America’s Arms Abyss : BLANK CHECK; The Pentagon’s Black Budget <i> By Tim Weiner (Warner Books: $21.95; 272 pp.; 0446-51507-8) </i>

Like some journalistic sorcerer’s apprentice, Tim Weiner turns a perfectly sensible thesis--that the Pentagon’s secret spending has grown excessive--into an excessive attack on the U.S. security apparatus, especially during the Reagan years.

That’s too bad. For Weiner’s eminently readable book, based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning series in the Philadelphia Inquirer, makes the sound point that the Defense Department’s $36-billion “black budget,” the budget hidden from normal public and Congressional view, has grown too big. Bigger than the federal government’s budget for transportation or agriculture. Twice as big as that for the Department of Education. Bigger, in fact, than any country’s military budget, except that of the Soviet Union. Weiner claims that it is growing faster than any section of the federal budget.

Especially apt is Weiner’s criticism of the more than $5 billion in “previously public Pentagon programs” that went black between 1986 and 1989. And especially unsettling is his finding that in the current 1991 budget, “almost twenty-five cents of every dollar for Pentagon research is black.” He raises valid legal questions in light of the Constitutional provision that “a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.”

But do such revelations warrant such hyperventilating?

The book’s shrill tone does not jibe with its serious thesis. Weiner forecasts the breathlessness in his Introduction: “I saw a world of secrets sealed beneath a steely cover. I wanted to pry the lid off the box, find a way inside and see the panorama sprawling within.” And the publicity blurb hypes the book as “as riveting as any techno-thriller, but more frightening because it is based on fact.”

But is it?

Weiner fingers the B-2 Stealth bomber, which he says “went through its research and development in complete secrecy” whereby “Congress couldn’t debate it” and it “was invulnerable to informed criticism.” True, the Stealth technology was shrouded and the bomber kept out of sight for years. But its existence was known from the time President Jimmy Carter flaunted it. While debate on Capitol Hill was muted, that was mainly because the Stealth bomber wasn’t controversial until the remarkable turnabout in U.S.-Soviet relations.

Few Congressional leaders, moreover, can feign surprise at its price, or its nature, for more than 170 senators and representatives and committee staffs were given access to the B-2 program after 1981.

Weiner huffs about the Reagan Administration seeking to tighten federal laws so that anyone caught publishing information on black programs could be “convicted of high treason. Upon conviction, such a traitor could be shot to death by a firing squad.”

Throughout Weiner’s fast-paced book, I kept wondering just how “black,” secret and stealthy all these programs really are. After all, I sit there reading about them on page after page. After all, Weiner won a Pulitzer Prize after writing about them in his Inquirer series.

In a nutshell, Weiner’s impressive investigative powers negate his intelligent thesis; little is indeed kept secret.

That’s why I support his call for greater openness. While he believes “The practice of black budgetry is a relic of the Cold War and should now come to an end,” I believe that broad budget categories should be unblackened. Technologies and specific covert operations, run according to Congressional procedures, need to be hidden from public scrutiny--but not big-ticket items like the overall CIA budget.

Speaking of the CIA--which Weiner does incessantly, despite the book’s billing on “the Pentagon’s black budget”--I find the book’s castigations antiquated and, again, excessive. Saying that the CIA “started out trying to save small, weak European nations from communism, and fared poorly. It found success overthrowing small, weak Third World governments in the name of democracy” is just not fair as a general summary of what the Agency has been doing for the last 40 years.

On a more positive note, Weiner’s case studies of the CIA’s weapons supplies to Afghanistan, the U.S. Army’s funding of a new paramilitary force, and the Iran-Contra fiasco make for interesting reading.

And he makes a sound point when saying that “the conventional wisdom of nuclear strategy was dead wrong.” For too long, the focus had been on the number of nuclear warheads, hardened silos and missiles. The procedures for possible use of nuclear weapons have, as Weiner points out, always been more important than their numbers, or even types.

Weiner’s wild words aside, his thesis deserves more serious, objective treatment. And I do subscribe to his thrust, quoted from Lord Acton, that “every thing secret degenerates.”