Good Sense Is Winning

A treaty banning all medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe has nearly made its way over a barricade built of cunning politics and vacuous bureaucracy.

It is a triumph of good sense second only to the good-natured Washington meeting last December at which President Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed the treaty.

After its fashion, Washington will concentrate for the next two weeks on whether it can now move through the U.S. Senate in order to be a ratified fact when Reagan goes to Moscow for a summit meeting starting May 29. Whether it does is of secondary importance.

What counts most is that the treaty now seems safe from both politics and the bureaucracy. In a matter of months the world may well be watching the superpowers smash up an entire class of missiles for the first time in nuclear history. And Reagan or his successor can then move on to the next step in reducing nuclear arsenals to something approaching manageable size.

Politics was the treaty’s first hurdle. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) was so determined to scuttle what he called the “trigger of the nuclear holocaust” that senators who supported ratification created an elaborate record of evidence to cover every conceivable accusation that could be raised during floor debate, no matter how irrational or irresponsible. That required answers to 135 questions from Administration officials who vouched for the language in the treaty and verified, for example, that the United States and the Soviet Union both defined such words as deployment in the same way.

Administration officials nearly tore up that record of evidence at one point because they feared a trap. In building the record, the Senate was asking the White House and the Pentagon to promise that the treaty would always mean just what it said. The Administration feared that the testimony might somehow be used to torpedo its own efforts to weaken the limits on the 1972 ABM treaty that limits ballistic-missile defenses. That may well happen, but the White House apparently has decided that it is a risk it must take to get the treaty ratified.

Just when the way to ratification seemed clear, Soviet bureaucracy intruded. The details may never be known, but at some level technicians on the Soviet side apparently began insisting that their top officials did not mean what they said about aspects of the verification process.

Because the techniques that each nation agreed will be used to verify that the other is not cheating are the most daring and the least tested parts of the treaty, that got everybody’s attention. Politics joined bureaucracy briefly, with Democratic senators lowering their eyebrows and raising their voices to indicate just how seriously they regarded this turn of events.

By this morning the Senate should have the full results of last week’s meetings between Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze that ended with both sides declaring that all of the fine print is now in order.

The President obviously longs to take a ratified treaty to Moscow. It would be nice if the Senate could accommodate him, but not at the risk of hurrying the process in ways that could make the broader cause of arms reduction falter.