Despite Soviet Flexibility, U.S. Officials Question Value of Arms Talks : Diplomacy: Amid political turmoil, can anybody in Moscow deliver on accords? There are doubts.

Just as the Soviet Union finally seems ready to talk about permitting more defenses against ballistic missiles, some U.S. government officials are wondering whether it is worthwhile--or even possible--to negotiate with Moscow in these chaotic days about that or any kind of arms control.

“Can anybody there deliver on anything they agree to?” a dubious official asked.

“Why tie ourselves to agreements with the Russian republic?” asked another, reflecting a belief that the Russian Federation will inherit most responsibilities for Soviet arms treaties as the center collapses.

“You can even hear Administration guys asking: ‘Who wants equity with a pygmy nation?’ ” one veteran arms control expert complained. “With the Soviet Union falling apart, some people feel they can wait for ‘strategic superiority’ to fall in our laps by default.”

The State Department is still committed to negotiations, but several officials concede that there is no assurance that any Soviets “are really empowered to negotiate” on the issue.

Despite these views, senior U.S. officials insist that the Bush Administration’s formal position is that negotiations are necessary for some issues, such as changing the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which bans most missile defenses. But they say that for other issues, such as eliminating short-range nuclear weapons, unilateral declarations with little, if any, advance notice are better.

President Bush six weeks ago embarked on this new kind of arms control by announcing U.S. withdrawal of most tactical (short-range) nuclear weapons from Europe and elsewhere. Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev quickly followed suit with a parallel move.

In his announcement, Bush also called on the Soviets “to join in immediate, concrete steps to permit the limited deployment of non-nuclear defenses” that would intercept missiles from Third World states but would not be able to defend well against more sophisticated and numerous missiles of the U.S. and Soviet arsenals.

Gorbachev quickly agreed to “discuss the U.S. proposal,” which would require amending the 1972 ABM treaty. That accord, perhaps the most significant of all U.S.-Soviet arms treaties, has precluded a costly race to produce missile defenses that would be at best only marginally effective against each other’s weapons.

Bush wants to build a modest missile defense system, called GPALS (for Global Protection Against Limited Strikes). It would consist of ordinary rockets, initially ground-based but later based in space, to intercept as many as 200 incoming warheads by simply ramming them. But that system would be as much a violation of the ABM treaty as “Star Wars”--Ronald Reagan’s dream of an antimissile space shield of laser-beam-like interceptors--would have been.

Because the Soviets have fought bitterly for decades against any easing of the ABM treaty, there is widespread disbelief that Moscow, despite Gorbachev’s words, will ever agree to change that accord.

“In all likelihood,” said Spurgeon M. Keeny Jr., director of the private Arms Control Assn., “Gorbachev’s response is no more than a diplomatically correct offer to listen to U.S. proposals while leaving them to endless discussions.”

Washington has not tried to make it easier for the Soviets to change their minds, either. Bush offered no concessions to get Moscow to take ABM revision seriously. And Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, if anything, went in the other direction.

The Administration seeks not just a modification, Cheney said, but “basically an end to the ABM treaty.” He also preemptively reversed the offer of the Reagan Administration to share “Star Wars” technology. “No,” he said flatly, the offer no longer stands.

The Soviets, for their part, have little antimissile technology to offer as bargaining leverage, despite extensive research work. They probably have spent as much as the Pentagon--more than $20 billion--on ballistic missile defense, plus considerably more on antiaircraft missiles that can be upgraded to intercept slower missiles.

“But they over-invested in directed-energy (beam) technology, which we now know is very far-out, futuristic stuff,” one government expert said. “Our system will be based on incremental advances in high-tech areas, like those that went into making laptop computers and fax machines.”

Despite severe budget constraints on the Pentagon, recent events have given new impetus to missile defenses:

* During the Persian Gulf War, worldwide television audiences saw Patriot antimissile batteries shoot down incoming Soviet-made Scud missiles, creating widespread public support for defenses against missile attacks from Third World nations such as Iraq.

* After the failed August coup, the purged Soviet military has a much weaker voice with which to oppose ABM treaty changes. At the same time, officials in the Soviet Union’s emerging republics are more concerned with missile threats from peripheral nations of the Mideast as well as from each other than is the Soviet center, producing some positive interest in the GPALS scheme as well as Gorbachev’s new willingness to talk about treaty changes.

* Congress has been surprisingly generous to the program. It appropriated $4.15 billion for missile defenses next year, including more than twice the Administration’s request for the ground-based first phase of a GPALS system, and directed that it be deployed by 1996.

Congress also directed that the ABM treaty should not be violated but urged the Administration to negotiate changes in the treaty with the Soviets.

Different agencies in the Administration, however, have different emphases in approaching such negotiations.

The Pentagon’s preference is for arms control by “mutual example and unilateral announcement,” one senior official said. “Certainly the traditional approach to arms control is passe--large, formal delegations of negotiators, with the goal of classic numerical reductions that have very comprehensive verification schemes.

“A better approach would be unilateral moves that result in greater ‘transparency’ (visual and other access to weapons data) without verification regimens that are difficult to negotiate, costly to implement and intrusive on our side as well as theirs,” he said.

State Department diplomats, on the other hand, see continued merit in old-style negotiations. “We start from the fact that they still have 30,000 nuclear weapons,” a senior Administration official said. “We want some say in their future.

“The center (the Soviet central government) still exists there,” he added, “even though a pale shadow of what it was. Its relationship with the republics is evolving, but the republics still see value in a center for economics, defense, foreign policy matters. We want to work with them as things evolve, to make sure they move in the right direction, not only economically and politically but also on defense and arms control matters.”