Defense Dispute Perils Arms Talks, Nunn Says

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) warned Thursday that the success of U.S.-Soviet arms reduction talks is in jeopardy unless the House, Senate and President Bush quickly agree on a plan for modernizing America’s strategic nuclear arsenal.

It was the first time that the powerful Senate chairman has spoken out since House and Senate members began meeting to discuss their differences on a $305.5-billion defense spending bill for fiscal 1990.

Nunn’s remarks clearly reflected a decision on his part to blame the House for failure of arms control talks if it does not yield to the position of the Senate and Bush.

The defense stalemate looms as the biggest obstacle between the President and Congress in resolving how the federal government will be funded in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. Unlike the Senate-passed defense bill, which the President generally supports, the House version sharply cuts funding for strategic weapons.

But, even while siding with Bush on the spending issue, Nunn faulted the President for failing to develop a coherent strategy for arms control talks with the Soviet Union.

He noted that the President’s current proposal for a ban on all mobile missiles is inconsistent with his request to Congress for funds to deploy two mobile missiles--the 10-warhead MX transported on railroad cars and the single-warhead Midgetman missile carried on truck beds. He called on Bush to revise his arms control proposal promptly.

But Nunn seemed most disturbed about the impact on the strategic arms talks of the current stalemate in Congress.

“I think the START talks are at stake in the next 30 days,” he told members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “If we do not come out with a sensible strategic nuclear program that the President himself has confidence in (and) the Joint Chiefs have confidence in, START talks are going to be a long, long time coming. So we have a lot at stake.”

Negotiations between the House and Senate began last Friday, and congressional sources reported that the two houses are nowhere near an agreement.

The House passed-bill trimmed $1.7 billion from the amount sought by Bush for deployment of the MX missile on rail cars and eliminated funding for Midgetman. It also cut $1.8 billion from Bush’s $4.9-billion funding request for research on the “Star Wars” missile defense system and put severe restrictions on funding for the B-2 bomber beyond fiscal 1990.

Nunn asserted that, by slashing funding for four major strategic programs, the House-passed bill eliminates much of the incentive that the Soviets now have for reaching an arms control agreement with the United States.

“I believe we have to give President Bush the tools to do the job,” he said.

He noted also that the House and Senate still fundamentally disagree on a number of conventional weapons programs. House members restored funding for virtually every conventional weapon that the Bush Administration sought to eliminate for cost-cutting reasons, including the V-22 Osprey helicopter and the F-14D fighter plane.

Moreover, as Nunn told reporters earlier this week, the President’s new anti-drug proposal has made it even more difficult to resolve these differences because the Administration and the Democrats have agreed that some of the money for the drug war must come from the Pentagon budget. Democrats are proposing to cut more from defense than Bush, however.

Many members of both chambers have expressed support for proposals to fund the drug war by cutting money almost exclusively from the major strategic weapons that Bush wants to preserve--particularly the super-expensive “Star Wars” and B-2 programs.