Among public officials, “the arms control process” is sacrosanct. The minority are willing to voice relatively narrow and legalistic complaints about specific treaties, never failing to assure us of their support for arms control per se and their eagerness to go back and get a “better” treaty. Their case, however, would be considerably enhanced were they to argue that the entire arms control process is a dangerous diversion from the constant, and growing, Soviet threat; but this is a truth none dare speak.
Or almost none. Senator Malcolm Wallop and national-security expert Angelo Codevilla have produced a new book which calls the American attitude towards arms control by its proper name: delusion. “To believe in arms control,” they write, “is to accept that a nation possessed of serious reasons, and weapons, for fighting another can and will set aside those reasons long enough to deprive itself of those weapons. Little by little, so goes the creed, as the means disappear from their hands and as they become accustomed to feeling less and less threatened, that nation’s leaders will also discard the reasons why they armed in the first place.” Our main problem is not that the Soviets are possessed of a devilish cleverness with which to bamboozle us. Rather, “the arms control process is something we do to ourselves, largely by ourselves.”
Verification, the subject of most criticism of arms treaties, is among the least of our troubles. Enforcement is a greater one; the U.S. invariably fails to respond to Soviet treaty violations, except by seeking more treaties. Moreover, our reluctance to disrupt “the spirit of the arms control process” has allowed the Soviets to attain superiority while staying mostly within the letter of treaties. The goal of American arms controllers is not security but formal agreement. Knowing this, the Soviets hold out for a treaty imposing few constraints (they rarely have to wait long; Americans do not like to make proposals they think Moscow will find disagreeable) and take full advantage of their legal running room, while the U.S. indulges in handwringing over whether American armament violates “the spirit of the process.”
Eventually, one would think, our leaders might face reality and cut their losses. Yet so heavily have many politicians invested in arms control, say Wallop and Codevilla,
that to speak of alternatives to arms control is to speak of alternatives to them personally. Whenever one discusses the failure of arms control agreements to bring about a safer world, even if one blames the Soviet Union for that failure, one is effectively blaming all those Americans who are responsible for formulating and selling the agreements.
Much of the worst damage has been done not by the liberals but by the supposedly tough, hardheaded realists. The arms control process began in the Eisenhower administration with the appointment of a Special Assistant for Disarmament (Ike selected Harold Stassen). Nixon and Kissinger, for their part, “were seduced by the idea that ‘the spirit’ of negotiations would control a totalitarian side in the same manner it would control the democratic side.”
The Reagan administration comes in for special attention. Ronald Reagan was first convinced to pay lip service to arms control as a “cover” against charges that his military buildup was militaristic. Then he came under pressure to demonstrate “sincerity” in his desire for negotiations. Aspiring to build a strategic defense but unwilling to repudiate arms control—indeed, committed to it by repeated public declaration—the President was maneuvered by Gorbachev into restricting SDI to lab research, leaving the decision of deployment to his successors. This latest sacrifice on the altar of arms control may prove costly. While the U.S. hesitates, the Soviet Union proceeds apace to build its own SDI and to augment its already-vast offensive threat.
It is to the authors’ credit that they do not take the easy path preferred by most Republicans: adopting the popular President’s assertion that his military buildup has so strengthened us that we can again afford to “take chances for peace.” There is a twist to this argument. Wallop and Codevilla point out:
The Reagan administration does not say we are stronger than the Soviet Union in absolute terms, or even that we are in a better relative position than during the Carter administration—both of which propositions are demonstrably untrue. Rather, the Reagan administration argues only that the U.S. military is in better shape in absolute terms than it had been during the Carter administration. This is both true and irrelevant.
Such straight talk does not normally issue from the mouths of senators. That it does from Wallop is gratifying evidence that there is someone in American politics who is willing to play the role of Churchill.
[The Arms Control Delusion, by Senator Malcolm Wallop and Angelo Codevilla (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press) $16.95]
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