## Chapter 2

# Deterrence Through Détente

## *The Hand of Henry Kissinger*

WHEN PRESIDENT NIXON took office in 1969, he spoke at once of the unique and fatal implications which nuclear weapons possess for the statesman. 'While I would like', he said, 'to provide the American people with complete protection against nuclear attack, it is not now within our power to do so...' The President added, 'It might look to an opponent like the prelude to an offensive strategy threatening the Soviet deterrent.'

President Nixon was reiterating the essence of Robert McNamara's passionate presentation to the Soviet Premier, Mr Kosygin, at the Glassboro summit two years earlier. To attempt a nuclear defence would merely mean an intensified race in *offensive* weapons to overpower that defence, and, therefore, 'Mutual assured destruction' - assuring the certain threat of retaliation in kind - should be acknowledged as the rational prescription for stable deterrence. It fell to the Nixon Administration to bring about the fascinating and fitful negotiation with the Soviet Union which was to give a cold and ambiguous assent to Robert McNamara's proposition.

The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) became the principal arena for a struggle which was itself a substitute for war. SALT was compared, in the beginning, to the Congress of Vienna in the last century, which secured the forty years of peace that followed the Napoleonic Wars. The similarities were superficially beguiling. What Talleyrand had said of his colleagues and former allies against Napoleon, that they were 'too frightened to fight one another, too stupid to agree', was given a wholly new dimension by the nuclear competition. The Russians were achieving nuclear parity with the United States. The balance of power was being challenged.

In 1968, the year Nixon was elected, the Russian had reasserted their hegemony in Europe by invading Czechoslovakia. In South Vietnam, the Communist forces (armed by the Soviet Union) had launched the 'Tet'

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offensive in more than forty provincial towns. Their ability to do so was seen in America at the time as overthrowing certain basic assumptions about the nature and progress of the war in Vietnam. In consequence, amid a growing domestic tumult, President Johnson decided not to seek re-election. As President Nixon drove down Pennsylvania Avenue from Capitol Hill on his inauguration day, the last image that he can have taken with him into office, as his car turned the corner by the White House, was of some stands of hostile demonstrators against the Vietnam War, waving the Viet Cong flag and chanting the name of Ho Chi Minh, the Communist leader with whose insurgent armies the United States was at war. There was grave public disquiet – and at the gates of the White House itself.

Into this forbidding context stepped Dr Henry Kissinger, with his immense talents and intelligence. For almost ten years he was to be one of the most powerful men in the world. In his own book about the Congress of Vienna, Dr Kissinger had written of those statesmen who achieved final greatness that it was given to them 'not only to maintain the protection of order but to have the strength to contemplate chaos – and there to find the material for fresh creation'. How far did chaos appear to Henry Kissinger himself to be the prospect, as he went to the White House as President Nixon's National Security Adviser and later his Secretary of State?

**HENRY KISSINGER:** It was a very difficult period, because the bipartisan consensus that had characterised US foreign policy for most of the post-war period was collapsing. A kind of opposition was developing in the United States that was unprecedented. The practical proposals that were being made had the consequence of a complete collapse of a military effort in Vietnam that our predecessors had started and which had left us with 550,000 troops in place. (Our studies indicated, for example, that it would take us eighteen months to get them out, even as a simple logistics problem.) This was continued with an attack on every military programme, together with the fact that the people who had created the conditions went into opposition to what were their own policies as soon as they were out of office. So it was an extremely complicated situation, not eased by the fact that President Nixon (who was a man of great accomplishment and great knowledge in foreign policy) did not have the art of gaining popular support the way, for example, President Reagan has.

**CHARLTON:** The 'strength to contemplate chaos', you said, 'there to find the material for fresh creation...' Why was arms control, SALT, the material for fresh creation as you saw it, and to become the principal activity for what you called 'a new structure of peace' with the Soviet Union?

**KISSINGER:** That was not our policy. Our policy was much more complicated than this. Arms control to us (that is, to Nixon and me, and to those who dominated the Nixon Administration) was not an end in itself.

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It was one of the tools, and in fact we did not make even the first preliminary agreement on arms control until May 1971, which was two-plus years after we came into office. Our strategy was to try to bring China into play; to try to isolate North Vietnam; to establish a new relationship with Europe and with the Soviet Union; to move ahead on a broad front. We believed in 'linkage'. We, for example, did not agree to any increase in trade until there had been some preliminary agreement on arms control. So we never believed that arms control by itself could carry the whole burden of East-West relations. There were, however, significant segments of American public opinion (especially scientific and intellectual opinion) who thought exactly that; and since they were needed to carry any agreement through the Congress against conservative opposition, they tended to have a more vocal role than our theory would have justified.

HENRY KISSINGER HAD AN overarching concept of grand strategy. His enticing of China out of its years of self-imposed isolation and the dialogue he established with the leaders of the Soviet Union have written some of the most important history of the twentieth century. Kissinger declared that the problem of the age was how to 'manage' the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower. That relationship turned fundamentally on the supreme instruments of national power and sovereignty – nuclear weapons.

As the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks began, the Soviet military programme was gaining momentum. (Dean Rusk has already drawn our attention, in the first chapter, to the decisions the Russians had taken in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis). For their part, the Americans had stopped building ICBMs, for the reasons Robert McNamara has given, and were now trying 'not to lose' rather than to win in Vietnam. There was evident concern about the long-term trends in the Soviet strategic advance. Kissinger believed that, as nuclear parity approached, it was the duty of the statesman to dominate what he could not avoid. That was also the intention of President Nixon, as the chief American negotiator with the Russians at the SALT talks, Gerard Smith, recalls.

GERARD SMITH: Neither side is going to let the other get a superior position. I think Nixon was sensible enough to realise that the best we could do would be to register parity, and not let the Soviets get into an overreaching position.

CHARLTON: But on the specific point of superiority, written into the Republican Party platform today as it was in the 1950s with President Eisenhower and Secretary John Foster Dulles - did Nixon yield on that for essentially the same reason Eisenhower himself did, that it could no longer be made a continuing requirement of American policy?

SMITH: I suspect that Eisenhower had a much clearer notion of what was possible than Nixon. You speak of Eisenhower talking about superiority.

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Soviet Union – as he did, symbolically, in the SALT agreement of 1972 – what did President Nixon then feel would deter the Soviet Union from political expansion elsewhere in the world? If the Soviet Union had achieved an equality of power with the United States, was not the corollary of that going to be expanding political opportunities?

SMITH: It was Kissinger's thesis that alongside the arms control agreements there would be a network of agreements that it would be in the interest of the Soviet Union to keep. I think Kissinger figured that if the Soviets went around committing aggressions, they could not have these other 'goodies' – and that would deter them.

KISSINGER'S GRAND DESIGN of judicious rewards and punishments as a deterrent, embracing trade and technology and credits as well as arms control, was critical to the nature of his discourse. Arms control by itself could not relieve tensions. If it were not linked to restraint in worldwide competition, Kissinger said, 'It could prove a safety valve for Soviet expansionist designs. Every time there was a Soviet aggressive move, there would be claims that the new tensions were making arms control even more important. And that is why', as Kissinger tells us in his memoirs and has repeated here, 'I believed in "linkage".'

But he was also convinced that the nuclear weapon had added a new dimension of horror and, therefore, responsibility for national leaders. We come to a point which divided Kissinger from some of his conservative critics in America. To what extent did he consider that possession by both sides of the 'absolute weapon' meant there could no longer be an 'absolute enemy' – an enemy whose ideology, or whose very existence, was a threat to one's own existence or survival?

HENRY KISSINGER: I have always believed that Communism is morally repugnant, and I think if you go through my writings you will never find any deviation from that point of view. I have also believed that nuclear weapons impose the necessity of co-existence. I do not base that co-existence on any moral acceptance of the Soviet system, but on the practical necessities that nuclear weapons create. That has been my position from the very beginning. I wrote a book in 1956 called *Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy* which was perhaps premature, but in which I said that, sooner or later (I thought it would come sooner than it did), strategic nuclear weapons would tend towards a kind of parity which would make absolute war impossible; and I called for alternatives. I've never changed that position. I believe that is still true now. Sometimes I have changed my view as to what the alternatives could be, depending on the technology of the moment, and I don't claim infallibility with respect to technological alternatives – but that's not my function.

CHARLTON: How far did you take the view that nuclear threats were more or less infallible in abolishing aggressive intentions?

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KISSINGER: I've never believed that – I've believed exactly the opposite. I've believed that as nuclear parity was achieved, threats *other* than nuclear war would gain greater force, and that it was the obligation of the West to create obstacles to these other threats.

CHARLTON: Stability at the level of the nuclear balance created instability at other levels?

KISSINGER: Exactly.

CHARLTON: How, in your view, did the ratio of nuclear strength influence or dictate the outcome of crisis?

KISSINGER: I have always believed, contrary to many scientists, that you're better off with superiority than with parity. I have also thought that absolute superiority was going to become next to impossible to attain; either because it was no longer achievable technically, or because the calculations would be too complex for anybody to have any confidence in them. Nevertheless, this is one extreme. At the other extreme, however, I believed (and I still believe) that a strategy based on mass extermination of populations would lead to the gradual demoralisation of the West, and to the growth of the unilateral disarmament movement and pacifism. I do not think one can (or should) convince democratic publics that their extermination is the key element in their security, either the threat of *their* extermination or of *mutual* extermination. So my view was that we would be better off with superiority than with parity. Even if superiority was not attainable, we were better off with a capacity for discriminating targeting than with a capacity for indiscriminate destruction.

CHARLTON: You are reported as having said that parity with the Russians stopped you, in your time – over the Soviet attempt, in 1970, to establish a submarine base at Cienfuegos in Cuba – from adopting the same tactics as President Kennedy had during the Cuban crisis in 1962.

KISSINGER: I never said that. Absolutely not. We used more or less the same tactics and we achieved more or less the same result: that is, we achieved the dismantlement of what we thought was a Soviet nuclear submarine base, and which I believe *was* a Soviet nuclear submarine base.

CHARLTON: With the implicit nuclear threat in order to achieve that?

KISSINGER: We didn't need implicit nuclear threats any more than Kennedy did, because Cuba is so close to our shores. We blockaded the harbour of Cienfuegos. He blockaded the whole island – so he more or less used the same tactic.

CHARLTON: Does, therefore, the behaviour of states in the last analysis conform to the traditional pattern – once nuclear parity has been established?

KISSINGER: No – but I think whoever has a local advantage has a decided and very important advantage, precisely because the side that can extricate itself *only* by initiating the use of nuclear weapons is at a very great disadvantage.

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AT THE HEART OF Henry Kissinger's discourse was his stated belief that, as the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity, '... threats other than nuclear war would gain greater force', and that 'it was the obligation of the West to create obstacles to those other threats.' Kissinger laid subsequent failures of the détente policy to create those obstacles, as a deterrent to the extension of Communist power and Soviet influence in his own time, squarely at the door of 'the Watergate scandal'. The crippling of Presidential authority meant the loss of the capacity both to offer incentives for responsible behaviour and to apply inhibiting penalties for aggressive action.

But there was also, perhaps, an underlying, unspoken reason. In Henry Kissinger's search for a stable world order were echoes of what Lord Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary and soul of the coalition against Napoleon, had told the House of Commons about the Congress of Vienna: 'The Congress was not assembled for the discussion of moral principles, but for great practical purposes – to establish effectual provisions for the general security.' Kissinger was trying to wean American foreign policy away from both its traditional oscillations and its historical preoccupation with moral principles. Henry Kissinger's manipulations of the balance of power might have been familiar in the statesman's world of the Congress of Vienna, a context he was trying to recreate; but they were alien to much of the American body politic, to whom foreign policy is obliged to be, above all, a public policy subject to public scrutiny.

HENRY KISSINGER: Our style of foreign policy would have been easily understood in Britain, but was not easy to understand in the United States. We believed in a national-interest-based foreign policy. You did not have to explain in Great Britain through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the problem of throwing Britain's weight to whoever seemed the weaker of the continental countries, and Britain made no moral claim for that. For the United States this was a rather novel approach.

At the precise moment that we had achieved apparent success, both at isolating Vietnam and in relations with China and the Soviet Union, there occurred 'Watergate', a totally unpredictable event which collapsed executive authority, so that for fifteen to eighteen months the locus of executive respect by the public was the State Department – which was unheard of. That then put us into a much more defensive posture, so by 1975, we had a coalition of conservatives and liberals against the policy that Nixon and later Ford were carrying out, with me as Secretary of State. You had liberals who felt that if Nixon was for peace, confrontation could not be all bad, and conservatives who believed that any deal with the Soviets was wicked.

CHARLTON: On the point of the moralistic aspects of the American political tradition, you've written of the time when you came to office that,

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for the United States, conflict is unnatural. It was seen as caused by evil men or motives. Thus the Soviet Union as a tyranny fulfilled the traditional image of irreconcilable conflict as between good and evil.

**KISSINGER:** You have two extremes in America. Since conflict is considered unnatural, one of two things happens: either the opponent is considered inherently evil, or it is believed that the opponent has undergone a conversion and is, therefore, ready for a final settlement – without being able to express what the content of the final settlement is.

**CHARLTON:** But if Americans saw relations between states as either peaceful or warlike, in black and white terms, why did you think, if that *was* the American political tradition, that it had become incompatible with the American national interest and a sound foreign policy?

**KISSINGER:** Because, at the end of the day, the relation among states has to be able to be expressed in some concrete conditions. If you cannot express it in concrete conditions, you are doomed to oscillate between extremes of conciliation and extremes of intransigence, overdo each of them as you go through each phase, and then be disappointed with each phase. The attempt that President Nixon and I made, inconclusively, was to see whether we could express conditions of peace or stability in some specific manner, and this more or less runs counter to the American tradition. Go back to American post-war history; take the policy of containment. You will find Dean Acheson, Dulles, Truman and Eisenhower always saying that when we have positions of strength, the negotiating position will improve. What we were going to *do* with the negotiating position – what we were going to *ask* of the Russians if they came to the conference table – I defy anybody to find one statement.

**DR KISSINGER'S CREATIVE AND COHERENT** substitute for this long-standing omission was his policy of entangling the Soviet Union in a web of involvements on arms agreements, trade and credits, to be linked to restraint by the Russians in the exercise of Lenin's ambition for the Soviet state as a power fulfilling a millennial mission. However, among Kissinger's more compelling domestic critics were those who felt there should be more to these involvements than the principle of agreement on a set of rules, and that what was missing from his concept was an ethic of a peaceful order. Otherwise why resist the revolutionary power?

Liberals who felt that détente condoned the suppression of human rights and conservatives who baulked at notions of equality or parity with the Soviet Union combined under the leadership of a powerful Senator, Henry (Scoop) Jackson. This formidable opposition in the Congress consistently attacked both the arithmetic and the concept of the SALT talks and all but wrecked the policy. One of the Americans who sat with Kissinger across the table from the Russian leaders during the SALT negotiations, as a member of the National Security Council, was Hal Sonnenfeldt.

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dangers of the appearance of inequality, and the expected Soviet ability to translate that advantage into political gains. The argument is endless whether the Soviets in Angola, and in Ethiopia, and later in Afghanistan were exploiting the appearance of strategic advantage.

CHARLTON: Whereas Henry Kissinger, and you, for example, took the view that those numerical advantages were illusory...

SONNENFELDT: We took the view that we could live with numerical disadvantages, especially as regards launchers, for a period of time. But, of course, one of the great disappointments of SALT I was that the clear assumption that there would *then* be substantial cutbacks in offensive forces (on which, incidentally, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Agreement was also based) was an assumption never borne out by subsequent events.

THE EMERGENCE OF THIS particular Soviet advantage in heavy land-based missiles, and the question of whether it stimulated the possibility of political transfers, had returned the American debate to an earlier apprehension, recalling President Kennedy's words in 1960. Reflecting upon the likely consequences of the sudden advent of Sputnik, the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile, he said:

> Soviet missile power will be the shield from behind which they will slowly but surely advance through 'Sputnik' diplomacy, limited wars and the vicious blackmail of our allies. The periphery of the free world will be nibbled away...

