3 -- Pool Report Reykjavik to Washington, 14 June 1, 1973

At the air base, Nixon --obviously pleased by the crowd and the waving and applauding --- went over to the common barrier rope from his limousine and began greeting the wives and children, using both hands campaign-style. Several of those he talked to said "God bless you." Nixon remarked on the fine weather and said "you've got a lot of daylight here." Turning away to walk to his plane, he waved and said "I've got to get going now...thank you for coming." The President's plane took off at 1:57 p.m. Iceland time, nearly 25 minutes behind the scheduled departure time because the final Reykjavik meeting ran a half-hour longer than planned.

On the drive to the airport from Í Reykjavik, Ron Ziegler reported that at the concluding plenary session, Nixon and Pompidou "spoke in warm, moving terms about the relationship we have between the two countries and the success of the meeting." Nixon and Pompidou had a total of 7½ hours of talks Thursday and today and were together socially another 3½ hours during last night's dinner.

Ziegler stressed that the talks were not for reaching agreements, but for consultation. From the standpoint of Nixon and Pompidou, Ziegler said, "it was a highly successful meeting." and the whole conference tone was "warm and friendly."

Ziegler quoted Nixon as saying "a new era" in American-French relations began when Nixon took office in 1969. Ziegler said Nixon personally has "great regard" for Pompidou and felt their discussions were "very frank, very direct, and conducted on a basis of friendship."

"As a result, the President considers it a highly successful meeting."

Ziegler said Nixon planned to spend the weekend at Camp David. Ziegler will be at the White House tomorrow (Saturday), but no briefing is scheduled. (end)

Angelo/Evans/Young

Brezhnev Assurance
Reportedly Received
By Kissinger on Jews

NY Times

Sat 6/2/78

By BERNARD GWERTZMAN

Special to The New York Times

WASHINGTON, June 1—Leonid I. Brezhnev, the Soviet Communist party leader, was reported today to have told Henry A. Kissinger last month in Moscow that the Soviet Union would permit Jews to emigrate at the current rate of 36,000 to 40,000 a year and that the education tax on emigration would remain suspended.

In addition, according to Jewish-organization officials and diplomatic sources in touch with the White House, Mr. Brezhnev accepted from Mr. Kissinger a list of about 1,000 “hardship” cases, including 42 Jews imprisoned on charges relating to their efforts to go to Israel, and said he would look into their cases.

The list, including background information on the various individuals, was compiled by American Jewish groups and was given to Mr. Kissinger, President Nixon's adviser on national security, in an unpublicized meeting before Mr. Kissinger went to Moscow in early May.

Mr. Kissinger's trip, May 4 to 8, was devoted to a discussion of Mr. Brezhnev's trip to

Continued on Page 4, Column 4

What Mr. Moran and other captains in the area decided to do these changed the nature of the nine-month-old "war." in which no one has yet been injured. They pulled out of the 50-mile zone, demanded British frigates, and said they would not go back without them. As newspapers in Iceland referred to the "British surrender," London decided to go along and send in the navy.

"It was a moment of real jubilation" said Mr. Moran, as he packed his bags in his cabin below decks. "That was almost two weeks ago—still we had some trouble. But the last time a gunboat aimed for us, we ended up with the Royal Navy frigate Cleopatra on one side and the Plymouth on the other.

"If it weren't for the navy we would have come back empty. We're all quite relieved."

This sense of relief over the protective cover of three British frigates in the dispirited waters is apparent all around the dockyard, the mile-long fish market and in the homes of the 2,500 men who sail aboard the trawlers based at Hull. Thousands here earn their living, either directly or indirectly, from fish and fish processing.

Mrs. Leslie Rouse, a mother of six whose husband is a mate, or second in command, said all the wives cheered when they heard the news about the British Navy. "We don't worry so much now," she added, "But my children still look at the telly and say 'Are they shooting at my dad?'"

