Washington

Washington

By MARK GRUENBERG

The
price
of
SALT
?

WHAT DO selling rocket motors to Great Britain and turning parts of the American West into Swiss cheese have in common? They will help determine how Illinois' U.S. senators will vote on the pending SALT (strategic arms limitaton treaty). Sen. Charles H. Percy has decided to support SALT, but Sen. Adlai E. Stevenson III has not.

Sen. Percy is part of a bipartisan Senate Foreigh Relations Committee majority which favorably reported the pact last month. Senate debate is scheduled to start the first week in October. But the price for Percy's support is the rocket motor for Great Britain. You won't hear him say the words "rocket motor" on the Senate floor, however. What he'll call it is "allowing the transfer of technology."

There is a clause in the treaty, Article XII, which bars circumvention of the arms control limits of the pact

through third parties. It is a standard clause in many international agreements. What it means in this case is that the U.S. cannot evade the numerical warhead or tactical weapon limits of the pact by assigning "excess" missiles to, say, Great Britain; and, the Russians cannot evade the limit by doing the same with missiles to, say, Bulgaria.

Percy was concerned that such a provision effectively prevented the defense of Western Europe and our NATO allies. In an attempt to assure our allies in return for their united chorus of support, the Carter administration made it crystal clear to the Russians at Geneva that, while we couldn't transfer excess missiles, we could share missile technology with our allies.

Percy's reply to the administration was that assurances weren't good enough; he wanted a "reservation" written into the resolution of ratification specifically saying that such technology transfers were not barred. His position was backed by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and is included in a package of proposed reservations recommended by the committee.

How would a technology transfer protect NATO and guarantee its support for SALT? For Percy, the answer is that such a provision would allow the U.S. to transfer to Britain the technology — in particular a guidance system and a motor the size of an ordinary TV set — which the British could use for a fleet of cruise missiles, if they decide to build them. The cruise missiles would be a counterweight to the Soviet might aimed at Western European cities - something NATO nations are worried about.

As part of the protection of NATO, Percy has also successfully argued for another reservation, saying that a SALT "protocol" banning any deployment of cruise missiles (which won't roll off the production line until 1982) cannot be extended after 1981 without a two - thirds vote of the Senate. The administration says the protocol will lapse anyway, and the issue is moot. Percy says the Soviets will try to make the ban permanent in 1981, and he wants to make sure they don't succeed.

If Percy's support is assured by these reservations, Stevenson's is not. For him, problem upon problem has been piled upon the SALT treaty. The latest is the "Swiss cheese" problem — the digging of thousands of holes in the American West for the proposed MX missile system which the pact will allow us to build. Putting it as bluntly as possible, and he has been doing so, Stevenson wonders whether the multi-billion dollar MX is not too high a price to pay for the SALT pact.

For Stevenson, the Carter administration position on the MX, like so many other administration positions in the past two-and-a-half years, is a disappointment. In an effort to win over votes of more conservative senators who are distressed about the present state of American nuclear and strategic defenses, Carter has promised to build the MX. "This is arms control?" Stevenson has rhetorically asked. To him, it looks like a further escalation of the arms race at a time when the country may not be able to afford it. He calls the MX "catastrophic" to arms control.

The MX has not been Stevenson's only concern about the arms control pact, just the latest one. As a member of the Select Intelligence Committee, he has been attending the closed hearings on whether the treaty is verifiable - a key issue in the SALT debate, and one that troubled him earlier this year.

"How do you debate verification?" he asked. "All the information is classified. We're studying the verifiability of each piece of the agreement, since you can't trust the Russians" the way we trust our allies.

The problem for Stevenson and other senators is how verifiable you want the treaty to be. Stevenson was distressed over our lack of knowledge of the opposition to the Shah of Iran because ----- among other reasons ----- Iranian "listening posts" provided immediate data about Soviet missile launching from the minute of blastoff. The administration says such exactitude was only marginally important; it's more important to catch basic trends and the number of warheads on each missile. Defnse Secretary Brown says we can do that by satellite without Iran. So does Senator Goldwater, a key SALT opponent.

That leaves what Stevenson sees as a SALT-sanctioned arms race, though it is verifiable all the way. It is this distressing prospect which has left Stevenson undecided.

32/ October 1979/ Illinois Issues

Illinois Periodicals Online (IPO) is a digital imaging project at the Northern Illinois University Libraries funded by the Illinois State Library