The Argument gathered force following President Nixon's decline and fall and became a major factor in the change of climate over the following years which led to the election of President Reagan. How Moscow saw the American condition at the time of the SALT negotiations and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972, which were coincidental with the last stages of the American engagement in Vietnam, has naturally arfoused a good deal of scholarly interest and historical speculation. As Henry Kissinger looked back to those perceptions, do they not show that the Russians had come to see an underlying change in the balance of power and a comparative (if transient) American weakness?

HENRY KISSINGER: Absolutely not! Considering that we had riots in the streets, that we were involved in a war in Vietnam, that the opposition party held both houses of the Congress, I think we achieved an extraordinary flexibility of foreign policy. After all, we drove the Soviets out of the Middle East even *after* Watergate. I don't think the Soviet Union looked on the Nixon Administration as a weak opponent. I think they looked at us as a formidable opponent – we 'opened' to China in the middle of all our travails (which must have been an extremely unsettling time for the Soviet Union) – and what opportunity did they seize during that period? As long as Nixon was even relatively *mimicked* we made progress in negotiations with the Soviet, lost no international position, and in fact made great gains in the Middle East.

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CHARLTON: But wouldn't you agree it is a period seen today as the prelude to a series of global adventures by the Soviet Union?

KISSINGER: It was a prelude to a series of global adventures for a whole variety of reasons. First, because with the collapse of our executive authority, starting in 1973, we destroying a President. We then had a McGovernite Congress. The people who were defeated in 1972, by the most overwhelming majority but one in American history, regained Congress as a result of events that had absolutely nothing to do with the political process. As a result of this, there was the oddest coalition between liberals and conservatives who took away both the carrot and the stick. They prevented us from resisting Soviet aggression in Angola. At the same time they challenged the Soviet Union with the Jackson and the Stevenson amendments, in which they cut off both credits and trade with the Soviet Union - and when the Soviet Union became more aggressive, preventing us from resisting it. Of course it led to the beginning of adventures.

Then, in 1977, you had the Carter Administration, which had an absolutely wrong perception of how to deal with the Soviet Union. You remember that when Carter came in, he said he was 'free of the inordinate fear of Communism'. He certainly did nothing, to put it mildly, to arrest the collapse of the Shah of Iran. He permitted the Soviets a major adventure in the Horn of Africa. There was no foreign policy.

That has nothing to do with détente. Our policy was to resist Soviet adventurism wherever it occurred, and as long as we had any authority we managed to do this. It was not détente that produced that situation - at least not as conceived by Nixon and Ford.

CHARLTON: But would you not agree that, over Angola, the principal elements of your strategy were pretty severely tested? We find you (in October of 1976) saying that 'the introduction of Cuban expeditionary forces, with Russian support, into an area of no historic Soviet or Russian interest is totally unwarranted', and then you went on to say, 'but we've never considered SALT a favour we granted to the Soviet Union, to be turned on and off according to the ebb and flow of our relations'.

KISSINGER: Yes, but let's get a few things straight. In the fall of 1974 the Congress passed the Jackson Amendment, which cut off 'most favoured nation' treatment of the Soviets. It passed a Stevenson amendment which cut off credits. So the Soviet Union, at the end, was worse off than it had been before the détente period started. This happened at the same time, as I've said, that a McGovernite Congress had just been elected that would not support any form of resistance to Communist aggression. Then when the Soviets started stepping up their activities in Angola, and we attempted to resist, the Congress voted against the thirty million dollars we thought we needed to support the anti-Soviet and -Cuban forces (the Savimbi forces, who are still there). At that point the question was, should we cut off SALT ... and at a time when we had a Congress that was not going to increase our military expenditures? I think it is absurd to conduct a

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truculent policy when you're not willing to back it up and I find myself in the ridiculous position that, in this sort of debate, I'm being attacked from the left for being too tough on the Soviets, and by the right for being too soft. We were trying to steer a middle course. Both the left and the right were trying to conduct an essentially moralistic policy – without backing it up with resources.

THE EARLY HOPES OF President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, that agreement to negotiate strategic arms limitations could be linked to Soviet assistance in America's disengagement from the sunless war in Vietnam, were not sustained. The Russians insisted that SALT was to be looked at on its own merits. With America a house divided and the uncompromising zealotry of the Communists in Hanoi, the détente policy could produce no honourable outcome in Vietnam. President Nixon's guarantee to the South Vietnamese proved not to be the bond of the American nation. Vietnam, in strategic terms, was in the end an American surrender.

HENRY KISSINGER: Certainly Vietnam was a disaster; but when you inherit a disaster, when you inherit 550,000 troops, you just cannot switch it off like a television programme. It would have been easy for Nixon, from a purely selfish point of view, to blame it all on his predecessor. But his judgment was, and I think it was correct, that the United States had no right to sacrifice 35,000 troops and simply liquidate it as if nothing had happened. After all, people forget it took de Gaulle five years to get out of Algeria.

CHARLTON: There is the evidence of what Gromyko said to Rab Butler (the British Foreign Secretary) when Butler was trying to enlist Gromyko's help about Vietnam. Gromyko said to him: 'Our American enemies are deeply embedded with men and munitions in Vietnam; we've no desire to interfere.' How much more likely is it that by 1970-71, as negotiations opened on SALT, they did see the American position as one of weakness?

KISSINGER: First of all, what concessions did we make to the Soviets in SALT? I mean, there is a whole series of myths that are retroactively invented which have absolutely no bearing. Can you name on concrete concession we made to the Soviets that was unwarranted – or that was not going to be imposed on us by the Congress anyway?

CHARLTON: I'm interested in how the Soviet Union saw this, and how...

KISSINGER: The Soviet Union, until 1971 and until our opening to China, procrastinated in negotiations. We had a number of things going for us, however. We had the opening to China. We had the fact that the Soviet Union was desperate to make an agreement with the West Germans on Berlin and East Germany, which they could not get against our active opposition. (I'm not saying it was necessary to get our support, but they could not get it against our active opposition.) Third, they were worried, as they always seem to be worried, by the beginning of our strategic

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defences.¹ And fourth, as soon as we started mining Haiphong the Soviet Union also realised that the military situation was changing. If we made a mistake, I think it was that we did not do in 1969 in Vietnam what we did in 1972—but that would have led to a revolt in our Cabinet and Nixon was not prepared to do that.

CHARLTON: There should have been a forward policy, of mining if necessary, earlier ...?

KISSINGER: I believe in retrospect that we should have done in 1969 what we did in 1972: that is to say, demand a settlement, or mined the harbours and bombed North Vietnam, but then that wasn't all that easy. A bombing halt had just been signed by the outgoing administration, and by that time public order had broken down in the United States. It's very difficult for a new administration to take upon itself the responsibility for dividing the country. But, despite these difficulties, in retrospect I believe that we should have done that. In fact, I thought so at the time and recommended it. But I recommended it in a way that had no real force, nor have I ever claimed any credit for it.

CHARLTON: As you remind your critics, there was no military programme sacrificed by the Nixon-Kissinger Administration, but one still has...

KISSINGER: As a matter of fact, SALT, paradoxically, was the only way to preserve our military programmes. Without SALT the Congress would have continued to cut. Take the strategic defence we had at the time: it wasn't called strategic defence, it was called the anti-ballistic missile system, ABM. We started out with twelve defence sites around the country. By the time the ABM agreement was signed, the Congress had already cut it to two; in the next Budget it was going to go down to one; so the thing had become an absurdity. One defence site meant nothing. And the whole thing passed by one vote – the Vice-President's! Every succeeding year it went down. By 1972 it was down to two, by 1973 it would have been down to nothing.

CHARLTON: But does not this very process contribute to what it is known Brezhnev said, in Prague, at a Warsaw Pact meeting in 1973? By 1985, he said, 'as a consequence of what we are achieving through détente, we shall have achieved most of our objectives; a decisive shift in the correlation of forces will be such that we'll be able to exert our influence whenever we need to...'

KISSINGER: Well, first of all, I don't think he said quite that, but...

CHARLTON: That is what he's quoted as...

KISSINGER: ... but never mind. Supposing he did say that (you have to remember that each side has the problem of justifying détente to its hardliners), the facts have certainly not borne this out. I would make the case for the proposition that détente has, on the whole, been more disarming for the Soviet Union than it has been for the West. It has brought

¹i.e. the American anti-ballistic missile system, later abandoned

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it endless troubles in the satellite orbit. It has not improved its relative technological position; quite the contrary, it has declined. If one looks at the growth of other nations in the Far East, it has created the problem of a two-front situation for the Soviet Union; and it led to a massive reduction in their influence in the Middle East. So, in a sense, in détente both sides were betting that they could use history. And even with an impaired Nixon, we made progress; with an unimpaired American administration, I think that situation would have been even stronger.

IN THE DYING LIGHT of the commitment in Vietnam, the American will to match limited war with limited war as a deterrent to the expansion of Communist power was, at best, uncertain. Senator Jackson pressed his attack on the consequent dangers of any perceived weakness in the central nuclear balance of power. The arithmetic of the SALT agreement had left the Russians with more offensive missiles than the Americans. But that had been the price of agreement. With or without SALT, the Russians would have had more because they were building more. What began as an arcane argument of Senator Jackson's about the theoretical possibility of a Soviet first strike against the American land-based missile force, the Minutemen, became a generalised charge that the loose constraints negotiated in SALT had presented the Russians with a claim to strategic superiority and to the political cards that go with it. An influential aide to Senator Jackson at this time, and an even more influential one today in the Reagan Administration where he is Assistant Secretary of Defence, is Richard Perle.

**RICHARD PERLE:** I can recall Senator Jackson sending to Henry Kissinger a memorandum in October 1970, suggesting - on the basis of intelligence that was obviously available to the Administration as well as to the Congress - that under the terms of the agreement that seemed to be emerging as the SALT I Interim Agreement the Soviets could, within the confines of that agreement (generously interpreted), double or even treble the effective capability of their land-based missile force. And that is precisely what happened.

**CHARLTON:** What governed your assessment of Soviet power?

**PERLE:** We had enjoyed a long period in which our own strategic forces were not seriously vulnerable to attack. We enjoyed that at great expense, by the development of submarine-launched ballistic missiles and the placing of land-based ballistic missiles in hardened concrete silos to shelter them from the effects of nearby nuclear blast. The inaccuracy of Soviet weapons that might be directed against those forces - all meant that a Soviet attack would fail. It would fail to destroy a significant fraction of the American retaliatory capability. For that reason there was a high degree of *stability* in the relationship.

What troubled us in the early 1970s was the prospect that the growth of Soviet forces would, in due course, lead to a situation where much of our

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retaliatory capability would be at risk. At the time it seemed to us that the Soviets were determined to acquire a capability to hold our retaliatory forces at risk – although this was not a proposition agreed to by the Administration. We saw the emergence of the threat which has since developed. Soviet doctrine, the structure of Soviet forces, the level of investment the Russians were then making and have continued to make since, all suggested to us that they wish to achieve a kind of military predominance which they believed (and continue to believe) translates ultimately into political power.

SENATOR HENRY JACKSON'S CRITIQUE was conditioned by a more visceral divination of the Soviet Union's intentions and capabilities, and the Senator's aide, Richard Perle, is thought to have exercised considerable persuasion over it. In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger accepted that Jackson had carefully studied Soviet tactics and strategy, and was convinced that they were out to undermine the free world. But while Kissinger agreed that this was a true enough reading of their intentions, he rejected the implication that all agreements were futile. 'Jackson objected', wrote Kissinger, 'to any agreement which afforded benefits to the Soviet Union, while he took it for granted that they would sign no agreement that did not promise them some gain ...'

W/

HENRY KISSINGER: I actually considered Jackson a good friend, and I agreed with many of his analyses of Soviet intentions. The difference between Jackson and me was that he wanted all-out confrontation, under the influence of one of his associates, Richard Perle. He wanted all-out confrontation with the Soviets, and he liked a policy of constant 'needling' of the Soviet Union. I believed that – in the face of the Vietnam War and out other pressures, and then in the face of Watergate – to court a confrontation with the Soviet Union would lead to a series of humiliations. That was one disagreement.

Secondly, I was not as pessimistic as Jackson about the evolution of the two systems. I believed that, on the whole, if we could keep the Soviet Union from expanding, we were capable of conducting a more flexible policy than the Soviet Union – as we proved in the Middle East. I did not think at all that the Soviet Union was bound to prevail in a political context. Quite the opposite.

Finally, I did not believe that the Soviet Union was gaining an advantage. It depended on whether we were willing to make the defence expenditures that were permitted under the agreement, and that was a matter of American decisions, not Soviet acquiescence.

THAT WAS PRECISELY THE POINT where Senator Jackson concentrated his attack on the nature of the arms control process. SALT became both an orphan and a victim when divorced from Henry Kissinger's wider context

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for it. 'Jackson', wrote Kissinger, 'was an absolutist who saw issues in black and white. We were gradualists seeking a policy that could be sustained over a long period.'

**RICHARD PERLE:** I think that is so much abstract obscurantism. Jackson believed that the only agreements worth having were agreements that diminished the magnitude of the threat we faced. Agreements that *permitted* the threat faced by the United States and its allies were not worth having. That is precisely the sort of agreement that was achieved in 1972. Since the opening rounds of the discussions that led to the agreement in 1972, the Soviets have added more than 8000 strategic warheads to their inventory. The threat has increased enormously. It was the *quality* of the agreement and not the fact of the agreement to which we took exception.

**CHARLTON:** Henry Kissinger maintains that he did not believe the Soviet Union *was* gaining an advantage. It depended, he said 'on whether we were willing to make the defence expenditures permitted under the agreement, and that was a matter of American decisions, not Soviet acquiescence.'

**PERLE:** It's fair to ask what was the point of arms control that set the stage for a requirement that we make massive additional investments in precisely the strategic arms that were the subject of the negotiation, while permitting the Soviets also to make massive investment in additional strategic forces. That was the point about the failure of the Interim Agreement. It permitted very sizeable growth on both sides. In my view it didn't restrain the Soviet Union at all, in any significant way.

**CHARLTON:** But when you and Jackson drafted the ratification of SALT I (and the Jackson Amendment), Kissinger appears to have taken the view that your attack was fundamental. It caught him unawares. 'They sought to destroy our policy', he has said, 'not to ameliorate it.'

**PERLE:** No, the reality was that the Interim Agreement was going to pass the Senate. There was no doubt in our minds about that. So we sought instead to condition, or attempt to condition, future agreements. The Jackson Amendment says simply that future agreements must be on the basis of equality — because the 1972 agreement clearly was not.

**CHARLTON:** Do you take the view that equality can be established as a fact? Because if it can't, isn't that tantamount to saying that no agreement is possible?

**PERLE:** I think equality can be established as a fact, but I think it is very difficult to freeze equality. The strategic forces of both sides are in a constant state of flux and evolution. And as vulnerabilities are discovered, they need to be fixed; as imbalances develop they need to be corrected. The role of arms control in accomplishing that is a much more difficult proposition.

Looking back on 1972, I think Henry Kissinger would have a hard time arguing that that agreement facilitated our maintenance of an effective balance. Indeed, in discussions I've had with him, he lays great stress not

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

45

on the military benefits of the 1972 agreement but on the political necessity
as he saw it at the time. With the emotions of Vietnam affecting the
American Congress and public as profoundly as they then did affect us, he
wanted to buy a bit of time in which we might regroup, in order more
effectively to compete with the Soviet Union.

THE INFERENCE THAT HENRY KISSINGER'S détente policy embodied a
melancholy pessimism about the American will to sustain a policy of
containment became central to the political debate which led, in the end, to
the Reagan Presidency. The critics of SALT questioned the assumption
that the Soviet Union could be contained other than by American power.
As Kissinger said, it was part of a larger controversy over whether arms
control enhanced or weakened the security of the West.

Kissinger himself rejected the notion which appeared in the anti-ballistic
missile debate (as it had in the debate over the hydrogen bomb in the
1950s), that unilateral restraint by the United States would induce the
Russians to follow suit. There was, he said, overwhelming evidence to the
contrary.

Early in the Nixon Administration, in the new uncertainties created by
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and following the domestic
upheavals over the course of the Vietnam War which caused President
Johnson to step aside, the Americans had taken the decision to go ahead
and be the first to deploy the multiple-warhead missile, MIRV. The
decision was criticised at the time and — almost more than any other since
—has been held responsible for making a huge increase in the nuclear
arsenals of both sides inevitable. Research and development of MIRV was
begun in the previous administration, as Robert McNamara reminded us
earlier, 'solely as a means of countering the Soviet deployment of an anti-
ballistic missile defence'.

