Reagan Vows Cut in Strategic Arms : Determined to Seek 50% Reduction in 2nd Missile Pact, President Says

President Reagan, raising the specter of a world devastated by nuclear war, has expressed determination to sign not only the treaty eliminating ground-launched intermediate-range nuclear missiles but a second treaty being negotiated with the Soviet Union to cut the arsenals of strategic, or long-range, missiles by 50%.

“I want to get those done,” declared Reagan, who views the treaties as the first steps toward achieving a goal of a nuclear-free world.

The President and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev are scheduled to sign the treaty on intermediate-range missiles during a Dec. 7-10 summit conference in Washington. Reagan wants to reach a final agreement on a strategic arms treaty covering long-range weapons in time for it to be signed at another summit meeting in Moscow next year.

Treaty Wrapped Up

A final agreement to eliminate all intermediate-range missiles was wrapped up by Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze during a session in Geneva last Tuesday. The United States and the Soviet Union have been negotiating a strategic arms treaty that Reagan hopes to sign next spring even though some arms control experts, including Kenneth L. Adelman, outgoing director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, have expressed serious doubt that the superpowers can reach agreement by then.

Reagan’s comments--along with observations on various issues by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald R. Ford--came during a television interview with British journalist David Frost. The hour-long program, produced jointly with U.S. News and World Report, is being aired tonight on 115 stations across the nation, including KCOP-TV (Channel 13) in Los Angeles. The program is the first part of a series entitled “The Next President” that will include interviews with presidential candidates.

In the Oval Office interview, the President warned that the “mutual assured destruction” approach that has characterized U.S.-Soviet relations could result in both sides getting “blown up by nuclear weapons.” This would result in devastation and a poisonous atmosphere that he likened to the April, 1986, explosion at the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear plant.

‘Where Do People Live?’

“Because suppose you did fire these weapons at each other,” he said. “Where do the people live then that are left alive after the explosions? When you’ve got 135,000 people at Chernobyl who can’t return to their homes because of the poison in the entire area!”

Reagan also said that he “wouldn’t have been sorry” if Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi had been killed in the April 15, 1986, bombing of Libya because the United States had “absolute indisputable” evidence that Kadafi was behind terrorist killings.

On a more personal matter, Reagan spoke of his close relationship with his wife, Nancy, and talked admiringly of her resilience and quick recovery from a recent mastectomy. He described her as “a tiny little thing” he had nicknamed “a peewee powerhouse” and said that being married to her is “kind of like coming into a warm fire-lit room when you’ve been out in the cold.”

Frost, whose post-Watergate interviews with former President Richard M. Nixon attracted some of the largest audiences on record for a news interview program, questioned Reagan, Carter and Ford about the significance of the Iran-Contra scandal, which surfaced in November, 1986, and evolved into the most severe political crisis of the Reagan presidency.

During his interview, the President--despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary cited by the presidential commission headed by former Sen. John Tower (R-Tex.) and congresssional investigating committees--still insisted that the scandal did not involve a sale of arms to Iran in a direct exchange for U.S. hostages held in Beirut.

No Aid to Kidnapers

“I did not see this as trading arms for hostages in the way in which it was done,” he declared. He contended he was not doing “anything for the kidnapers” but was selling arms to the Iranians so that they would use their influence to try to free the hostages.

While exclaiming “No! No!” Reagan emphatically rejected any comparison of the Iran-Contra affair with the Nixon Administration’s Watergate scandal, which involved a 1972 break-in and wiretapping of the Democratic Party headquarters and a cover-up of the crime that eventually led to impeachment hearings in Congress against Nixon.

(Rather than face an impeachment trial in the Senate, Nixon resigned in August, 1974, after the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment. He was succeeded by then-Vice President Ford.)

On the other hand, Carter, interviewed at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta, said: “Irangate is much more serious. Watergate was a . . . relatively insignificant crime of breaking into an office,” while the Iran scandal “has damaged our nation in the Mideast Arabian (Persian) Gulf area and internally as well.”

Denouncing what he called the “unconscionable . . . bribery of kidnapers,” Carter said that it “not only encouraged additional taking of hostages, but it rewarded those who did kidnap Americans and still hold them now almost three years later.

U.S. Reputation ‘Damaged’

“And I think it damaged our nation’s reputation among our allies and friends who were discouraged not to send arms when we were secretly sending them,” he said, adding that “falsehoods and misleading statements” made to the American public caused further embarrassment.

