last week’s deployment of the 131st B-52 bomber equipped to carry cruise missiles. The long-expected breach of the SALT II limit came less than two months after President Reagan offered, at the summit meeting in Iceland, to reduce ballistic missiles by 50% over the next five years and then negotiate the elimination of the rest.

But what particularly irritated members of Congress, Dicks told Nitze, was that the breakaway from restraints in the second strategic arms limitation treaty came after Congress had heeded a presidential plea immediately before the Iceland meeting to drop its planned arms control measures.

At Reagan’s request, Congress dropped a resolution that would have called on the Administration to continue to adhere to the SALT II agreement, even though it has never been ratified by the Senate.

“The President reached out to us . . . then turns around and ignores what Congress advised him to do,” the congressmen said. “ . . . This Administration has not done much for bipartisanship.”

Nitze acknowledged that SALT II never came up in the discussions in Iceland, saying, “There’s not much time in a two-day meeting.” Also, he said, violations of the treaty’s limits by the Soviets--alleged by the Administration but denied by Moscow--had already turned the treaty’s terms into “unilateral limits.”

Aspin, who has conducted several days of hearings to examine what happened at the Iceland meeting, said he was puzzled that the Administration chose to break the SALT limit last week while it was embroiled in the uproar over the secret arms sales to Iran.

“It comes at a time,” Aspin said, “when the Administration didn’t need further controversy with Congress or its allies.”