In a neat suburban area, Mrs. Richard Taylor, whose husband is now fishing near Iceland, remains concerned

FEATURES COLUMNS

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE 2 JUNE 1973

ANNALS OF DIPLOMACY

SALT

V~AT THE SUMMIT

WASHINGTON POST 4 JUNE 1973 (3)

Beyond the
Plowshares

By Nicholas von Hoffman

"Too frightened to fight each other, too stupid to agree," John Newhouse quotes Talleyrand as saying in Newhouse's remarkable series of articles concerning the SALT agreements in New Yorker magazine (May 5 through June 2). How the United States and the Soviet Union managed to move from the deplorable condition of Talleyrand's epigram to the first arms limitation treaty since the 1920s is finally explained in the good, clear prose which people who aren't nuclear horror technicians can understand.

Ordinarily instant history is so unreliable, so lopsided and so passionate that about all it's good for is footnote material for the real historians who come along later. Newhouse's work (published as a book under the title of "Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT," Holt, Rinehart and Winston, N.Y., $7.95) can't be attacked on any of these grounds.

He has produced a most useful history just now when we need it because SALT is currently underway and unless we have some good idea of what all the tedious haggling is about, we voters and taxpayers may destroy disarmament through inadvertence or stampede our government into accepting a position of such military inferiority that we'll end up getting ourselves wiped out.

Newhouse didn't write his articles by collecting newspaper clippings. With all of the administration's yowling about the Pentagon Papers and Jack Anderson, it appears that "Cold Dawn" is the recipient of leaks on the scale of a crack in the Grand Coulee Dam.

Although the author cannot discuss his sources, it's apparent from his text that he has had something like near complete access to files of the National Security Council. The only information he may not have been able to get his mitts on is notes of the conversations between President Nixon and Henry Kissinger and their Russian counterparts.

Ordinarily, it would be many years before a history of such secret and touchy negotiations could be written on the basis of such extensive interviews and documentation. The analysis and organization of the material aside, Newhouse should get some kind of award for reportage and the New Yorker ought to get something too for financing the man for a year while he galvanized around half the capitals of Europe collecting the information.

With a work on this topic, the first urge is to flip to the back and see which side got the better of the deal. That's a mistake. Its greatest value is its perhaps unique description of the way the American political bureaucracy works. Most of us laymen assume that when the United States enters into negotiations like SALT we come and they come to the table with a shopping list and then everybody haggles and compromises.

What Newhouse shows is that neither side arrives with a very clear idea of what it wanted; that, in one sense, SALT wasn't the world's two great powers dealing with each other, but an infinite number of groups on both sides of the table struggling with each other as much as with their main bargaining adversary.

"We were obliged to negotiate with ourselves," Newhouse writes and in his describing that process we get a unique view of the tangle of politics, tech-

(CONTINUED NEXT PAGE)

HE fourth round of the strategic-arms-limitation talks. (SALT) ended on May 28, 1971, and the American delegation went right to work preparing for the fifth round, which was due to begin in Helsinki on July 8th. The May 20th breakthrough, achieved through "back channel" negotiations between Washington and Moscow established Washington's cherished simultaneity principle—that limits should be set on offensive and defensive weapons at the same time. It also dictated a whole new negotiating position. If words meant anything, both governments were bent on having a SALT agreement. A political dynamic had developed that would presumably push the talks along. That was new. The back channel would be kept open by the supreme political authorities, if only to prevent another deadlock. That was also new.

The gloom had lifted, but there remained considerable skepticism. The huzzards for May 20th were muted by warnings thrown up by various knowledgeable Americans, including bureaucrats and Soviet specialists. Many of them felt that although it was useful and appropriate for Henry Kissinger to be negotiating privately with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly F. Dobrynin, Nixon should have remained offstage. In public committing his office and its prestige to a SALT agreement, as he had in announcing the May 20th understanding, he risked tempting Moscow to exact the greatest possible concessions. Nixon, after all, would be running for reelection in 1972. Anxious bureaucrats feared that the Russians would raise the price of a SALT agreement once they had decided that Nixon needed it. Not long after the May 20th statement, a closely involved American said, "May 20th was unfortunate on two counts. It was too narrow in scope, and it got Nixon neck out. It will be an uphill fight amend or stretch May 20th. The Russians now assume that Nixon need an agreement." (A year later, the same figure, no less closely involved, took a different line, arguing that Nixon had been right to involve himself publicly in the May 20th understanding. "The Congress and public opinion had to be prepared for a SALT agreement that would make a distinction between "fense and defense," he said. "We know that an ABM [anti-ballistic-missile] agreement would be in treaty form

and permanent, while the agreement on offense would be less formal and of limited duration. May 20th was the first step in preparing people for that.")

