ARMS CONTROL: CRISIS OR COMPROMISE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605740075-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 3, 2012
• Sequence Number: 75
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
1 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605740075-1
A,RTIM-F APPE
ED FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Air /_0Z( Summer 1985
John Steinbruner
ARMS CONTROL:
CRISIS OR COMPROMISE
he issues of strategic arms control are complex in their
technical details, but they nonetheless revolve around a reason-
ably simple central problem. The United States is primarily
interested in reducing the level of strategic force deployments
in order to alleviate a perceived threat to the U.S. interconti-
nental ballistic missile forces and a politically sensitive imbal-
ance in weapons deployed in Europe. The Soviet Union is
primarily interested in restricting the process of technical im-
provement in order to alleviate what it perceives as an emerging
threat to Soviet IcBMS and ultimately to the entire structure of
Soviet military forces. With the United States committed to
revising the past and the Soviet Union to shaping the future,
viable compromise requires arrangements that do. both. The
issues are too extensive and the underlying hostility too great
to allow an immediate, comprehensive solution. Thus, compro-
mise must be achieved through a series of partial measures,
each of which balances force reductions and modernization
restrictions.
Recent 'arms control negotiations have not focused on a
balanced but limited combination of force reductions and
weapons modernization restrictions, and that fact has virtually
precluded their success. The proposals the U.S. and Soviet
governments have advanced could be supplemented or com-
bined in a variety of ways to embody such a balance, but in the
context of related events the practical opportunities are limited.
The Strategic Defense Initiative announced by the United
States and the Soviet reaction to that announcement have made
the issue of weapons in space a necessary element of any
immediate compromise. Both in the substance of security and
in the politics of adversarial diplomacy, that issue has become
the gate to all others.
To the extent that an objective perspective is possible on
matters so dominated by national sentiment, it appears that an
agreement restricting the direct use of weapons in space is of
overriding mutual interest for both countries. The reasons are
quite fundamental. Over the past 20 years, space has been
accepted as a sanctuary for gathering and communicating
information necessary for the safe and stable management of
Continued
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605740075-1
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605740075-1
worldwide military operations. The satellites that support these
purposes depend upon mutual tolerance that has been estab-
lished in practice, though not legally defined. They are suscep-
tible to disruption and are highly vulnerable to deliberate
attack. Both the United States and the Soviet Union have long
been able to improvise indiscriminate attacks in space that
would damage their own satellites as well as the opponent's,
but neither has fully developed the weapons and organizations
dedicated to precise and systematic destruction of the oppo-
nent's assets. Both are now in the early stages of doing so. If
not established by formal agreement, the informal tolerance
that now protects intelligence and communication activities in
space is likely to be degraded very severely, with consequences
for the stability of international security far greater than those
posed by any of the weapons issues that are more prominently
discuss.
The most important threat to each country does not arise
from weaknesses in political resolve, technical capacity, organ-
izational competence or destructive firepower. The gravest
threat is the inability to impose reasonable restraint, a mutually
acknowledged problem for which each prefers to blame the
other. There is in fact plenty of blame to be shared and, simply
on practical grounds, each country would be well advised to
begin at home. In the case of the United States, that requires
adjustments in our strategic arms control policy.
John Steinbruner is Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings
Institution.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605740075-1