REFLECTIONS THE SALT PROCESS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01315R000400350019-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 17
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 10, 2004
• Sequence Number: 19
• Publication Date: November 19, 1979
• Content Type: NSPR

Approved For Releas f QO /tORK ]GA-RDP88-01315R0004
ARTICLE A.Pf':AREn 19 November 1979
ON PAGEr0YY- lf0
KULECT IONS
THE SALT PROCESS
N the summer of 1978, when it be-
gan to. be clear that the SALT II
treaty would be signed with the
Soviet Union, the Select Committee on
Intelligence of the United States Sen-
ate began to prepare for its role in the
procedures by which the Senate would
take up a resolution of ratification. As
a member. of the ' committee, .I jour-
neyed to Geneva to talk to the negotia-
tors of the draft agreement that was
taking shape and began to go over the
history of SALT I, more formally
known as the Interim Agreement on
Certain Measures with Respect to the
Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms .
and the Treaty on the Limitation of
Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems, signed in
1972.
It did not take long to establish that,
whatever else SALT I. might have done,
it accomplished little by way of limit-
ing strategic offensive arms. For that
matter, it wasn't even an agreement
about weapons, as ordinarily under-
stood. Rather, it was an agreement to
limit the number of launchers each
party would have for its long-range
ballistic missles..A launcher (or silo,
in the usage of the military) for a
land-based missile is a hole in the
ground. You could get hurt by falling
.into one, but it is missiles, and, more
specifically, the warheads of missiles, .
that kill people, and these. were not at
"all limited by SALT I. Nor, it appeared,
would they be much limited by SALT II.
From the time of. the first agreement,
the number of American warheads in-
creased steadily, and those of the So-
viets more than doubled. It appeared
they would double again under SALT
II.
This was hardly reassuring. But more
troubling still was the realization that
this all came as news to me. I had
never given great attention to the sub-
ject, but from the time of the Treaty
Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in
the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and
Under Water, of 1963, I had had the
impression that things were,going.well
enough, or at least not badly.. I did
not have the excuse most persons might
have for being vague about the details.
I had served in four successive Ad--
ministrations, from that of Kennedy
WAS to wait almost a year, until
I the morning of Wednesday, July
11, 1979, when Dr. William J. Perry,
Under-Secretary of Defense for Re-
search and Engineering, testified on
SALT-Ii before the Committee on For-.
eign Relations. Perry, a mathematician,
speaks plainly and, as with many in
his rarefied profession, is a man of un-
assuming appearance and manner. All
the more was the contrast with the
on. I had known virtually- all of the 11
principal arms negotiators and,. from
university life, a good number of the
strategic-arms theorists. 1 . had . sat at.
the Cabinet table of two Presidents
listening to reports on progress. Al-
ways they were reports on progress.
Or such was the impression I took
away. I now began questioning my
own judgment, then that of others-
especially as the Carter Administration
began to proclaim the virtues of SALT
Ii in terms I could recognize as essen-
tially the same as. those in which the
Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford
Administrations had presented their
achievements in arms control.- I began
to wonder whether anyone from the
most recent Administration, or more
generally from the world of arms con-
trol, would ever describe the agree-
ments in terms that comported with
what now appeared to me as a differ-
et, even new reality.
Caucus Room of the Old
Senate Office Building, in
which the hearings. were
'held.. The Caucus Room is.
a place -of unashamed exhi-
bition.-and splendor dating
from 1906, when Theodore
Roosevelt, having built the
West Wing of the White
House, commenced to chal-
lenge the Congress from his
new office, and the Senate
decided to get itself an of-
fice building of its own. Un-_
til that period, Presidents
had worked in their living
rooms, as it were,. and?sena
tors at their desks in the
Senate Chamber. Neither fa-
cility had been much ex-
panded from the time of Jef-
ferson, although during the
eighteen-forties a kind . of
box was- fitted onto the tops
of Senate desks, adding a
little storage space. (Daniel
Webster declined the extrav-
agance, so that to this day
his desk is single-storied.) If
the interior of the Capitol
can be said to be Palladian.
and given to republican' vir-
- -010
0011
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 toes in design, the Caucus Room, only
slightly smaller than thaAftttav?ifliFe
her itself, is Roman Imperial, and
make no mistake. It struck me as a
not inappropriate setting for 1}r. Per-
r_v's subject, SAL Ii.
The Secretary of Defense, Harold
Brown, had just finished his prepared
statement in favor of the arms-limita-
tio'n treaty. Curiously, the charts and
displays he had brought along to illus-
trate his points, in the manner of mil-
itary briefings, were exclusively con-
cerned with recent and prospective
improvements in and additions to the
nuclear arms of both countries. The
capabilities of both the United States
and the Soviet Union to destroy so-
called hard targets, such as missile silos,
were represented as about equal, with
the Soviets slightly ahead as of now
and maintaining a slight lead through
1990-when both capabilities would
have about trebled. -
Perry's testimony began. He had no
prepared statement, it being his role to
provide answers to technical questions
the Secretary's testimony might have
raised. But he said a few words any-
way, and in doing so made perhaps the
best case yet presented for SALT 11,
while describing with a technician's
candor its shortcomings. Ile said:
SALT 1's success was in getting the
process started. There was a substantial
arms control success in the [Anti-Bal-
listic Missile] Treaty, but essentially,
there was no success in reducing the
number of offensive weapons. The best
evidence of that is, just look to see-what
happened to the number of warheads in-
dicated on that chart since SALT I. Both
the United States and the Soviet Union
have added about 3,000 warheads since
1972.
The Vladivostok agreement [of 1974]
was one more important advance in this
process. It did specify upper bounds. It
included bombers, not just missiles in
the forces, but it still permitted sub-
stantial increases in warheads as of that
time.
President Carter tried to break that
upper spiral with his March, 1977, pro-
posal for SALT, and as you well know,
that was rejected by the Soviet Union.
In fact, it is my belief that any SALT
proposal in this time frame that does not
preserve the Soviets' right to modernize
their ICB\I [Intercontinental Ballistic
Missile] force would be rejected. My
judgment is, they have made a very sub-
stantial commitment to that. The ICBM
is really the only strong component of
their strategic forces, and they seem to he
resolutely opposed to making any sub-
stantial reduction in it.
Therefore, the SA 1.1' ii treaty which,
we have arrived at, while it is a major,
improvement over the Vlgsllv,~ i~k r r
merit... still allows si - i ;
spiral of the number of nuclear weapons.
I anticipate that the Soviet Union will
continue to pursue the modernization of day, by far the greatest portion of r=ur
ReIe Srelf4l' /0-11f*21P 614 P$ OuSi15RQ 4i Qt3~AO8s s from what areieures w itch r Brown showed you.
"
and that we will respond to that, so that
both sides then will continue tu- have
significant increases in nuclear warheads. I
That is the bad news, The good news
that comes with that is that SALT t1 also
establishes a process and goals. The most
significant goal is the one to achieve a
real reduction in nuclear weapons-not!
in delivery vehicles.but in actual weapons. t
My question then, as a defense planner,
is bow do Ave structure our strategic
programs in the years ahead to he com-
patible with that goal-ant only to he
compatible with it but actually-to facili-
tate the achievcmerit 01 that goal of get-
ting a reduction,- a real reduction, in nu-
clear capons in the future.
The master term here' is "process."
Clearly,-neither the first nor the second
~ agreement did much to limit arms.
Weapons and weapons systems on both
sides continue to accumulate. But the
agreements 'did establish a forum in
which the two nations, discussed these
matters, and entered into a degree of
cooperation concerning them. This was
the case, I had undcrstotxl for sonic
time, in the matter of inonitorin`-the
various means by which each nation
keeps track of the activities of the
other in order to verify that the \L?r
agreements are being kept. \Vheth-'
er our abilities here are sufficient ryas
the question the Intelligence Commit-
tee faced when it bean formal hear-
ings on the issue of verification soon af-
ter SALT 11 was signed by Presidents
Carter and Brezhnev in Vienna, on
June 18th.
LONE of the standing or select.
1 committees, the Select Commit-
tee on Intelligence normally does its
-work in closed sessions, which meet in
the Capitol dome in a small Bearing
room that is suspended, you might say, from the cupola. It was built up there
for the use of the joint Committee oil
Atomic Energy, the first committee ofd
the Congress that routinely did itsi
work in camera. Of the materials the
Intelligence Committee deals with,
none arc more sensitive, because they
really are secrets, than these concern-
ing information about Soviet strategic
nuclear forces, and, more especially,
concerning the means by which that
information is obtained. A minuscule
fraction of the information conics from
agents of one or another sort-ttt`-
bllxn', in the contraction favored by
the intelligence community. Early- in
the postwar period, it a .vas judged
that the Soviet Union was much ton
.
,
n
Relfs id 2Q05?('f1Y14': LIB E3P [OI1.43(15F29QO400;3BWI' Vkae House leaked ton
agents. Machines were put to work, the New York Times that the Unit
with ever-increasing sop}iiytic:ttiun; tu- ed States had a similar station in Nor-!
known as
technical collection sys-
tems." Basically, there are three such;
systems. First, a number cE satellites;
continuously circle the earth taking
photographs of the Soviet Union, as can
how be done with extraordinarily high'
resolution. (The technician-, speak of
picking out "the golf bail on the
green.") Second, the United States
can monitor the radio signals, known
as "telemetry," which the Soviet mis-
siles send back in flight. Third, Ameri-
can ships watch incoming missiles in
the Pacific firing zones, establishing
distances travelled, the pattern in
which multiple warheads land (known
as the "footprint"), and otht-r such in-
formation. The Russians have com-
parable systems. Either side can effec-
tively count the number of land-based
missiles set to silos and ready to be!
launched on the other side. The num-
bers of submarines and launchers'
are readily enough established, as are
the numbers of intercontinental bomb-
ers.
Each side, naturally, hopes that the.
other side will not know when some
new advance has been made in detec-
tion systems, and on this score thereI
was some difficulty to be resolved as
the Senate prepared to consider v_ri-;
fication under the SALT II a,,recrocrt:.
In recent years, Soviet intelligence hi
the United States had scored a number;
of successes that alerted the Russians to
the development of new-American in-
telligence technology. In 1975, So-'?
viet agents had obtained in-ormation 1
about a major satellite system known
As Rhyolite. In 1978, it was learned:
that agents had also obtained the oper-1
sting manual for the most advanced oft
our satellites now in operation, they
KH-I1. In both instances, the espio-
nage had seemingly been simple and.
inexpensive; in one case, th.: mater-,-
als were acquired, for quit: modest;
amounts of money, from a youthful:
employee of the TRW' co:?poration,l
and in the other from an employee of
the Central Intelligence Agency itself.!
This suggested that the Soviet; have no,
great difficulty learning what we are
capable of spotting, and can take appro i
priate evasive action. In add.=tion, the!
loss to the United States of listening,
posts in Iran which monitored activity`!
at a missile range near the Aral Sea, in
south-central Soviet Asia, involved a=
considerable loss of information not eas-:
fly obtained otherwise
Then
on Ju
e;
 way. The leak was intenr~tional to reas-
sure those favorable to t14~RW.4 ; tF-R
the same time it jeopardized the Nor-
wegian "asset," to use another term of
the intelligence community. Thus, the
question arose as to whether the United
States would be able to be certain that
the Russians were abiding by the terms
of an arms-limitation treaty that would
extend through 1985. .The record of
SALT I was both reassuring and cau-
tionary. There was no conclusive proof
that the Soviets had committed any nma-
jor violations of SALT I strictly con-
strued. By and large, what they agreed
not to do they did not do. But where
we said we hoped they would not do
something they paid not the least at-
tention.
This, as it turned, out, was no small
matter. One of the principal negotiat-
ing objectives on the American side in
SALT I was to insure that neither side
built any more "heavy" missiles. This is
a term for missiles big enough to carry
a huge "payload," which can deliver a
large number of nuclear warheads'-
ca-pable of reaching and destroying mis-
siles on the other side. They are; po
tential "counterforce" weapons', be-
cause they can be used` effectively
against other forces. (Missiles aimed
against cities are called "countervalue"
weapons.) As of 1972, the Russians
had three. hundred and eight ,heavy
SS-9 missiles, while the United States
had 'no modern heavy missiles. In
SALT I, it was agreed to freeze both
sides, meaning that the Soviets would
and we would not have modern heavy
missiles. Although this appeared to be
an imbalance, American strategic doc-
trine at that time did not call for coun-
terforce weapons, and-we were well
enough content. It was understood that
the Soviets would replace their SS-9
missiles with a new model, or "genera-
tion"-the SS-18. However, the So-
viets were then also planning to replace
a medium-sized missile, the SS-11, with
another new model, the SS-19, which
was so much bigger and more accurate
as to become, for practical purposes, a
new heavy. As the Intelligence Com-
mittee stated on October 5, 1979, in
the public portion of its report to the
Senate on the capabilities of the United
States to monitor SALT II:
The 'Soviets' unanticipated ability to
emplace the much larger SS-19 in a
slightly enlarged SS-11 silo circumvented
the safeguards the United States thought
it had obtained in SALT I against the
substitution of heavy for light ICBMs.
Rel~ec r i 469W L/ X bA-ft'P- 'f 5RO1001400990(~ 19,3id the B-I bomber.
mated, in order to compensate or the In a press conference on June 22,.