HENRY KISSINGER: Secretary McNamara did not want to build an anti-ballistic missile defence. He therefore developed the idea of a MIRV, arguing that with MIRV we could saturate any Soviet defence and that therefore there would be no strategic inequality if the Soviets had a defensive system and we did not. By the time the Nixon Administration came into office in 1969, more than ten tests of MIRVs had already been conducted. It is generally thought that weapons are operational at a maximum of twenty tests, but certainly, by the time you have undertaken ten tests you have gone down the road toward proving the weapon. Then, for a while, the Soviets were reluctant to enter negotiations.

So by November 1969 (when negotiations started), probably fifteen
tests had been conducted on a schedule established by the previous
administration. Most of its members then started opposing — just as they
had with the Vietnam War — what they themselves had created. We had no
assurance at all that the Soviets would agree to a limitation of ballistic

46

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

missile defences. We in fact proposed, and we opened, the MIRV discussion – admittedly with an unacceptable proposal. The proposal was that there should be a stoppage of all testing. The Soviets countered with a proposal that there should be a stoppage of all *deployment*, but that *testing* should be permitted, of course, this was an easy way for them to catch up. CHARLTON: Rather like the SDI issue now?

KISSINGER: Right. So that is where it stalemated. Now, should we also have proposed, at that point, that there should be a stop to *both* testing and deployment? Well, this is a tactical issue. Historical experience with the Soviets shows that, if they wanted an agreement limiting MIRVs, we could not have driven them off the table with it. They would have deluged us with it. Our primary problem at that point was to keep enough support for the agreements that we *were* making, and MIRV was the one programme that the Defence Department had that was not being contested in any significant way – or any decisive way – by the Congress.

As soon as we had the SALT I agreement, we made a whole series of proposals on MIRVs to the Soviet Union which would have imposed severe limitations – none of which they accepted. So, should we have made it two years earlier? It's easy to say in the light of all that happened. One always has to consider the option in any one field compared to the totality of issues that were before us.

CHARLTON: In December 1974 you said, of MIRV, that it was the same question people faced when the H-bomb was developed. It raises the issue whether it's the United States development which then in turn produces that same development on the other side.

KISSINGER: And I think the answer is the same. The Soviets started deploying MIRVs in 1973, which means that they were well along by 1970 and 1971, which is the time we may have had an opportunity. As it turned out, we exploded our H-bomb about nine months before the Soviets. We deployed our MIRVs about eighteen months before the Soviets. It is impossible therefore that they could have developed MIRVs just in that short interval *between* the time we did and they did.

MIRV AND ITS FRATRICIDAL counterpart ABM, the anti-ballistic missile, were respectively offence and defence, sword and shield. Superficially they had transported this classical antithesis into the nuclear era. But given the enormous power of even a single nuclear weapon, the ancient discord of sword and shield were adjudged unconvincing by Robert McNamara. It fell to Henry Kissinger to search for some common understanding of the proposition that, in the nuclear age, the adversary becomes in a sense a partner in the avoidance of nuclear war as a political and moral necessity.

The historic essence of the first SALT agreement, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, was that each side renounced the defence of its society against the nuclear arsenal of the other. As Henry Kissinger has reminded us, the US Congress had cut the budgets for an American

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

47

counterpart to the already deployed Soviet ABM defence system 'to an absurdity'. But in the labyrinth of the SALT accord is Ariadne's threat – which leads us, in the present day, to President Reagan's case for the 'Star Wars' defence.

Two expectations arising from SALT I were not fulfilled. Henry Kissinger had hoped to shape the outcome so as to delay the trend which would give the Soviet Union a first-strike capability against the American land-based missiles by the 1980s, and then to use that delay to negotiate reductions in the numbers of offensive missiles in another and more comprehensive agreement. But the speed and extent to which the Soviet Union built up their offensive forces were underestimated.

HENRY KISSINGER: You have to understand a number of things about the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. First, there are a great many heroes *now* who were in their foxholes when all this was going on! At the time of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the number of US missile sites, as I've already pointed out, had been reduced to two. So our choice was whether we were going to agree to the Congress unilaterally dismantling the anti-ballistic missile defences, or whether we were going to get something for it from the Soviet Union.

At that time the build-up of Soviet offensive forces was in its infancy. We made a unilateral statement (or we had our delegation make a unilateral statement) to read into the record that the United States considered the continued existence of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to depend on significant *cuts* in offensive forces. If these offensive forces were not reduced within the time limit of the offensive agreement, then the conditions for abrogation of the treaty would exist.

Rather than this leading to a reduction of offensive forces, the Soviets built up their offensive forces to a remarkable degree. So the balance between offensive and defensive forces was substantially destroyed. As soon as the ABM treaty and SALT I were signed, we initiated negotiations for the limitation of multiple warheads and reductions to very small numbers. *That* the Soviets consistently refused. So we have a totally new situation today.

DR KISSINGER REMAINS CONVINCED, however, that SALT was made, in his words, 'the whipping boy' for a more fundamental philosophical contest in East-West relations. The extent to which American strategic policy should be informed by a discussion of 'moral principles' rather than assembled for 'great practical purposes' (the distinction Castlereagh made concerning the Congress of Vienna), and the extent to which it was a reflection of domestic impulses and emotions – therefore subjective rather than objective – could not be resolved. That same Soviet Union with which, in President Nixon's Administration, Kissinger established a wide range of contacts, is the one with which President Reagan much later

48

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

would find it difficult to collaborate at all – for essentially the reasons given by Senator Jackson's associate (and now President Reagan's Assistant Secretary for Defence) Richard Perle.

RICHARD PERLE: The kind of business that was done in 1972 was profitable, but profitable for one side only. The Soviets will always be prepared to do business with us if it produces an advantage for the Soviet Union. I haven't the slightest doubt that Mr Gorbachev would cheerfully sign agreements with the United States that accomplish for him what the 1972 agreement accomplished for Brezhnev.

Look at the other agreements of that period. I don't think one can take the arms control agreements in isolation. There was an agreement on grain which led immediately to a massive Soviet raid on the American grain harvest, pushing up the price of grain to American consumers and solving a very serious Soviet problem. There were agreements on science and technology that led to very significant transfers of technology to the Soviet Union, and we now see them showing up in Soviet military systems. There was a general agreement on principles governing the relationship that crowned a thirty-year Soviet effort to induce the West to accept the principles contained in that document – the Soviet policy line of 'peaceful co-existence' and the like. I think, looking back on that period, that the agreements signed were in every case advantageous to the Soviet Union, and I think that's all one needs to know in order to explain their readiness to sign them.

NEITHER HENRY KISSINGER NOR PRESIDENT NIXON had any desire to accommodate their critics. To a large extent they shared the philosophical case against the Soviet state and its ideology. Dr Kissinger thought of Senator Jackson as an ally and regretted that the Senator chose to oppose him. It was, wrote Kissinger in his memoirs, 'a national tragedy that those who shared a similar strategic analysis should conduct a civil war over tactics ...'

But the gap was surely wider than a disagreement over tactics. Both sides wished to 'contain' the Soviet Union. Kissinger thought that, with seductive inducements, the Soviet Union might be escorted from its traditional expansionism to restraint, and that Russia's economic failures and fear over Kissinger's bringing China into play would press the Soviet leaders to co-existence on the West's terms. The other side - Kissinger's conservative opponents - saw nothing but an implacable adversary and an endless vista of contests and confrontations. At that well-remembered press conference in Moscow in 1974, Henry Kissinger asked a question that has often been quoted since: 'What in the name of God is strategic superiority?' The resonance of this has been sustained. How should the historian understand him?

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

49

HENRY KISSINGER: That is absolutely correct. I do not believe that you can rely on a first-strike strategy as the defence against all contingencies. Again, one has to consider this in the context of events. That remark was made in late June 1974 in Moscow, a month before Nixon was forced out of office. We found ourselves in the position of being harassed on détente at a time when we had absolutely no capacity for confrontation. And I still believe this: I do not think it is possible to achieve the degree of strategic superiority that existed in the 1940s and 1950s, such that we can rely on nuclear superiority to defend Europe and other parts of the world. I remind you that Reagan has never tired of pointing out in the last two or three years that we are not trying to win a war. In what way does that differ from what I said ten years earlier?

CHARLTON: One of your most persistent and formidable critics, Senator Jackson, sought to know why you had not demanded lower limits from the Soviet Union, as he felt you should have. I thought you gave a very interesting answer to that on the way to Peking in 1974, which was taken down verbatim at the time. I'd like to read it to you. You said:

> The only way we could even have talked about lower numbers was to drastically increase defence spending and to hold the increase for a number of years, long enough to convince the Soviets that we were going to drive the race through the ceiling with them...

That sounds very like the Reagan programme today.

KISSINGER: Exactly correct. That is still my view.

DR HENRY KISSINGER'S HAND WAS EVERYWHERE during one of the most creative periods in post-war diplomacy, of which he is one of the great public figures. Why did he think disenchantment with détente set in so early? 'Overall,' Kissinger says, détente was 'ground down between a liberal idealism unrelated to a concept of power and the liturgical anti-Communism of the right'. But, Kissinger has said, although we made our share of mistakes, the fundamental assault on détente was made by the Soviet Union: with the Soviet-Cuban expeditionary forces in Angola and Ethiopia; their appearance in Aden; the Kremlin's encouragement of North Vietnam's takeover of the South; the pressures on Poland; and the invasion of Afghanistan. Détente had not deterred.

Over the next few years and during the long agony for détente of the Carter Presidency, the strategic debate in the United States was powerfully shaped by forces associated with the Committee on the Present Danger. They would return a different answer to Henry Kissinger's question in Moscow that June night in 1974: 'What in the name of God is strategic superiority?'

[L]

RED ALERT

53

the particular resonance that the Korean War had in the 1950s, in calling for rearmament?

ROSTOW: Exactly. Calling for rearmament and a strengthening of the policy of solidarity. Trying to repair the damage which had been done to the national foreign policy consensus by Vietnam.

CHARLTON: No doubt there were many ingredients in the making of your decision, but what was the final spur to forming the Committee on the Present Danger?

ROSTOW: The final spur was the sense that we had very little time; that the hopes that had been invested in SALT I, and in Nixon's policy of détente, were manifestly proving to be false; and that the Soviets were gaining so rapidly in nuclear strength, despite the provisions of SALT I and the prospective provisions of SALT II, that we soon would have no alternative but to surrender. The Soviet policy with regard to nuclear weapons and therefore with regard to arms control agreements was extremely astute and well conceived; but it was a policy not of détente, not of relaxation of tensions, but of nuclear blackmail.

EUGENE ROSTOW'S PERCEPTIONS of the Soviet Union were those which had been broadly endorsed by the Americans during the period of the Cold War. It was central to the crusade of the Committee on the Present Danger that events had once more shown the Soviet Union to be incorrigibly militant. The hopes nurtured by the activity called 'détente', and the process of arms control conducted by Henry Kissinger, stood, by these lights, confounded.

The basic concept of parity in the SALT negotiations, as an acceptable strategic relationship with the Soviet Union, was attacked as placing the United States at a disadvantage. While the United States adhered to deterrence and retaliation, parity – plus the Soviet policy of strategic initiative (a belief in a first strike, and weapons assigned with that use in mind) – in fact gave the Russians *superiority*.

This critique was put forward in answer to Henry Kissinger's much-quoted question, uttered in Moscow in June 1974: 'What in the name of God is strategic superiority?' The claim that the SALT talks had acquiesced in an American disadvantage and that Kissinger's approach was fatally flawed is, naturally, in conflict with the views of Henry Kissinger himself, particularly concerning the 'quality' of the SALT I Interim Agreement – the target of what would become the prevailing indictment of détente.

HENRY KISSINGER: At the time of the Interim Agreement, the Soviets were building about 240 missiles a year, and we were building none. We considered it a considerable achievement that we were stopping the build-up of Soviet forces. Now, of course, you can say that the Soviets would have stopped anyway. Nobody can ever prove that. We thought the

54

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

maximum we could achieve in 1972 was to get a freeze on the *additional* 'digging of holes' or of silos by the Soviet Union. Our strategy then was that, in the next period, we were going to strive for a *reduction* of these, plus a reduction of warheads. What we could have achieved if there had not been any Watergate, nobody can ever know.

The fact is that as soon as the agreement was signed, suddenly people started saying this sanctified an inequality of numbers – which was total nonsense, *because they did not count the bombers*. They just counted the missiles. They did not count the fact that we had multiple warheads, that they did not. We then achieved – even after Watergate, under President Ford – equality in numbers. Whereupon the debate shifted on to the 'Backfire' bomber, which has since disappeared from the scene. The basic difficulty is that if you have an opposition that is determined to wreck any negotiation on a subject as technologically complicated as SALT, the administration in office is in an almost hopeless position.

**CHARLTON:** In fact, Admiral Moorer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, giving evidence about this, said the SALT I treaty should be seen not in the light of what it had frozen but of what it had forestalled. That you had actually forestalled what would by 1977 have been a three-to-two ratio in the Soviet Union's favour.

**KISSINGER:** That's exactly correct.

**CHARLTON:** Nonetheless, we find Paul Nitze saying by the mid-1970s that the Soviets were not following a strategy of deterrence and retaliation: 'They spelled out their belief in a strategy of first strike' and their weapons had been assigned 'with that in mind'. Therefore, in their case, 'Parity plus their policy of "strategic initiative" gives them superiority.'

**KISSINGER:** Well, there are a number of things ... I think Nitze is a man of considerable knowledge and one of the most experienced people we have in this field. He felt badly treated by Nixon – and by me I suppose – at the time of the Moscow signing, and there was some merit in it ...

**CHARLTON:** In what respect?

**KISSINGER:** In the sense that the delegation had done ninety-five per cent of the negotiating in Helsinki and Nixon took one hundred per cent of the credit in Moscow. On the other hand, that is not unusual. That is what Presidents tend to do, and in an ultimate sense it is their prerogative. You don't expect laurels to be given to the individual negotiators. (On the other hand, they were not treated well. They were treated rudely and I've pointed that out.)

I do not believe that the Soviets are relying on a first strike. I do believe that the Soviet Union has designed its strategic forces with a more military concept than the United States has. They do have the capacity to prevent a tit-for-tat, because they can respond with more military options than we can. In other words, they can force us into initiating the destruction of civilian targets earlier than *they* have to. That gives them a

RED ALERT

55

great advantage -not to wipe out our retaliatory forces, though they may be able to do that to our land-based retaliatory force.

CHARLTON: What is your response, then, to a SALT critic like Paul Nitze, who said that the basic concept of parity was the flaw for him in the SALT agreements, because parity can't be precisely determined and it puts the United States at a disadvantage because of the differences in military strategy?

KISSINGER: First of all, you've never heard Nitze say anything like that when he was in a position of responsibility. You've only heard Nitze say that out of office; you haven't heard him say that in office. And neither in our administration, nor in the administration he is serving now, has he ever taken anything like that position. On the contrary, he has been more on the conciliatory side - conciliatory in the sense of trying to find something in the point of view that could be negotiated.

CHARLTON: More inclined to 'walk in the woods'?

KISSINGER: Exactly. That's right. And now with the Strategic Defence Initiative he has stated criteria that are in fact unfulfillable, so that operationally he is working more in that direction. But the option of superiority did not exist at the time. There was no programme that we could get through the Congress. There is no programme that we stopped in the Nixón Administration.

It is true that we probably underestimated the speed with which the Soviet Union would 'MIRV'. But by the year 1984 that does not make any difference. The strategic gains the Soviets had made were not due to the rapidity of their 'MIRVing', but due to the irresolution of the Carter Administration. Supposing the Soviets had 'MIRVed' more slowly? We would still have lost Iran. We still would have had a Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

CHARLTON: Yet there is this division still, isn't there, over these perceptions of power which the central nuclear balance conveys. Between those who say the Nicaraguas and Angolas are assisted into history because the central nuclear balance has altered ... that Khruschev withdrew from Cuba because of that ultimate reality, American strategic superiority, and ...

