Reagan’s Man at the Arms Control Table : THE GREAT UNIVERSAL EMBRACE ARMS SUMMITRY: A Skeptic’s Account <i> by Kenneth L. Adelman (Simon & Schuster: $19.95; 368 pp.) </i>

During much of Ronald Reagan’s presidency Americans were treated to the spectacle of appointees to high office speaking and acting as if they wished to emasculate or even abolish the departments of government they had ostensibly been hired to run. Education, Interior, Environmental Protection, Health and Human Services, a host of regulatory agencies--all at one time or another were led by persons for whom lifting the weight of their own organization from the backs of the governed was a mission akin to a religious calling.

Adelman came to the Arms Control Disarmament Agency after polishing his ideological credentials as deputy to Jeane Kirkpatrick, the U.S. representative to the United Nations. He replaced Eugene Rostow, the crusty former Yale Law dean and founding member of the Committee on the Present Danger, who was fired when Reagan’s inner circle began to fear that he was too willing to strike a deal with Moscow. (Those were the days when the Kremlin was still the center of the “Evil Empire.”)

Adelman, 36, saw it as his mission to save Reagan from the “arms controllers.” He writes: “No arms control deal can prevent nuclear devastation, reduce the risk of war much, if at all, save money, or increase U.S. security, again much, if at all.” Arms control, he continues, “could easily hurt but cannot easily help the nation; it is something to view more often with trepidation than anticipation.”

Although Adelman underlines Soviet statements, going back to Lenin, lauding disarmament as sand in the face of the capitalist enemy, he does not join his ideological friends who argue that success in negotiations with the Russians will lull the West into a false sense of security and therefore into lowering its guard. Quite the contrary. “It is hard to imagine the country being lulled when conservatives keep sounding alarm bells about the perils of being lulled,” he says. And the guard stays up: “No major American weapons system has been stopped or seriously constrained by the terms of an arms agreement.”

Here, indeed, is one root of Adelman’s skepticism about the utility of negotiated arms control. Agreements thus far have tended to curb only weapons the two superpowers have not valued highly, and both have rushed to compensate for reductions by building more of those weapons not covered by agreements. “No area of science, medicine, or even public policy would continue to elicit so much hope after so many years of unsuccessful effort,” he writes. “Arms control must be approached as one of the intangibles of life, a rite seemingly needed to satisfy some deep longing in our collective soul.” (His book takes its title from a fabled disarmament conference among the animals in which each beast proposed abolishing those weapons upon which its predators most relied until at last the bear arose and said: “Comrades, let us abolish everything--everything but the great universal embrace.”)

Like some liberals these days, Adelman prefers reciprocal unilateral steps to negotiated formal agreements. One side independently would eliminate a certain number of deployed weapons or suspend production in one category, and then look around to see what the other does in response. That would eliminate the paranoid scratching for marginal advantage that often characterizes negotiations. An example, at least in principle, is Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s announcement late last year that by 1991 his country would reduce its armed forces by half a million men, and eliminate a number of tanks and artillery pieces, the weapons the West fears most, from positions facing NATO forces. If he follows through with those reductions he can then reasonably expect a comparable gesture from the West. If no such reciprocal move is forthcoming he will be able to draw appropriate conclusions.

Where Adelman parts company with liberals is in his unswerving support of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and his refusal to acknowledge that a U.S. capability to destroy some incoming Soviet missiles might raise the risks of war in a future crisis by spurring the Soviets to launch first, rather than sit back and allow us to destroy a portion of their missiles in their silos and then use our defenses to pick off most of those missiles they do succeed in launching. He also fails to recognize that the very aspects of arms control that he dismisses as ritualistic have had real value in inducing Washington and Moscow to use their military relationship as a channel of communication when their disagreements left them unable effectively to talk about any of the other issues dividing them.

Adelman’s book is schizophrenic about the Soviet Union. Its acknowledgement of the profound changes under Gorbachev is grudging in the extreme, and tempered by repeated recitations of all the international mischief that Moscow is allegedly still working. That is not surprising: The pace of change in the U.S.S.R. over the last year has been so rapid as to catch off balance any author--especially one who, like Adelman, takes such pains in so many passages to establish his true-blue conservative coloration.

The most interesting parts of Adelman’s book are not his provocative arguments about arms control or his lucid and objective explanations of nuclear doctrine, but his accounts of bureaucratic warfare over arms control within the government in Washington, and his vivid narratives of the three Reagan-Gorbachev meetings in which he participated. Especially good is his description of the frantic, unscripted Reykjavik summit of October, 1986, in which the two presidents, negotiating without aides, appeared to be on the verge of a deal for eliminating nuclear ballistic missiles. His aim, he says, was not to write a kiss-and-tell memoir, but his portraits of Reagan and his principal lieutenants, especially Secretary of State George Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan, pull no punches. And although he avows great affection for Reagan, in his pages the President comes across as a genial stopped clock, right twice a day, but in Reagan’s case, Adelman argues, right when it counted. (The most memorable scene--Reagan’s John Wayne-like remark to a television set showing Gorbachev’s arrival in Reykjavik: “When you stop trying to take over the world, then maybe we can do some business.”)

Adelman’s book is marred by a patronizing, snide tone. The State Department, he notes in a typical passage, fought one of his proposals “with an intensity rarely displayed in its dealing with the Soviets or others around the world.” And just in case a reader does not fully grasp his point, he coyly adds a parenthesis: “(State’s ‘diplomatic entrance’ features a flower garden filled with pansies and bleeding hearts.)”

The horticultural note suits Adelman’s purpose, but it happens not to be true. So, alas, do many other things he says. I cannot recall a book with more factual errors. Most are minor--names misspelled, numbers or dates wrong. But many are serious. The Soviets, he writes, “now station more troops (in East Germany) than exist in the entire United States Army.” Wrong: The 1988 numbers were 380,000 and 760,000, respectively. Evgeny Velikhov, the Soviet physicist, is a “two-timer who manages their SDI program and castigates our SDI program on the U.S. lecture circuit.” Wrong: Velikhov has worked on lasers but plays no significant role in the Soviet anti-missile program. The Soviets lead the United States “on (SDI-related) ground-based lasers, particle beams, and terminal defense.” Wrong: Most experts say the United States leads in all these fields. There are other incorrect statements. Many others are misleading. Some seem designedly so. And the book is singularly devoid of references.

Adelman’s glib, reckless writing will put off many readers. That is regrettable, because his book is a significant contribution to recent history. And its arguments deserve to be pondered.