Soviets' "geographical disadvantage." 1972, Nixon stated that Laird was;
(To reach the open Atlantic Ocean, correct in this judgment:
ie
n
So
st
f
i
t
ri
b
a
ce
v
nes mu
or
ns
t su
ma
, pass through the relatively narrow gaps:
between Greenland, Iceland, and the
United Kingdom; our submarines;
reach the open ocean at once.) But the
range of the SS-N-8, the new Soviet
submarine-launched ballistic missile,
turned out to he considerably greater
than expected, enabling it to be fired at
American targets while the submarine
remained in the Barents Sea. There is
little reason to think the Soviets cheat-
ed by misrepresenting the range of
their weapon at that time. They simply
remained silent about its full potential.
But in any case they got in edge on us.
Our monitoring system soon estab-
lished that the SS-1 I had been re
placed by the SS_ 19, although the new-1
er missiles used the same silos, slightly;
enlarged. The State Department was!
provided the facts and presented them
to the Soviets. It was then that the
problem arose. The Soviets agreed, or
did not disagree, that they were put-
ting an entirely new strategic-weapons
system in place but asserted that noth-
ing in the SALT I agreement prevented
their doing this. Nothing did.
Mr. Brezhnev made it absolutely clear
to nie that in those areas that were not,
controlled by our- offensive agreement;
that they were going ahead .vith-their I
programs. For us not to would seriously
jeopardize the security of the United
States and jeopardize the cause of world':
peace. I
SALT 1, he added, "while very impor-
tant, is only the first step, and not the
biggest step."
SALT ii has so far followed precise-
ly this pattern. Just as Nixon had done,
President Carter, immediately upon
returning to the United States from his
summit meeting, delivered an address
to a joint session of Congress last June
in which he hailed the agreement, and
in the same address (not waiting two
weeks) he announced there would hel
more weapons. Indeed,. he asserted that I
one of the principal advantages-of the
treaty is that it would enable us to go
forward with a new missile system---
the MX. This "missile experimental"
(one day it will no doubt be named for
a Greek god) is to be a mobile land
based missile, our first. It will be more
powerful even than the liquid-fuelled
.SALT i-the Anti-Ballistic Missile Atlas and Titan giants of the nineteen-
Treaty permanently limiting each fifties, the only heavy missiles the
side's ABM systems, and the "interim" United States has ever, so far, de-
executive agreement that essentially played. On September 7th, President
prohibited each side from building ad- Carter announced the "basing mode"
ditional ballistic-missile launchers for and other specifics of the MX. Each
five years-was signed by President would be placed on a vehicle and
Nixon in Moscow on May 26, 1972. moved to a couple of dozen different
In an address to a joint session of Con- launching emplacements around a "race
gress on the day he returned to the track," in random and presumably tin-
United States, the President hailed the, predictable ways, so as not to be "tar-
event, saying, "This does not mean geted" by Soviet missiles. Each would
that we bring back from Moscow the carry ten warheads, each of these with
,promise of instant peace, but we do a yield equivalent to hundreds of kilo-
' bring the beginning of a process that tons of explosives. (The Hiroshima
can lead to lasting peace." However, bomb was twenty kilotons.) The "race
;two weeks later, in a message trans- tracks" will require thousands of miles
mitting the agreements, to the Senate,. of road and an area the size of Mas-
he stated that while together these were sachusetts. The President said the new
an "important first step in checking MX "is not a bargaining chip," to be
the arms race.*. . it is now equally es- bartered away in any future arms nego-
sential that we carry forward a sound tiations, but will represent a perma-
strategic modernization program to nent "unsurpassed" feature of the na-
maintain our security and to ensure tion's strategic nuclear deterrent. Two
that more permanent and comprehen hundred ' 1X missiles would be deployed
sive arms-limitation agreements can be in Nevada and. Utah. This mode, thei
reached." President said, met requirements he had
At this time, the Secretary of Defense, set for a mobile missile system: surviv-
Melvin R. Laird, was maintaining that ability, verifiability, affordability, envi-
the Con re st o a ronmenjj,al
~e~ n ~ss and consistency
Regr01yiP$set'fe? 15RQlfTaals. On this occa-
permitted by SALT I, such as the Tri- sion, Secretary Brown, while predicting
Similarly, in SALTAjVreF&-
States-conceded to the Soviets the right
to build a larger number of missile-
 that the Soviets would respond "nega-
tively" to this United Slaw?8 cetldtfr16
tnent, said that if they a tpaoed in a
fruitless race" to try to overwhelm our
new system they would strain their eco-
nomic resources, and that if they cre-
ated a new land-based missile system of
their own they would he vulnerable to
United States attack, presumably from
the new American system.
The Fedcration of American Scien-
tists promptly declared the MX to he
"not just an inflationary multi-hillion-
dollar strategic mistake, but an arms-
control disaster." The F.A.S., begun
in 1946 as the Federation of Atomic
Scientists, has since that time been It
leading advocate of nuclear-arms con-
trol. Its judgment was stern:
The :NIX missile announced today con-
tains the seeds of its own destruction
since, as a counter-force weapon, it will
necessarily stimulate the Soviet Union to
procure still more warheads which will,
in turn, quickly threaten MX quite as
much as the Minuteman missiles are
presently threatened. In the process, the
SALT limits will become untenable.
Worse, the Air Force will ask for the
right to abrogate the ABM treaty to
get anti-ballistic missiles to defend the
MX. Thus the AIV%I treaty will also be
threatened and the arms race will really
be back with a vengeance.
The F.A.S. warned that there was
"no strategic need to imitate the Rus-
sian preference for large land-haled
missiles," and added, "The precipitous
quality of the decision to move to
match the Soviets in land-based ntisssile
throw-weight has been induced by
SALT." Induced by SALT? If this seems
a contradiction in terms---or, at the
very least, "counterintuitive," to use a
term of systems analysis-then all the
more reason to pay heed. There are
systems that exhibit such properties, pro-
ducing the opposite of their intended
outcome, with the consequence that in-
tensifying the effort to achieve the de-
undesired.
As the summer pared into autumn,
attacks on SALT it from arms-control
advocates increased. Just two days
after the F.A.S. issued its statement,
Richard J. Barnet, who served in the
Arms Control and Ilisarmatment
Agency in the Kennedy Administra-
tion, described the treaty in an article
in the Washington Post as "something
to stir the. hearts of generals, defense
contractors, and senators from states
disarmament nor arms control but all
exercise in joint arms management. The
Releetm 28 OrIeMI fduc CIA WQilS
military in both countries because it rati-
fies the huge weapons-acquisition pro-
grams both are pushing.
In the fall issue of.Foreign Policy,
,
p
y
Leslie H. Gelb began an essay on the the number of Russian warheads in-
future of arms control with the blunt; creased in the years immediat)y ahead ,
assertion "Arms control has essen from five thousand to thirte m thou-
bally failed." He had a friendly word " sand, rather than to only twelve. If
for SALT 11, which is perhaps not sue- an additional thousand mattered, sure-
prising, far, as a director of the Bureau i ? an additional seven thous: nd mat-
of Politico-Military Affairs from 1977 1 tered more. Well not nece ssariiy-
sponsibility in the Department of State
for conduct of the negotiations once
the Carter Administration came to of-
fice. But he concluded that in the
main the process had not worked.
Only a few weeks. ago, the Times,
with what measure of irony one can-
called for ratification by de-
not say
,
as
n
agree
to
claring, "SALT 11 is a sound agreement tern, but almost no heed was beingI
that will confine the nuclear arms race paid to the fact that both they and`
to specified channels." It is perhaps not= (now) we are roaring ahead in an,
fair-minded to press the images of edi arms race, and using the treaty as an,
torialists too far, but it may be notedi argument for doing so.
that when a diffused flow is forced into Was this "the bureaucratic mind atI
a confined channel the result is accel-! work"? Preoccupied- with predictabil-
to 1979, he had had the principal re-I Ionly if the increase provided-the So-
e.ration. Whatever became of arms
control?
A T each stage of the SALT negotia-
tions, and with each new agree-
ment, the nuclear forces on both sides
have increased. Those of the Soviets
have increased faster than those of the
United States, but this trend was pres-
ent prior to SALT. When the talks
,
were first proposed, in 1967, the So-I the playful maxim that with respect tol
viets had nine hundred nuclear war-;
heads. They have some five thousand pons are almost invariably 'wrong.
today. At the expiration of the SALTI among the intuitive and the severely
tone : ... ...,... -eti...-atat ... . ? --
they will have roughly twelve thou-
sand. During that period, the number
of United States warheads will grow,
from the present nine thousand two
hundred, to about twelve thousand
also. By 1985, the Soviets will have
four warheads for every county in the
United States, and the United States
will have four warheads for every ray-
on, a comparable unit of government
in the Soviet Union. But the Soviet
warheads in total will have more than
three times the megatonnage of the
American warheads. Although it is pos-
sible that these rates of growth would
be greater without the treaties, it is also
possible that they would be lower.
At the hearings concerning our
ability to verify the Russians' compli-
? the probabilities and the diffi j ultics of
verification, but always in the conte~lt
56~40AORMAg-~oviet numbers. It
,came to me that, with numbers so
;great, verification couldn't much mat-
ter. Suppose that by foul duplicity, com-
American incompetence
'
ounded b
viets some special edge. But they would
have an edge on megatonnage in either
event. Indeed, they already have that
edge. There was something unreal
about our inquiry. The possibility that
the Soviets might increase rheir nu-
clear forces at a pace grer.ter than
ity, but scarcely at all distressed when
what seems' predictable is disaster? In.
part; yes. The Arms Control and Dis-
armament Agency has been in place
for almost two decades now, and may
be assumed to he as committed to the
SALT process as the Bureau of Rec-
lamation is to irrigation, and process
can become sufficient unto itself. Jay
known as a vicious circle.
.There was, in any event, a more
portentous paradox to be resolved, and
as the Intelligence Committee hearings
droned on my attention drifted away;
from verification toward the subject of
doctrine. The SALT process' has its
premise in the doctrine of deterrence.
The NIX missile is incompatible with
the doctrine of deterrence. It is, as,
its advocates in the Administration like
to say, a "hard-target-kilcounter-
force weapon." But the str:tteb c doc-1
trine of deterrence specifically precludes:
either side from obtaining counter-,
force weapons. ' How, then, could we
be building the missile that undermines
the doctrine in - order to sttstain the
doctrine?
brimming .with military reservatiums
and arms plants." His tone verged out
the contemptuous:. .
Time 100 pave treaty; t'iA'frpW,4lF c
the prospectus for a bond issue, is neither
ancc Wtt,t Life L,Caay, 11sc,1 UL a'-' " a+o- t paraooxr x es, ana the maFtng ;
elehW 2@(fg?gf42r~If;l* l $50P 15ROd94O O b918yond human dimen-1
sionate, some detached, came be ore lion. I had best be out with it directly.
the Intelligence Committee to argue, Deterrence was a stunning intellectual
int7
object of much con-
a
w
d
has c3ntributed
Forrester, at M.I.T.
 achievement. It "solved" the seeming-
IV insoluble problem of4JYr &'1f$
the use of nuclear weapons. But it tivas
flawed and has been undone by the
intuitive but wrong assumption that the'
Soviets would see the logic of our solu-
tion and do as we did. Especially that
they would see the meaninglessness of
strategic "superiority."
As no other subject, strategic-arms
doctrine has been the realm of the in-,
tellectual and the academic. This is
military doctrine, to be sure, but it has
never, in this nation, been formulated
by military men. It began with the
physicists who created the weapons-
men such as J. Robert Oppenheimer,
Hans Bethe, and Leo Szilard-who
were then joined by other physicists
and scientists, and also by social sci-
entists. These latter-men such as Al-
bert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, Fred
C. IkIe, Alain C. Enthoven, Henry;
Rowen, and Henry Kissinger--came to
be known collectively as "defense intel,
lectuals." They moved in and out of
Washington, but in the main they kept
to their campuses and think tanks, or
almost always returned to them, where
their task, in Kahn's phrase, was
"thinking about the unthinkable." In-
deed, they have been something of a
caste apart, even in academia. Oppen-
heimer at Alamogordo as the first
atomic bomb exploded-"I am become
death, the shatterer of worlds"-gives
something of the aura of it. They ate at
their own tables in the faculty clubs,
and held seminars to which few were
invited.-They met with Russians when
few others did.
And they developed the doctrine of
deterrence-a doctrine of weapon use
of which the first premise was that the
opment. SALT ii seems destined to in-
Releh , c T t 12 : RDP 8 J 1
i5 as come u , In t e
because the Russians did not keep to
our rules. There has been nothing aca-
demic about their strategic doctrine, or
at least not that we know of. They ap-
pear, to have just gone plodding on,
building bigger and better weapons,
until, by an incremental process, they
nuclear force of their own, whereupon
het yie issue was joined: How to face
ROOr44i6N`~~1w~it- the same powers of 1
are on the point of being able to!
wipe out American land-based mis-
siles-a counterforce ability. At one
level, this achievement has been spec-
tacular; at another, less so. For all
the sophistication involved, nuclear
weapons today are still nothing more
than improved versions of the _ V-2
rocket with an atom bomb on top. But
the improvements have reached the
point where the doctrine that was to
prevent their use has evidently been
utterly undone. It had been the hope
of the early arms-control negotiators
that we would teach the Soviets our
doctrine and they would abide by it.
