False START

FOR A MOMENT, recently, President Bush contemplated a minor but useful departure in our dealings with the Soviet Union. His spokesman announced that the United States might be willing to engage in a summit meeting with President Gorbachev even in the absence of a Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) agreement limiting nuclear weapons. Alas, the Administration retreated before the squeals of protest from bureaucrats and experts who have been conditioned by two decades of detente-think into believing that the leaders of the U.S. and USSR can meet only if they sign an arms-control treaty. The Soviets have come to count on our overpowering desire for arms control to elicit concessions from Presidents eager to win applause for making the world safer (at least in theory) from nuclear war. And, of course, those who spend their lives negotiating these deals and discoursing on the esoterica of arms control cannot imagine that it is anything but the most important issue in U.S.-Soviet relations.

In truth, arms control has always been something of an illusion: political relations are what breed peace, war, or something in between, not elaborate technical arrangements. The Soviets have skillfully used arms control to score political points, and in particular to claim an equality with us that is chimerical. It helps neither us nor, for that matter, them if we reinforce the delusion that they remain a superpower in anything by the narrowest sense of the term. Nor does it make sense for us to bolster Gorbachev's prestige at a time when his limits as a statesman and a leader have become apparent even to us, let alone his own people.

Arms-control agreements have, from time to time, served us ill. No need to point to the far-from-helpful naval agreements of the 1920s and '30s that weakened the Anglo-American powers before World War II: it is enough to observe how arms control in the form of unthinking support for the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty is an obstacle to development of American strategic defenses. And some of the "merely technical" issues that remain in dispute are hardly insignificant--among other things, the United States has to decide how much intrusive inspection of our facilities and weapons are probably likely to benefit more than we will from the intelligence-collection opportunities offered thereby.

This is not to say that we should scupper the START treaty, merely that we should take our time about it. We have never done anything about Soviet cheating on arms control, but always rushed into one agreement after another even when, as now, such a deal is more in the interests of that collapsing giant than of our own side. If the Soviets really want an agreement before the summit, they should have it only on our terms.