When a new President is elected, the voters have a right to expect him to appoint new officials who believe in and enthusiastically implement the policies on which the winning candidate ran. Otherwise, it would be a farce for presidential candidates to address the issues, take stands, and make promises.
The SALT II Treaty and its arms control provisions were a major issue of the 1980 election. The difference between the two candidates was clear and unequivocal: Jimmy Carter signed it, promoted it, and said the 1980 election would be a referendum on SALT II; Ronald Reagan vigorously attacked it and called it “fatally flawed.”
Has Ronald Reagan fulfilled his election victory mandate in this area? A recent report by the Heritage Foundation is very disturbing. It shows that the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency is still staffed and controlled by the Carter team which tried to shove SALT II down our throats in 1980.
Eleven of the top policymakers in the Arms Control Agency are persons who held high jobs in the Carter Administration. Three or four Republicans have been appointed for window-dressing, but only to minor or non-policymaking positions.
The Deputy Director of the ACDA, who has actual control of the day-to-day management of arms-control personnel and policies, is Robert T. Grey, who served in the Carter State Department as director of the Office of Advanced Technology. His most recent job was as administrative assistant for Senator Alan Cranston, one of the Senate’s ultra-liberals.
Reagan’s top two political appointments to ACDA were longtime Democrats and disarmament advocates, although they went on record against SALT II. The Reagan Director of ACDA, Eugene Rostow, was Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in the Johnson Administration and a fervent believer in the 1946 plan to turn over our nuclear arsenal to the United Nations. Paul Nitze, whom Reagan appointed to the Intermediate Nuclear Force negotiations, was Secretary of the Navy in the Johnson Administration, where he functioned as one of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s chief lieutenants in cutting back our 8-to-1 nuclear superiority over the Soviets in 1962, to parity by 1968.
Since Rostow and Nitze are essentially pro-arms-control-treaty (even though they opposed SALT II), it is easy to see that their hearts are not in any effort to build an ACDA staff supportive of Reagan’s hard line on Soviet treaties. The way they evade the ideological issue is to appoint what they call fcareer professionals” who have State Department or ACDA “experience.”
Who has such experience? Obviously, those who held posts under Carter. More specifically, those who engaged in Carter’s aggressive SALT-selling campaign of 1980, their first-year record proves, not only that they are not implementing Reagan’s policies, but that they are still pursuing Carter’s policies.
A major example of this is the record of ACDA’s Bureau of Verification, which had been abolished by Carter because he didn’t want to know about Soviet violations of SALT I. The Reagan White House ordered the Bureau to be recreated. But the Carter holdovers in ACDA have arranged that only two professionals and a total of seven persons are now assigned to it, thus assuring that it is merely a “paper” bureau. By contrast, the ACDA Bureau of Nuclear Weapons and Weapons Control has 60 employees.
SALT II was dropped because Carter could not get enough ratification votes in the U.S. Senate. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan gave Carter a face-saving excuse to withdraw it.
Reagan’s Navy Secretary John Lehman was 100% correct when he stated publicly that the United States was not legally bound by SALT II. So why was he reprimanded? Why did Reagan’s Secretary of State announce that the U.S. will continue to comply with the treaty terms so long as Russia does? That statement is a sad joke so long as no real effort is made to check up on Soviet compliance.
Longtime Reagan supporters are increasingly alarmed over the staffing of ACDA, the Reagan Administration’s unilateral decision to continue to observe Carter’s unratified SALT II Treaty, and the peculiar reluctance to confront the Soviet Union on violations of existing arms-control treaties. All Carter holdovers should be removed from ACDA and replaced by Reaganauts so that Reagan policies on arms control can replace Carter policies.