If there was' something patronizing
in the notion of "raising the Russians'
learning curve," as the phrase went,
there was also much respect in the
belief that once we had come to the
correct solution of a complex prob-
lem they could be brought to see that
we were indeed correct. These were
serious American academics, who held
their Russian counterparts in full re-
gard. But the enterprise failed. And
why? Because the Russian situation is
not our situation, the Russian experi-
ence not our experience. If intellect
must fail, let it fail nobly; and it is in
nobly rejecting the notion of failure
that intellect fails most often.
Perhaps that is too strong. To state
that an enterprise has failed is to sug-
gest that it might have succeeded. Yet
.from the outset this has somehow
seemed improbable. Let it be said for
the postwar' strategic nuclear theorists
that they were not intimidated by their
subject, nor immobilized by it. They
did not shrink from action in the face
.of an incredible new dimension of war.
The influence of the theorists was
to be seen early on, when the United
States government, in 1946, proposed
destruction..
In one respect, this' was an issue as
old as the airborne bomb-a develop-'
ment recognized as revolutionary long
before it became so. George Quester,
in his fascinating book "Deterrence!
Before Hiroshima," has traced thej
"prehistory" of nuclear deterrence.
In 1899, the First Hague Conference
banned bombing from balloons, but!
the Germans went ahead even so to de-
velop the first strategic bombing force,
using dirigibles, while the British may be
said to have prepared for them with a
theory. In a study, "Aircraft in War-
fare," published in 1916, a British math-
ematician, F. W. Lanchester, offered
a quite contemporary notion of what
we think of as the nuclear deterrent:
A reprisal to be effective must be de-
livered with promptitude like the riposte
of a skilled fencer. A reprisal which is
too long delayed possesses no moral
weight and has every appearance of an
independent act of aggression; it may
even plausibly be given as an excuse for
subsequent repetition of the original of
fence.... The power of reprisal and they
knowledge that the means of reprisal.
exists will ever be a far greater deterrent
than any pseudo-legal document.
There was much discussion in the
pre-nuclear era of the utility of attack-
ing cities, of the ability to defend cities,
of preempting the enemy's offensive
air forces, and the like. In a letter writ-
ten in 1914, Winston Churchill re-
vealed himself a firm advocate of what
would be known as "counterforce."
"The great defence against aerial men-
ace," he wrote then, "is to attack the
enemy's aircraft as near as.possible to
their point of departure." However,
perhaps because the opportunity was so
new, most thinking concentrated on at
tacking cities.
In this respect, the outlines of an
enduring argument were apparent well
before the technology itself was at
hand. It was in the Second World
War that technology created -oppor-
tunities to implement speculation.
What to do with a strategic -bombing,
force? What to do with emerging mis-I
Bile forces? We now know from the
United States Strategic Bombing Sur-
vey, conducted at the war's end, that
the bombing of German cities was less
effective in weakening Germany than
was thought at the time. We also
know that Hitler's V-2 rockets might
have had significant impact if, instead,
weapon must never be used first, and
of which the principal object was that
it never be used at all. The nuclear
.power was to deploy its forces so that
if attacked it could attack back, in-.
flicting assured destruction on the party
that had attacked in the first place.
This capacity could be achieved by a
fairly limited number of missiles aimed
at the cities. of the potential adversary.
Only two developments could under-
mine the doctrine. If the adversary de-
veloped and deployed a defensive weap-
on-an ABM-that could protect his
cities, then his destruction. would not
be assured and he could become ag-
gressive and threatening. Or if the
adversary possessed an offensive weap-
on that could destroy the missile force
,aimed at his cities---which is to say a
i counterforce weapon -
he could become aggressive and threat-
a
e
contemp
at
w
c
ve reta
on,
s
of being used as terror weapons against
lea e 2n8 d1t `ar 1o' R00> 0 1fi i they had been used
o aggression y on
ent a n s. ) a
orts---the sta
-
ainst the Channel
g
g
p
the late nineteen-fifties, however, the ing areas for the Allied offensive into
Soviets commenced to have a strategic;
to turn its atomic bombs over to the
United Nations-a proposal that the
Soviet Union blocked. Then, for a pe-
riod, the theorists receded from influ-
ence as the United States, with the only
strategic nuclear force around, adopted,
or said it had adopted, a policy of "mas-
t
d
l
hi
h
i
i
li
"
 the Continent-which is where some
of the German generals wanted to
send them. Approved F
Consideration of these issues in the
nuclear era was surely colored by the
use of the atomic bomb against Hiro-
shima and Nagasaki, in what current
theorists would call a "countervalue"
mode. So awesome was the scale of
destruction from what, by today's
standards, was a small bomb that the
destruction of whole countries could
now he envisioned. Had the distinction
between military and civilian targets in flight with an anti-ballistic missile.
disappeared? It was this possibility, im-1 \Vhereu)on the issue of defense arose.
mobilizing to many, that brought forth E ential to the doctrine of deterrence
the doctrine of deterrence. The prob-
lem for the United States, as earlier
it had been for Great Britain, was to
deter aggression. We were the great
heavily protected. This was then an in-
vulnerable second-strike force. But soon
r Rft617 2P0/?jVu1 jZdr QryRDPtll8-
doubt. Not only did the Soviets acquire
more missiles and more. warheads,
which was predictable, but an unpre-
dictably rapid rise in accuracy also took
place. Missiles once meant to hit within
miles of a target now possessed accu-:
racks prescribed in hundreds of yards.
Hardened silos could be destroyed.
Another technology was also being
developed-that of destroying missiles
termed. If damage limitation }:as pos-
sible, how could it he foregone? W lilr
315RQ004003041nding tilt missile
sites. The logic was impeccaltle. The
Air Force, understandably-, w_is vi.?or-
ried about the vulnerability of our
Minutemen, and with a str. ightfor-
ward military logic proposed to double
their number: with more targets, a So-
viet first strike would have lent chance
of wiping out our second strike. But
with twice as many Minutemen the
United States could target the Soviets'
missiles as well as cities, and so reduce
their capacity for a retaliator,- strike.
Doctrine has it that, given available
was that neither side have any defense. technology, two warheads must be
In effect, each side exchanged hostages, aimed at a silo to have a satisfactory
whose lives thereafter depended on probability of a "kill." Given the num-
their side's good behavior. The Rus- ber of Soviet missiles at the time, one
power, with no need or desire to attack" sians were given American cities, to be thousand single-warhead Mi-itltemen
others but wishing to avoid being at- destroyed instantly if the United States could not be counted on to "tike out'
tacked.. We had not succeeded with launched a nuclear attack on Russia. the Soviet strike force, but two thou
Germany and Japan. But the nuclear This was our guarantee to the Russians sand could. (There is the eve --present
weapon suggested that the power of, that we would not launch such an at- problem of "fratricide," whereb} the
retaliation had become awesome in- tack. The Russians were deemed to first warhead to land des:rot's its
deed=enough to inhibit any would-bed have given us their cities. But now mate-but enough.) It was .mr doc-
aggressor who had any sense of the' there was talk of hedging. It seemed : trine to deny ourselves any such capac-
realities involved. Not only awesome the Russians might be developing a ity, lest the Soviets understandably be-
but capable, in Lanchester's words, of means to defend themselves against iii- come alarmed. Better to keep to' the
being "delivered with promptitude," in; coming missiles, much as anti-aircraft one thousand, but to defend totem. Not
contrast to the long buildup that had defenses were developed in an earlier so, said others, most especiall:,? Robert
been required for American forces be-I period. ABM systems are highly tech- S. McNamara, the Secretary of De
fore they could he effectively used ini nical in design but simple enough in Tense. If we defend anything, the dc- I
the Second World Var. concept. One bullet shoots down anoth- mand will spread to defend every-
Albert \Vohlstetter conceived the er bullet. But if the systems worked, if thing.
"second strike" as the key concept of our second strike did not assure the John Newhouse begins. "Cold
deterrence. This is to say, the nuclear destruction of Soviet cities, then the Dawn," his account of SALT I, which _
riposte. If an enemy strikes, you. will Soviets could contemplate a first strike, originally appeared in this magazine,
strike back with devastating conse- and deterrence would fail. In this see- b}' likening the debate to the disputa-
quences. In addition, Wohlstetter of- nano, the nation that defends its cities tions 61-the Church Fathers:
fered two crucial insights: There is an Call strike first, knowing that its cities So much of the substance and vocabu-
essential requirement for the invulner- are no longer hostage. In another lary of SALT are at least as remote from'
ability of one's ability to strike back. scenario, the nation watching this de- reality, as most of us perceive it, as earl.:
The design of strategic forces and their. Tense being built strikes first, before it Christian exegesis....As in tie case o~
emplacement has to insure this. But its has lost its hostage. This is how SALT the early Church, contending schools form
began. around antagonistic strategic concepts.
is also the case that this can never be The most relevant of these are known asf
insured once and for all, fl ray force be- assured destruction and damage limita-
comes vulnerable over time, especially HEY are not impersonal intellect togs, and each can claim broad support
if an adversary' is working hard at tuals who made these calculations. and intellectual respectability Debates
snaking it so. Hence, there can be no Some are intense and committed as between the tiro schools recall those be-
few men of the age. But to share twecn the Thomists and the essentially;
final deterrent. Franciscan followers of Dues Scotus.
It was Wohlstetter's insights that their passion it is necessary to elite)- The `iscan sus prevailed, as have the pro-
made made defense planners aware, in the their logic. Vhat dtt you mean, tine; ponents of assured destruction, who as-l
late nineteen-fifties, that the bombers' could ask, when you say that we must sect, for example, that ballistic-missile+
of the Strategic Air Command were) not defend ourselves because if we do defense of population is immoral because
our enem will attack? The problem it may degrade your adversary's ability
}' to destroy your gun cities in a second
becoming vulnerable to Soviet attack. I
When the Russians had few warheads of public perception was not great in strike. His confidence under pined, he+
and no missiles, two dozen dispersed the nineteen-sixties. A deference sys-I might then be tempted in a cris to strike)
SAC bases were secure enough. But as tem-a \vllluidnsss to leave difliault pre-emptively; in short, knowing you are
Soviet capabilities grew in the nineteen- decisi+tlis to e!:pr ' its-which hid risen effectively protected from has
strike assault and fearing your intentiSecond-
ons,
fifties the airplanes became vulnerable. in place since the h+unh x%-as built, con- he may choose" to strike first. Thus, sta-
In response, however, from 1962 toI tinucd undisturbed. But then heresyl bility, a truly divine goal in the nuclear)
1967 the United States deployed a appeared in the midst of the close-knit age, becomes the product of =secure sec-
thousand Minutema missiles in the and almost closed community of cx- ond-strike nuclear offenses on both sides.
++ OR ; e e2psets2 i1?f A Qi 1 1 81 111" ROQD4130s36t~Ofi190hing to know about
Midwest in harden
to say, in launchers dug deep and i or "damage limitation," as it wacl SALT: The decision to propose talks,
INUED
 and the first agreements, constituted a I defenses that would preserve our sec-
victory. for a specific rMk ReWsEtr2QO5M4At2=ttOlA F %4-01
cured destruction." It was even then al ABM defense of the Minutemen. But
contested doctrine and gave signs of doctrine decreed that this, too, would be
how vulnerable it might be to ideologi- destabilizing. Once an anti-ballistic-mis-
cal attack in the form of caricature. In sile defense was perfected, the tempta-
1969, Donald. Brennan, of the Hud- tion to use it to defend cities as well as
son Institute, labelled it "rnulual as missile silos would grow. And the oth-
sured destruction," so that the acro- er side could never be sure that we
nym "MAD" came into play, like some weren't planning to do exactly that, as
new weapons system all its own. But quickly as possible, at a time of our
even earlier, in the 1964 film "Dr. own choosing.
Strangelove," Stanley Kubrick had car- The decision point came on Decem-
icatured a proposal of Herman Kahn, ber 6, 1966-"the precise beginning
"the doomsday machine," which would of SALT," as Newhouse has it-at a
automatically produce a second strike, meeting between McNamara and
so that the victim of a first strike could Lyndon Johnson, in Austin, Texas.
never hesitate to retaliate and decide Instead of going forward with an
d surrender Malting a second ABM system, as proposed byr the Joint
t
Minister Alexei Kosygin arrived III,
15MQ04QO061J3ey, for a summit'
meeting with President Johnson. Dean
Rusk, who was Secretary Of State at
that time, later recalled for Newhouse
that the Americans tackled Kosygin in
a "go for broke fashion." The Rus- 1
sians, naturally, wondered what we
were up to. When told of the dangers
of the ABM, Kosygin replied, in effect,
"How can you expect me to tell the
Russian people they can't defend them-
selves against your rockets?" This sure-
ly is a recognizable political instinct. At
about this time, Senator Richard Rus-
sell was saying that if there was a nit-
clear war and only two persons sur-1
rived he wanted them both to be,
Americans. .
A year later, on June 24, 1968, the
Senate voted funds for the deployment
of an ABM system known as Sentinel,
which had been developed but not put
in service. Three days later, Soviet For-
eign Minister Andrei Gromyko an-
nounced that his government was ready
to begin negotiations.. Roger P. Labrie,
of the American Enterprise Institute
for Public Policy Research, writes that
"SALT, like all previous attempts at ne-
gotiating limitations on nuclear weap-
ons, stemmed from the interaction ofl
new weapon programs with prevailing
strategic concepts."
