WHY THE DITHER OVER WEINBERGER LETTER?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000807640005-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 12, 2012
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: November 19, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/12 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000807640005-5
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LOS ANGELES TIMES
19 November 1985
Why the Dither Over Weinberger Letter?
By EDWIN M. YODER JR.
If any doubt lingered that the engine
of summit publicity is self-propelling,
requiring fuel of the lowest octane, the
curious affair of the Weinberger letter
would dispel it.
As President Reagan took wing for
Geneva last Saturday, the New York Times
and the Washington Post broke a leaked
"confidential" letter to him from the
secretary of defense. The leak plunged the
summit party aboard Air Force One into a
dither. Yet all it reveals-surprise!-is that
Caspar W. Weinberger remains skeptical of
the tattered arms-control system negotiat-
ed from 1969 on by Presidents Richard M.
Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter.
That is news of the Earth-is-round
variety. Weinberger and his top civilian
adviser on arms control, Richard Perle, are
known to be devoted foes of arms control-
at least in any form that the Soviets might
buy. They view anything short of radical
paring of the Soviet offensive arsenal as a
risky deal, inimical to U.S. security and to
the stability of deterrence.
Weinberger also, like Reagan in private
moments, believes that the Soviets are
compulsive loophole-seekers and, like little
boys at the marble ring, will fudge if not
watched closely.
These are the views that Weinberger
and Perle brought to the Pentagon in 1981.
And Weinberger has done everything
short of picketing the Oval Office with
placards to persuade Reagan (who needs
little persuading) of their truth. Despite the
pious posturing of the Soviets, who have
joined the game of big-time news manage-
ment in Geneva, Weinberger's views are
not likely to be news to Mikhail Gorbachev.
And, finally, no one expects Reagan and
Gorbachev to negotiate, in detail, over
strategic weapons anyway. Gorbachev
probably lacks the authority to strike big
bargains; Reagan certainly lacks the mas-
tery to do so.
Indeed, Weinberger appears merely to
be trying to head off any attack of
sentimentality that might prompt Reagan
to accede to a "strict" legal interpretation
of the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty
(which could hinder "Star Wars") or a
further informal extension of the still-
unratified SALT II agreements negotiated
by Carter. The Soviets would like both.
So why the dither?
Weinberger's assessment of Moscow's
tendency to deviousness may be untimely,
but it is, alas, all too accurate. For instance,
the Soviets, having agreed not to "under-
mine" SALT.II, are nonetheless encoding
some of the signals from their long-range
missile tests in order to thwart U.S.
electronic surveillance. That's a violation
certainly of the spirit and perhaps of the
letter of the draft treaty.
Even so, the Weinberger view of arms
control and its flaws is far from exhausting
all aspects of the issue.
It takes too little account in general of
the politics of arms control that, as the
recent U.S, dust-up with New Zealand
shows, is nudging even solid friends toward
nuclear unilateralism. Such is the redun-
dancy of nuclear power on both sides (at
least in the view of bystanders) that over-
doing the cheating issue is, or may seem,
evasive nit-picking.
Despite the successful deployment last
year of a new generation of U.S. "Euro-
missiles" in Western Europe, unilateralist
fever is latent. The Euromissile success
could be misleading. It could not have been
pulled off except that the Soviets, as usual,
tried to prevail by bluster and bluff. It has
been the salvation of NATO policy that the
Soviets are their own worst tacticians, a
state of affairs that may not continue under
the wilier Gorbachev.
From the 1945 days of the Baruch Plan
forward, U.S. Presidents have set, and have
been expected to set, the pace of risk in
nuclear restraint and arms control. The
esoteric technicalities in which Wein-
berger and his aides tend to absorb them-
selves-again, as a matter of duty-yield
an excessively technocratic view of what is
at heart a problem in diplomacy and high
politics.
Summits, as essentially political exercis-
es, are the diplomats' meat and drink. Thus
State Department advice is probably more
useful to Ronald Reagan at Geneva than
that of the arms technicians.
That realization may explain Wein-
berger's worry, and even the untimely
leaking of his warning letter. It certainly
makes good copy. That it should be treated
as momentous revelation, however, tells
less about "the news" than about our
overblown conception of it.
Edwin M. Yoder Jr. is a syndicated
columnist in Washington.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/12 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000807640005-5