Word: sdi
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Congressional leaders of both parties, like the sagacious Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, have been invited into the White House for their counsel. Their inputis now being felt on issues like the ABM treaty, SDI, trade, welfare. Changes in Reagan's approach to policy are almost inevitable, unless he wants to court more defeat, which could darken his exit a couple of years hence...
...rested on the superpowers' willingness to forgo large-scale strategic defenses, lest the accumulation of shields on one side provoke a proliferation of nuclear spears on the other. Secretary of State George Shultz and his chief arms-control adviser Paul Nitze got President Reagan to declare that the SDI program is a research program permitted by the ABM treaty. But in 1985 other officials -- particularly Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle and State Department Legal Adviser Abraham Sofaer -- launched a campaign to "reinterpret" the pact. According to them, nothing in the treaty impinges on the right...
Thus when it voted 88 to 2 to give the treaty the status of law, the Senate knew what it was doing: ratifying an explicit ban on the development and testing of space-based, exotic ABMs -- precisely the type of SDI system that the Reagan Administration now argues it can develop and test under its broad interpretation of the treaty. If the Administration persists in its policy, Nunn warned, it risks a "constitutional confrontation" with the Hill and a congressional "backlash" against funding for SDI...
...course the second scenario is less favorable than the first for the U.S.S.R. But it is also less favorable for the U.S. and for the entire world. This provides reason to hope that the U.S. will not deploy SDI and will limit itself to research, which may even bear fruit in peaceful areas...
This then is the choice, either insistence on the package approach and a continuation of the arms race at existing and growing levels, combined with inevitable deployment of SDI, or abandonment of the package approach, which would permit an escape from the Reykjavik deadlock. Of course, in the worst case ((SDI deployment)), which I do not believe likely, a new round of the arms race would begin with the U.S.S.R. replacing silo-based missiles with mobile ones. Even in that event, I do not believe that the strategic position of the U.S.S.R. and the stability of the international situation would...