Then the Russians invaded Czecho-
slovakia. The first SALT talk, scheduled II
for September 30, 1968, was put off,)
and before the atmosphere had clearedf
Richard Nixon had succeeded Lyndon
Johnson. But the two Presidents dif-
fered fered little in strategic doctrine. Nixon,
if anything, was the more concerned
with the nuclear race. Finally, the talks
began. Kissinger took over. SALT I was
signed.
WHAT was SALT I? First, agree-
VV YV ment was reached that neither
side would deploy a general ABM de-
fense. This was a success; surely-at
least for doctrine. There , would be
little defense against strategic missiles.
(Each party was to he allowed two
truncated ABM sites, but no more.)
Second, the Soviets obtained agree-
ment to nuclear parity' with the Unit-
ed States. This was a large achieve-
ment for them, in both symbolic and
real terms, but one that doctrine al-
lowed the United States to concede.
At the time 'the SALT process began,
McNamara calculated that the United
States had a three- or four-to-one ad-
o
rnstea
strike inevitable in order to prevent a Chiefs of Staff, McNamara urged that
first strike was eminently logical, but a decision be put off until the State De-
its proponents could also be made to partment could explore' with MoscowI
seem crazy, like the mad scientist in the idea of talks on limiting strategic
Kubrick's film-a caricature which arms.
suggested that because so many of the In these events, as in others, Mc-
defense intellectuals were German, Namara emerges as a man of deep
their thinking must also be Teutonical- feeling and utter integrity, but almost
ly rigid. too much of the latter. A Captain Vere
Looking back, it seems clear that the without serenity. It was his judgment
urgency with which the Americans that assured destruction required an
approached the Russians in the hope of ability to destroy twenty to twenty-five
obtaining an arms agreement that per cent of the Soviet population and
would protect the assured-destruction fifty per cent of its industrial capacity
doctrine arose as much out of concern in a retaliatory strike. He also judged
to secure the doctrine in American) that-the Soviets must be convinced that
strategic policy as to introduce it to the they could do as much damage to the
strategic policy of the Soviet Union. If United States if it fell to them to re-
it could be codified in an agreement taliate. Hence, there must be no Amer-
with the Soviets which committed both ican missile defense. In a speech at
sides, then the argument at home Ann Arbor, in 1962, he had questioned
would be more secure. For good or the prudence, even the morality, of
ill, attacks on MAD had about there al such a targeting doctrine, but there-
quality. of the political left. If the Rus- after he put qualms behind him and
sians could be shown to have the same did his duty. He held unflinchingly to
dispassionate view of nuclear realities, the proposition that deterrence "means
this might mollify such opposition in ? the certainty of suicide to the aggres-
the United States. Of course, if Amer- sor." Through the nineteen-sixties,
icans of both left and right persuasions pressure grew for the United States to
would argue later on that assured de- develop modern heavy missiles, as the
struction is a strategy that places ex- Soviets had done, or to double the Min-
ceptional reliance on the good faith and uteman force. He successfully blocked
good judgment of quite unreliable each effort, asserting, in 1967, when
adversaries, the adversaries could well the United States had five thousand
remark that this was our idea, not warheads, that this number was "both
theirs. . greater than we had originally planned
But there was also a technological and in fact more than we require." He
imperative. In the middle nineteen-Six- repeatedly warned against the "mad
ties, the Soviets began to deploy their momentum intrinsic to . ,, . all new nu-
own missiles in hardened silos, which clear weaponry," adding, "If a weapon
over time might give them a second- system works-and works well-there
strike capability, and even a first-strike is strong pressure from many directions
capability, to destroy U.S. land-based to procure and deploy the weapon out
t level
d
h
i
e pru
en
on to t
missiles in a surprise attack. No great of all proport
technological feats were involved-just required.
In s a steady creep of nurj~< jct rc elete e r IgQI~gu~-
curacy. Planners in the Pentagon an
defense intellectuals began to talk of
h after) vantage in number of warheads, which
> p 141 SROkM&, M l 'b true measure of nu-
clear power. ut the doctrine of as-
sured destruction minimizes the ques-j
 Lion of advantage. As long as the scc-~ tain agreement that neither side would
h 1
?
and strike is devastatin r
g,A+l~i$1~t11*
Superiority, in this perspective, loses its
- meaning. -In--July, - 1974,-. after -the
SALT I I negotiations had begun, Kissin-
ger responded to a question in a press
cc,nfercnce thus: "What in the name of
God is strategic superiority? What is;
r Re n e ~`0~ 1' t~ r klitt c
AI
istic Itt1syt ii
the: significance of it ... at these levels
of numbers?" .After a point, numbers
meant nothing-to us.
The doctrine of assured destruction
holds that the curve relating numbers
of -weapons to strategic power flattens
out-at 'a fairly early stage. It may or
may not he chance that this stage was
seen to have been reached at about
the number and extent of the weap-
ons svstems. the- United States already
had in the mid-sixties. In 1971, two
of the most gifted and experienced
defense intellectuals, Alain Enthoven
aid K. WTayne -Stnitlt (the former
an official of the Kennedy-and John-
son administrations, the latter an
official of the Nixon Administration),
wrote in their book "How Much is
Enough?": -
The main reason for stopping at 1,000
-Minuteman missiles, 41 Polaris subma-
rines and some. 500 strategic bombers is
that having more would not be worth
the additional cost. These force levels
are sufficiently high to put the United
States an the "flat of the curve."
It may he said that this judgment
was reached at a time when the at-
niosphere of the Vietnam \V'ar made it
pointless to consider any increases.
Even so, there should be no question
that the view ivas sincerely held.
Again, looking back, it seems clear
that this doctrinal consideration took
the edge off the American disappoint-
ment that SALT I did not provide for
any real arms reduction. The United
States had hoped to put a freeze on the
development of any further heavy mis-
siles, with their greater capacity to
knock out an enemy's ability to retali-
ate after a first strike. But the Russians
were going ahead with both their SS-1S
and SS-19, and there was no stopping
them. In ballistic-missile-firing sub-
marines, the Russians were accorded a
numerical advantage of sixty-two to
our forty-four to "corr,pensate" for the
greater distances their underwater craft
would have to travel to be on station.
As noted above, they soon equipped
these submarines with a longer-range
missile, wiping out their disadvantage,
and thus coming out ahead of where
they had been. If we were disposed to
think that such margiA dnt F e1'I
clearly the Russians a no . ire
United States very much hoped to ub-i
ing came of tlti?.
The great and debilitating failure
of SALT 1, huwcrcr, is that it did n,,t
produce any agreement between the
two nations on strategic doctrine. It
might have seemed that it did, and
certainly Americans hoped timat it did,
but it did not. This failure was made
clear in July-, 1972-two months after
the treaty was signed-hy William
R. Van Cleave, a political scientist who
has served as an adviser to the SALT
"My Country and the World," Andrei
D. Sakharov, the Russian phi sicist, ie-
P15% 0 3 }QAL9-fir .1955 in Siberia,
delegation. In testimony before a Sen-
ate subcommittee headed by Henry
M. Jackson, Van Cleave made a point
that it was time some political scientist
made:
The U.S. arms-control community has
always had an academic character and a
hype r- rationalistic approach to arm+ con-
trol that assumes arms control to be an
intellectual problem rather than a politi-
cal one.
Van Cleave was critical of the "ea-
gerness" of the American negotiators
for an agreement that, he felt, led
them repeatedly to change positions.
He was scornful of the belief, as he
saw it, that we and the Soviets shared`
an overriding common goal of strategic:
stability as defined by American strati-I
gic and arms-control concepts. The
over-all evidence, he said, "is persuasive
that the Soviet leaders do not share out
assured-destruction doctrine. That thcc
do is an unsupportable notion."
What doctrine did the Soviets es-
pouse? This seemed evident enough' to
Van Cleave: "The Soviets--in contrast
to the United States-have seen the
strategic-force balance as an expression
of political power." It had been Nlc-
Namara's view, and it persisted, "that
the strategic-force balance had no im-
portant political meaning." Whatever
the case, it was clear .to Van Cleave
that the Soviets thought otherwise. To
hare the power to blow up the world
three times was to have more power
than did he who could blow it up on!G-
twice. The Soviet military seemed to
have a simple notion that more was
better than less. There were, at the
very least, those among them who were
prepared to think of nuclear wars as
winnable, in the sense that ono side
would emerge better off than the other.
This sort of thinking, of course, is in-
compatible with the doctrine of ns-
snred destruction.
The Soviet Union'-, military were,
where he had successfully tested a So-
viet hydrogen bomb:
The evening after the test, at a pri-
vate banquet attended only by the officials
in charge of the tests, I proposed a toast
that "our handiwork would never ex-
plode over cities." The director of the
tests, a high-ranking general, f at obliged
to respond with a parable. It!, gist was
that the scientists' job is to -mprove a
weapon; how it is used is nore of their
business.
The American negotiators of SALT I
were to learn early on just how firmly
the Soviet military were in charge
when they found that they knew more
about Soviet strategic forces than did
their Soviet civilian counterparts. Mili-
tary secrets are not widely shared in
the Soviet Union, and at ons point
the negotiations a Russian general sub;-
gested to an American that it wasn't
necessary to talk about sue matters
in the presence of-what?--unautho-
rized listeners! Soviet military plans
were not, in any significant measure,1
subject to negotiation with Americans;
or anyone else. In consequence, the
Americans returned home to face a sec-
ond negotiation with their own mili-I
tary. What seems to happen. in SALTi
talks is that when negotiators have, ink
effect, agreed with the military forces:
of another nation that those forces;
should be increased they are almost re-I
quired to return and agree with their!
own military forces that their. forces
should be increased also. It is a matter
of relationships. If the Rus -.ians were
building a Caribbean fleet, and the
United States was either ignoring this
or else snarling and snafping and
threatening, American admirals, while!
.they. would certainly be urging a Baltic'
fleet or some such countermeasure,;
could nonetheless be told to stay out of
the argument and leave foreign affairs
to the President. But once the Press-I
dent had agreed with the Soviets that;
it was quite acceptable for thorn to have,
a flotilla in the Caribbean he simply:
would not be in a position to tell his
own admirals that they wculd be al-
lowed no compensatory increases. He
could, of course, but he wo-ild be dis-'
credited as a man who preferred the'
interests of other people's nilitary toy
his own. In a situation where the so-
viet military always insists on more,1
the process will always-end with the:
American military insisting on more asI
well.
ele a'f c `ir~tTI - 4 ~r3i~ R4~ $ 119t eign'Rela:ions Com-~
is not made by professors. In his hook 1 mittee last July compared the Poseidon
 missile, now deployed ~-~, ~e Pa }on he la vtie But we hadn't viets "coon Mete assurance against ant
nuclear submarines, witti6t iie riclen Re~ aour s ar ion OF4f4i P1 ~8 J~115R~Q~ ~ t5~~ t%i rforee threat from
'
"
missile that has been designed for the,
new Trident submarines, the first of'
which will go to sea sometime next
year. Secretary Brown's display ticked
off the revelant information:
TRIDENT IMPROVEMENTS OVER POSEIDON
* Weight-15% greater
* Fuel-advanced technology, more ef-
ficient
* Accuracy-/ more accurate at same
range
* Range-twice as great
* Explosive power-twice as great
Those' who follow weaponry would;
have noted that the new missile, with
far more destructive power, is none-
theless about-the same size as its prede-
er admitted to ourselves that the Rus-
sians did not accept deterrence as doc-
trine; that, unless stopped by the most 1
forceful intervention, they would build
until they achieved superiority. They
But the Russians
the United States.
abruptly turned it down. Grornyko was
1scarcely polite. He all but suggested!
that to propose to the Soviets that they
reduce strategic arms was an insult.!
(To be sure, his actual remarks were'
addressed to the suddenness with which
the proposal was made.) In any event,!
with significant reductions dismissed,
the SALT II negotiations proceeded toy
a wan conclusion, the basic numbers
almost unchanged after two and a half
years of negotiations by the new team.
At Vladivostok, in 1974, President
Ford and General Secretary Brezhnev
had agreed that each party should have
2,400 strategic nuclear delivery vehi-
cles ? (missiles and bombers), with 'a
sublimit of 1,320 bIIRVed missiles plus
bombers capable of carrying cruise mis-
siles. (A cruise missile is essentially a
pilotless plane. Unlike a.ballistic' mis-
sile-which simply goes where it has
been aimed, like a bullet--a cruise
missile can be directed' in flight.) SALT
II reduces this over-all limit to 2,250
by .1951, but without any conse-
quence. The Soviets will scrap some
antiquated missiles they have probably
kept around only for bargaining pur-
poses. We will hold on to our B-52s-
planes that are now as, old as the pilots
who fly them. SALT II limits the num-
ber of warheads per MIRVed ICBM,
but each side is to be permitted an en-
tirely new ICBM and to improve its
existing ones within limits that mayl
or may not permit fundamental ad-
vances. There are no limitations of
significance. .
Once again,. a second negotiation,
took place back in Washington. The
result was the MX. Recall that a grin-
cipal American objective in SALT. I was
to prevent the Soviets from. building any
more heavy missiles, which they pro-
ceeded to do regardless. Again, no re-
duction in modern heavy missiles could
be agreed to; thus SALT II provided
that the Soviets should continue to
have 308 and we should. continue to~
have none. Opponents of SALT II make
much of this "imbalance." But, as Am-
Ralph Earle II, chairman of !
bassador
the American delegation to SALT, told
the Senate Foreign Relations Commit-
tee in July, the MX, while not a heavy
missile, does have as much "equivalent
effectiveness as Soviet heavy ICBMs."
