'Supply-Side Arms Control'
Morrison, David C.
BOOKS 'Supply-Side Arms Control' DEADLY GAMBITS: THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION AND THE STALEMATE IN NUCLEAR ARMS CONTROL by Strobe Talbott Alfred A. Knopf. 380 pp. $17.95. by David C....
...Thanks in large part to Reagan's tendency to appoint ideologues and neophytes to top Cabinet policy posts, the task of charting America's course to Geneva fell to "the two Richards": former New York Times reporter Richard Burt at the State Department and Richard Perle, a hawkish former aide to Senator Henry Jackson, at the Pentagon...
...Reagan "would step to center stage to deliver his lines in set speeches," Talbott writes...
...Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger took a particularly hard line, saying that SALT obstructed weapons programs the United States needed right away...
...We don't care if the goddamn things work or not," Burt stated at a staff meeting...
...This self-defeating, hard-nosed policy is all the more remarkable for being formulated by third-echelon figures in the Administration...
...Reagan, Tal-believed his Ad-should dispense had traditionally a criterion in Amer-arms-control policy: tiability,' an accommodation to what the other side might reasonably be expected to accept in an agreement...
...But behind the scenes, where decisions were made and policy was set, he was to remain a detached, sometimes befuddled character...
...What we care about is getting them in...
...Talbott discusses the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) "Euromissile" talks and what the Administration, in an attempt to distance itself from the "fatally flawed" SALT II, has dubbed the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START...
...Deadly Gambits, from which the above incident is drawn, is a thoroughly dispiriting chronicle of the Reagan Administration's failure to learn about arms control...
...They could settle for nothing, no agreement of any kind, which might mean the utter collapse of the enterprise the superpowers had begun a generation before to regulate their rivalry in its most dangerous aspect...
...policy...
...Perle's goal has been to postpone any agreement with the Soviets until the United States completes its buildup, "to teach the David C. Morrison is a research analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C...
...The men who had come into office vowing such ambitious changes in arms control approached the end of their first term facing a highly disagreeable choice," Talbott writes at the conclusion of Deadly Gambits...
...intermediate-range deployments in Europe and making removal of cruise and Pershing missiles already deployed a precondition for resumption of the INF and START talks, the Soviets painted themselves into a diplomatic corner with no face-saving exit in sight...
...Two characteristics guish the Reagan arms-control policies of previous adtions: a penchant unacceptable of-ership vacu-bott writes ministration with what been / d i s t i n -team's from those ministra-for making fers and a lead-um...
...By adamantly refusing to accept any new U.S...
...Perle is the standard-bearer for a clique of Pentagon civilians who, Talbott says, "while committed to avoiding, if possible, a nuclear war, prided themselves on being hard-headed enough to accept the possibility that the planet might not, in the end, be big enough for both superpowers...
...After all, that doesn't matter unless there's a war...
...by David C. Morrison At a May 1981 National Security Council meeting, members of the newly installed Reagan Cabinet set to damning the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT...
...There's not even a marginal military reason for exceeding the SALT limits," he argued...
...Like what...
...Jones patiently explained that sea- and ground-launched cruise missiles were prohibited only in a SALT protocol that would expire before the United States was even ready to deploy such missiles...
...or they could scramble desperately for what would perforce be a modest stop-gap, a face-saver, a 'quick fix.'" Events of the past four years suggest the first choice may be the only one remaining for a uniquely ideological Administration at a uniquely perilous juncture in history...
...The troubling question indirectly raised by Talbott's book is whether, even if the U.S.-Soviet arms dialogue were to resume, the Reagan Administration would be capable of taking a realistic and productive arms control course...
...In any case, deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles was the be-all and end-all of U.S...
...The cruise missile program," replied Weinberger...
...Only after Reagan took power "did it become the predominant and unabashed purpose of arms control to dictate to the U.S.S.R...
...BOOKS r nation a lesson in the virtues of supply-side arms control...
...Later, a discouraged Jones commented to a colleague, "These guys have a lot to learn...
...The fault for this, of course, cannot be laid entirely at the White House doorstep...
...Should America emerge unscathed from the current experiment in "supply-side arms control," Talbott's eminently readable and meticulously detailed Deadly Gambits will prove a key source for future historians of this dark time...
...asked General David Jones, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...And that is just what we have today: lots of arms production but no new controls...
...an entirely new sort of arsenal, one more to America's liking...
...Reagan's "zero-zero" offer, which expected the Soviets to destroy all of their existing intermediate-range missiles in exchange for no new U.S...
...Like its predecessor, Endgame, Time magazine diplomatic correspondent Strobe Talbott's 1979 book on SALT II, Deadly Gambits is a largely reliable behind-the-scenes account of the most crucial diplomatic process of our times...
...deployments, was both dishonest and unnegotiable...
...Significantly, the bulk of the action in Deadly Gambits takes place not in Geneva but in Washington, where the Administration has stumbled through endless sterile interagency debate...
Vol. 48 • October 1984 • No. 12
