‘Kissinger the Revisionist’

Former Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie’s condemnation (Editorial Pages, March 20) of former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger’s “revisionism” is nothing more than a personification of Muskie’s opposition to the Strategic Defense Initiative, which Kissinger endorses.

In condemning SDI via Kissinger, Muskie says, “Responsible policy must forswear technological escapism.” He says, “If we are to escape strategic calamity, technology must be an instrument of diplomacy, not a substitute for it.” Diplomacy, according to Muskie, “must be rooted in Soviet-American cooperation to shape a new balance between offense and defense.”

Muskie’s “new balance” is as old as “arms control,” the only objective of which, as President Reagan has pointed out, is offensive weapons disarmament, to which the superpowers are irrevocably committed. Muskie, like Kissinger, is an “arms controlist.” The President and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev are “arms abolitionists.”

Strategic defense, considered by some to be technology’s “Mission Impossible,” has demonstrated that it is an “instrument of diplomacy.” Soviet violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty in their Krasnoyarsk strategic defense (begun before 1983), provoked SDI, and now SDI provokes its own uncoupling from negotiations looking to removal of Euromissiles. A fitting epitaph for ABM, the dead pigeon.

WILLIAM L. MOORE

Hemet