KISSINGER: No. Khruschev withdrew from Cuba because we had local superiority. On top of it, what made it easier was that we also had strategic superiority. We could easily have handled Angola if the Congress had not cut our forces. Whether we could have handled Iran or not can be debated for ever, but certainly - even if we had had superiority - we would not have threatened to use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union in order to keep Khomeini from coming to power. We surely would not have used nuclear weapons to keep the Sandinistas from coming to power, since we put them into power - and that had nothing to do with the strategic balance. That had to do with the understanding of pure political reality.

CHARLTON: You've written of the period of the decline of détente and of

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THE STAR WARS HISTORY

support for arms control that its critics were 'clamouring for a policy
which elevated confrontation into an instrument of policy ...'

KISSINGER: Yes, but without being willing to pay the price for it.

CHARLTON: '... and in the middle of the worst domestic crisis for a century'.

KISSINGER: And, I repeat, without being willing to pay any price. They thought that if you blow the trumpet hard enough the walls of Jericho were going to collapse automatically.

THE SITUATION WITH WHICH Kissinger had been confronted was the one which Nitze and his associates campaigned to redress. Whereas Kissinger had sought to transcend the ideological differences in the cooperative entanglements of détente, the Committee on the Present Danger examined the Soviet challenge much more in terms of the ideological concepts which the Soviet leadership used to describe and defend their policies.

The principal formulation of American strategic policy during the era of containment of Soviet power, which began under President Truman, was a document known as NSC (National Security Council) 68. Then, as now, the military strength of the West was held to be dangerously inadequate. NSC 68 considered the Soviet design of world domination to be indivisible from the Communist system and fatal to the West. The Soviet Union, the inheritor of Russian imperialism, possessed and was possessed by a worldwide revolutionary movement which *required* the dynamic extension of its authority. The author of NSC 68, adopted by President Truman as policy when North Korea (aided by Soviet Russia) invaded South Korea in 1950, was Paul Nitze.

PAUL NITZE: If I might say a word about the origin of it. This was at a time when we found out that the Soviets had tested an atomic weapon in 1949. It was also right after Chiang Kai-Shek had been driven from the mainland of China. I'd been much impressed by a book written by a man called Nathan Leites, who talked about the 'standard operating code' of the Kremlin. In it he stressed the fact that when the 'correlation of forces' was unfavourable, Lenin had adopted the doctrine that that was a time when one ought to throw dust into the enemy's eyes, so that one would have time to rebuild and to change the correlation of forces. So these two events, the removal of our monopoly and the consolidation of Communist control over the mainland, would be two radical changes in the correlation of forces which the Soviets were bound to take into account if they were still following the precepts that Lenin had laid down.

CHARLTON: As in Lenin's famous remark: 'Probe with bayonets, and if you strike mush, go on - if you meet resistance, retreat.'

NITZE: That's correct. Up to that time, US policy and Allied policy generally had been emphasising entirely the economic and the political elements of policy and had paid little attention to the military aspects. Our

-1-

**CHARLTON:** The impeachment of President Nixon and the annihilating victory of North Vietnam over the South in 1975, crowned the political defeat of the United States. The American body politic fell to a feverish and divisive introspection. It was a dark night of the soul for Thomas Jefferson's Republic.

When it came to President Nixon and Henry Kissinger's choice and conduct of a policy of detente designed to mitigate the ambitions of the Soviet Union, the reasonable logic of "what might have been" was slowly replaced by the more passionate logic of what had happened. The predominance of the United States which had continued since the end of the Second World War to guarantee the appearance of order belonged to the past.

In SALT I, the first agreement to limit strategic weapons signed by Nixon and Brezhnev in 1972, the Americans had formally acknowledged their acceptance of the Soviet Union's achievement of nuclear parity. Both sides had renounced defence of their territory and populations against nuclear attack. The agreement left the Americans with more nuclear warheads and the Soviet Union with more powerful missiles. While Mr. Brezhnev had said it was warheads that kill not missiles, any American President was bound to point out that as the Russians placed more warheads on their own larger rockets they would then have an overall superiority which would challenge the American notion of stability.

In other words both sides had subscribed to a parity which, in the absence of further agreement, would be transient.

In addition, if the use of nuclear weapons guaranteed mutual destruction then, arising out of that nuclear stalemate it was conventional military power which shaped the outcome. Therefore, if a great power used a conventional superiority to harm a rival great power's vital interests it would violate the unspoken laws of arms control.

This essentially was the overall challenge to deterrence in part created and starkly posed following the American disaster in Vietnam.

Over the next few years the American strategic debate was powerfully influenced both in and out of government by those Americans who formed the Committee on the Present Danger. Foremost among them was Paul Nitze, who is now President Reagan's chief arms negotiator. He has held high responsibilities for strategic matters in almost every American administration since the end of the Second World War. And in the last half of the 1970's the character of the nuclear arms debate was largely fashioned by Paul Nitze.

**NITZE:** Some of us in 1975, '76, '77 came to the conclusion that there was an inadequate understanding of the degree to which the combination of a regime which continued to believe in the Marxist-Leninist objectives and which was building a superior military capability would exploit that military capability not necessarily in military terms, but in political terms around the world bit by bit, chip by chip, incident by incident.

**CHARLTON:** What Kennedy called being I think nibbled to death in a nuclear stalemate.

**NITZE:** Exactly, this was not widely recognised - It was necessary to emphasize it, that there were so many voices which were taking the opposite point of view, this arms race point of view. I think Paul Warnke was the leading one who used the analogy of two apes on a treadmill and that they were competing and if one of the apes

[LC]

-2-

would get off, the situation would be cured. In other words that the whole reason for the quote, "arms race", was the fact that the United States had not ceased its efforts to maintain an adequate capability to deny the Soviet Union a useful military superiority. I thought that was a very dangerous deviation from common sense thinking and so did some of my friends.

**CHARLTON:** For Paul Nitze and his fellow members of the Committee on the Present Danger the ultimate issue of East West relations was defined in the nuclear arms talks. There, the nuclear weapon was held to be the master of all its interlocutors. But, did it in fact impose a common moderation. More particularly, did the Soviet Union still believe its mission on earth was to spread the true faith by the sword and subversion?

There was no universal American view and America itself was a house divided. Nitze and his friends set out to appeal across party lines. Among those friends was another distinguished democrat. He had served in the administrations of three Democrat American Presidents, Roosevelt, Truman, and Johnson and a fourth, a Republican - Ronald Reagan, would appoint him to the post Paul Warnke had held as Head of the Arms Control and Disarmament agency. For several years he was the Chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger. Eugene Rostow. Like Nitze, Rostow sought the refreshment of America in the former certainties, of the era of containment.

**ROSTOW:** We had formed a committee within the Democratic Party to try to rally the faithful to the traditional policy of the party since the time of Roosevelt and Truman, and it didn't gain much headway and therefore we decided to form a committee a bipartisan committee, which is a very characteristic thing for Americans to do when they want to press a cause, and we waited till after the election of 1976, but we prepared for it. And the reason of course underlying all this was the weakening of the support for the bipartisan foreign policy of Truman and Acheson. Occasioned first by Korea and then most acutely by Vietnam and by the tragic experience of failure in Vietnam. So this was to say, well, to the American people, Vietnam was a failure but there's no other policy and we must rally public opinion to realise that we've lost a battle and not the war and that the protection of the national interests of the United States requires that kind of a policy of collective security.

**CHARLTON:** But there was a Committee for the Present Danger at the time of the Korean War and I wondered if you meant it to have in the 1970's the same particular resonance that the Korean War had in the 50's [Exactly] calling for rearmament?

**ROSTOW:** Exactly, calling for re-armament and a strengthening of the policy of solidarity. Trying to repair the damage which had been done to the national consensus about foreign policy by Vietnam.

**CHARLTON:** What would you say was the final spur to forming the Committee for the Present Danger?

**ROSTOW:** The final spur was the sense that we had very little time, that the hopes that had been invested in SALT I and in Nixon's policy of detente were manifestly proving to be false and that the Soviets were gaining so rapidly in nuclear strength despite the provisions of SALT I and the prospective provisions of SALT II that we soon would have no alternative but to surrender. The Soviet policy with regard to nuclear weapons and therefore with regard to arms control agreements was extremely astute, well conceived, but it was a policy not of detente, not of relaxation of tensions but of nuclear blackmail.

**CHARLTON:** Eugene Rostow's perceptions of the Soviet Union were those which had been broadly endorsed by Americans during the period of the Cold War.

[L]

-3-

It was central to the Committee on the Present Danger's crusade that events had once more shown the Soviet Union to be inescapably militant. Therefore the hopes nurtured by the activity called detente and the process of arms control conducted by Henry Kissinger, stood confounded.

The basic concept in the SALT negotiations of parity, as an acceptable strategic relationship with the Soviet Union was attacked as putting the United States at a disadvantage. While the United States adhered to deterrence and retaliation - in the Soviet case, parity plus their policy of strategic initiative (a belief in a first strike to which their weapons had been assigned with that use in mind) gave the Russians superiority.

This critique was put forward in answer to Henry Kissinger's much quoted question in 1974, "What in the name of God is strategic superiority?"

The claim that the SALT talks had aquiesced in an American disadvantage and that Kissinger's approach was fatally flawed, naturally is in conflict with the views of Henry Kissinger himself.

**KISSINGER:** At the time of the Interim Agreement the Soviets were building about 240 missiles a year and we were building none. We considered it a considerable achievement that we were stopping the build-up of Soviet forces. Now of course you can say the Soviets would have stopped anyway. Nobody can ever prove that. We thought the maximum we could achieve in 1972 was to get a freeze on the additional digging of holes or of silos by the Soviet Union. Our strategy then was that in the next period we were going to strive for a reduction of these plus a reduction of warheads. What we would have achieved if there had not been any Watergate, nobody can ever know. The fact is that as soon as the agreement was signed, suddenly people started saying this sanctified an inequality of numbers which was total nonsense because they didn't count the bombers. They just counted the missiles. They didn't count the fact that we had multiple warheads that they didn't. We then achieved even after Watergate, under Ford, equality in numbers, whereupon the debate shifted on to the backfire bomber which has since disappeared from the scene. The basic difficulty is that if you have opposition that is determined to wreck any negotiation on a subject as technologically complicated as SALT, the administration in office is in an almost hopeless position.

**CHARLTON:** In fact Admiral Moorer, I think, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, giving evidence about this, said the Treaty should be seen, SALT I, not in the light of what it had frozen but what it had forestalled. That you had actually forestalled [That's exactly correct] what would have been a three to two ratio in the Soviet Union's favour by 1977.

**CHARLTON:** Nonetheless we find Nitze, Paul Nitze, saying by the mid-70's, the Soviets do not follow a strategy of deterrence and retaliation. They spell out their belief in a strategy of first strike and their weapons have been assigned with that in mind, and therefore in their case parity plus their policy of strategic initiative gives them superiority.

**KISSINGER:** I do not believe that the Soviets are relying on a first strike. I do believe that the Soviet Union have designed their strategic forces with a more military concept than the United States has. They do have a capacity to prevent a tit for tat, because they can respond with more military options than we can. In other words they can force us into initiating the destruction of civilian targets earlier than they have to do it. That gives them a great advantage not to wipe out our retaliatory forces. They may be able to do that too, our land based retaliatory force.

[L]

-4-

**CHARLTON:** And therefore what is your response to SALT critics like Nitze who say that the basic concept of parity was the flaw for him in the SALT agreements because parity can't be precisely determined and it puts the United States [First of all] at a disadvantage [First of all] because of the differences in military strategy.

**KISSINGER:** First of all, you have never heard Nitze say anything like that when he was in any position of responsibility. You've only heard Nitze say that out of office you haven't heard him say that in office. And neither in our administration nor in the administration that he is serving now, has he ever taken anything like that position. On the contrary he has been more on the conciliatory side, conciliatory in the sense of trying to find something in the point of view that could be negotiated.

**CHARLTON:** More inclined to walk in the woods.

**KISSINGER:** Exactly, that's right. And now with the S.D.I. he has stated criteria that are in fact unfulfillable so that operationally he is working more in the direction of limiting or destroying a stable ... but the option of superiority did not exist at the time. There was no programme that we could get through the Congress.

**CHARLTON:** That situation with which Kissinger had been forced to contend was the one which Nitze and his associates campaigned to redress.

Whereas Kissinger had sought to transcend the ideological differences in the cooperative entanglements of detente, the Committee on the Present Danger examined the Soviet challenge much more in terms of the ideological concepts which the Soviet leadership itself used to describe and defend their policies.

The principal formulation of American policy during the era of containment of Soviet power which began under President Truman was a document known as NSC 68. Then, as now, the military strength of the West was held to be dangerously inadequate. NSC 68 considered the Soviet design of world domination as indivisible from the Communist system and fatal to the West, because the Soviet Union, the inheritor of Russian imperialism possessed and was possessed by a worldwide revolutionary movement which required the dynamic extension of its authority.

The author of NSC 68, adopted by Truman as policy when North Korea invaded the South in 1950, was Paul Nitze.

**NITZE:** I'd been much impressed by a book written by a man called Nathan Leites who talked about the standard operating code of the Kremlin, and in it he stressed the fact that when the correlation of forces was unfavourable Lenin had adopted the doctrine that that was a time when one ought to pull back and attempt to throw dust into the enemy's eyes so that one would have time to rebuild and change the correlation of forces but when it was favourable then one was duty bound to take actions to nail down those advantages that one might get before the other side could change the correlation of forces and that these two events, the removal of our monopoly and the consolidation of Communist control over the mainland would be two radical changes in the correlation of forces, which the Soviets were bound to take into account if they were still following the precepts that Lenin had laid down.

**CHARLTON:** In his famous remark, 'probe with bayonets, [Yes] and if you strike mush go on, if you meet [That's correct] resistance, retreat.' Well now when you wrote NSC 68 how much confidence did you personally feel, how much did you express, that two nuclear powers could exist mutually deterred in a stable relationship?

-5-

**NITZE:** We felt really quite confident that it could be done but that it required many things which were quite different than a world in which only one power had nuclear weapons. In a world where one power, the United States, which was a democratic country, a member of an alliance of democratic countries. If that power had nuclear weapons, then there was no danger that nuclear weapons could get out of hand because a democracy and an alliance of democracies wouldn't permit, really, a democratic country to use those nuclear weapons except under the most extreme conditions of provocation.

**CHARLTON:** You've just said that you felt confident that two powers possessing the atomic weapon could co-exist in some sort of mutually stable relationship, but my own reading of NSC 66 was that you had very little confidence in that, and that you foresaw the danger of war not just from accident or from crisis, accident arising out of crisis, but from a premeditated Russian aggression.

**NITZE:** We felt that the Marxist-Leninist doctrine did dedicate itself to a world which would be completely Socialist as a transition stage to the worldwide triumph of Communism, and that this called for every effort by the Soviet Union to promote such a world.

**CHARLTON:** I have here something that you wrote in an article for Foreign Affairs in 1956, in which you stated your belief, this is some six years after NSC 66, that the West should maintain indefinitely a position of nuclear attack and defence superiority versus the Soviet Union and its satellites. Now where does that belief stand in your own mind now?

**NITZE:** Today the situation is such that that is no longer a feasible proposition. The Soviets have in fact developed certain advantages in what is called prompt hard target kill capability, in fact, distinct advantages over the West in that sphere. They've also developed certain advantages - they have in fact the only defence against nuclear ballistic missiles today and they have the only operational anti-satellite system and they have a distinct advantage in conventional weapons on the Eurasian land mass.

**CHARLTON:** In these first years after Nixon's downfall and while President Ford and later Carter were endeavouring to consummate the SALT process Kissinger had pursued, the Committee on the Present Danger was making an increasingly effective and emotional public utterance.

Nitze and his associates reduced the Byzantine complexities of SALT to a simple proposition. The Soviet leaders had succeeded in making the state of the military balance a powerful political influence, and the source of currents of fear which were transforming political positions all across the spectrum of Western politics. Gene Rostow once more.

**ROSTOW:** The nuclear balance was changing and changing very rapidly which meant that the credibility of the American guarantees to Europe, to Japan, to South Korea, guarantees that were less formal than that but were obvious in the political situation, guarantees to protect our vital military interests, were losing their credibility. General de Gaulle said it for the first time, Henry Kissinger said it over and over again, and a great many other people were beginning to believe it, even though they didn't say it aloud in public.

