Salt Ii

More than half the Senate urged President Reagan today to put the United States back under the limits of the SALT II nuclear arms control treaty that the United States breached last month. A letter signed by 57 of the 100 senators said the U.S. action was an "open invitation to the Soviets" to violate several of the numerical limits in the treaty. "We could probably have gotten more than 57, but a lot of them are overseas and a lot are out of pocket," said Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-Ark.

President Reagan remains unrepentant. In the glare of daily revelations, the old actor huffs and puffs and blusters with indignation over being ill-used by the press, demonstrating for all to see that, like his friend, the attorney general, he is not only fuzzy in the ethics department but clearly does not know right from wrong. It's too bad in light of these recent exposures, that all of Reagan's decisions (decisions that affect us most seriously and deeply such as: abandoning SALT II, vetoing the Clean Water Act, decisions that have negatively affected the poor, the public schools, health, the environment, minorities, etc.)

The Soviet Union announced Friday that it has decided to observe, "for the time being," limits on nuclear weapons set out in the SALT II treaty, even though the United States has exceeded those limits. The announcement was made by Tass, the official Soviet news agency, which at the same time denounced the Reagan Administration for going beyond the treaty's ceiling by equipping its 131st B-52 bomber to carry cruise missiles.

The Soviet Union said today that it will abide by SALT II limits on strategic nuclear arms despite the Reagan Administration's "big mistake" in deciding to abandon the unratified treaty. "Taking into account the immense universal importance of the issue and the need to preserve the key constraint on the strategic arms race, the U.S.S.R. refrains for the time being from abandoning the limitations under SALT I and SALT II," the official press agency Tass said.

House Democrats upbraided the Reagan Administration on Thursday for breaching the 1979 SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union. They said it makes no sense to ignore the pact's limitation on nuclear arms while at the same proposing to the Soviets a significant reduction in the two countries' ballistic missiles. Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.), a member of the committee, made their comments to Paul H.

Ronald Reagan evidently decided to use the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and the Iranian-Nicaraguan scandal as cover for his accelerated repudiation of the SALT II arms-limitation treaty. The consequences will surely be severe. SALT II was never ratified, but the United States and the Soviet Union did agree on a no-undercut policy whereby each side promised not to take any action that would destroy the treaty.

The United States violated ceilings in the unratified SALT II nuclear arms treaty Friday when another Air Force B-52 bomber capable of carrying atomic-tipped cruise missiles became operational. The treaty's numerical limits were breached when the eight-engine B-52 arrived at Carswell Air Force Base in Texas after having been modified to carry as many as 12 low-flying cruise missiles.

The United States broke the arms limit of the unratified SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union today when a B-52G bomber--fully equipped to carry nuclear-armed cruise missiles--landed for duty at a Strategic Air Command base in Texas. The Pentagon reported that the big, eight-jet Stratofortress touched down at Carswell Air Force Base outside Fort Worth, Tex., after a flight from Kelly Air Force Base at San Antonio, where it had been modified to carry the sophisticated cruise weapons.

President Reagan has ordered the deployment Friday of the 131st B-52 bomber equipped with cruise missiles, a move that will break the 1979 strategic arms agreement that limits multi-warhead weapons systems, Pentagon and other U.S. officials said Wednesday. The President made his decision after a policy review meeting Tuesday with his top national security advisers, including Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Pentagon officials said.

The United States is still within the limits of the unratified SALT II treaty despite movement of the 131st U.S. cruise-missile-carrying bomber from its hangar in Texas, the White House said today. James P. Rubin, assistant director of the private Arms Control Assn., and some senior Administration officials who requested anonymity have been quoted as saying a key SALT II limit was exceeded when the bomber was wheeled outdoors.