Paul Nitze chose an apt analogy when he compared the SALT II negotiations to the courtship between a rich bachelor and an acquisitive beauty — each aspiring to wedlock, but he for marriage and she with alimony in mind. Both sides want SALT II, but for different goals. We want to reduce the fear and the cost of nuclear weapons, while the Soviets want to make permanent their nuclear weapons’ lead over us so they can be in the driver’s seat of international politics.
Fortunately we have the benefit of the first-hand knowledge of a former member of the Soviet SALT team to tell us how the Russians hope to cash in on their SALT “alimony” after going through the formalities of a SALT “marriage.” Dr. Igor Sergeyevich Glagolev, a former Soviet SALT team consultant with impeccable credentials as a Kremlin adviser, defected to the West in 1976.
Speaking at a forum in Washington, D.C., recently, Dr. Glagolev pointed out that the terms of SALT II would allow the Soviets “to keep its more powerful weapons” and “perpetuate their superiority.” He added that the Kremlin is doing a good job of concealing their superiority from the U.S. public with the help of USSR censorship and the pro-detente media in the West.
The terms of SALT II confirm his criticisms. SALT II would protect one of the Soviets’ most important advantages, their “heavy” missiles. Heavies are the missiles that can destroy the opponents’ weapons in hardened silos. SALT II permits the Soviets to deploy 308 heavy ICBMs (the SS-9s and SS-18s which carry 25 to 50 megatons each), while the United States may not deploy any ICBMs of that power at all. Our largest missile is our Titan II, rated at 5 to 10 megatons each and much older.
SALT II forbids us to use trucks or railroad cars as mobile launch sites, a principal way that we could prevent our missiles from being vulnerable to Soviet attack. Some experts believe that SALT II would also ban the Multiple Aim Points system under which we could build hundreds of empty silos and transfer our missiles from one to another so the Soviets would never know ICBM locations.
SALT II limits sea- and land-based cruise missiles to a range of 347 miles, making them useless as strategic weapons. It limits air-launched cruise missiles to a 1,550-mile range, making the planes vulnerable to Soviet interceptors. SALT II limits will include our old, subsonic B-52 bombers while excluding the Soviets’ new supersonic Backfire bomber, of which they are now producing five a month.
The SALT-sellers are threatening the American people that, if our Senate doesn’t ratify the treaty, arms costs will escalate out of sight. This is a red herring. Our current military budget is a lower percentage of our federal budget than in any year since 1950.
The Soviet military budget was never affected in the slightest by SALT I — its signing in 1972, its five-year life, or its lapsing in 1977. The Soviets simply continue to build for strategic superiority regardless of costs or treaties.
Eugene Rostow, chairman of the executive committee of the Committee on the Present Danger, has correctly analyzed SALT II as “a step toward war, not peace … which can only invite more Soviet pressure and more risk. It would freeze us in a position of inferiority, deny us the opportunity to redress the balance, weaken our alliances, and isolate us.”
The World War II generation learned by bitter experience that the arms-limitation and naval-reduction agreements of the 1920s not only did not prevent war, but positively encouraged aggressors to attack. It’s too bad that each generation has to learn fundamental lessons of international politics all over again.
It isn’t that aggressors want war; they don’t. As Clausewitz put it so well, the aggressor would prefer to enter your country unopposed.