**CHARLTON:** You mean Kissinger's speech in Brussels where he said, "You cannot expect us to multiply assurances, we cannot possibly ..."

**ROSTOW:** No, where he said something else, he said "Great powers don't commit suicide for their allies." It was a very blunt and very brutal and I think in the circumstances profoundly unwise statement.

[L]

-6-

**CHARLTON:** But you part company with those who see the nuclear weapon as having no utility other than to deter other people from using them.

**ROSTOW:** Absolutely. I think the heart of the problem is that we in the West find it extremely difficult to believe that the Soviet theory about nuclear weapons is not the same as our own. And I think now in 1985 if you look back at what's happened and especially at the huge build-up of the Soviet nuclear force since 1972, the date of the first SALT agreement. You've got to accept I think that the Western view of the function of nuclear weapons and therefore the function of arms control agreements is entirely different from the Soviet view. We're looking to assure stability and to remove causes of accidental war and that sort of thing and they're seeking nuclear superiority and our acceptance of their right to nuclear superiority, so as to assure American neutrality. We conceived of the Soviet build-up, Henry Kissinger asked that famous question, "what on earth can you do with nuclear superiority?". Well I think the Soviets have a very clear answer and it's now very obvious. Their theory of building a huge nuclear force was not to have a nuclear war, but it was exactly the theory of the Kaiser before 1914 who built a huge fleet not to fight the Royal Navy but to assure British neutrality in the event of a continental war. And what the Soviets are trying to do is to assure American neutrality in the event of a war either in the Pacific or in the Atlantic.

**CHARLTON:** Rostow's conclusion about Soviet intentions and capabilities echoed those of Truman and Acheson in the era of containment. It called up spirits from the vasty deep of the Cold War. And, the question Shakespeare made Hotspur ask of Glendower, 'But will they come when you do call for them?' - became the issue in the American strategic debate.

It was the achievement of this remarkably energetic set of foreign policy actors who formed the Committee on the Present Danger - both Rostow and Nixons were men in their 70's - that they proved themselves to be the triumphal branch of that debate. It undermined the efforts of Henry Kissinger and President Ford, and later President Carter to ratify a second SALT accord. It also paved the way for President Reagan to call up the atrophied spirit of containment in the 1950's, and win public support for its corollary - greatly increased spending on defence.

The early claims in the Nixon administration for the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which was the cornerstone of arms control, did little to discourage the notion that the two rival political systems, in their concepts of nuclear deterrence, had converged in a significant way.

But Nitze, who was one of the chief negotiators of SALT I, was vehemently sceptical.

The history of the Committee on the Present Danger suggests that it particularly influenced public attitudes when deep concern was allied with deep knowledge and long experience as in Paul Nitze's case.

**NITZE:** I've been in this business as long as you can remember! So that this wasn't just a bolt out of the blue that somebody, suddenly thought of arms control. Arms control has always been, ever since 1946, has been an element which has been important in US policy. The question at issue has been whether or not it is practical, whether or not one can in fact get useful arms control, arms control which will contribute to a reduction in the risk of war.

[L.C]

-7-

**CHARLTON:** Would you find any serious quarrel with something I have here that Herbert York who was Director of Research and Development in the Pentagon for many years and one of the President's scientific advisers, wrote of the 1972 treaty, the SALT I and the ABM Treaty. He mentions the common understandings about basic issues that were clearly implicit in that agreement between the United States ...

**NITZE:** Which I think is quite wrong ...

**CHARLTON:** ... and the Soviet Union.

**NITZE:** There were no common understandings about that. We agreed on the language of several specific documents.

**CHARLTON:** So the idea that the ABM Treaty reflected a common doctrine ...

**NITZE:** ... is nonsense.

**CHARLTON:** ... among the two powers ...

**NITZE:** ... is nonsense. It's nonsense.

**CHARLTON:** ... of mutual assured destruction is not what you accept.

**NITZE:** ... is nonsense, is nonsense. The Russians were perfectly clear that they were not agreeing to anything beyond the specific obligations which they obligated themselves to abide by in the Treaty and the associated documentation. Because there was a good deal of talk about this question as to whether one was agreeing to the spirit of something that went beyond the pieces of paper we hoped they would look at it that way. They did not.

**CHARLTON:** Well one might have supposed therefore that you would have been less wholeheartedly committed yourself to the SALT I agreement if that doctrinal difference which you've always drawn attention to and which is implicit in NSC 68 was still your view.

**NITZE:** No, it still was my view but I still thought that the ABM Treaty specifically, could be, even though it had flaws in it, the most important of which was later cured in an agreement of 1978, but still the ABM Treaty I thought could be made into a useful document with respect to the Interim Agreement. Gerard Smith and I had recommended against the signing of the Interim Agreement which was part of SALT I 'cause we thought that was too one sidedly unfair to the United States but when both pieces of paper were agreed concurrently, both Gerard and I supported the package in the hope that In the next two or three years, it would be possible to negotiate a new treaty to parallel the ABM Treaty which would comprehensively and properly control offensive systems, but we never were able to get that.

**CHARLTON:** Nitze's absolutism contrasts with Kissinger's search for common interest. Kissinger's policy had been to try and end the traditional American oscillation in foreign policy between, as we have previously heard him say, 'extremes of intransigence and conciliation.' He had seen detente and arms control as a continuous process - an activity to be practised rather than a state that was reached. It was his complaint that SALT was unfairly made to bear the whole burden of East West relations.

The advice given by the first representative in Imperial Russia of the London Muscovy Company in the days of Queen Elizabeth the First had been as follows, 'When you deal with these people, make your bargains plain and put them in writing.'

-8-

It became part of the assault mounted on the results of the arms control dialogue with the Russians, in our own day, by its opponents, that Kissinger's diplomatic virtuosity had taken too little account of the Elizabethan wisdom.

America had read into the record of the SALT agreement some unilateral interpretations. It made such agreement in certain vital respects little more than a promissory note as Gene Rostow saw it.

**ROSTOW:** There's a debate about what was permitted, you remember the controversy about unilateral interpretations, and there was a reason for those unilateral interpretations.

**CHARLTON:** You mean that when the Secretary of State here, Mr. Rogers, said he was giving a unilateral interpretation to certain clauses which was clearly not in terms of what happened in Vietnam and elsewhere, the interpretation given to it by the Soviet Union.

**ROSTOW:** Well, Vietnam didn't have anything to do with it. The background to that affair was very different and very interesting. It was the history of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. We took the position that under the treaty, if a European political entity emerged, it would be considered a nuclear power by virtue of succession to the nuclear status of Britain and France. And the Soviets said then they couldn't agree publicly to any such statement, but that if we made such a statement as an official interpretation of the treaty, they would not publicly disagree with it knowing the centrality of the independence of Western Europe to the American national interest. And that was done. Now what happened in 1972 was exactly the same except with a different outcome. That is the Soviets wouldn't agree formally to the unilateral interpretations as I recall it, there were five of them. And the United States said well then, we will announce these as unilateral interpretations and expect you not to differ. They never differed in public of course, they never said those are impermissible interpretations - what happened was they went ahead and built the weapons that President Nixon and Henry Kissinger thought were forbidden.

**CHARLTON:** And which weapons were those?

**ROSTOW:** The SS18's and the SS19's. There were several others but the general build-up of the big weapons which we then recognised again in the SALT II Treaty. It was a very very devastating experience. The tangible advantages were that this changing nuclear balance permitted them to pursue with great energy a programme of expansion based on the use of conventional force. Vietnam was one example, the Middle East and the African adventures, another. After all the Cold War began in Iran with a Soviet probe toward Azerbaijan. It's now being conducted in the Caribbean, the approaches to the Panama Canal. There's quite a difference.

**CHARLTON:** The fact that the grandchildren of Lenin stand today on the southern doorstep of the United States itself makes the obvious point that the East West conflict spares no part of the world.

The central critique of the Committee on the Present Danger was that this change in the nuclear balance was radiating new perceptions of opportunity and anxiety.

The confidence with which Kennedy had acted against Khrushchev's diplomacy by intimidation in the Caribbean was to be contrasted with American hesitation as a new generation of revolutionaries and guerillas supported by Moscow pulled Central America into the mainstream of world history.

-9-

The loss of the strategic superiority Kennedy had enjoyed prevented the United States from using its conventional forces to defend its interests, as Kennedy had threatened to do.

Arms control negotiations had failed to eliminate this coercive reality.

The powerful opposition in the Congress of Senator Henry Jackson, which had all but nullified Kissinger's detente policy, when allied with the crusade of the Committee on the Present Danger formed a hyphen of bipartisan support to President Reagan's call later for the militarisation of foreign policy. Whereas Kissinger had considered that America could not keep its alliances together without dedication to arms control, this new consensus was overtly sceptical.

Senator Henry Jackson's former associate, who drafted much of the Senator's unyielding opposition to SALT, is now President Reagan's Assistant Secretary for Defence. Had the Soviet Union possessed a superior insight into the military and political utility of nuclear weapons? Richard Perle.

**PERLE:** A different insight and an insight that I think was based in part on Soviet judgements about the West, about the willingness of the West to match the Soviet Union, but I think one should also say that if there was a superior insight on the part of the Soviet Union, it was into the nature of the arms control process and how arms control might be used to facilitate a continuing Soviet build-up with greatly diminished apprehension in the West. I can't think of a comparable period in world history in which one of two adversary states was permitted to expand its military forces on the scale of the Soviet expansion between say 1970 and 1980 without arousing the most profound apprehensions in the other adversary state, and I think the unrealised hopes for arms control and the attendant psychology and the political detente that we sought had the effect of permitting that build-up to take place without producing the normal reactions one would have expected at any other time in history. The history of arms control is not terribly encouraging and I find the passion for it out of all proportion to its historical record.

**CHARLTON:** Now the West Europeans place arms control and the superpower dialogue ahead or higher in importance than issues about the nuclear balance would you agree. Now what do you see as the significance of that?

**PERLE:** Well I think it's very foolish indeed. Not only because there is no historical justification for the confidence in arms control that one would expect given the enthusiasm for it from the Europeans. But all the arms control agreements in the world are not going to protect our security or our interests if the military balance is permitted to deteriorate and becomes adverse to the West to the point where the Soviet Union feels that it can exert pressure. That the West in turn feels it cannot resist.

**CHARLTON:** Richard Perle therefore rejects the view that the process, in arms control, is almost as important as the result.

By the late 1970's this ascendant strand of thinking among American policy makers considered that the effort to persuade the Soviet Union to accept strategic concepts which Marxist Leninist ideology rejected, had demonstrably failed.

This analysis of the Soviet Union prepared to fight and win a nuclear war was sustained by a perceived ability to do so. Unlike the United States they had a civil defence programme to diminish their casualties and the Soviet Union's achievement of superiority in land based missiles conferred the opportunity of a first strike. That threat in turn made American nuclear strength no longer a deterrent against Soviet expansion.

-10-

But as a statesman, faced with destiny's challenge in this dialogue with the Russians over nuclear arms, was it inevitable that relations had to be governed by the inveterate pessimism of the worst possible case? Paul Nitze.

**NITZE:** The worst possible case is always worse. Who suspected that Pearl Harbour would occur. Who suspected that Mr. Hitler would really be as dreadful as he turned out to be. You know the worst possible case is generally worse than the imagination can imagine but the, what you have to deal with really is what are the logical and most probable cases, you can't deal with the worst possible cases.

**CHARLTON:** But I ask you that as a diplomat rather than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who is bound to return a certain answer. He's charged with a narrower responsibility. As a diplomat you still feel that in these circumstances there is no alternative, presented with a phenomenon like this other than to accept the pessimistic scenario.

**NITZE:** No I don't believe it to be pessimistic, that's what I'm quarrelling with you about. I believe that there's no point in looking at the world other than with open eyes and accepting facts as they are. Why should one ignore facts, that road is sure to lead to disaster.

**CHARLTON:** It's very important I think that we should understand the issue you made over the Soviet advantage, or the perceived advantage they have, in the big land-based missile. Now you spoke and wrote at the time that the Soviet Union was pursuing a theoretical war winning capability. Now does that mean that you accepted that the edge that they had with this big missile did not represent a real disarming first strike capability.

**NITZE:** Yes, what I had in mind was, it represented a real first strike disarming capability against fixed land-based targets in the United States and in the rest of NATO, but it did not represent an ability to take out at least a portion of our bomber force, that portion which was on alert and ready to take-off in a few minutes notice and it did not include those S.L.B.M.'s and at sea, so that it did not have a true disarming capability because what was left would still be able to deny the Soviet Union any real advantages, any political advantages from a military attack. It would still leave the Soviets with great military advantages. It would leave them in a position where they could undoubtedly aspire to win in military terms a nuclear war. In other words to be in a position where they could end that war favourably to themselves. We still have a good deterrent, but I repeat I think the Soviets have an advantage in those forces which count with respect to ending up or being in a superior military position during a war and you know there's only one thing worse than having a nuclear war and that's to lose a nuclear war.

**CHARLTON:** By Paul Nitze's measurement, the application of arms control had furthered neither disarmament nor stability based upon the central balance of terror. While diplomats had persisted in their search, technical advances and ideological imperatives were all the time making stability elusive, if not impossible.

The optimists had been rejoicing in MAD, mutual assured destruction, unaware or unheeding that the deterrent threat of nuclear weapons was becoming less and less plausible.

Three years ago in 1982 President Nixon argued that even if the balance is restored in nuclear forces by America "we will not" he said, "fully restore their deterrent effect, as in crises like the Cuban missile crisis and the Arab Israeli war in 1973. A threat of mutual suicide is simply not credible."

-||-

Henry Kissinger had considered that it was sheer escapism to yearn for a past that technology now proscribed, and that overwhelming superiority could not be recaptured.

But containment, which was not just the slogan but the inspiration of bipartisanship in American foreign policy had rested on superiority. Gene Rostow.

**ROSTOW:** The implicit premise and this is the essence I think of the entire problem. What Truman said and what Kennedy said and what Eisenhower said and all the spokesmen of American policy and Western policy generally throughout the early part of the period, was that the Western nations were going to oppose aggression against their interests. That's what Korea means. This time we're going to prevent a general war by stopping small wars and it was the reaction to that experience in Korea, then most emphatically in Vietnam afterwards that led the West, to scratch its head and say well there must be a better way of reaching agreement than that, because the Soviets didn't stop you see.

**CHARLTON:** Isn't that an important distinction in your own view of what deterrence should be. Deterrence to you is not the status quo, [No] stability in that sense, there is an element of compulsion about it, coercion, that is getting the Soviet Union, or aiming to get the Soviet Union to do something which it is not at present doing.

**ROSTOW:** That's correct. What we're trying to persuade them to do through deterrence, through collective security is to respect the rules of the United Nations charter against aggression which is the only code we have representing at least a nominal agreement among the powers as to the rules of behaviour in international affairs. Those rules are not an invention or dream. They go back to the Congress of Vienna and the whole experience of the State system. Now what's happened is, when you talk to a Soviet diplomat about that or a Soviet law professor for that matter, he says you're asking us to give up a foreign policy, rooted in our nature as a society in the State. In other words they're saying, we have a right as leader of the Socialist Commonwealth to use force for aggressive purposes against States and you don't. That's an untenable position and unless it's changed, it's bound to lead to the most ghastly explosion.

**CHARLTON:** But how can it be changed? How can the Soviet Union be deterred from its world view, it's historic mission?

**ROSTOW:** There are only three ways in which that can be done given the folly of American policy during the 70's in failing to keep pace with the Soviet drive for nuclear superiority. We can build like mad which is a very disagreeable thought, midgetmen and minuteness and so on, MX's. We can develop the defensive weapons which is of course what's happening now, the Soviets have put an enormous effort into that and President Reagan really had no choice but to match it. It's very much like the choice presented to Roosevelt about the nuclear weapon, when the scientists came to him and said, 'Hitler's making nuclear arms.' President Roosevelt didn't have a choice. He had to go ahead.

**CHARLTON:** Eugene Rostow, who has served four Presidents, from Roosevelt to Reagan, has carried us forward to the present day and to the political origins of the Star Wars proposal and the answer it might give to Henry Kissinger's famous question in Moscow in 1974 when he contemplated the baroque superfluity of destructive power in the nuclear arsenals of America and Russia, "What in the name of God is strategic superiority, what do you do with it?".

