Treaty Ratification

Report Outline
Senate Unrest Over Foreign-Policy Role
Separation of Powers in Treaty Making
Military Considerations in Treaty Making
Special Focus

Senate Unrest Over Foreign-Policy Role

Importance Attached to Ratification of SALT

When the senate acts on the arms agreements President Nixon brought home from Moscow, its considerations will be weighted by more than the immediate issues of national security and world peace. A sense of frustration felt in Congress, especially in the Senate, bears on the debate. It arises from a view that the legislative role is withering under the impact of presidential diplomacy in the nuclear age. The Senate's right of “advice and consent” in treaty making, the constitutional device for injecting its will into the shaping of foreign policy, often has been bypassed by recent Presidents through executive agreements and other means.

Of the two Strategic Arms Limitation (Salt) pacts signed in Moscow on May 26, 1972, one was the Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems (ABMs), and the other was technically an executive agreement placing a numerical freeze on U.S. and Soviet offensive missile launchers for five years at roughly the present levels. Senate ratification of the treaty by substantially more than the required two-thirds majority currently is expected to come sometime next month. In a move to add the prestige of congressional concurrence to the offensive missile agreement, President Nixon also submitted it for simple-majority approval by both Houses.

In the aftermath of the Moscow summit conference, there was nearly unanimous agreement among scholars, scientists and political leaders that the accords signaled an acceptance of parity—”sufficiency” in Nixon's terminology—in nuclear weapons, final rejection of “first-strike” strategy by either nation, and acknowledgment by each nation of the other's equal status in the first rank of international power. Dr. Henry Kissinger, the President's principal national security adviser, outlined for 100 members of Congress what the administration believes is the basic issue.