In a word, the MX is a counterforce
missile. And that is what the issue hasi
been from the first. The United States'
RQPcg4M`d90A0-what we vowed we
would never do. And so SALT II pro-)
duced precisely the advance in counter--!
might, for example, have been told in
1969 that this would be a wholly un-
attainable goal. That we would out-
spend them two to one. That we would
still be spending when they were bank-
rupt. But this was a threat we could'
not make, even though,. ironically, it is
one we could have carried out. I fear
that those may. turn' out to have been
the days when the peace of the world
was irretrievably lost.
cessor. In fact, Trident I missiles can be 'HEY did not seem so. Nixon
fitted in the launchers of the Poseidon, deeply desired that a SALT II
submarine. (This is now being done,' agreement-a permanent treaty this
with the result that .our submarine fleet time-would put an end to increases
will have much greater megatonnage in nuclear weapons and possibly bring
in its warheads- even before the new about actual decreases. But he fell) and
Tridents begin to be commissioned.) negotiations made no progress. in that
As one thought connects to another, direction under President Ford, al-
I found my attention drifting away though he, too, was altogether com-
from Secretary Brown's exhibit and mitted to the process. Then came the
back to a sunny June day in 1977, my new Carter team, including many-old
first. year in the Senate, with many faces from the Johnson years. They
things still unfamiliar.' The Navy was were hopeful, even exhilarated by the
launching a new submarine, the U.S.S. opportunity they now had, and they
New York City-the first warship ever moved quickly with a bold proposal.
named for our town-and I had been In March, 1977, the Carter Ad-
asked to speak at the ceremonies in the ministration, in the person of Cyrus
shipyard of the Electric Boat company, Vance; who had been Deputy Secre-
in Groton, .Connecticut, where it was tary of Defense under Johnson and
to be launched. I had done a spell. in was now Secretary of State, proposed
the Navy at the end of the Second to Moscow a significant reduction in
World War, and shipyards were famil- nuclear weapons. This Comprehensive
iar. But as the official party walked Proposal would have reduced the num-
along to the ways where the modest ber of launchers for MIR1'S (multiple
New York City awaited us, a never independently targetable reentry ve-
equalled leviathan hove in sight. There, hicles) from 1,320, which had emerged
broadside to the river-for it would as the lowest level the Soviets would
fair stretch to the opposite bank if accept, to between 1,100 and 1,200,
launched in the conventional man- with a separate sublimit of 550 on the
ner-was the hull of the first Trident number of_MlRVed ICBMs, the most
submarine. There has never been such accurate and worrisome kind. (A
a thing, and anyone who has been to MIRVed missile has more than one
sea would know it. My U.S.S. Quiri- warhead, each of which can be inde-
nus, 40-mm. gun mounts and all, pendently aimed at a different target,
could have been taken on board as a As the "bus" travels through space, if
ship's launch. James R. -Schlesinger, ejects first one warhead, then another,
then Secretary of Energy, was walking in different trajectories and at differ-
beside me. He had been Secretary of! ent velocities.) Five hundred and fifty
'Defense during the period when the1 is the number of MIRVed ICBMs the
trident program was getting under United States has, deployed. ,
way,' and he recalled expressing mis- Paul Nitze, who has been officially
givings about it, saying that the boats involved in arms negotiations under
were too big, too vulnerable-that Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and
smaller ones would have done better. Nixon -(there are not many qualified
What had possessed us? I asked. It was / persons in this field, and careers show
the price of SALT I, hApipbedred For ele QQ0&W1iFy: QA-RDR8$-6tMf
And so an American buildup of sorts field of policy), has testified that
commenced, ending the long freeze of Vance's 1977 proposal offered the So-
 force weaponry which SALT I had central but still important: (1) ratios of licence Agency, had the self-confi-I
hoped to prevent. S) r lie surviv o elation and industr must , d rice to -lance. `'he1
1 11~VgOeW Fbr ele,?e 1/1,Z,er'dAvRQR860, a'1~R06VM0 l `~~ 3s
Carter Administration in to stress States, and (2) the surviving military t'x+ r'ctsc iveil fo-tvard and was con-
that the content of the treaty redly halance should remain in our f-i or.,.rf eluded. The B "Team made 1 powerful
didn't matter much, that it' was the deterrence should fail, a favorable sur- case-more so than had been antici-
process that had to he preserved. living military balance could make it rated. In October, word (f the exer-
But if the process meant anything, it easier for us to negotiate an end to the cise leaked; in December, the 7'imes
tear and limit further damage to the
had to he one that protected assured reported the results. The B Team,
destruction as a strategic doctrine. The [inlted States.
headed by Richard Pipes, of Harvard,
proposal to go ahead with the MX At this time, Schlesinger, still at had come to the conclusion that the,
implied that we ourselves were aban- Rand, commenced to argue that the Russians .were seeking strategic sit-,
cloning that doctrine. Of course, by United States could not allow the So- periority.
1979 assured destruction was already viets to develop an "asymmetric ca- The indignation in Washington wash
in ideological danger in its own sane- picity against us." That is to say, they palpable. "Tlie very' sugE,estion was
tuaries. Newhouse, likening much of should not have a counterforce eapa- greeted with horror, as will happen;
the debate in the nineteen-sixties to hility greater than our own. For either when a doctrine grows rigid. The B'
earlier debates about heresy, also notes side to have such a capacity would be Team members were near to anatbe-i
that heresies somehow never the out. fatal to the doctrine of assured destruc- niatized. They had been invited to:
However much orthodoxy always as- tion, properly construed; for both to challenge the conventional wisdom,
sorted itself in the end, McNamara have it would be doubly fatal. Schles- but they had made too good a case.;
continued to have doubts. In 1964, finger persisted, and in 1973, as Secre- Senator Malcolm Wallop suhsequently
less than two years after his Ann Ar- tart' of Defense, he proposed that the observed:
hor speech, he declared in a Defense United States develop a "heavy throw- While consciously refusing to entertain;
Department "posture statement" that weight" missile to offset Soviet Bevel- the Soviets' own conception of what they;
"a damage-limiting strategy appears to opments. This missile became the MX, are about militarily, the authors of the;
he the most practical and effective More to the point, in the course of NIE's over the years have evaluated So-1
course for its to follow." Such a strict- viet strategic forces using indexes.which
the nineteen-seventies Pentagon offi- tend to stress our own doctrine of MAD.
egy would involve trying to destroy cats began to talk openly of targeting -
some of an adversary's missiles in order Soviet military facilities in terms of The 1976 N.I.E., Wallop noted, did
that his retaliatory strike would not be "limited strategic options." The Tri- mention that the Soviets stein to think
s+) devastating. (Of course, implicit in dent II missile, to he deployed aboard in terms of ability to will nuclear wars.
this concept is the possibility that the the giant submarine, would verge upon Nevertheless, the estimates continued
United States light, after all, strike a counterforce capability. (Submarine- to interpret both United States and So-
first-in response, for example, to a So- launched missiles are still not as ac- viet forces according to the criterion ofI
vict invasion of Europe.) At this time, curate as land-based missiles. Thus, assured destruction. But hc'w could this: I
United States missiles were presumably while they are fully effective in an interpretation he reconcilecr with Soviet,
aimed at Russian cities. McNamara assured-destruction mode-they can he conduct, By 1976, they were (as they
acknowledged that a damage-limiting sure of hitting Leningrad, for exam- still arc) spending twelve to fours.
strategy would require greater forces plc-they are less so in a counterforce per cent of their gross national prod,.
than the "cities oil}" Strategy, but he mode; where the target is a hole in the on defense-the sign, if tie ninetee:,
thought it would he worth it, especial-i ground ten or fifteen feet in diameter, thirties offer any evidence, of a corm-
1v with a Chinese nuclear force coming requiring that a warhead land within try planning to go to war. "Bureau-
(in line. In 1966, he appeared to favor several hundred feet or so in order to cratic inertia" was an ex1:lanation Put~
an anti-Chinese ABM system. This "kill.") Nothing dramatic by way of forth, and it could well ae the right
would be a "thin" system, designed to a great debate ending in a break with one, although "momentur.i" might be
defend against only a few missiles. The previous policy occurred. Rather, as the the better term. But after a point
kussian,s would know that such a sys- Soviets crept toward a first-strike ca- larger possibilities had to he confronted.
tern was not directed against their large pability, American strategic doctrine In his 1978 annual report as Secretary i
and growing force, simply because it slowly changed also. This was never of Defense, Brown said th it because of 1
would offer no effective defense. The really acknowledged, except in the "a substantial and continuing Soviet,
proposal is worthy of note as an ex- edginess and growing- anxiety of those strategic effort," the strategic balance 1
ample of logic producing illogic. The who could sense the drift of events but "is highly dynamic." Altht~ugh puzzled
reasoning that led to the decision was could not arrest them. as to "why the Soviets are pushing so
I
flawless, save that the Chinese had no An episode in the fall of 1976 re- hard to improve their strategic nuclear;
missiles. McNamara soon enough re- vealed the depths of this anxiety. Once capabilities," he noted that "we cannon
canted. In the middle of the Vietnam each year, the intelligence community ignore their efforts or assume that they
War, lie could scarcely ask for more produces the National Intelligence are motivated by consideration either:
nuclear weapons, but his doubts were Estimate, known Inc-illy as the N.I.E. of altruism or of pure deterrence.", ~
on record. H. was not clone- Then, A of grumbling began about , in May, 1979, in the com
In the spring of 1968, just as the the relative optimism concerning Soviet meneement address at Annapolis,
SALT talks were about to begin, Har- intentions and kept being repeated. Leo Brown asserted that Moscow had lungs
old Brown, then Secretary of the Air Cherie, of the President's Foreign sought to threaten American land-
IForce,- told the Senate Preparedness Intelligence Advisory Board, had the based ins-ssiles and would probably be
Sullcolaimittec: inspired notion to set up competing :able to achieve this capability in tile! earl ' nincteen-eralitles. I;i an analysis
i .
t+, addition to theAl~lardvted ble elea Vt0109/lf1t12d. F l3F l13' 5 00(~#(} g-3 pt r,3kichard Burt, of the .
pahility, our measurement of deterrence mate and one to challenge rt. i. eorge
,hnuld include two other criteria, less Bush, as Director of the Central Intel- ~ l inirs, a formidably well informed
nnMMTNTTED
 sntal well 'connected journalist, offered
the judgment that 13 lyto)dl P'Cjr
cepted the B Teams analysis.
As perspectives on .Soviet conduct
began to change, American conduct
began to be seen in different light also.
Was it the case that the Soviets were
"catching up"' Were we "falling be-
hind"? It must be understood that
these were new questions. In the -I4Ic-
Namara era, it had been assumed that
American strategic superiority was as
certain as was the validity of American
strategic doctrine. But now it began
to be noted that while the United
States budget for strategic arms had
been level for a decade and a half, that
of the Soviets had continued to rise.
In rough terms-they can only he
that-the Soviets since 1969 have
been outspending the United States in
strategic forces by a margin of two to
one. I)r. Perry reported to the For-
eign 'Relations Comtriittec that current
United States spending on strategic
forces is about $12 billion a year, while
the Soviets spend on the order of $25
billion. (More recently, the Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency re-
ported that the Soviet Union spent a
total of $140 billion on all its armed
forces in 197 7-almost one-third of
all military spending in the world. The
United States spent $101 billion.
Wohlstetter calculates that American
strategic spending, in constant dollars,
actually peaked hack in fiscal 1952.)
The Soviet buildup has been steady
over a generation now, leading an
-:control expert from the Kennedy
arms
era to remark recently that if the fa-
miliar man from Mars were to he pre-
sented with a chart showing the rise of
Soviet weaponry over the past three
decades and told that somewhere dur-
ing that period an arms-limitation
agreement was signed with the United
States, the visitor would be quite un-
able to pick the year.
The result is to he seen. in numbers
of warheads. If plotted, it would he
seen that the Soviet curve has been
steeper for some time now-up from a
more than five-to-one disadvantage in
1967 to less than two-to-one today,
on to parity in 1985 and to superiority
thereafter, if the trends persist.
Number of warheads, however, is
not the only measure of nuclear pow-
er. Size matters, and accuracy matters
even more. It is not a question of pro-
jecting a time when the Soviets will
have attained superiority; they have
already done so. In this area, Nitze's
estimates are mdtspens4h~uhtd or
cause they are his and be~clt I ise t ltey are
public. In thrr~owweight-the pounds in place by that Administration, while 1
-
Rele spZ~Td O17'1I I 'l - > 0-0 3 5R those who supp,orted Johnson in Viet
ttze estimates tRat t e Avlets y 44RQyt ~ib~v to be suspicious of
1977 had an advantage of 10.3 million SALT.)
pounds to the United States' 7.6 mil-
lion, this being the effect of the Soviet
heavy missiles. By 1985, he projects a
widened gap: 14.5 million for the So-
viets, eight million for the United
States. The gap is even more dramatic
in the critical category of explosive
power-in what is called "equivalent
megatonnage." Nitze gives the Soviets
a nearly three-to-one advantage for
1977: 9,319 equivalent megatons for
the Soviets, 3,256 for the United
States. For 1985, he projects a slightly
widened gap but not greatly increased
amounts of megatonnage on either
side.