-12-

The view of the Soviet Union held by Paul Nitze and his associates, which had guided the American policy of containment during the Cold War gained the high ground once more in the failure of Jimmy Carter's Presidency, and the more confident use of military force by the Russians. Henry Kissinger's detente faltered in the sands of Ethiopia and was finally buried in the harsh hills of Afghanistan in the wake of the Soviet invasion.

In the Carter years, Republicans and Democrats of the American foreign policy establishment who had upheld the bipartisan policies of deterrence and containment since the Second World War were divided on almost every topic. The Americans found no clear cut political will.

END

BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION
TALKS & DOCUMENTARIES, RADIO
RADIO THREE

# THE STAR WARS HISTORY

Presented by Michael Chariton

## 2. DETERRENCE THROUGH DETENTE - The Hand of Henry Kissinger

Taking part: Henry Kissinger, Gerard Smith, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, Richard Perle

Programme No: BTW647J586
Tape No: TLN34/647J586
TX date: Sunday 6th October 1985 1715 - 1800
Producer: Anne Winder,
Room 7087 Broadcasting House,
Ext: 4612

-1-

**CHARLTON:** When President Nixon took office in 1969 he spoke at once of the unique and fatal implications which nuclear weapons possess for the statesman. "While I would like" he said, "to provide the American people with complete protection against nuclear attack, it is not now within our power to do so." The President added this, "it might look to an opponent like the prelude to an offensive strategy threatening the Soviet detente."

President Nixon was reiterating the essence of Robert McNamara's passionate presentation to the Soviet premier, Kosygin, at the Glassboro summit two years earlier. To attempt a nuclear defence would mean only an intensified arms race in offensive weapons and therefore, mutual assured destruction, should be acknowledged as the rational prescription for stable deterrence.

It fell to the Nixon administration to bring about the fascinating, fitful, negotiation with the Soviet Union which was to give a cold and ambiguous assent to McNamara's proposition.

The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, SALT, became the principal arena for a form of struggle which itself was a substitute for war. SALT was compared in the beginning, to the Congress of Vienna in the last century which secured the forty years of peace that followed the Napoleonic wars. The similarities were superficially beguiling. What Talleyrand had said of his colleagues and former allies against Napoleon, "too frightened to fight one another, too stupid to agree" was given a wholly new dimension by the nuclear competition.

The Russians were achieving nuclear parity with the United States. The balance of power was being challenged. In 1968, the year before Nixon was elected, the Russians had reasserted their hegemony in Europe by invading Czechoslovakia. In Vietnam, the Communist forces, armed by the Soviet Union, had launched an offensive in more than forty provincial towns which was seen in America at the time as overthrowing basic assumptions about the nature and progress of the war. In consequence, amid a growing domestic tumult, President Johnson stood down and did not seek reelection.

Into this forbidding context stepped Henry Kissinger, with his immense talents and intelligence. For almost ten years he was to be one of the most powerful men in the world. In his own book about the Congress of Vienna Kissinger had written of those statesmen who achieved final greatness, that it was given to them not only to maintain the perfection of order but to have the strength to contemplate chaos - there to find the material for fresh creation.

How far did chaos appear to Henry Kissinger himself to be the prospect as he went to the White House as President Nixon's National Security Adviser and later his Secretary of State.

**KISSINGER:** It was a very difficult period because the bipartisan consensus that had characterised American foreign policy for most of the post-war period was collapsing. A kind of opposition was developing in the United States that was unprecedented. The practical proposals that were being made had the consequence of a complete collapse, of a military effort in Vietnam that our predecessors had started and which had left us with 550,000 troops in place and our studies for example indicated that it would take us eighteen months to get them out even as a simple logistics problem together with an attack on every military programme, together with the fact that the people who had created the

[L]

-2-

conditions, went into opposition to what were their own policies as soon as they were out of office. So, it was an extremely complicated situation not eased by the fact that President Nixon who was a man of great accomplishment and great knowledge in foreign policy did not have the art of gaining popular support the way President Reagan has for example.

**CHARLTON:** The strength to contemplate chaos you said and there to find material for fresh creation. Why was arms control, SALT, the material for fresh creation as you saw it and to become the principal activity for what you called a new structure of peace with the Soviet Union.

**KISSINGER:** That was not our policy, our policy was much more complicated than this. Arms control to us, that is to us, to Nixon and me, and to those who dominated the Nixon administration was not an end in itself - it was one was of the tools and in fact we did not make the first even preliminary agreement on arms control until May 1971, which was two plus years after we came into office. Our strategy was to try to bring China into play, to try to isolate North Vietnam to establish a new relationship with Europe and with the Soviet Union to move ahead on a broad front. We believed in linkage; we for example did not agree to any increase in trade until there had been some preliminary agreement on arms control. So we never believed that arms control by itself could carry the whole burden of East-West relations; there were however significant segments of American public opinion, especially scientific and intellectual opinion who thought exactly that, and since they were needed to carry any agreement through the Congress against Conservative opposition, they tended to have a more vocal role than our theory would have justified.

**CHARLTON:** Henry Kissinger therefore had an overarching concept of grand strategy. His enticing of China out of its years of self imposed isolation, and the dialogue he established with the Soviet leaders have alone written some of the most important history of the 20th Century.

Kissinger himself declared that the problem of the age was how to manage the emergence of the Soviet Union as a super power. That relationship turned fundamentally on the supreme instruments of national power - the nuclear weapons.

As the strategic arms limitation talks began the Soviet military programme was gaining momentum, while the Americans had stopped building and were now trying not to lose rather than win in Vietnam. There was evident concern about the long term trends. Kissinger felt that, as nuclear parity approached, it was the duty of the statesman to dominate what he could not avoid. That was also the intention of President Nixon, as the chief American negotiator with the Russians at the SALT talks, Gerard Smith, recalls.

**SMITH:** I think he felt that the Soviets were moving faster in the strategic field than we were, and maybe this was the last time in '69, '70, '71, that we could deal with the Soviets on an equivalent basis. So it didn't come to his mind as sufficiency so much as it did to stop the Soviets from going ahead pell mell.

**CHARLTON:** To what extent therefore as President Nixon negotiated with his Soviet opposite numbers, the ABM Treaty, the first SALT agreement, to what extent was he in the French diplomatic formulation "demandeur"?

**SMITH:** We never had that sense of being "demandeur" in the actual front lines. I felt that we had substantial qualitative advantages even though the Soviet numbers were increasing and ours were not, and we were on the verge of the MIRV, the multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles, and the Soviets were not and would not for some years, so that the qualitative advantage, we thought and I think correctly, lay with us.

-3-

**CHARLTON:** But "demandeur" perhaps in another sense, as the Soviet Union may have have seen it, in that SALT I and the American decision to prosecute that, was a recognition that there was no way other than by agreement to limit arms that the Soviet Union, could be prevented from achieving numerical superiority in offensive ballistic missiles.

**SMITH:** I think that is probably correct at that time. Now given enough years ahead, it's no trick, we could always, if it was in our interest build more of the current class of ballistic missile, but I think you're right in saying in 1969 - 70, absent arms control, the Soviets were going to have a larger number of launchers for their strategic forces than we were.

**CHARLTON:** Gerard Smith. Kissinger's grand design of judicious rewards and punishments as a deterrent, embracing trade and technology and credits as well as arms control was critical to the nature of his discourse.

Arms control by itself could not relieve tensions. If it was not linked to Soviet restraint in world wide competition, Kissinger said, it could prove a safety valve for Soviet expansionist designs. Every time there was a Soviet aggressive move there would be appeals that the new tensions made arms control even more important. "And that is why," Kissinger tells us in his memoirs, "I believed in 'linkage'".

But, he was also convinced that the nuclear weapon had added a new dimension of horror and therefore responsibility for national leaders.

We come to a point which divided Kissinger from some of his conservative critics in America. To what extent did he consider that possession by both sides of the absolute weapon meant that there could no longer be an absolute enemy - an enemy whose ideology, or whose very existence was a threat to one's own existence or survival?

**KISSINGER:** I have always believed that Communism is morally repugnant and I think if you go through my writings you will never find any deviation from that point of view. I have also believed that nuclear weapons impose the necessity of co-existence. I do not base that co-existence of any moral acceptance of the Soviet system but on the practical necessities that nuclear weapons create. That has been my position from the very beginning, I wrote a book in 1955 or 6 called 'Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy' which was perhaps premature but in which I said that sooner or later, I thought it would come sooner than it did, strategic nuclear weapons would tend towards a kind of parity which would make absolute war impossible, and I called for alternatives. I've never changed that position.

**CHARLTON:** Did you take the view that nuclear threats were more or less infallible in abolishing aggressive intentions.

**KISSINGER:** I've never believed that - I've believed exactly the opposite. I've believed that as nuclear parity was achieved, threats other than nuclear war would gain greater and greater force and that it was the obligation of the West to create obstacles to these other threats.

**CHARLTON:** That stability at the level of the nuclear balance ... created instability at other levels.

**KISSINGER:** Exactly.

-4-

**CHARLTON:** The subsequent failures of the detente policy to create those obstacles as a deterrent to the extension of Communist power and Soviet influence in his own time, Kissinger laid squarely at the door of the Watergate scandal. The crippling of Presidential authority lost both the capacity to offer incentives for responsible behaviour and penalties for aggressive actions.

But, there was an underlying, unspoken reason also.

In Kissinger's search for a stable world order there were echoes of what Lord Castlereagh had told the House of Commons about the Congress of Vienna. "The Congress was not assembled," Castlereagh said, "for the discussion of moral principles but for great practical purposes - to establish effectual provisions for the general security."

Kissinger was trying to wean American foreign policy away from both its traditional oscillations and its excessive preoccupation with moral principles. Henry Kissinger's brilliant manipulations of the balance of power were familiar in the statesman's world of the Congress of Vienna he was trying to recreate but they were alien to the American body politic. Foreign policy in the United States is obliged to be above all a public policy subject to public scrutiny.

**KISSINGER:** Our style of foreign policy would have been easily understood in Britain but was not easy to understand in the United States. We believed in a national interest based foreign policy. You did not have to explain in Great Britain through the 18th and 19th Century the problem of throwing Britain's weight to whoever seemed to be the weaker of the continental countries and Britain made no moral claim for that; for the United States this was a rather novel approach. At the precise moment that we had achieved apparent successes, both at isolating Vietnam and relations with both, with China and the Soviet Union, there occurred Watergate a totally unpredictable event, which collapsed executive authority, so that for fifteen to eighteen months the locus of executive respect by the public was the State Department which was unheard of, and that then put us into a much more defensive posture, and so by 1975 we had a coalition of Conservatives and Liberals against the policy that Nixon and later Ford were carrying out with me as Secretary of State. You had Liberals who felt that if Nixon was for peace, confrontation couldn't be all bad and Conservatives who believed that any deal with the Soviets was wicked.

**CHARLTON:** On the point of the moralistic aspects of the American political tradition - you've written of the time when you came to office that conflict in the United States is unnatural and seen as caused by evil men or motives and thus the Soviet Union as a tyranny fulfilled the traditional image of irreconcilable conflict as between good and evil. [OVER]

**KISSINGER:** You have two extremes in America - you have either people who think since conflict is considered unnatural, one of two things happen, either the opponent is considered inherently evil or it is believed that the opponent has undergone a conversion and is therefore ready for a final settlement without being able to express what the content of the final settlement is.

**CHARLTON:** But if Americans saw relations between states as either peaceful or warlike in black and white terms, why did you think, if that was the American political tradition that it had become incompatible with the American national interest and a sound foreign policy?

-5-

**KISSINGER:** Because at the end of the day the relation among states has to be able to be expressed in some concrete conditions. If you cannot express it in concrete conditions you are doomed to oscillate between extremes of conciliation and extremes of intransigence, and overdo each of them as you go through each phase and then be disappointed with each phase. The attempt that President Nixon and I made, inconclusively, was to see whether we could express conditions of peace or stability in some specific manner, and this more or less runs counter to the American tradition. If you go back in American post-war history, you take the policy of containment, you will find Dean Acheson, Dulles, Truman, Eisenhower always saying that when we have positions of strength the negotiating position will improve. What we were going to do with the negotiating position, what we were going to ask of the Russians if they came to the conference table, I defy anybody to find one statement.

**CHARLTON:** Henry Kissinger's creative and coherent substitute for this omission was his policy of entangling the Soviet Union in a web of involvements on arms agreements, trade and credits to be linked to the restraint of the Soviet Union's ambition as a power fulfilling a millennial mission.

However, Kissinger's domestic critics felt that there should be more to these involvements than the principle of agreement on a set of "rules". That what was missing from his concept was an ethic of a peaceful order. Otherwise why resist the revolutionary power?

Liberals who felt that detente condoned the suppression of human rights, and Conservatives who baulked at the notions of equality or parity with the Soviet Union combined under the leadership of a powerful Senator, Henry Jackson. This formidable opposition in the Congress consistently attacked both the arithmetic and the concept of the SALT talks and all but wrecked the policy.

One of the Amerians who sat across the table from the Russians during the SALT negotiations with Kissinger as a member of the National Security Council was Hal Sonnenfeldt.

**SONNENFELDT:** The parity notions that existed in the administration at least 15 years ago, in the early '70's, did not mean that the Soviets would be left risk free to pursue their various objectives and purposes. Now that particular presumption, that underlying premise of detente and indeed of the whole detente regime was not borne out in the event, partly because the Americans were so divided that we had problems defining what our interests were what our commitments were.

**CHARLTON:** Then SALT I was approved by the Senate only after Senator Jackson's amendment to the Treaty was passed that asked the President to seek a future treaty that would not limit the United States to levels of these missiles which were inferior to limits for the Soviet Union. Now what underlay that objection there's a perception of power and the exercise of power, the political exercise of power through these weapons which clearly was not resolved here in the States.

**SONNENFELDT:** Well we had no consensus in this country and there were a lot of people including Senator Jackson but people in the Republican Party as well who believed that the ABM agreement might have been unwise because they saw more promise in the possibilities of defence and saw us, Americans, giving up in an area, where technologically we might well have had an advantage over the Soviets, and secondly, people were unhappy about the seeming disparities that were incorporated in the SALT I offensive agreement which gave the Soviets substantially larger numbers of submarines for sea/launch Ballistic Missiles, gave them or legitimised their very substantial advantage in landbased

ICBM's and that produced the Jackson Amendment to which you refer calling for equality in future agreements without however defining precisely how that equality would be constituted. But I think the dominant argument really had to do with the political appearance. Now there is one issue however which is a military issue, at least to a very considerable degree, which has really bedevilled the whole process of negotiating strategic arms limitations with the Soviets and that is that because of their large land based forces and our relatively small land based forces, the Soviet capacity to threaten the totality of our land based force was seen on the horizon in 1972 and became essentially a fact by 1980, let us say, whereas a comparable American capability to threaten a large portion or the entirety of the Soviet land based missile force has still not been achieved to this day.

**SONNENFELDT:** Hal Sonnenfeldt. Whether the appearance of that particular Soviet missile advantage translates itself into political gains is an argument that is with us still and became a major factor in the election of President Reagan.

How Moscow saw the American condition at the time of the SALT negotiations and the last stages of the war in Vietnam has naturally aroused a good deal of scholarly interest and speculation.

As Henry Kissinger looks back to those perceptions did they not show that the Russians had come to see an underlying change in the balance of power and a comparative, if transient, American weakness?

**KISSINGER:** Absolutely not. Considering that we had riots in the streets, that we were involved in a war in Vietnam, that the opposition party held both houses of the Congress, I think we achieved an extraordinary flexibility of foreign policy, and after all, we drove the Soviets out of the Middle East even after Watergate. I don't think the Soviet Union looked at the Nixon administration as a weak opponent. I think they looked at us as a formidable opponent - we opened to China in the middle of all of our travails which must have been extremely unsettling for a time to the Soviet Union and what opportunity did they seize during that period? As long as Nixon was even relatively unimpaired we made both progress in negotiations with the Soviets, lost no international position and in fact made great gains in the Middle East.

**CHARLTON:** But it's a period would you agree seen today as the prelude to a series of global adventures by the Soviet Union?

