Fortifying the Treaty

Senate ratification of the treaty to dismantle every medium-range Soviet and American nuclear missile in the world would not change big-power relations with Europe so much as it would reflect changes that probably cannot be prevented.

So even though the Senate will take a month to debate the treaty starting in mid-April, the chances of rejection are slim, because the consequences of killing the document signed by President Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev at their Washington summit meeting last winter would be true turmoil in Europe. There is some concern among nations in the Western alliance that removing Soviet SS-20 and American Pershing 2 missiles would increase the Soviet threat in Europe. But going back on a treaty that the President had signed would cut Europe’s confidence in American leadership even further.

It is even conceivable that a rejection could weaken Gorbachev among more conservative communist leaders to the point where he would lose ground in his campaign to drag his nation into modern times.

The treaty, which the Foreign Relations Committee sent to the Senate floor by a 17-2 vote on Wednesday, probably already has squirmed through most of the ambushes that could be set for it by die-hard opponents of better relations with the Soviets.

It even survived one ambush that was sprung, by accident or design, by the White House itself.

The committee did two jobs at once while it listened to testimony and built a factual record concerning such important questions as whether compliance could be verified and cheating could be detected.

It tried to build an air-tight case that the treaty meant what it said. It wanted to make sure that a future White House could not claim, as the Reagan White House has done with the 1972 anti-ballistic-missile defense treaty, that the Senate ratified the treaty on the basis of a misunderstanding of its meaning. That claim is important to the White House because, when read literally, the ABM treaty prohibits many things that the White House wants to do as part of research and development on its “Star Wars” missile defense project.

In addition, the committee also needed a record to protect the Senate against itself--or at least against some of its more irresponsible members like Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.).

The committee built that record by asking Pentagon and State Department officials a series of 135 questions. For example, the record now contains an Administration definition of the word “deployment” as it was understood by both the United States and the Soviet Union in putting the medium-range-missile agreement into writing.

Having built the record, as one member notes, neither Helms nor any other senator will be able to make false claims about loopholes in the treaty during floor debate and have the outcome depend on one senator’s word against another’s.

The treaty was reported out of committee with one last protective device--a clause that says flatly that the treaty means what Administration officials said that it means during the game of 135 questions.

A letter from a White House lawyer opposing the clause threatened to lead to still another legal showdown that might have endangered the treaty itself. Six members voted not to include the clause as part of the treaty, but the committee still approved both the treaty and the amendment overwhelmingly.

The Senate will now add its own inspection of the treaty to that of the committee and the Administration. In the end the Senate should add its own hearty endorsement to the first step back from the nuclear-arms race in two decades. The Senate should also do its share of making certain that the treaty not only makes an entire class of nuclear weapons vanish but that it also points the way to larger cuts in even larger missiles.