Why START Stopped

In the presidential campaign of 1980, Ronald Reagan helped make SALT a four-letter word, all but unmentionable in polite but hard-headed company. Such was his distaste for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that had been under way for more than a decade. Yet during his Administration, the quest for an agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union on the size and composition of their intercontinental nuclear arsenals has continued under the new acronym of START, for Strategic Arms Reduction Talks.

As Mr. Reagan nears the end of his presidency, an important part of his legacy is a work-in-progress: a START treaty already in the form of what diplomats call a joint draft text. But that document still contains numerous brackets that indicate points of disagreement. Soviet and American negotiators in Geneva labored hard to remove some of those brackets during this past summer. In late September, Secretary of State George Shultz and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze are scheduled to meet in New York and Washington, and START will be high on their agenda. While last-minute breakthroughs are still possible, neither side expects a completed treaty to emerge from that meeting.

Time may have run out for the Reagan Administration in arms control, though not for the enterprise itself. Both of President Reagan’s would-be successors, George Bush and Michael Dukakis, have indicated that they would build on the considerable progress that President Reagan, in partnership with General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, has made in START during the past few years.

However, in addition to inheriting an unfinished treaty, the next administration will also inherit some unanswered questions about the future of American defense programs. Further progress toward finishing the treaty will almost certainly require progress toward answering those questions.

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