THE REYKJAVIK SUMMIT, CONGRESSMAN RICHARD RAY

"I believe that we built our expectations too high in believing that the pre-summit meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Gorbachev would produce a significant agreement. More progress was made than anticipated and we should not be disappointed with the results. More importantly, the leaders have cut through mountains of rhetoric which should make the arms control talks in Geneva and possible future agreements more likely."

"We should not let partisan politics damage the accomplishment at Reykjavik and a summit in the future should be encouraged. It is my policy to support the President or to give him the benefit of the doubt whenever possible. He has my support in this instance." "History has proven that the Soviets are not trustworthy. The complete details of the summit are unknown to me, but I am under the impression that the Soviets were anxious to neutralize the possibility of S.D.I. becoming a reality.

"It's unlikely that Gorbachev would have agreed to unquestionable verification, leaving doubt as to the effectiveness of an agreement. Therefore, I believe that the President was concerned that we would have given away S.D.I., disarming and our deterrent system on the word of the Soviets."

"The Reykjavik summit was, in my opinion, shrewdly orchestrated to box the President in. If he agreed to the Soviet proposal, the Soviets could reduce or slow down their weapon's armament program."

"If the President disagreed the Soviets would announce to the world that the U.S. is not sincere about arms control. This could cause a reaction which could upset our NATO allies and possibly even influence the elections in England to favor the Labor Party. The Labor Party is campaigning to remove nuclear weapons from England if they win."

"The Soviet economy is in a miserable condition and Gorbachev, most likely, is chafing from the large percentage of funding which the Soviet defense requires. To have to compete more heavily with S.D.I., puts an additional burden on the economy.'

"I personally believe that the S.D.I program and its cost can create funding problems for our present defense. Despite my opinion, I applaud the President for not 'giving away the store' and for his dilligent approach to a real and lasting arms control agreement."

DISSENTING VIEWS OF REPRESENTATIVE DUNCAN HUNTER

There is an old Talmudical saying that if you don't know where you are going any road will take you there. The recent Defense Policy Panel hearings represent one such road. As a result, this report is a celebration of form over substance. A discussion of the real issues of arms control simply would not have been consistent with the kind of political sniping that dominated this report. To quote the distinguished chairman, Mr. Aspin, "this is no way to run a railroad.”

Since this report purports to analyze the process and product of the administration's approach to the Iceland summit, it is appropriate to look briefly at the Panel's hearings as well as the report within the same framework. In particular, the processes and product of the report are far more flawed than anything the administration could possibly be accused in regard to its handling of arms control issues before, during, and after the Iceland summit.

Discussion of the substantive flaws of this report will follow comments on the process and style of the report, as well as the hearings. If the panel were sincerely interested in the intricacies of the arms control negotiations that took place in Iceland, the hearings would not have assumed the circus atmosphere they did, with the guest of honor usually being the press, not the witnesses. Closed hearings, at a time when the entire panel, or at least a more representative cross-section, was present would have been more meaningful politically and would have reflected a serious attitude toward sensitive matters of national security.

Perhaps most astonishing has been the lack of consultation that panel members received regarding the very existence, let alone contents, of our own report. I was not aware that this report was in the works until a week or so before I was presented with the final draft and informed that I had less than a week during which to comment. While it appears that certain, if not all, members of the panel were kept in the dark as to the existence of this report, it was established through the public testimony of Gerard Smith, a senior official of the Arms Control Association (a non-governmental agency with a clearly defined political agenda contrary to that of the administration's), that he and his associates had been supplied with an early draft of this report in order to comment and correct. Panel members have every right to be indignant over the committee leadership's blatant breech of conduct in keeping drafts of this report from elected members of Congress while circulating it around Washington in order to solicit the approval of private individuals and institutions. Adding insult to injury, I have even heard rumors asserting that the framework, if not basic text, of this report was well developed even before the panel commenced the hearings on which it is allegedly based. This would, of course, explain the report's similarity to a number of the chairman's press releases distributed between the summit and the beginning of the panel's hearings. While this report accuses the administration of bypassing necessary bureaucratic channels in the conduct of arms control summitry, the accusers should look a little closer to home before pointing the finger.