Some of the wisest heads in Washington worried that Nixon had maneuvered himself into the role of supplicant—the worst of negotiating positions. They were unaware of two critical elements in SALT. First, Americans know now, but didn't then—not, at least, with any assurance—that Communist Party chief Lyndon B. Johnson had committed himself within his party to a policy of expanded negotiation and détente. Hence, in relation to his constituency, Brezhnev's prestige was perhaps no less involved than Nixon's. Second, Nixon and Kissinger had long since opened a back channel to Peking, and it, too, had become abnormally active. Soviet leaders must have been aroused by movement toward the liaison they most feared. Triangular politics had started.

As might be imagined, the immaculate secrecy of the May 20th affair iritated many people already chafed by Kissinger's tight grip on SALT. If SALT III and IV were the gloomy rounds, SALT V was to be the rancorous round—at least in Washington, where the task of erecting a new United States position around the so-called "parameters of May 20th" taxed, if it did not exhaust, the patience of nearly everyone. Some relationships were already damaged, and the summer of 1971 was to open fresh wounds, which only time and perhaps distance will fully close. Preparing for SALT V meant filling in the numerous blanks the May 20th understanding. Some of the significance of the understanding lay in what it failed to say about things and in what it failed to say about others. It was hardly a legal document. A number of ambiguities remained. Nobody knew just which offensive weapons might be included in the simple freeze that had been agreed to. ICBS (intercontinental ballistic missiles) would be, but SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles) and strategic bombers were neither included nor excluded from the terms of the identical, backup letters exchanged by Nixon and the Soviet leadership or from the Kissinger-Dobrynin negotiating history. Nor was there any reference to Washington's first priority—a

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1-F

ANNALS OF DIPLOMACY -- CONTINUED

sublimit on very large land-based mis-
siles, like the Soviet Union's SS-9,
which if equipped with MIRVs (multiple
independently targetable reentry ve-
hicles) would pose a threat to M...
man, America's ICBM. Since the
limit was basic to the United States
position, the White House assumed that
Moscow would regard it as an implicit
part of the ICBM freeze. For those who
worried most about the security of
Minuteman missiles, the uncertainty on
this point was disturbing. Another am-
biguity turned on the Russian version
("pri") of the term "simultaneity;" it
had less force than the English word.
Finally, it was one thing to accept the
principle of "equality" in ABMs, quite
another to achieve it; the Russian side
was defending its capital city, while the
American was planning to protect
ICBMS at four different sites.

Those members of Kissinger's staff who worked on SALT felt that a limit on SLBMs should be worked out. Kissinger hadn't pressed for including SLBMs in the May 20th understanding. With the Russians trailing the U.S. in both the number (operational) and the quality of Polaris-type submarines, which were known in Washington as Y class, he feared that making an issue of SLBMs might produce another stalemate. Worse still, springing the SLBM issue on them might provoke Moscow into reviving the argument over America's Forward Based Systems, which consist mainly of aircraft based in Europe to counter Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles targeted on Western Europe. This issue was now happily on the shelf. Also, at this point Kissinger may very well have been prepared for a race in SLBMs, since a SALT agreement would certainly freeze the Soviet advantage in ICBMs. His staff felt strongly that the risk of proposing a limit on SLBMs was

worth taking. It behooved the Ad-
ministration, they felt, to maneuver the
Russians into accepting as much as pos-
sible in this first phase of SALT, be-
cause the prospects for the second phase
seemed (and still seem) less promising.
A SALT agreement that permitted the
Soviets to have six hundred more ICBMS
than the Americans while allowing
them to build their submarine force up
to a level of eighty or ninety boats over
the following five years might set
off serious opposition in the Congress.
Much better, argued the staff, to ob-
tain a limit on both ICBMS and SLBMS.

