DEPARTMENT
June 21, 2005 12:00 AM EDT
It was one of those tentative secret decisions that aim to give something to everyone. But the document drafted after an intense National Security Council meeting last week had elements to placate all sides of the Administration’s fractious arms-negotiating team. In a significant victory for Secretary of State George Shultz, Reagan decided to scrap two American submarines to continue–for now–compliance with the unratified SALT II treaty. Yet to please Pentagon hard-liners, he set the stage for “proportionate responses” to alleged Soviet violations. Work will be accelerated on the small single-warhead mobile missile known as the Midgetman and on an advanced radar-evading cruise missile. He proposed a study of yet another new mobile missile, dubbed Mobileman, which would be about the size of the 78,000-lb. silo-based Minuteman.
The contortions were prompted by the fact that on May 20 a new Trident submarine is due to slip into the sea off Connecticut. Its 24 ballistic missiles would put the U.S. over the SALT II ceiling. Although Reagan once called that treaty “fatally flawed,” he again decided to preserve the informal agreement by both superpowers to abide by its provisions; he ordered that two older Poseidon subs be scrapped. SALT’s critics, most notably Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, urged that the old subs be mothballed and kept ready as a protest against alleged Soviet breaches. But violating SALT II would have upset Congress and the European allies and possibly derailed the summit as well.
Reagan’s decision to accelerate work on the 38,000-lb. Midgetman was designed to please strategists who favor the small mobile missiles. Their reasoning: compared with the Minuteman and the new MX, the truck-carried Midgetman will be less vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike and less destabilizing because it cannot threaten a knockout blow of its own. Many in the Pentagon, however, would like to put more warheads on the Midgetman and make it larger. Hence Reagan’s decision to order study of a possible Mobileman missile, carrying as many as three warheads. Adding warheads, opponents protest, will make the weapons more destabilizing and could prompt the Soviets to do the same with their own new mobile missiles.
Never one to decide such matters once and for all, Reagan left his options open. He indicated that the U.S. might scrap SALT II if the Soviets did not clean up their act, and he said nothing about what he will do in December, when modernized B-52s are to be fitted with new cruise missiles that would again push the U.S. past the treaty’s limits.
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