Beware a START Framework : Unsound Steps Taken in Summit Haste May Not Be Rectified

As Ronald Reagan heads for his fourth summit meeting with Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Washington savants and other “informed sources” predict no deal on the main arms-control agenda item--an accord reducing strategic nuclear weapons. We should be so lucky.

The truth is that there is a very high likelihood that this summit meeting will produce some type of strategic arms reduction, or START, agreement. Both sides have made clear their desire for such an accord. Although a finished treaty will not be ready for the Moscow meeting, a seductive alternative can and almost certainly will be. Known by various names (aide memoire, joint statement, communique), this alternative is a “framework” agreement, a distillation of the various component parts of a future START treaty already agreed on in principle between the parties.

It would be a serious mistake for the United States to adopt such an approach for three basic reasons:

--We should not negotiate important arms-control accords under a deadline. Inevitably, a framework agreement produced at the summit would be the product of arbitrary deadlines and negotiating pressures imposed by the meeting’s schedule--an environment inconsistent with careful and workmanlike drafting of sound agreements.

The task of defining, let alone reaching agreement on, the acceptable terms for sharp reductions in strategic arms is particularly complex and fraught with great risks for Western deterrent forces. If ever there was an agreement that should be insulated from the sort of high-stakes poker typical of summit meetings and their imposed negotiating deadlines, this is it.

--Framework agreements themselves are bad ideas. It is simply not a sound practice to accept arms-control arrangements in principle without knowing the specifics. After all, as President Reagan has often said, “The devil is in the details” of these accords; it is most ill advised to accept the framework of a treaty without, for instance, reaching express agreement on the procedures that will be followed to verify it.

There is, moreover, the problem that such a framework agreement can begin to bind the United States--despite the fact that no formal treaty is in effect. Consider one plausible scenario: President Reagan agrees in Moscow to a formula for reducing our strategic forces that will require the dismantling of substantial numbers of our ballistic-missile-carrying submarines. Members of Congress will cite this framework agreement to argue that it makes no sense to procure more of these submarines and that, particularly in light of the budget deficit, funds that are sought for this purpose should not be appropriated. The result could be effective constraints on vital U.S. programs even in the absence of a corresponding binding limit on Soviet capabilities.

--A Moscow framework agreement would, of course, reflect the substantive problems that are inherent in the emerging START treaty. A number of leading authorities have properly expressed their misgivings about the effect that the START accord will have on stability; Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, among others, have written forcefully that the reducing of strategic nuclear weapons will not necessarily make the world a safer place. To the contrary, the effect of the START-imposed changes in American and Soviet forces may actually increase the Soviet Union’s incentives for an attack.

Many believe--and with good reasons--that the new treaty may simply be unverifiable.

What’s more, if a START treaty, like the one banning intermedate-range missiles, constrains conventional and futuristic technologies as well as nuclear ones, it will surely exacerbate the Soviet Union’s present advantage in non-nuclear arms to the detriment of security in the Western world. The START deal becomes still less attractive if, as now seems likely, its price entails making the development and deployment of the Strategic Defense Initiative even more difficult than it is at present.

Despite these drawbacks, President Reagan will be sorely tempted to sign up to a strategic-arms framework accord in Moscow. But the correct, though more difficult, approach would be for the President simply to “stand down” on START, both at the summit meeting and for the remainder of his term. Doing so would allow time to assess our experience with the implementation of the INF agreement; to analyze the contribution of stability (including the effect on the conventional-force balance) likely to be made by such START reductions; to address the associated requirements for verification, and for a new Administration, free of artificial deadlines, to negotiate a detailed START accord with care and deliberation.

The risks to the nation of making a hasty and unsound arms-control accord on these vital forces so far exceed the ephemeral, if heady, glory of a signing ceremony as to make stopping START now the only responsible course of action.