The difference in the nation’s reaction to the Iran-Contra scandal, Carter said, “is that when Nixon made his Watergate mistakes, the country was in a punitive mood. The press was determined to punish President Nixon, the Congress had the inclination and maybe the general public did as well.” But after the “horrible experience” of Watergate, Congress, the press and the public have had “an aversion to any punishment of President Reagan,” he said.

“We did not want another Watergate,” Carter said. “So I think that, although the mistake made was much more serious in this instance, the presidency itself has been protected, and that is a protection of which I fully approve.”

While the country probably will not know in the near future how much Reagan was told about the scandal by the two principal Iran-Contra figures--Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North and Rear Adm. John M. Poindexter--”we ought to just presume that he didn’t know anything about it and let it go,” Carter said.

Ford, interviewed at Beaver Creek, Colo., where he was vacationing, criticized the Iran-Contra operation indirectly, declaring that any high-risk covert action in his Administration would have been more carefully supervised.

Bewilderment Over Decision

Ford expressed bewilderment that Reagan overruled Secretary of State George P. Shultz and then-Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, who opposed the Iranian arms sale, and accepted the advice of then-CIA Director William J. Casey and then-National Security Adviser Poindexter, who strongly favored the transaction.

“I can’t imagine overruling the two top Cabinet officers and taking the judgment of some individuals of lesser responsibility,” Ford declared.

Reagan, questioned about the U.S. bombing of Libya, said that Kadafi was not a target even though the bombardment hit both his residence and his headquarters, killing his daughter and seriously injuring his two youngest sons.

The raid was carried out with as little damage as possible to civilians, Reagan said, “but we wouldn’t have been sorry if he (Kadafi) had been where the targets were.”

The President said there was indisputable proof that Kadafi had been behind the Dec. 27, 1985, terrorist attack at a Rome airport that killed 10 persons, including an 11-year-old U.S. girl and two other Americans.

‘Something Had to Be Done’

“He was behind that and we had the proof and we felt that something had to be done to show him that he could not carry on as he was carrying on,” Reagan said. “And there has been quite a difference since that attack.”

The President, grim-faced as he discussed terrorism, smiled broadly when asked about the First Lady, who has been totally devoted to--and fiercely protective of--her husband since giving up her acting career after their marriage.

Although she was a successful young actress at the time, Reagan said she told him after they got married, “This is my career now, and I’m not going to have that (acting) career because maybe some people can do both, but I can’t.”

Reagan said that the doctors who treated his wife for her breast cancer “are still amazed. They are wide-eyed because they’ve never seen a recovery as fast as hers. From the day after the operation, they said she was ahead of schedule on recovery.”

Praising his wife’s work to prevent drug abuse among young people, he noted that her nationwide program of “Just Say No” clubs evolved during a tour speaking to children in schools and drug treatment centers when a little girl in a class in Oakland asked what to do when someone offered narcotics.

12,000 ‘Just Say No’ Clubs

“Nancy said, ‘Just say no,’ ” the President recalled. “Today, there are over 12,000 ‘Just Say No’ clubs in the schools of the United states. They even have T-shirts with that on them.”

In the interview with Frost, Reagan also said that:

--As titular head of the Republican Party, he does not feel free to endorse one of the candidates for the GOP presidential nomination, “but I am here to say that I think (George Bush) has been the finest vice president in my memory in this country.”

--After leaving office, he would like to start a movement to eliminate the constitutional amendment that limits presidents to two terms because “it is the only office that is elected by all the people, and it seems to me it’s an interference with the people’s democratic rights to tell them that they are restricted and cannot vote for someone as often as they want to do that.”

Carter was asked during his interview whether Iran’s leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, or Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who opposed Carter for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, was more responsible for his defeat by Reagan.

Khomeini Key to Defeat

“Well, I think the ayatollah,” Carter said. “It’s obvious that the Iran revolution was a key factor, not only because of the hostages and the embarrassment of nothing being able to get them out earlier but also because the price of oil skyrocketed on a worldwide basis and caused high inflation, high interest rates and so forth.”

But Carter, long bitter over Kennedy’s failure to enthusiastically embrace the Democratic ticket in 1980 after losing the nomination, said that the senator’s “long, drawn-out campaign, and his refusal to support me and (then-Vice President Walter F.) Mondale, was a factor because we wasted a lot of our political strength trying to bring the Democratic Party back together.”

When asked if he likes Kennedy, Carter replied:

“Yes, personally, I like Ted Kennedy. I would not want to see him president; I don’t think he’s qualified to be president. But I certainly don’t have any animosity toward him.”