Policy Versus the Law: The Reinterpretation of the ABM Treaty (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 285 Policy Versus the Law: The Reinterpretation of the ABM Treaty. By Raymond L. Garthoff. Washington, D.C: The Brookings Institution, 1987. 117 pp. $8.95/paper. Reviewed by Thomas Mahnken, MA. candidate, SAIS. The controversy generated by the Reagan administration's interpretation of the 1972 ABM treaty has been prolonged and at times bitter, with implications not only for the fate of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) but also for the separation of powers within the government. Raymond L. Garthoffs book provides a detailed, though somewhat esoteric, account of the interpretation question. He is indeed qualified to write on the treaty — as a Department of State representative to the SALT negotiations, he was one of the key architects of the document , and as senior fellow in the Brookings Institution Foreign Policy Program, he has continued to study U.S. -Soviet relations. Garthoff presents the Reagan administration's 1985 formulation of the socalled "broad" interpretation of the treaty, permitting development and testing of all defensive systems based on exotic technologies (for example, lasers and particle beams), as a political tool permitting otherwise forbidden testing for SDI. Garthoff argues that in 1972 the superpowers agreed to a restrictive ABM treaty, one that would allow testing and development of fixed, land-based exotic systems only. The problem with Garthoffs argument is that it, too, has a political bias, based on the assumption that ballistic missile defense is destabilizing and that the Soviet Union follows a policy of mutual assured destruction. Garthoff begins by examining the treaty's text. The controversy over the interpretation of the ABM treaty in effect revolves around the weight and meaning of articles II and III (defining the ABM components that are to be banned and describing permitted deployment), and Agreed Statement D (stating that limits on systems based on "other physical principles" will be negotiated if such systems are developed). The problem with Garthoffs contention that the treaty bans not only ABM missiles, launchers, and radars but anything that can be used in their place is that it makes Agreed Statement D superfluous, effectively discarding a section that both delegations spent time and effort to negotiate. A large portion of the book is taken up by a description of the negotiating record of the treaty. At first the documentation for this section seems quite impressive , until one realizes that the information footnoted is from Garthoffs own personal memoranda. He devotes considerably less attention to statements of the U.S. and Soviet teams at official negotiating sessions, a much more valuable set of evidence. Further, Garthoff almost totally ignores Soviet positions and objectives in the negotiations. While claiming that the ABM treaty bans the deployment of all types of ABM systems, including those based on exotic technologies, he omits the fact that the Soviet delegation not only favored a narrow definition of ABM components but also refused to accept limits on future systems. The main problem with Garthoffs argument is that it fails to distinguish between what the U.S. delegation sought in the negotiations and what it achieved. It is true that the Americans tried to get a total ban on ABM systems. However, 286 SAIS REVIEW the treaty itself, as the prime instrument of interpretation in both the U.S. and Soviet legal systems, shows this was not what the two superpowers agreed. The third part of the author's case considers the treaty ratification process, and here again his use of evidence is selective. Garthoff quotes statements that support his view of the treaty at length while virtually ignoring such important evidence as president Nixon's Letter of Transmittal and the testimony of secretary of state Rogers and ambassador Smith, chairman of the U.S. SALT delegation . Here again the problem arises of what people thought they had accomplished versus what the letter of the treaty and the official negotiating record reflect. The final part of Garthoffs analysis is concerned with American and Soviet practice since 1972, which the author feels is in accord with his view of the treaty. This is true insofar as neither the United States nor the Soviet Union has deployed exotic ABM systems. What the analysis ignores, however...