**KISSINGER:** It was a prelude to a series of global adventures for a whole variety of reasons. First, because the collapse of our executive authority starting in 1973, we destroyed a president, we then had a McGovernite Congress that the people who were defeated in 1972 by the most overwhelming majority but one in American history, regained Congress as a result of events that had absolutely nothing to do with the political process. That then, as a result of this, there was the oddest coalition between Liberals and Conservatives who took away both the carrot and the stick. They prevented us in Angola from resisting Soviet aggression. At the same time they challenged the Soviet Union with the Jackson and Stevenson amendments, in which they cut off both credits and trade with the Soviet Union and then when the Soviet Union became more aggressive prevented us from resisting it. Of course it led to the beginning of adventures. Then in 1977, you had the Carter administration which had an absolutely wrong perception of how to deal with the Soviet Union and you remember when Carter came in, he said, he was free of the inordinate fear of Communism. He certainly did nothing to arrest the, to put it mildly, the collapse of the Shah of Iran. He permitted the Soviets a major adventure in the horn of Africa. That had nothing to do with detente. Our policy was to resist Soviet adventurism wherever it occurred and as long as we had any authority, we managed to do this.

**CHARLTON:** But, the early hopes of Kissinger and Nixon that agreement to negotiate strategic arms limitations could be linked to Soviet assistance in the American disengagement from Vietnam proved illusory.

The Russians insisted SALT was looked at on its own merits. That, and the uncompromising zealotry of the Communists in Hanoi meant that the detente policy could produce no honourable outcome in Vietnam. President Nixon's guarantees to the South Vietnamese proved not to be the bond of the American nation.

Vietnam in strategic terms was, in the end, an American surrender.

**KISSINGER:** Certainly Vietnam was a disaster but when you inherit a disaster, when you inherit 550,000 troops, you cannot just switch it off like a television programme. After all people forget it took de Gaulle five years to get out of Algeria.

**CHARLTON:** There's the evidence of what Gromyko said to Rab Butler, the British Foreign Secretary, when Butler was trying to enlist Gromyko to help about Vietnam, and Gromyko said to him, our American enemies, are deeply embedded with men and munitions in Vietnam. We've no desire to interfere. I was just going to put it to you that how much more likely that by 1970 - 71, as negotiations opened on SALT, that they did see the American position as one of weakness.

**KISSINGER:** First of all, what concessions did we make to the Soviets in SALT, I mean there're a whole series of myths that are retroactively invented, that have absolutely no bearing. Can you name one concrete concession we made to the Soviets that was unwarranted, or that that was not going to be imposed on us by the Congress anyway.

**CHARLTON:** I'm interested in how the Soviet Union saw this and how ...

**KISSINGER:** The Soviet Union until 1971, until our opening to China, the Soviet Union procrastinated in the negotiations. We had a number of things going for us however, we had the opening to China. We had the fact that the Soviet Union was desperate to make an agreement with the Germans on Berlin and on East Germany, which they could not get against our active opposition. I'm not saying it was necessary to get our support but they could not get it against our active opposition. Third, they were worried as they always seem to be worried by the beginning of our strategic defences and fourth, then as soon as we started mining Haiphong the Soviet Union also realised that the military situation was changing. If we made a mistake and I think it was that in that we did not do in 1969 in Vietnam what we did in 1972. But that would have led to a revolt in our Cabinet and Nixon wasn't prepared to do that.

**CHARLTON:** That there should have been a forward policy mining if necessary ...

**KISSINGER:** I believe I believe in retrospect that we should in 1969 have done what we did in '72, that is to say demand a settlement or mined the harbours and bombed North Vietnam. But then that wasn't all that easy since there had just been signed a bombing halt by the outgoing administration and because by that time, public order had broken down in the United States and it's very difficult for a new administration to take upon itself the responsibility for dividing the country.

**CHARLTON:** As you rightly remind your critics there was no military programme sacrificed by the Nixon, Kissinger administration, but one still has ...

**KISSINGER:** As a matter of fact it was the only way to preserve our military programmes paradoxically without SALT the Congress would have continued to cut it, take the strategic defence which we had at the time. wasn't called strategic defence, it was I think called anti-ballistic missile system. We started out with twelve defence sites around the country. By the time the agreement was signed, the Congress had already reduced it to two, in the next budget it was going to go down to one, so the thing had become an absurdity.

**CHARLTON:** But does not this very process contribute to what it is known that Brezhnev said in Prague at a Warsaw Pact meeting in 1973 when he said that by 1985 as a consequence of what we were achieving through detente, we shall have achieved most of our objectives, a decisive shift in the correlation of forces [Well] will be such that we'll be able to exert our influence whenever we need to?

**KISSINGER:** Well first of all I don't think he said quite that, but ...

**CHARLTON:** That's what he's quoted ...

**KISSINGER:** But never mind supposing he did say that, you have to remember that each side has the problem of justifying detente to its hardliners. The facts have certainly not borne this out. I would make a case for the proposition that detente has, on the whole, been more disarming for the Soviet Union than it has been for the West. It has brought it endless troubles in the satellite orbit. It has not improved its relative technological position, quite the contrary, it has declined in its technological position. If one looks at the growth of other nations in the Far East, it has created the problem of a two front situation for the Soviet Union and it led to their, the massive reduction of their influence in the Middle East. So in a sense both sides were betting in detente that they could use history and even with an impaired Nixon, we made progress, with an unimpaired American administration, I think that situation would have been even stronger.

**CHARLTON:** But in the aftermath of Vietnam the American will to match limited war with limited war as a deterrent to the expansion of communist power was at best uncertain.

Senator Jackson pressed his attack on the consequent dangers of any perceived weakness in the central nuclear balance of power. The arithmetic of the Salt agreement had left the Russians with more offensive missiles than the Americans. But, that had been the price of agreement. With, or without, SALT the Russians would have had more because they were building more.

What began as an arcane argument of Jackson's about the theoretical possibility of a Soviet first strike against the American land based missiles became a generalised charge that the loose constraints negotiated in SALT had presented the Russians with a claim to strategic superiority and the political cards that go with it.

An influential aide to Senator Jackson at this time, and an even more influential one today in the Reagan administration where he is Assistant Secretary of Defence - Richard Perle.

**PERLE:** I can recall Senator Jackson sending to Henry Kissinger a memorandum in October of 1970, suggesting, on the basis of intelligence that was obviously available to the Administration as well as to the Congress, that under the terms of the agreement that seemed to be emerging as the SALT I Interim Agreement the Soviets could within the confines of that agreement generously interpreted, double or even treble the effective capability of their land based missile force, and that is precisely what happened.

TC

-9-

**CHARLTON:** Richard Perle drafted much of Senator Henry Jackson's critique, which was governed by a more visceral assessment of the Soviet Union's intentions and capabilities.

Writing in his memoirs, Henry Kissinger agreed that Jackson had studied carefully Soviet tactics and strategy and was convinced that they were out to undermine the free world. And, while Kissinger himself agreed that it was a true enough reading of their intentions he rejected the implication that all agreement was futile. "Jackson objected" said Kissinger, "to any agreement which afforded benefits to the Soviet Union while we took it for granted they would sign no agreement that did not promise them some gain."

**KISSINGER:** I actually considered Jackson a good friend and I agreed with many of his analyses of Soviet intentions. The difference between Jackson and me was that he wanted all out confrontation under the influence of one of his associates, Richard Perle. He wanted all out confrontation with the Soviets and he liked a policy of a constant needling of the Soviet Union. I believe that in the face, first of the Vietnam war and our other pressures, then in the face of Watergate to court a confrontation with the Soviet Union would lead to a series of humiliations, that was one disagreement. Secondly, I was not as pessimistic as Jackson about the evolution of the two systems. I believed that on the whole if we could keep the Soviet Union from expanding that we were capable of conducting a more flexible policy than the Soviet Union, and as we proved in fact in the Middle East and I did not think at all that the Soviet Union was bound to prevail in a political contest, quite the opposite. And finally, I did not believe that the Soviet Union was gaining an advantage - it depended whether we were willing to make the defence expenditures that were permitted under the agreement and that was a matter of American decisions not a matter of Soviet acquiescence.

**CHARLTON:** But that was precisely the point where Senator Jackson concentrated his attack on the nature of the arms control process, and SALT became both an orphan and a victim when divorced from Kissinger's wider context for it.

Richard Perle.

**PERLE:** It's fair to ask what the point is of arms control, that sets the stage for a requirement that we make massive additional investments in precisely the strategic arms that were the subject of the negotiation, while permitting the Soviets also to make massive investment in additional strategic forces. That was the point about the failure of the Interim Agreement. It permitted for very sizeable growth on both sides. In my view it didn't restrain the Soviet Union at all in any significant way.

**CHARLTON:** But when you and Jackson drafted the ratification of SALT I and that amendment Kissinger appears to have taken the view that your attack was fundamental, caught him unawares; they sought to destroy our policy he said, not to ameliorate it.

**PERLE:** No, the reality was that that Interim Agreement was going to pass the Senate, there was no doubt in our mind about that, so we sought instead to condition or attempt to condition future agreements. So the Jackson Amendment says simply that future agreements must be on the basis of equality because the 1972 agreement clearly was not.

**CHARLTON:** Do you take the view that equality can be established as a fact because if it can't that's tantamount to saying that no agreement is possible.

LC

-10-

**PERLE:** I think equality can be established as a fact, I think it is very difficult to freeze equality. The strategic forces of both sides are in a constant state of flux and evolution and as vulnerabilities are discovered, they need to be fixed as imbalances develop they need to be corrected. The role of arms control in accomplishing that is a much more difficult proposition and looking back on 1972 I think Henry Kissinger would have a hard time arguing that that agreement facilitated our maintenance of an effective balance and indeed in discussions I've had with him he lays great stress not on the military benefits of the 1972 agreement but on the political necessity as he saw it at the time, with the emotions of Vietnam affecting the American Congress and public as profoundly as the war then did affect us, to buy a bit of time in which we might re-group in order more effectively to compete with the Soviet Union.

**CHARLTON:** Richard Perle's inference that Henry Kissinger's detente policy embodied a melancholy pessimism about the American will to sustain the policy of containment, became central to the political debate which led, in the end to the Reagan presidency.

The critics of Salt questioned the assumption that the Soviet Union could be contained other than by American power. As Kissinger said, it was part of a larger controversy over whether arms control enhanced or weakened the security of the West.

Kissinger himself rejected the notion which appeared in the anti-ballistic missile defence debate, as it had with the Hydrogen bomb in the 50's, that unilateral restraint by the United States would induce the Russians to follow suit. There was, he said, overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Early in the Nixon administration, in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia the Americans had been the first to deploy the multiple warhead missile MIRV, heavily criticised at the time as making another cycle in the arms race inevitable.

MIRV as Robert McNamara reminded us in the earlier programme, was begun "solely as a means of countering the Soviet deployment of an anti-ballistic missile defence".

Henry Kissinger.

**KISSINGER:** Secretary McNamara did not want to build an anti-ballistic missile defence. He therefore developed the idea of a MIRV arguing that with MIRV we could saturate any Soviet defence and that therefore there would be no strategic inequality. We had no assurance at all that the Soviets would agree to a limitation of ballistic missile defences. Historical experience with the Soviet shows that if they wanted an agreement limiting MIRVs we couldn't have driven them off the conference table with it. They would have deluged us with it. Our primary problem at that point was to keep enough support for the agreements we were making and MIRV was the one programme that the defence department had that was not being contested in any significant way or in any decisive way in the Congress.

**CHARLTON:** The historic essence of the first SALT agreement, the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972 was that each side renounced the defence of its society against the nuclear arsenal of the other.

As Henry Kissinger reminded us earlier the Congress had cut the budgets for a defence system to an absurdity anyway.

-11-

But in the labyrinth of the SALT accord is Ariadne's thread - which
leads us, in the present day, to President Reagan's case for the Star Wars defence.

Two expectations arising from Salt One were not fulfilled. Kissinger had hoped to shape the outcome so as to delay the trend which would give the Soviet Union a first strike capability against the American land based missiles by the 1980's, and then to use that delay to negotiate reductions in the numbers of offensive missiles in another and more comprehensive agreement. But the speed and extent to which the Soviet Union built up their offensive forces were underestimated.

**KISSINGER:** At the time of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the number of missile sites as I pointed out had been reduced to two, so our choice was whether we were going to agree to the Congress unilaterally dismantling the anti-ballistic missile defences or whether we were going to get something for it from the Soviet Union. Secondly, at that time the build-up of Soviet offensive forces was in its infancy. We made a unilateral statement, or we had our delegation make a unilateral statement, to read into the record that the United States considered the continued existence of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to depend on significant cuts in offensive forces and that if these offensive forces were not reduced within the time limit of the offensive agreement, that then the conditions for abrogation of the Treaty would exist; rather than lead to a reduction of offensive forces, the Soviets built up their offensive forces in a remarkable degree, and so that the balance between offensive and defensive forces was substantially destroyed. Secondly, as soon as the ABM Treaty and SALT I was signed, I initiated, we initiated negotiations for the limitations of multiple warheads and reductions to very small numbers. That the Soviets consistently refused so we have a totally new situation today.

**CHARLTON:** Henry Kissinger is convinced however that SALT was made, in his own words, the whipping boy, for a more fundamental philosophical contest on East West relations.

The same Soviet Union with which Kissinger established a wide range of contact was the one with which President Reagan much later would find it difficult to collaborate at all, for essentially the reasons given by Senator Jackson's associate and now the Assistant Secretary for Defence, Richard Perle.

**PERLE:** I don't think one can take the arms control agreements in isolation. There was an agreement on grain which led immediately to a massive Soviet raid on the American grain harvest pushing up the price of grain to American consumers and solving a very serious Soviet problem. There were agreements on science and technology that led to very significant transfers of technology to the Soviet Union that we now see showing up in Soviet military systems. There was a general agreement on principles governing the relationship that crowned a thirty year Soviet effort to induce the West to accept the principles contained in that document - the Soviet policy line of peaceful co-existence and the like. I think looking back on that period the series of agreements signed were in every case advantageous to the Soviet Union and I think that's all one needs to know in order to explain their readiness to sign them.

**CHARLTON:** Neither Henry Kissinger nor President Nixon had any desire to accommodate their critics to the left. They shared to a large extent the philosophical case against the Soviet state and its ideology.

As we've heard him say, Henry Kissinger thought of Senator Jackson as an ally and regretted the Senator chose to oppose him. It was, said Kissinger in his memoirs "a national tragedy that those who shared a similar strategic analysis should conduct a civil war over tactics."

LQ

-12-

But the gap was really much wider than a disagreement over tactics. Both sides wished to contain the Soviet Union. Kissinger thought, that, with seductive inducements, the Soviet Union might be escorted from its traditional expansionism to restraint; and that Russia's economic failures, and fear at Kissinger's bringing China into play, would urge the Soviet leaders to coexistence on the West's terms. The other - his conservative opponents - saw nothing but an implacable hostility and an endless vista of confrontations.

At a much remarked press conference in Moscow in 1974, Henry Kissinger had said, "What in the name of God is strategic superiority?" How should the historian understand him?

**KISSINGER:** That is absolutely correct. I do not believe that it, you can rely on a first strike strategy as the defence against all contingencies and again one has to consider this in the context of events. That remark was made in late June 1974 in Moscow, a month before Nixon was forced out of office. We found ourselves in the position of being harrassed on detente at a time when we had absolutely no capacity for confrontation and I still believe, I do not think it is possible to achieve the degree of strategic superiority that existed in the '40's and '50's such that we can rely on nuclear superiority to defend Europe and other areas of the world and I remind you that Reagan has never tired of pointing out in the last two or three years that we are not trying to win a war, and in what way does that differ from what I said ten years earlier.

**CHARLTON:** One of your most persistent and formidable critics, Senator Jackson, demanded to know why you hadn't sought lower limits from the Soviet Union as he felt you should have. I thought you gave a very interesting answer to that on the way to Peking in 1974 which was taken down verbatim at the time. I'd like to read it. You said this, the only way we could have even talked about lower numbers was to drastically increase defence spending and to hold the increase for a number of years, long enough to convince the Soviets that we were going to drive the race through the ceiling with them. That sounds very like the Reagan programme today.

**KISSINGER:** Exactly correct. That is still my view.

**CHARLTON:** Henry Kissinger brought about one of the most creative periods in post war diplomacy and he is one of that diplomatic history's great public figures.