HOW did this come about? As near
an answer as we are likely to get
is that a synergistic-relationship devel-
oped between the doctrine of assured
destruction and the combined restraints
on the United States imposed by. the
experience of Vietnam and the hopes
aroused by detente. If this seems com-
plicated, let it be said that nothing
simple is likely to explain how the
world's most powerful military nation
lost its advantage over an economically
and technologically inferior competitor
in the course of a decade-and with
almost no one noticing.
The doctrine of assured destruction,
as I have noted, holds that the curve
relating numbers of weapons to stra-
tegic power flattens out at a fairly early
stage. One of the virtues of the as-
sured-destruction doctrine was that it
permitted the civilians in the Pentagon
and in the Bureau of the Budget to
form an estimate of what the military
really needs. How many warheads, for.
example, were required to insure that
fifty per cent of the industrial capacity-
of the Soviet Union would be de-
stroyed in_ a.second strike? The doc-
trine fitted in surprisingly well with the
management ethos that McNamara
and others brought to defense issues. It
suited .even better the needs of the gov-
ernment leaders of the later nineteen-
sixties who, while seeking strategic-
arms limitations, were also waging war
in Vietnam. Holding back expenditure
in the strategic area eluded the fury
,that would have arisen had they pro-
posed otherwise, and may have mod-
erated opposition to the war. (An in-
teresting aftermath: those most bit-
ter about the Vietnam policies of the
' Johnson era are today likel . to be most
e Btr~&B t11{4 pstrs c h-pi
These considerations were, if any-
thing, even more intensive in Nixon's
first term. Certain defense intellectuals
of the Johnson era began to assert that
Soviet strategic behavior was basically
imitative of ours-two apes on a tread
mill, as the image went-overlook-
ing, presumably, that the fondest hope
of the community in the early sixties
was that Soviet behavior would, be-
come imitative. In any event, this
was presented as an argument against
increasing American forces. Then
Nixon embarked on the policy of de-
tente with the Soviets, which added
further. grounds for allowing United
'States force levels to remain frozen.
'And that is what happened.
The irony of all this was nicely il-
lustrated in an article in The New
Rebublic, in August, 1979, by the
journalist Morton Kondracke: At the
end of July, Henry Kissinger had
testified before the Foreign Relations
Committee, declaring himself not so
much opposed to SALT II-he allowed
he would have initialled the treaty-
as in favor of great new military ex-
penditures to prevent a further weak-
ening of the United States of a sort
that, he said, had brought about a
"crisis situation threatening the peace
of the world." Kondracke interpreted
this as'the familiar (although puzzling)
charge that Democrats are somehow
soft in these matters. He seems to have
taken the charge personally. In any
event, he retorted with some vehe-
mence:
According to Kissinger, when the US
left Vietnam, the Republican administra-
tion of which he was a part planned to
build major new strategic weapons sys-
tems: the. B-1 bomber by 1981, the MX
missile by 1983, the Trident submarine
and missile by 1979, and various kinds of
cruise missiles in the 1980s. These weap-
ons would have reversed the trend
toward Soviet superiority, "but every one
of these programs has been canceled, de-
layed, or stretched out by the current
administration."
Kissinger's version of history scarcely
squares with the facts or with Pentagon
figures. Far from trying to reverse the
strategic doctrines of the Johnson ad-,I
ministration, Kissinger and President !
Nixon accepted them completely. The US
land-based missile force was not in-1
creased by a single launcher during eight !
years of Republican administration. In i
fact, the Nixon and Ford administrations
cut back on strategic spending from the'
levels reached in- the closing Johnson I
years. Johnson's last budget called for
b
1tl bh#
e e ouays,ut te 1 `~t r~tinistrations aver-I
R
aged $10 billion a year in comparablet
 dollars. Some cuts were imposed by Con- manner, the Soviets have acquired, or States and Western Europe '-against,
tiress, but most were calledpp,,~~y~~,, ~' ~r R@f@ 'c0~P5fflq' ': fit- 31 SR69t)4t;OdO'6 23 strategic nuclear
lord budgets. It's true, few llserats were p2bility a ainst our land-base) ? S. force primarily designed to wipe out
impressed when Republican officials We hope tdo the same to theirs. Ev- Russian cities and factories rat)- r than
boasted that they were continuously cut-1 Ling defense spending, but they really erything the SALT process was designed to strike at missile silos and other mili-
were. to prevent has come about. tary targets. The policy of mutual as
All true enough. The Nixon-Ford
years were a time of unprecedented
increase in social spending, and of
decline in military spending. Rather
like the Hitchcock film in which the
diamond is hidden in the chandelier,
this information was effectively con-
cealed from the American people by
publishing it in the budget. It may
well prove that the historic mission (as
Governor Jerry Brown might say) of
the Carter Administration is to increase
defense spending and cut social spend-
ing. There is a mild law of opposites in
American politics. Republicans fre-
quently do what Democrats promise,
and the other way around.. President
Carter was the most dovish of candi-
dates in 1976, promising to cut the
defense budget by five to seven billion
dollars a year. Nothing of the sort hap-,
pened, however. Social spending was.
effectively frozen, but defense-spend-
ing began immediately to rise. In an
address in Washington on September
27th of this year, Zbigniew Brzezin-
ski, Assistant to the President for Na-
tional Security Affairs, made a good
deal of this:
While our critics say they would have
been strong for defense if they had- re-
mained in office, in fact, defense spend-1
ing in constant dollars declined in seven;
of the eight years of the Nixon-Ford Ad
ministration. For the past decade, there
has been a steady decline in the level of
the defense budget in real dollar terms.
We began to reverse that trend in the
first three budgets of the Carter Admin-
istration, and President Carter is the first
President since World War II to succeed
in raising defense spending for three
straight years in peacetime.
The Soviets did not do this by cheat- sured destruction had created P "para-
ing or by startling technological break-i doxical world [in which] it is the lib-
throughs. They did it by the steady eral, humane, progressive community'
( 'that is advocating the most bloa(:-thirsty
accumulation of more missiles an ad-
ditional thousand in the course of the strategies." It was absurd, lie con-
nineteen-seventies) with greater accu- -tinued, "to base the strategy of the'
racy, and more warheads with greater IVest on the credibility of the treat of
explosive power. They aimed them, as mutual suicide." It was necessary fort
evidently they have always done, at the United States to develop a new;
our silos--in violation, that is, of our, nuclear "counterforce capability"'con-i
doctrine that they should be aimed at! sisting of missiles designed to be used.
our cities, so that they could retaliate against military targets rather than'
with vast destruction in case we at- civilian ones.
tacked first. They either now can or Herein resides' the final irony of
soon will be able to take out our silos, the SALT process. Not only has it failed:
leaving the United States with a much ~ to prevent the Soviets from de-reloping
reduced second-strike capability. Not: a first-strike capability; it now lead
enough, it is generally thought, Be-1 the United States to do so. The process
, has produced the one outcome it was
sides, Nitze writes, the Soviets now' I
have -a third and fourth strike-an designed to forestall. And so we see
ability to deter our retaliatory strike by ;policy in ruins.
threatening our surviving cities and: -
population. If it is all unthinkable, the: W must are we to do? First, we.
Soviets seem nonetheless to have been ' YV must try to get some agree
thinking about it. ment - on what our situation is. Is i
As have we. Heresy and recantation wrong to think that something of the,
abound, and one of the more striking sort is emerging? The %Vashington1
events of the SALT n debate so far is Post noted on August 1st, "Here it is
that both Secretary Brown and Kis-1 barely midsummer, and a growing
singer appear to have joined Schlesin- chorus of important voices (w'tose op-
ger. In his testimony before the For- position had been most feared) is say-
eign Relations Committee on July, ing that the treaty itself is nc villain,
11th, Brown said that the Administra- that its ratification is almost r matter
tion's primary goal was maintaining es of indifference, that the fundamental
sential equivalence with Moscow in nu-' strategic problems that most concern
clear forces, but that to do it "we need them are in fact beyond the Fower of
to show the Soviets that they do not the treaty, as such, either to remedy
have an advantage in attacking military or even make much worse." _.
targets-that we, too, can do so." And Jimmy Carter is the exception. On
he elaborated a bit, in response to a July 31st, the same day Kissinger tes-
question from Senator George McGov- tified before the Foreign Relations
ern: "It is not a matter of us pushing Committee, the President dec ared, in
Brzezinski was not just taking -the Soviets into being able to destroy our:: Bardstown, Kentucky, that >ALT IT
credit for increasing defense spending. silo-based missiles. They have gone that will "stop the Soviets' buildup." It will
He was asserting that his Administra- route." Brown stressed that the mobile :not do anything of the sort. Nor does;
tion, unlike its predecessors, was awake MX missiles, in addition to being able :anyone in the Carter Admiristration
to the Soviet challenge. It has been a to survive attack, had another attribute: I who is in a position to know ague any;
quiet development, this emergent chat- "Because of their accuracy and their longer that it does. Last spring and
lenge. Those who espy some special warhead capability they will be able to summer, the joint Chiefs of Staff, tes-I
cunning at work have a difficult case hit Soviet silos, and that will, indeed, tifying before the Senate Arned Ser-i
to make. The plain fact is, as Van give the Soviets a motive for going - vices Committee, were unanimous in
Cleave testified in 1972, that the So- away from silo-based missiles." their conclusion that Soviet strategic;
viets never gave any indication that A month after testifying before the, power, under the agreement, would:
~
they accepted assured destniction as a Foreign Relations Committee, Henry expand beyond what it is noaF. At the
strategic doctrine and would not seek Kissinger spoke in Brussels at a meet- July 11th meeting of the Foreign Re-1,
nticlear superiority. How does the prov- ing of military experts. As reported, he lations Committee, the Chairman of
erb go? The fox knows many things, said he now believed that successive) the joint Chiefs, General David C.1
United States Administrations. includ-, Jones, said, "Some may conclude that;
one thing their bedg,Oggo eF~It'Rel#iigg"2&3 11 :rf/'fi A ~'$'-c 15 (~ ~ 1 rse trenrs in So-
seemed to know is that more is better., Irons, were wrong in tin i10 t ?}d viet strategic forces- including current!,
So they kept getting more. In thisl could adequately protect the Hite s
nctir mTlvUE`~
 and' projected qualitative improve-
ments. This is simply nApplTOV.eGt FAnd later: "Similarly, the focus on
constraining what the Soviets could do
without a SALT agreement had ob-
scured the more fundamental recog-
nition of what they have done, are
doing, and can do within the SALT
framework." The director of. the Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency,
George M. Seignious II, has stated
that the Soviets will continue to en-
gage in a "relentless" strategic-arms
buildup with or without the SALT If
treaty.
We can hope that the President now
knows he has been wrong. If this is
so, we can hope he will say so. The
SALT II treaty is' in trouble, because
many senators feel it has been misrep-
resented. A profound change could
take place if the President were simply
to say that it is a chilling agreement
but the best he could get, and that it is
in our interests only if SALT III brings
true reductions. Secretary Vance, in
his letter of June 21, 1979, submit-
ting the treaty to the President for
transmission to the Senate, said, can-
didly enough, "For the first time, we
will be slowing the race to build new
and more destructive weapons." If
the President were to say only as
much-that we are at most slowing
the race-things could be different. If
he does not, there is no alternative save
to oppose him on the facts, and try to
develop a national policy without him.
This is not easily done with a Presi-
dent engaged. But, in my view, it must
be done. For those in charge of Ameri-
can strategic policy-including the
President, whether or not he has
thought it through-are now advocat-
ing a course of action which, if suc-
cessful, will bring about the very nu-
clear face-off that not ten years ago
was unhesitantly defined as the worst-
case condition. This is to say that the
United States and the Soviet Union
will be confronting each other know-
ing that both have the capacity to at-
tack and destroy the other's land-based
missile forces, and can do so in forty-
five minutes.
If still further irony is desired, it
may be noted that, in the most explicit
way, American behavior has turned
out to be imitative of the Soviets. This
was implicit in the aftermath of SALT 1,
when the Trident submarine and the
B-1 bomber were agreed to. But these
weapons were at least compatible with
an assured-destruction doctrine. The
price of SALT II, negotiad~e
Administration before the y reaty . was
even signed, was the MX missile. From
the time Schlesinger first proposed it,
r Rdle?iabez00131o1I2oa G A F;[9F 6- 6 oh
a counterforce missile. In other words,
after only two rounds of negotiations,
acquiring a counterforce capacity has
become the condition of salvaging the,
very negotiations that were begun with
the object of preventing either side
from obtaining a counterforce capacity.
In any event, the world is sure!
to be different for the United States,.
and considerably less secure. Within'
months, the Soviet Union will have
the capacity to destroy the Minutemen,
our land-based deterrent. These are
the missiles that were meant to deter;
superiority and that we can learn to
315 1)0#4100'33Cf0 31aubt we can. But
will anyone assert that in such circum-
stances we will not be living difterent-
ly? And if one is drawn to the un-
happy conclusion that the SALT process
has not limited the number of weapons
in the United States and the Soviet
Union, what are we to think about the
nature of world politics when many
nations possess the nuclear weapon?