The style of this report is unprofessional. There is more personal judgment and preception than hard, empirical analysis which

raises more pressing questions of the degree to which the panel's undertaking can be considered at all serious. As noted, both the content and the style of the report suggest little more than a compilation of the barrage of press releases that were so diligently distributed prior to the hearings (if only rough drafts of the panel report had been made so readily available!).

However, the most serious stylistic flaw is the report's utter lack of comprehensive footnotes. Having drawn a number of controversial conclusions, allegedly based on the testimony of sixteen different witnesses over the course of nine days of hearings, one would think the footnotes would be as extensive as the text itself. Therefore, I can only assume from the conspicuous lack of attribution that the report's conclusions are not supportable based on the testimony. In sum, the structure and style (i.e., the process) of the hearings and this accompanying report were, in the words of the distinguished chairman, "slip-shod" and generally "shoddy".

Substantively, the report is confused and in places, factually incorrect. For example, this report claims that the president's July 1986 letter to Gorbachev proposed, among other things, "a complicated scheme which would have permitted deployment of strategic defenses by either side within seven and a half years while remaining within the bounds of a modified ABM Treaty" (emphasis added). This is wrong. In fact, the president's offer was that both sides would conduct research, testing, and development as permitted by the ABM Treaty for seven and a half years and then, pursuant to the Treaty, negotiate over the issue of deployment. If the decision were made by either side to formally deploy, six months notice would be required. President Reagan did not suggest modifying the ABM Treaty.

In lieu of addressing any serious arms control issues on their merits, this report immediately launches into a rather pointless chronology attempting to detail the negotiating positions of the U.S. and Soviets at Reykjavik. The reader is never informed of what arms control discussions entail, why negotiating parties take certain positions, and the implications of arms control proposals on national security and western stability. Instead, the reader is inundated with inane detail informing him of the author(s) of drafted letters, why President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev chose to sit at a table rather than in side chairs at the Iceland meeting, and extraneous information about the Daniloff affair.

This convoluted description, not analysis, of the Iceland talks is probably presented as it is in order to prevent acknowledging the undeniable fact that before the Reagan administration took office, the Soviet Union had steadfastly refused to accept, even theoretically, the concept of reducing strategic arms as opposed to only limiting them. This achievement, remarkable in and of itself, is all the more so in light of persistent Congressional efforts to impede such progress by threatening, retarding, and even canceling strategic programs during annual consideration of the defense budget.

More recently, such obstructionism has been compounded by the inclusion in both defense authorization and appropriation bills of arms control legislation that, if passed into law, would deprive the President and his appointed representatives of any negotiating flexibility in Geneva. Why should Moscow negotiate for U.S. con

cessions when the Congress is so predictable in their willingness to do so instead?

The panel report also concludes that the U.S. representatives at Iceland put the national security of the country at great risk when they were forced into the role of reacting to Soviet initiatives rather than taking and maintaining the initiative themselves. This clearly reflects a myopic view of the history of U.S.-Soviet arms control negotiations. After all, it was President Reagan who ultimately forced the Soviets to react in accepting reductions as the focus of future arms control talks. President Reagan ignored pressure, including congressional, refusing to take the route of political expediency and conclude a "cosmetic" arms control agreement. Therefore, his determination was also instrumental in forcing the Soviets to discuss arms control in terms of strategic reductions.

It is perplexing that this report seemingly reprimands the administration for losing, or never taking, the negotiating initiative while simultaneously condemning them because, "the process moved too fast-'progress' went too far, overshot its mark, and yielded the U.S. nothing but the appearance of confusion and frustration." One cannot have it both ways.

