Word: accordant
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Kicking off the testimony last week were two of the Administration's most important SALT-sellers: Vance and Defense Secretary Harold Brown. They presented powerful arguments on behalf of the pact. Vance stressed that the accord "will greatly assist us in maintaining a stable balance of nuclear forces. It fully protects a strong American defense." Taking aim at critics who argue that SALT II is a bad deal for the U.S., Vance emphasized that the treaty "will permit, and in fact aid, the necessary modernization of our strategic forces. And it will slow the momentum of Soviet strategic programs...
...more secure militarily than we would be without it." It would also save them money. With the treaty, Brown maintains, preserving the nuclear balance with the Soviet Union would require increasing strategic spending, now $10 billion a year, to about $12.5 billion. But, he insists, without an accord, the Pentagon budget for strategic weapons would have to spurt to as much as $16 billion a year. Said he: "There would be more weapons, higher costs and probably less security-for both sides...
...other hand, the chiefs admitted that some of the proposed accord's provisions "operate primarily to our advantage." As examples, they cited the ceiling of 2,250 launchers, which requires Moscow to dismantle some missiles, and the ban on Soviet mobile SS-16 missiles. The chiefs' main message, however, was that with or without SALT, the U.S. must increase its spending on strategic weaponry-Declared Jones: "We will be required to undertake a series of important strategic modernization programs to maintain strategic parity...
...Thursday the committee heard its first testimony from the other side of the SALT debate. Edward Rowny, a recently retired lieutenant general who was the Joint Chiefs' representative on the SALT II delegation for six years, denounced the accord for establishing "conditions which threaten our security for years to come." During the talks, said Rowny, "we gave concession after concession." Paul Nitze, who helped negotiate the SALT 1 accord, warned that the new treaty's provisions "one-sidedly favor the Soviet Union" and that the arguments for them were full of "fallacies and implausibilities...
...actual text of the treaty and reservations or understandings attached to the Senate's Resolution of Ratification, the parliamentary instrument by which the upper chamber approves treaties. U.S. legal practice makes no such distinction: understandings and reservations are just as binding on both parties to an accord as an amendment to the treaty itself. But the Soviets might be willing to overlook this point, provided that the understandings merely explain or repeat points in the treaty and do not actually change its provisions. In this way the Soviets would not literally be forced to accept amendments that they have...