What will be their views---the views
of India, Pakistan, South Korea, Israel,,
South Africa, Libya, Argentina, Bra-1
zil, perhaps others-on deterrence, as-
sured destruction, and the rest? Kis- 1
J v
the Soviets from initiating any nuclear' singer suggests that once the present
exchange. Following such a first strike state of affairs is understood, "panic"
by the Soviets, an American President will spread through the world.
could send in bombers and launch our
submarine missiles. No one can esti- That decisive technological event
mate the horror that would follow in that led to the shift in the balance
the Soviet Union and then, of course, of power, it seems to me, was the de-
in the United States. It may be that; ployment. of MIRVS-a term first used
this prospect will be sufficient to deter; in public in 1967. Packing a number;
the Soviets from launching a first' of warheads on each missile no doubt
strike, whatever the degree of provo-' seemed an elegant and economical solu-
cation or panic. But is there reason-to! tion to the problems that the Johnson
suppose that nuclear supei;':rity willi Administration faced. (In the United
have no effect on their iril~''rnational States, development of MIRY began in
behavior? Certainly men suc}i as Nitze 1965. The first flight tests took place
think otherwise. He writes: on August 16, 1968. The first Soviet
To some of us who lived through the test took place five years later, in Au-
Berlin crisis in 1961, the Cuban crisis in gust, 1973.) But it profoundly trans
1962, or the Middle East crisis in 1973, formed the significance of the Soviets'(
the last and key judgment in this chain of huge rockets, with their tremendous)
reasoning-that an adverse shift in the ;
strategic nuclear balance will have no 1 throwweight. Once the Soviets could
political or diplomatic consequences- install MIRVS, they were bound to be
comes as a shock. In the Berlin crisis of "ahead." As viewed in hindsight,- it
1961 our theater position was clearly un- might have been perceived that the
favorable; we relied entirely on our stra- MIRV technology would work ulti-
tegic nuclear superiority to face down
Chairman Khrushchev's ultimatum. In mately to the Soviet advantage. If its
Cuba, the Soviet Union faced a position were the case that the American in-
of both theater inferiority and strategic i terest in `IIRV* was related to a desire
inferiority; they withdrew the missiles ; to overcome a putative ABM system
they were deploying. In the 1973 Middle ; in Russia. the elimination of ABM
East crisis, the theater and the strategic
nuclear balances were more balanced; should have argued simultaneously for
both sides compromised. the elimination of nrIRV as well. But
It is hard to see what factors in the this assuredly did not happen. So long
future are apt to disconnect international i
politics and diplomacy from the under- as no one had a defense, deterrence (
lying real power balances. The doctrine tended to ignore the prolifera-'
nuclear
balance is only one element in the over- tion of offensive weapons. _
all power balance. But in the Soviet view,; In what sense, it is asked, do the
it is the fulcrum upon which all other Soviet heavy missiles mean that the
levers ito ~linflue ce--military, economic, Soviets are "ahead"? This is the ques- ~
In any international crisis seriously tion with which adherents to assured
raising the prospect that the military! destruction automatically respond when I
arms of the United States and of thell the Soviet superiority is mentioned.
USSR might become engaged in active, President Carter, in his 1979 .State
and direct confrontation, those directing; of the Union Message, reported that
U.S. and Soviet policy would have to give' ust one of our relatively ativeI
the most serious attention to the relative just Y invulner-
strategic nuclear capabilities of the two able Poseidon submarines ... carries
sides. enough warheads to destroy every
Unequal accommodation to the Soviet large and medium-sized city in the
Union would then have resulted not in
,Union would bu f e th- Soviet Union." His roposal that the
r R~# ~~ ~05/~1~ -031 3fi PQ4Q0364th19- missiles be de-
It has been said that the Soviets have ployed on a race-track system was
learned to live with American nuclear) tr.o-g,ll ULD
 openly a response to thRRs~ee who +~ 'r
tion whether suhmarinesr'~lif(cQ~Vo`lic ~, ,_., _.. c_-__r_. t _ ~?__.__
.r amtnist.ration-s I98U budget, "UnI
September 1 1 th, stated that "President) Falk, of Princeton, who does not at all,
Sdefense receives a real increase in fund- approve, has called "a mood of biptrti-
Carter's choice of a new basing s3 s-1 ing." He said these increases should be n
tern to make American missiles mo-! san militarism." Senator Ernest F. Hof-'
i given the closest scrutiny; linos said:
bile and invulnerable to surprise at-,' a
tack removes the only real obstacle? First, in the strategic field, we should The SALT hearings did have a shock-
to ratification of the SALT treaty not reorient our defense posture more
? ing effect on this Congress and or the
to fight a nuclear war than to prevent it.
Phis is, of course, the Administrations people of the United States..." Rather
We should not develop weapons systems I
view also; as long as a second strike that increase the 'threat of nuclear war. than a disarmament arms Iimitatior:, we
r had, in contrast, rearmament hearings
is assured, received strategic doctrine We should not buy weapons to appease and a rearmament conference and a re-
remains valid, and technicalities such the opponents of SALT. armament treaty between the America
as the size of an adversary's forces are Here our number one concern ought to.
people and our leadership.
be the MX missile and its basing system."
not relevant. This is to say that if the The Administration plans to spend nearly In the course of all this, the SF.-nate
Soviets are "ahead" merely in the sense $1 billion in the FY 1979 Supplemental doves of a sudden found themselies S. n in
that they have more, it just doesn't and the FY 1980 budget. This billion is
the SALT I
matter that much, but a foot in the door for many addi- a hawk trap. In 1972,
~
And what happens if we don't, tional billions. Eve.-i without cost over- ABM treaty passed easily, by a vote
runs, the system will cost us at least $30 of 88 to 2, but by the autumn of 1979
fact, build the MX? The deference billion to build and deploy. ,it was, hard to count thirty-five vote
structure that previously surrounded The MX missile is highly- accurate and J or SALT IT. If a resolution of ra vfica-
nuclear strategy is no more. (ZVito devastating. It is so threatening to Soviet
reacting this article, can remember nuclear forces that it could tempt Soviet lion were to pass, a great many ttnde
leaders to strike us first in a crisis. The !tided votes would have to'be obtained
noting that the Johnson Administration result tvill be unparalleled destruction to I and many of these set as their prce an
had decided to develop a multiple in- both societies. 1inerease in defense spending. Bloom!
dependently targetable reuntry vehi- But President Carter went ahead in ;Nunn called fora true increase of five
cle?) In a nation where nuclear pow- any event. And then went beyond that, per cent per year for the coming; five
er plants can no longer be built, does Carter had accepted increases in de- year period. On September 1$t'i, the
anyone seriously suppose that the gov- fense spending; he now began to ad-' Senate, by an overwhelming 'r8-19
ernment can dig up Utah and Nevada
h
`
to put vocate t
agreed to a true increase of three
em. Public-opinion polls vote, to put in place our largest missiles ____
_ r--_I
h
for t
e
----? r statement Fed- for SALT 11 was that it would improve I '(Kennedy voted for the increase, and
of which the ment of the Fed- our strategic position. The public felt ;has come out in favor of development,
erasion of American Scientists is mere-
to th
-r
e fense spending if there was a newt Next, by a surprising 55-42 sore, a
Alaska pipeline will he recaecalllleed d' a key
SALT treaty, and many seemed to, , flue-per-cer;t true increase was ?greed'
amendment protectin
the
i
eli
g
p
p
ne
think the right course was to have' to for fiscal years 1981 and 1982. The
tafrom ts Passed chaelleenSges enatto e tied one thirty- ey one voen. both--SALT It and a bigger defense 1982 defense appropriation would be
The Air Force has identifi budget. Whatever the case, SALT 11 in the neighborhood of $170 billion.1
have was no more than sined when the o The total outlay for fiscal 19,6 was
eight federal laws that could have president-"to the g consternation of $87.9 billion.
bearing on the MX and on the vast
network of shelters that will have to be liberals," as the political scientist 4ViI- A case can be made for this f ill's in
hide it. an to ar- creases. (I supported both.) Tut not;
dug in Utah and Nevada in order to !tarn Schneider observes-beg
Wild gue that the new treaty allows for high- for the blindness with which tie Ad-
(This list eBurro o er United States military spending in ministration and its supporters are go-1
, Free-Roaming Horse and Br order to reach parity with the Soviet ing about it. The dominant mood in!
Act of 1971.) In Washington, it is all.
Union. More immediately, a number the last Congress was to bring a halt
too plain that a considerable body of d of senators such as Sam Nunn be an- to increases in federal spending. This!
opinion is remaining muffled on the ' g -'
MX so as not to jeopardize SALT II. to state that they could not support an}?' culminated in an amendment to a taxi
treaty unless there was such an increase cut bill in 1978 which was sponsoredop 051 Once SALT IF is adopted, this - in military spending. The Administra- by Senator Nunn and Senator Lawton'
lion will beco me open, and will ll find Chiles, both Democrats. The amend-!
leadership in the political world from meet, which was passed by the Senate'
prominent, even dominant figures such but failed of adoption in the House,!
as Governor Brown, who has opposed would have required that total federal
the MX with special intensity. outlays as a proportion of the gross na-I
If environmental obstacles fail, op- bona! product decline by stated inter-!
position will-surely arise to the spend vats from 22.5 per cent in 1979 toI
ing involved. Indeed, it already has 19.5 per cent in 1983. Very simply, if ~
arisen. Early in the debate onSALT 11, the country wants the over-all budget;
it was reasonably safe to assume that ceiling to come down- and the mill
there was a high correlation between tary budget floor to rise, social, spend
support for the treaty and opposition toy ing will be crushed. A pretty price for;
defense spending. The correlation was. an arms-limitation treaty that increases'
not perfect, but it was significant.' arms.
Thus, on January 26th, Senator Ed-' t, of social end-i
ward M. Kennedy, a depe t rev vor Release 2005/01/12: CIA-RDP88--113150 area 35~YPf~ Auential as those
31 0 3 W g_%5& long the Stir" T
who want to see military outlays in-'
 creased. The record over the decade,
as Dr. Brzezinski's speech of Septem-
ber 27th suggests, is 4 rgwwd Be
more powerful. There is every reason
to think that once SALT I[ is ratified
they will withdraw their support for
the military increases, having realized
what such costs-the defense budget
would about double, to $250 billion
by fiscal 1985-will mean to domestic
There is room for much mis-
outlays
.
understanding and not a little bitter-
And if these pressures are not suf-
the Soviets will surely launch
ficient
,
a determined propaganda campaign.
The MX, they will say-have said!-
Those who supported SALT will bt
rallied to oppose this abandonment of
SALT principles. In 1978, the Soviets
demonstrated that they could reverse
said that it is these limits which make and industries of both countries many i ^t<
the MX viable. If the Soviets went times over, while deliberately denying!
Relga",20 OM1)3e~~sI f2D1 818r0r! 15ib1 1 ~1~ty of a defense.... They
b, ., ,, 'a multl#:~Y assured destruction
the size of their heavy missiles per-
they would effectively have a
mits
,
first-strike capability against the MX.
Tom Wicker, writing in the Times,
states:
Without the limit of 10 warheads per l
missile ... the treaty would impose, the:
Soviets could put so many warheads on!
their giant SS-18 missiles that not even
the mobile MX missile system could be
made safe.
This, alas, is not the likely "scenario."
When the Soviets announce that they
are increasing the number of warheads
per missile, as they will be permitted
to do once SALT II expires at the end
of 1985,' the President of the United
States, whoever he is, will announce
that in view of this Soviet action our
reaction must be to double-the size of
the M.X. Whereupon the Soviets will
announce that they are putting mobile
missiles on highways. (A trench system
will be too expensive for them.) SALT
II will have effectively brought an end
not only to the hope of arms limitation
but to the SALT process itself.
S there no hope? There is some, if
not much. We should be clear that
we are in for a very bad time, and
that the longer we put off recognizing
our condition the worse it will be-
come. It may just be possible to join
hawk and dove, liberal and conserva-
tive (hopeless, deceitful terms!) in
recognizing that we have held to - a
strategic doctrine that. cannot be sus-
tained. It would work only if the Rus-
sians shared it, but evidently they do
not, and neither do a growing number
of Americans. The physicist Freeman
Dyson has argued most vigorously that
only, defense weapons are moral in a
nuclear world, making the nice point
that we don't have such defenses in
part because there is no elegance in''.
their development. In his memoir,
"Disturbing the Universe," some of
which originally appeared in this maga-
zine, Dyson writes, "The intellectual
arrogance of my profession must take
a large share of. the blame. Defensive
weapons do not spring, like the hydro-
gen bomb, from the brains of brilliant
professors of physics. Defensive weap-
ons are developed laboriously by teams
of engineers in industrial. laboratories."
Engineers!
Dyson continues:
is that the certainty of retaliation will
stop anybody from starting a nuclear'
war.
Dyson is a believer in damage limi-I
tation:
The ground on which I will take my l
stand. is a sharp moral distinction be-'
tween offense and defense, between of-
fensive and defensive uses of all kinds of
weapons. The distinction is often diffi-
cult to make and is always subject to
argument. But it is nonetheless real and
essential. And at least its main implica-
tions are clear. Bombers are bad. Fighter
airplanes and anti-aircraft missiles are
good'. Tanks are bad. Anti-tank missiles
are good. Submarines are bad. Anti-sub-
marine technology, is good. Nuclear
weapons are bad. Radar and sonar are
good. Inter-continental missiles are bad.
Anti-ballistic-missile systems are good.