Furthermore, this report blames the administration for not involving more of the governmental bureaucracy in preparation of arms control positions prior to the Iceland summit while, again, accusing the administration of not taking the initiative. The authors of the report have obviously missed the terrible inconsistency in their argument. How can the administration keep the negotiating negotiatingly initiative while simultaneously involving more of the bureaucracy in the preparation for, and actual negotiation of, arms control with the Soviets? It is the endless, bureaucratic, interagency process that precludes any administration from maintaining

on an issue as sensitive, complex, and politically divisive as arms control.

The authors of this report conclude that the presence of Marshal Akhromeyev, Chief of the Soviet General Staff, "should have been a strong signal that the Soviets were anticipating flexible negotiating on the most important strategic issues, requiring real-time military analysis and approval of the top military officer." This conclusion is encompassed within the larger accusation that the U.S. military (i.e., the Joint Chiefs of Staff), was (1) not represented by a "senior enough" officer in Iceland and (2) left out of the preparation of the arms control proposals discussed. Both of these conclusions are absolutely untrue.

More disconcerting, however, is the authors' demonstrated lack of understanding of the great differences between the role of the military in Soviet and American societies. Rather than reflecting a new-found Soviet desire to negotiate seriously and "flexibility", General Akhromeyev's presence in Reykjavik can just as readily be interpreted as the Soviet military's desire to preempt any negotiating mistakes having potentially serious implications for the Red Army. The only arms control the Soviet military can support is that which, at the very least, maintains the status quo or more preferably, that which tips the "balance of forces" further in their favor.

Raymond Garthoff, noted expert on the Soviet military and a witness before the panel, has concluded that, "Soviet military par

ticipation in the SALT planning and decisionmaking, and in the actual negotiations, has been active and vigorous at all levels. The effect of this role has probably been to exert a conservative and cautious influence on Soviet [negotiating] positions." ("The Soviet Military and SALT," in, Soviet Decisionmaking for National Security. Jiri Valenta and William Potter, eds., 1984, p. 146.)

The point to be emphasized is that the military plays a predominant role in all facets of Soviet society. More specifically, the presence of senior Soviet military figures at arms control discussions with the United States has been the rule, not the exception, for at least twenty years. For example, the number two delegate during the first three rounds of the SALT I discussions almost two decades ago was then First Deputy Chief of the Soviet General Staff Nikolai Ogarkov.

Finally, for those critics of the lower profile U.S. military involvement at Reykjavik, Garthoff asserts that the U.S. has always been represented by capable military officers with excellent staffs in the area of arms control but that, "the scale of military representation [was always] ... more limited" (op cit., p. 144). Thus, it is somewhat ironic that the same politicians who have consistently rejected the advice of the JCS about U.S. defense programs and priorities (Admiral Crowe testified on November 25 that he had not even been asked to testify before the House Armed Services Committee during its consideration of the 1987 defense authorization bill) are now bemoaning the alleged fact that the U.S. military played too minor a role in the arms control discussions at Reykjavik. Furthermore, the only true conclusion that the presence of Marshal Akhromeyev in Iceland can possibly support is one that every American should already know-the U.S. and Soviet Union have fundamentally different philosophies dictating the respective roles of the military and the political in society. This is not overly insightful after forty years of cold war foreign policy.

In addition to the accusation that the JCS was not involved enough in the Iceland summit arms control discussions, the panel report also worries that our NATO allies were not informed of U.S. negotiating positions that had potentially serious implications for the security of Europe (several members invoking this very argument have been among those advocates of a significantly reduced U.S. conventional posture in Europe. Where is the concern for our NATO allies in proposals such as these?) Moreover, the President is accused of having agreed to ban all nuclear weapons within ten years, as opposed to all ballistic missiles (which contrary to this report's assertions, has been discussed before the Iceland summit. In fact, President Carter made references to the very same concept as far back as 1977).

While all three arguments are fallacious, they unfortunately represent a lack of realistic understanding of the complexities involved in high-level negotiations and the summit process. The most basic guiding principle, especially in negotiations as complex as arms control, is that nothing is formally agreed to until and unless everything is agreed to. Had any "grand" arms control scheme been agreed to by President Reagan and General Secretary Gorba