The SLBM issue was thrashed out
in high-level meetings on June 18th
and June 30th. The Soviets then had
twenty-two Y-class boats operational
and at least fifteen under construction,
compared with forty-one United States
Polaris boats operational. But the Rus-
sians were building nuclear submarines
at the rate of eight per year and, if they
chose, could have had a fleet virtually
twice the size of the United States fleet
in five years. Washington had no plans
to increase America's SLBM force; in
any case, the United States building ca-
pacity was fully absorbed in modifying
Polaris boats to take the MIRVed Posei-
don missile system. Since each Poseidon
could carry from ten to fourteen w
heads, America was in fact increase
the destructive potential of the
marines many times over without
adding to their number. The State
Department and the Arms Control
and Disarmament Agency threw their
weight behind the Kissinger staff.
SLBMs, they felt, should be included.
Gerard C. Smith, who headed both the
agency and the U.S. SALT delegation,
went beyond the staff, which was
proposing to freeze the Soviet program
at the magic number of forty-one. He
argued in favor of stop-
ping the Russians in their
tracks and not allowing
them to complete the boats
they had under construc-

tion. Since they were
ahead in ICBMS, Smith
wanted to halt a dynamic
Soviet program in an area where the
United States still held a commanding
lead. The White House—that is to
say, Nixon and Kissinger—bought the
staff argument. The United States
would propose halting SLBMs on July
31st and allowing the Soviets to com-
plete the boats under construction as of
that date.

Kissinger's astonishing visit to China
in July strengthened the bias of his
staff in favor of pressing the Russians
on SLBMs. With the channel to Pe-
king now wide open, the United States,
they felt, was in a remarkably good
position to bargain with Moscow. At
this point, the Joint Chiefs of Staff did
not have strong feelings on the issue.
That, too, would change. By autumn,
the Chiefs were insisting so strongly on
including SLBMs that any retreat from
this position would have run the risk of
losing their support for a SALT agree-
ment. In any case, the critical decision
was taken following the meeting on
June 30th: A new SALT position was
outlined in National Security Dec
Memorandum 117, signed by
President on July 2nd. The W
House, after swallowing hard, had
cided to push for a limit on SLBMs.
Moreover, the White House clung to
this position even when it appeared that
Moscow would never agree. It was
one of the few SALT positions from
which the White House was never to
budge. In the weeks preceding the
Moscow summit, indeed, the SL-
limit had become Washington's to
priority item and the toughest piece
bargaining in the back channel, where
it was finally worked out.

Decision Memorandum 117 also
proposed a freeze on ICBMS, as of De-
cember 31, 1971. Any new Soviet
missiles that United States satellite pho-
tography did not establish as completed

(CONTINUED NEXT PAGE)

BEYOND THE PLOWSHARES -- CONTINUED

nology, service rivalries, theologies and bureaucratic
hopes and fears that we like to dismiss with such terms
as the military-industrial complex.

If this data does damage to the idea that we are
led by a group of slightly crazed, stone-headed military
monoliths, we learn that the Russians' internal deci-
sions-making process is hardly more rational. Their
negotiators didn't even know how many rockets they
had until we told them: "At one point Colonel-General
Nikolai V. Ogarkov, who was listed as their second-
ranking delegate . . . took an American delegate aside
and urged that he and the other Americans discontinue
talking so specifically about Soviet military hardware:
such matters, he said, need not concern his civilian
colleagues."

For those of us who have long since made up our
minds about Nixon and Kissinger, what we also learn
from the Newhouse articles is that the actualities are
a little more complicated than our passionate judgment

of the two as unregenerate war criminals.