Just as Dyson's views were being
published in The New Yorker, thee
political scientist Karl O'Lessker was
making almost precisely the same point
in The American" S pectator, an. organ
of pronounced conservative views:
decision to deploy the neutron bomb-
the "capitalist" bomb that "destroyed
people but not property." The MX
missile will certainly. arouse yet fiercer
passions.
For two decades now, the doctrine
of` deterrence has led us to believe that
strategic superiority doesn't matter.
"What in the name of God is stra-
tegic superiority?". Kissinger asked.
There is a simple answer. Strategic su-
periority is the power to make other
people do what you want them to do.
Already, the Soviets, approaching a
palpable strategic superiority, give signs
that it is their intention to control our
defense policy. They set out to block
the deployment of the neutron bomb
in Europe, and they did. They evi-
dently intend also to try to prevent our
deployment of intermediate-range Per-
shing II missiles in Europe. They have
given plain notice that they will not
permit the United States to deploy an
MX missile that would in fact be an
"invulnerable" counterforce weapon.
In the best of circumstances, the mis-
the nineteen-eighties. SALT II, if rati-
expires in 1985.. By, then, the
fied
,
Soviets will know all there is to know
about the capabilities of the new Amer-
ican weapon. They know enough al-
ready to be certain that it is a counter-
force missile, and we do not pretend
otherwise. It will have a combination
of yield and accuracy that gives to each
warhead a kill probability against a So-
viet silo without precedent in our mis-
sile force. In response, the Soviets need
only say that if we go ahead they will
have to abandon the "fractionation')
limits of a maximu rMWA
-Older readers will recall that most
notorious of all presidential campaign
television commercials, the one in .1964
that showed a little girl plucking. the
petals from a daisy while the voice-over
recited the countdown to an all-obliterat-
ing nuclear explosion. 'Paid for by the
Democratic. National Committee, it was
designed to impute to Senator Barry
Goldwater a degree of recklessness, bor-
dering on insanity, that would, were he
to, be elected President, in all likelihood
lead to a nuclear holocaust killing tens
of millions of little children around the,
world. The ghastly irony of that com-
mercial is that at the very time it was
receiving the personal approval of Presi-
dent Johnson, his own Secretary of De-
fense, Robert McNamara, was fixing in
concrete an American military strategy,
that had no options other than'this na-
tion's surrender or the indiscriminate
slaughter of countless millions of civilians
here .and. in the. Soviet Union in a mili-
tarily pointless nuclear exchange.. What
makes it all the more appalling is that
the Russians,'by contrast, were then elab-
orating a strategy designed to gain vic-
tory by destroying Western, armed forces
while minimizing civilian casualties: an
application of classic Clausewitzian doc-
trine. .
It is this reality that underlies the anti-
MAD, anti-SALT partisans' call for the
development of city-protection systems,
from fallout shelters to.anti-ballistic mis-
siles. And it is one of the sovereign
ironies of our age that the proponents of
MAD ' have succeeded in portraying the
anti-SALT camp as being indifferent to
the horrors of nuclear war, while in point
of fact it is MAD, and MAD alone, that
postulates the nuclear annihilation of
Mutual assured destruction is. theni great cities as the logical culmination to
strate that has led the United Statesi international conflict.
lease 2 0 fO1I1 i!ofIA-RDP88 fh1
offensive forces of nuclear bombers and
missiles, sufficient to destroy the cities
R00R993?'I.h4, a fervent support
-I
er of SALT II, in a review of Dyson's
per land-based missi a which are im-
posed by SALT H. President Carter has
 book in the Washington Post, made a! destruction is the kind of idea thati says any new treaty will have to 'include r
"to
f1 # have come
similar point. Sakharov rc w"vAIE r FR$ qQQWJn{12 fa yRARa8F .131pe Ot0?
words "Somewhere between the Damage limitation, h y contrast, is in-= ep te t c ri eep cuts" } I But Pe for for malting "deep cutcfie test;
pel of nonviolence and the strategy stinctive-the idea of defending oneself of any new agreement, he says, "we've
of Mutual Assured Destruction there is easy to grasp. got to get our arms control constituency
thinking in a more sophisticated and ma
must be a middle ground on which
I a"
reasonable people can stand-a ground UT, above all, is it not possible to. G luelb way andoot these things.
and other analysts point to the
that allows killing in self-defense but return to the simplicity of the. need to look more closely at elements
forbids the purposeless massacre of in- idea that nuclear arms should be con- within the over-all total of strategic'
nocents." Sakharov then comments, trnlled? \'l nhlstettcr has remarked of weapons, such as agreements that would
"With all my heart and soul, I sup- SALT that it is a problem posing as a: help keep missile submarines safe. I
j - Within government, thorough exami-
port port this thesis," adding his agreement solution. Part of the problem has been' nation of these questions has only recent- `
with George Kerman that first-strike the attachment of the process of nego-, ly begun. There is no expectation of
nuclear weapons are both amoral and,1 nation to the specific assumptions of a; breakthrough negotiations next time.' in the West, can lead to, in Sakharov's' strategic doctrine that only one side; The next SALT agreement will indeed i
y be modest," said one knowledgeable Pen-
words, "dangerous complacency with entertained. Yet further problem has' i tagon official.
a
regard to conventional weapons." (Hel arisen from the unreal notion that there Is it truly not possible to propose to:
refers to the decline of Western con- is somehow a distinction between "stra- the Soviets that some reductions be
ventional a-ms.) - tegic" nuclear weapons and other kinds. negotiated forthwith? So that the'
Moving and humane as such a com- The Pershing II missile, which the world, ourselves included, will know
ment may be, it ignores the fact that, United States would like NATO to de- that the time is coming when the'
in principle, assured destruction was ploy in Western Europe, is as much al l strength of our respective fore s will
not an offensive strategy. Cities wouldl strategic weapon as far as Britain and at last begin to decline? And if the
be levelled only- as a response to ag- Holland are concerned as is the Tri-t Russians refuse then at least we will,
gression: the very terribleness of the1 dent in the United States. Almost the know what we are in for.
response to aggression was supposed best case for SALT II' is that SALT III A senator can take refuge it what
to prevent it. It were well that, before could engage the whale panoply of na- the body calls the "pending business.."
abandoning the doctrine, we remember
tion-busting nuclear arms. The United And that is the SALT II treat). The
why we adopted it in the first place. States and the Soviet Union today have debate over its ratification ought to be!
But that, in a way, is the most telling far ton many nuclear weapons. They an opportunity for the illurnina-:ion ofl
point. It is hard to remember just why ought not to have any. Yet while the our situation, an opportunity to ex-1
we did it. As a set of ideas, deterrence other does, both will. But need we amine the quality of the ideas th:'t have,
theory was perhaps not very complex; have more and more? Need we sign brought us to our present pass. On Au-
but it was too complex. treaties to legitimate an arms race that gust 1st, I proposed an amendment to
Political ideas must be simple., neither side might be willing shame- the treaty in the hope that it might
Which is not to say they must be facile. lessly to go forward with unilaterally? prove clarifying. I have taken the lan-
To the contrary, the most profound An agreement on principles accom-I guage about "significant and snbstan-
propositions are often the simplest as: panning SALT Ti asserts that it is the : tial reductions in the numbers of stra-1
well. Whitehead's rule to "seek sim-; intention of the parties to achieve in tegic offensive arms". from the Joint
plicity and distrust it" is appropriate-` SALT III what are called "significant Statement of Principles and Basic,
ly cautionary, but he did first of alll and substantial reductions in the num- Guidelines for Subsequent Negotiations
say: seek simplicity. Imagine explaining hers of strategic offensive arms." But which accompanies the-treaty end in-
assured destruction to a rally. There! already the Carter Administration- serted it-as the last paragraph of the
was a time when no one had to do this strangely ambivalent Administra- treaty and 'specified that unless such
that, when the essential information! tion whose pronouncements Senator reductions are agreed to by Deccmber~
was held in a few hands and a defer- Charles McC. Mathias, Jr., has de- 31, 1981, the treaty terminates.
ence system made it possible for de- scribed as "an antiphonal chorus of ( . This date corresponds to the period
visions to be made without much being,, hawk and dove"-has been warning ff + of a protocol accompanying the treatyquestioned. That was the political situa- us not to expect anything of the sort. (which prohibits either side- frcm de-
tion in which assured destntction was. Gelb, in his Foreign Policy article, Iploying mobile ICBM latinchers-an
adopted as national strategy. That noting that "many -people insist that !MX, for instance-or deploying sea-
situation no longer exists. We will only through reductions can one launched or ground-launched cruise
never knowingly agree to start build- achieve `real anus control,"' warned missiles with a range in excess of sixi
ing the MX merely as a bargaining chip, against "a fascination with reductions." hundred kilometres, of the sort we!
as some have suggested, intent on stop- Not many weeks after the article ap- riow contemplate placing in Western 1
ping as soon as a bargain is reached. peared, this became a distinct Adrninis-. Europe. The Joint Statement of Prin-
A shift in American strategy to de- tration line. When the Foreign Rela- ciples provides that these issues will bell
fensive modes that the Soviets could tions Committee began in mid-October discussed in SALT IlL But on October!
not think aggressive or destabilizing to "mark up" the SALT if treaty, 26th President Carter assured Senate
would now require an open debate on "highly placed" sources were all over; Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd that
strategic doctrine of the kind we have Capitol Hill warning against the very l
he was utterly and irrevocabI ' cam-
not had. For what it may suggest, thought that SALT III might produce' mitted to going forward with bath the:
let me note that after a year's im- arms reductions. Vernon A. Guidry,' MX and the cniise missiles and would;
mersion in the subject I have no t. Jr., reported in the Washington Star: l never bargain them away in return
view of my own, save . ppdbltsdi . r Release 2005/Q11/12 : CIA- P88-0l31kRQOARQ. And so it has',
Une key . Al. analyst stil in govern=
to think that political ideas, in order- eat, who did not want to be named,' come to this. Determined above all else!
to be viable, must be simple. Assured r~n-KT11:U' Ij
 Approved For Release 2005/91/12 : CIAlRDP88-01315RO004003500119-3
. ___ [?___._ _-1 F r o frpntvi t_ _L_ 1:1_
with arms limitation in the title, a!
President pledges himself never to limit
arms but rather to raise them to un-
precedented levels. This, of course, will
mean the collapse of SALT III---unless
.we agree now that by a time certain in
the near future actual reductions will
be agreed to. This is to say, before the
MX momentum is so great that the
Russians shift into a yet higher gear in
order to outrace us, while we become I
ever more panicky as the realization
spreads that two decades of deterrence
have left us. desperately exposed to
Soviet threat.- -
I expect all manner of criticism of
my particular initiative. It will be
argued, by defenders of 'the SALT
process, that two years is too short a
time to complete the task. I will be
told that wisdom dictates that the pace
of - arms-reduction negotiations not be
forced. Yet one wonders whether such
objections by defenders of the process
do not 'indict that very process-byl
pointing out the futility of trying to
make it do what it is supposed to. I
will be reminded that the Soviets re-
sisted the proposals for armed reduc-
tions offered by Secretary Vance in
March of 1977. If they would not
agree even to discuss them in 1977,
why should they do so now? I believe
this question needs to be answered,
and as soon as reasonably possible. I
think it best that the SALT II treaty
itself oblige the Soviets to give us their
answer-one way or the other---so
that we are no longer able to delude
ourselves about our prospects.
-WVe did delude ourselves after
SALT I. An amendment by Senator Al-
an Cranston to the joint Resolution
of Congress that endorsed the Interim
Agreement called on the President at
the earliest practicable moment to be-
gin "Strategic Arms Reduction Talks
(sART)" with the Soviet Unicn, the
People's Republic of China, and other
countries. In a prescient speech on the
Senate floor on September 14, 1972,
Cranston said:
endless series of escalators broken only
by occasional landings which lead in turn
to other escalators. A partial limitation I
will be followed by a new build-up,
which may in turn be limited by a new,
freeze and superseded by new and so-!
phisticated forms of escalation. And so it
will go.
An amendment by Senator Edward
S. Brooke declared:
Congress considers that the success of
the interim agreement and the attain-,
nient of more permanent and compre-~
pensive agreements are dependent upon;
the preservation of longstanding United
States policy that neither the Soviet
Union nor the United States should seek -
unilateral advantage by developing a first-
strike potential.
Clearly, neither expression of congres-
sional intent and desire had the least
effect on the outcome of SALT Ii.
But have we -ever probed deeply
into Soviet feelings on this matter?
We have never asked them to face,
directly, the intellectual dilemma of an
arms-limitation negotiation that pro-
duces arms expansion. Or is this what
the Soviets have wanted all along?
Surely, they have prospered militarily
and geopolitically during the life of the{
SALT negotiations. Has that been their!
purpose? We have nothing whatever'
to lose if we trv to find out. At the
least, I have been convinced that the
SALT process is not self-corrective, and
that, accordingly, the energy necessary
to change its present direction must
be generated from outside the SALT
process. It is a process grown unreal,
producing results opposite to those
intended but thereupon defended as
valuable in their own right. Gibbon has
been described as detecting a "leakage
of reality" in - the late Roman Empire.
There was a Pope then, and- it didn't
help, and it may not help that there is
one still. But John Paul II certainly
had a point when he said,;;at they
United. Nations, that the nuclear build-1
up shows there is "a desire to be ready]
for war, and being ready means being!
able to start it."
-DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHANM
Approved For Release 2005/01/12 : CIA-RDP88-01315R000400350019-3