Why did disenchantment with detente set in so early?

Overall detente says Kissinger was "ground down between a liberal idealism unrelated to a concept of power and the liturgical anti-communism of the Right."

But although we made our share of mistakes Kissinger has said, the fundamental assault on detente was made by the Soviet Union itself, with the Soviet Cuban expeditionary forces in Angola and Ethiopia, their appearance in Aden, the Kremlin's encouragement of North Vietnam's takeover of the South, the pressures on Poland and the Invasion of Afghanistan.

Detente had not deterred.

Over the next few years and the long agony for detente of the Carter presidency, the strategic debate was powerfully shaped by forces associated with the Committee for the Present Danger - they would return a different answer to Henry Kissinger's question, "What in the name of God is superiority?".

END

30

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

Into this forbidding context stepped Dr Henry Kissinger, with his immense talents and intelligence. For almost ten years he was to be one of the most powerful men in the world. In his own book about the Congress of Vienna, Dr Kissinger had written of those statesmen who achieved final greatness that it was given to them 'not only to maintain the pre existing of order but to have the strength to contemplate chaos – and there to find the material for fresh creation'. How far did chaos appear to Henry Kissinger himself to be the prospect, as he went to the White House as President Nixon's National Security Adviser and later his Secretary of State?

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

31

P

[L]

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

33

[L.C]

34

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

**KISSINGER:** I've never believed that – I've believed exactly the opposite. I've believed that as nuclear parity was achieved, threats *other* than nuclear war would gain greater force, and that it was the obligation of the West to create obstacles to these other threats.

**CHARLTON:** Stability at the level of the nuclear balance created instability at other levels?

**KISSINGER:** Exactly.

**CHARLTON:** How, in your view, did the ratio of nuclear strength influence or dictate the outcome of crisis?

**KISSINGER:** I have always believed, contrary to many scientists, that you're better off with superiority than with parity. I have also thought that absolute superiority was going to become next to impossible to attain; either because it was no longer achievable technically, or because the calculations would be too complex for anybody to have any confidence in them. Nevertheless, this is one extreme. At the other extreme, however, I believed (and I still believe) that a strategy based on mass extermination of populations would lead to the gradual demoralisation of the West, and to the growth of the unilateral disarmament movement and pacifism. I do not think one can (or should) convince democratic publics that their extermination is the key element in their security, either the threat of *their* extermination or of *mutual* extermination. So my view was that we would be better off with superiority than with parity. Even if superiority was not attainable, we were better off with a capacity for discriminating targeting than with a capacity for indiscriminate destruction.

**CHARLTON:** You are reported as having said that parity with the Russians stopped you, in your time – over the Soviet attempt, in 1970, to establish a submarine base at Cienfuegos in Cuba – from adopting the same tactics as President Kennedy had during the Cuban crisis in 1962.

**KISSINGER:** I never said that. Absolutely not. We used more or less the same tactics and we achieved more or less the same result: that is, we achieved the dismantlement of what we thought was a Soviet nuclear submarine base, and which I believe *was* a Soviet nuclear submarine base.

**CHARLTON:** With the implicit nuclear threat in order to achieve that?

**KISSINGER:** We didn't need implicit nuclear threats any more than Kennedy did, because Cuba is so close to our shores. We blockaded the harbour of Cienfuegos. He blockaded the whole island – so he more or less used the same tactic.

**CHARLTON:** Does, therefore, the behaviour of states in the last analysis conform to the traditional pattern – once nuclear parity has been established?

**KISSINGER:** No – but I think whoever has a local advantage has a decided and very important advantage, precisely because the side that can extricate itself *only* by initiating the use of nuclear weapons is at a very great disadvantage.

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But there was also, perhaps, an underlying, unspoken reason. In Henry Kissinger's search for a stable world order were echoes of what Lord Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary and soul of the coalition against Napoleon, had told the House of Commons about the Congress of Vienna: 'The Congress was not assembled for the discussion of moral principles, but for great practical purposes - to establish effectual provisions for the general security.' Kissinger was trying to wean American foreign policy away from both its traditional oscillations and its historical preoccupation with moral principles. Henry Kissinger's manipulations of the balance of power might have been familiar in the statesman's world of the Congress of Vienna, a context he was trying to recreate; but they were alien to much of the American body politic, to whom foreign policy is obliged to be, above all, a public policy subject to public scrutiny.

At the precise moment that we had achieved apparent success, both at isolating Vietnam and in relations with China and the Soviet Union, there occurred 'Watergate', a totally unpredictable event which collapsed executive authority, so that for fifteen to eighteen months the locus of executive respect by the public was the State Department - which was unheard of. That then put us into a much more defensive posture, so by 1975, we had a coalition of conservatives and liberals against the policy that Nixon and later Ford were carrying out, with me as Secretary of State. You had liberals who felt that if Nixon was for peace, confrontation could not be all bad, and conservatives who believed that any deal with the Soviets was wicked.

[L]

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THE STAR WARS HISTORY

Liberals who felt that détente condoned the suppression of human rights and conservatives who baulked at notions of equality or parity with the Soviet Union combined under the leadership of a powerful Senator, Henry ('Scoop') Jackson. This formidable opposition in the Congress consistently attacked both the arithmetic and the concept of the SALT talks and all but wrecked the policy. One of the Americans who sat with Kissinger across the table from the Russian leaders during the SALT negotiations, as a member of the National Security Council, was Hal Sonnenfeldt.

[L]

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THE STAR WARS HISTORY

**CHARLTON:** Whereas Henry Kissinger, and you, for example, took the view that those numerical advantages were illusory...

**SONNENFELDT:** We took the view that we could live with numerical disadvantages, especially as regards launchers, for a period of time. But, of course, one of the great disappointments of SALT I was that the clear assumption that there would *then* be substantial cutbacks in offensive forces (on which, incidentally, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Agreement was also based) was an assumption never borne out by subsequent events.

**THE EMERGENCE OF THIS** particular Soviet advantage in heavy land-based missiles, and the question of whether it stimulated the possibility of political transfers, had returned the American debate to an earlier apprehension, recalling President Kennedy's words in 1960. Reflecting upon the likely consequences of the sudden advent of Sputnik, the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile, he said:

**HENRY KISSINGER:** Absolutely not! Considering that we had riots in the streets, that we were involved in a war in Vietnam, that the opposition party held both houses of the Congress, I think we achieved an extraordinary flexibility of foreign policy. After all, we drove the Soviets out of the Middle East even *after* Watergate. I don't think the Soviet Union looked on the Nixon Administration as a weak opponent. I think they looked at us as a formidable opponent – we 'opened' to China in the middle of all our travails (which must have been an extremely unsettling time for the Soviet Union) – and what opportunity did they seize during that period? As long as Nixon was even relatively unimpaired we made progress in negotiations with the Soviet, lost no international position, and in fact made great gains in the Middle East.

[L]

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KISSINGER: It was a prelude to a series of global adventures for a whole variety of reasons. First, because with the collapse of our executive authority, starting in 1973, we destroying a President. We then had a McGovernite Congress. The people who were defeated in 1972, by the most overwhelming majority but one in American history, regained Congress as a result of events that had absolutely nothing to do with the political process. As a result of this, there was the oddest coalition between liberals and conservatives who took away both the carrot and the stick. They prevented us from resisting Soviet aggression in Angola. At the same time they challenged the Soviet Union with the Jackson and the Stevenson amendments, in which they cut off both credits and trade with the Soviet Union – and when the Soviet Union became more aggressive, preventing us from resisting it. Of *course* it led to the beginning of adventures.

Then, in 1977, you had the Carter Administration, which had an absolutely wrong perception of how to deal with the Soviet Union. You remember that when Carter came in, he said he was 'free of the inordinate fear of Communism'. He certainly did nothing, to put it mildly, to arrest the collapse of the Shah of Iran. He permitted the Soviets a major adventure in the Horn of Africa. There *was* no foreign policy.

That has nothing to do with détente. *Our* policy was to resist Soviet adventurism wherever it occurred, and as long as we had any authority we managed to do this. It was not détente that produced that situation – at least not as conceived by Nixon and Ford.

KISSINGER: Yes, but let's get a few things straight. In the fall of 1974 the Congress passed the Jackson Amendment, which cut off 'most favoured nation' treatment of the Soviets. It passed a Stevenson amendment which cut off credits. So the Soviet Union, at the end, was worse off than it had been before the détente period started. This happened at the same time, as I've said, that a McGovernite Congress had just been elected that would not support any form of resistance to Communist aggression. Then when the Soviets started stepping up their activities in Angola, and we attempted to resist, the Congress voted against the thirty million dollars we thought we needed to support the anti-Soviet and -Cuban forces (the Savimbi forces, who are still there). At that point the question was, should we cut off SALT... and at a time when we had a Congress that was not going to increase our military expenditures? I think it is absurd to conduct a

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THE STAR WARS HISTORY

[L.C]

**THE EARLY HOPES OF President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, that agreement to negotiate strategic arms limitations could be linked to Soviet assistance in America's disengagement from the sunless war in Vietnam, were not sustained. The Russians insisted that SALT was to be looked at on its own merits. With America a house divided and the uncompromising zealotry of the Communists in Hanoi, the détente policy could produce no honourable outcome in Vietnam. President Nixon's guarantee to the South Vietnamese proved not to be the bond of the American nation. Vietnam, in strategic terms, was in the end an American surrender.**

5

**HENRY KISSINGER:** Certainly Vietnam was a disaster; but when you inherit a disaster, when you inherit 550,000 troops, you just cannot switch it off like a television programme. It would have been easy for Nixon, from a purely selfish point of view, to blame it all on his predecessor. But his judgment was, and I think it was correct, that the United States had no right to sacrifice 35,000 troops and simply liquidate it as if nothing had happened. After all, people forget it took de Gaulle five years to get out of Algeria.

**CHARLTON:** There is the evidence of what Gromyko said to Rab Butler (the British Foreign Secretary) when Butler was trying to enlist Gromyko's help about Vietnam. Gromyko said to him: 'Our American enemies are deeply embedded with men and munitions in Vietnam; we've no desire to interfere.' How much more likely is it that by 1970-71, as negotiations opened on SALT, they *did* see the American position as one of weakness?

**KISSINGER:** First of all, what concessions did we make to the Soviets in SALT? I mean, there is a whole series of myths that are retroactively invented which have absolutely no bearing. Can you name on concrete concession we made to the Soviets that was unwarranted – or that was not going to be imposed on us by the Congress anyway?

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**CHARLTON:** I'm interested in how the Soviet Union saw this, and how...

**KISSINGER:** The Soviet Union, until 1971 and until our opening to China, procrastinated in negotiations. We had a number of things going for us, however. We had the opening to China. We had the fact that the Soviet Union was desperate to make an agreement with the West Germans on Berlin and East Germany, which they could not get against our active opposition. (I'm not saying it was necessary to get our *support*, but they could not get against our active opposition.) Third, they were worried, as they always seem to be worried, by the beginning of our strategic

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CHARLTON: There should have been a forward policy, of mining if necessary, earlier ... ?

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SENATOR HENRY JACKSON'S CRITIQUE was conditioned by a more visceral divination of the Soviet Union's intentions and capabilities, and the Senator's aide, Richard Perle, is thought to have exercised considerable persuasion over it. In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger accepted that Jackson had carefully studied Soviet tactics and strategy, and was convinced that they were out to undermine the free world. But while Kissinger agreed that this was a true enough reading of their intentions, he rejected the implication that all agreements were futile. 'Jackson objected', wrote Kissinger, 'to any agreement which afforded benefits to the Soviet Union, while he took it for granted that they would sign no agreement that did not promise them some gain...'

THAT WAS PRECISELY THE POINT where Senator Jackson concentrated his attack on the nature of the arms control process. SALT became both an orphan and a victim when divorced from Henry Kissinger's wider context.

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Early in the Nixon Administration, in the new uncertainties created by
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and following the domestic
upheavals over the course of the Vietnam War which caused President
Johnson to step aside, the Americans had taken the decision to go ahead
and be the first to deploy the multiple-warhead missile, MIRV. The
decision was criticised at the time and – almost more than any other since
–has been held responsible for making a huge increase in the nuclear
arsenals of both sides inevitable. Research and development of MIRV was
begun in the previous administration, as Robert McNamara reminded us
earlier, ‘solely as a means of countering the Soviet deployment of an anti-
ballistic missile defence’.

So by November 1969 (when negotiations started), probably fifteen
tests had been conducted on a schedule established by the previous
administration. Most of its members then started opposing – just as they
had with the Vietnam War – what they themselves had created. We had no
assurance at all that the Soviets would agree to a limitation of ballistic

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THE STAR WARS HISTORY

missile defences. We in fact proposed, and we opened, the MIRV discussion — admittedly with an unacceptable proposal. The proposal was that there should be a stoppage of all testing. The Soviets countered with a proposal that there should be a stoppage of all *deployment*, but that *testing* should be permitted, of course, this was an easy way for them to catch up.

**CHARLTON:** Rather like the SDI issue now?

**KISSINGER:** Right. So that is where it stalemated. Now, should we also have proposed, at that point, that there should be a stop to *both* testing and deployment? Well, this is a tactical issue. Historical experience with the Soviets shows that, if they wanted an agreement limiting MIRVs, we could not have driven them off the table with it. They would have deluged us with it. Our primary problem at that point was to keep enough support for the agreements that we *were* making, and MIRV was the one programme that the Defence Department had that was not being contested in any significant way — or any decisive way — by the Congress.

As soon as we had the SALT I agreement, we made a whole series of proposals on MIRVs to the Soviet Union which would have imposed severe limitations — none of which they accepted. So, should we have made it two years earlier? It's easy to say in the light of all that happened. One always has to consider the option in any one field compared to the totality of issues that were before us.

**CHARLTON:** In December 1974 you said, of MIRV, that it was the same question people faced when the H-bomb was developed. It raises the issue whether it's the United States development which then in turn produces that same development on the other side.

**KISSINGER:** And I think the answer is the same. The Soviets started deploying MIRVs in 1973, which means that they were well along by 1970 and 1971, which is the time we may have had an opportunity. As it turned out, we exploded our H-bomb about nine months before the Soviets. We deployed our MIRVs about eighteen months before the Soviets. It is impossible therefore that they could have developed MIRVs just in that short interval *between* the time we did and they did.

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HENRY KISSINGER: You have to understand a number of things about the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. First, there are a great many heroes now who were in their foxholes when all this was going on! At the time of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the number of US missile sites, as I've already pointed out, had been reduced to two. So our choice was whether we were going to agree to the Congress unilaterally dismantling the anti-ballistic missile defences, or whether we were going to get something for it from the Soviet Union.

At that time the build-up of Soviet offensive forces was in its infancy. We made a unilateral statement (or we had our delegation make a unilateral statement) to read into the record that the United States considered the continued existence of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to depend on significant cuts in offensive forces. If these offensive forces were not reduced within the time limit of the offensive agreement, then the conditions for abrogation of the treaty would exist.

Rather than this leading to a reduction of offensive forces, the Soviets built up their offensive forces to a remarkable degree. So the balance between offensive and defensive forces was substantially destroyed. As soon as the ABM treaty and SALT I were signed, we initiated negotiations for the limitation of multiple warheads and reductions to very small numbers. That the Soviets consistently refused. So we have a totally new situation today.

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HENRY KISSINGER: That is absolutely correct—I do not believe that you can rely on a first-strike strategy as the defence against all contingencies. Again, one has to consider this in the context of events. That remark was made in late June 1974 in Moscow, a month before Nixon was forced out of office. We found ourselves in the position of being harassed on détente at a time when we had absolutely no capacity for confrontation. And I still believe this: I do not think it is possible to achieve the degree of strategic superiority that existed in the 1940s and 1950s, such that we can rely on nuclear superiority to defend Europe and other parts of the world. I remind you that Reagan has never tired of pointing out in the last two or three years that we are not trying to win a war. In what way does that differ from what I said ten years earlier?

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THE STAR WARS HISTORY

**CHARLTON:** In fact, Admiral Moorer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, giving evidence about this, said the SALT I treaty should be seen not in the light of what it had frozen but of what it had *forestalled*. That you had actually forestalled what would by 1977 have been a three-to-two ratio in the Soviet Union's favour.