The defrocked Quaker and the Kraut take, in their
painful, studied, cautious ways, an even grander politi-
cal and military gamble than most of us outside the
government have perhaps realized. It may even have
been larger than SALT's No. 1 senatorial critic, Scoop
Jackson of Washington, has averred.

Judged on a one-shot basis, the gamble was too
dangerous to take; but as Newhouse shows, it makes
quite good sense if Nixon is right and we are going
into an age of negotiation. Then SALT is part of a very
long process of beating swords into plowshares, a busi-
ness that turns out to be more complicated than the
Bible suggests.

But that gamble is worth taking, especially if you
remember that up to now man has never invented a
weapon he didn't ultimately use.

© 1973. The Washington Post/King Features Syndicate

2-F

that date would be banned. This was a bald effort to prevent the Russians from filling the huge new holes they were found to have dug in their SS-9 ICBM fields. In short, the White House was trying to hold Moscow to the existing two hundred and eighty-eight SS-9s and to head off deployment of something perhaps even more formidable. (No new holes were started after July—a circumstance suggesting that the Soviets were serious about a freeze.) Decision Memorandum 117 fell with a thud on the bureaucracy. The text had been prepared in haste ("in frantic haste," according to one participant), because of the pressure of other business—notably the still secret (on a trip—on Kissinger. In fifteen or double-spaced pages, it laid out a number of wholly new positions, about which unhappy SALT bureaucracy had scarcely been consulted. Several weeks of confused and often bitter skirmishing lay ahead.

The SALT delegation left on July 5th for the customary NATO briefing in Brussels, and would go on from there to Helsinki. At that point, Decision Memorandum 117 fell under a heavy attack from the delegation. Many of the positions were appealed. These included the language on radar limitations, definitions of "exotic" ABMS, and the question of how to ban such ABMS. The freeze dates were also challenged, with the delegation arguing that all Soviet missile construction—land-based and sea-based—should be halted as of September 30th. The delegation, if only for negotiating purposes, aimed not just at freezing the Soviet Union's numerical inferiority in submarines but at making certain that none of the new holes—there were ninety-one of them, twenty-five very large and sixty-six smaller—would ever house missiles. The appeals were reviewed, and another Decision Memorandum—No. 120, dated July 20th—was sent out. The delegation was conceded some points but was overruled on others, including the freeze dates. Rancor and confusion grew.

Washington's truly nasty problem was finding a position on defense—on limiting ABMS—that the various parts of the town could live with and that might be negotiable. To date, no other issue had created such contention, and in July and August it pushed the major figures in SALT to a new peak of bitterness. As if the ABM issue weren't complicated enough, each of them in his own way made to make it more so. In Helsinki, the talks were devoted almost entirely to ABMS, not because the Soviets were reneging on the "simultaneity" principle but because they were continuing to treat defense as the first order of business. Agreement in prin-

ciple on ABMS would presumably clear the path for serious conversation on offense. The delegation went along with this approach, partly because it was unhappy with the United States ABM position and hoped to change it by one means or another. Soviet insistence on an ABM deployment solely in defense of each country's capital (an option known as National Command Authority) having been set aside by the May 20th understanding, the White House had decided to build its ABM position around Safeguard defense of ICBMS, a project already under way. The President, after all, was committed to the program; it had bargaining value, and there seemed no alternative. Most of the bureaucracy, one participant in the debate recalls, "was dragged along kicking and screaming." A novel formula was concocted, which became known as three-or-one. Each side could choose between defending its capital city with a hundred ABMS and defending its ICBMS at three separate sites with a total of three hundred ABMS. The first alternative represented what Moscow was already doing. The second represented essentially what the Administration planned to do. The idea was rather disingenuous, because by then everyone knew that the Soviets would not dismantle Galosh (Washington's name for the Russians' ABM defense of Moscow), as they would have had to in order to adopt the second alternative. In effect, the Administration was rigging a position that would have left the United States with three ABM sites, the Soviet Union with one. A case of sorts could be made for such a disparity: If the Russians were to have more ICBMS (and perhaps SLBMS), why shouldn't the United States have more ABMS to defend itself against them? Besides, the Galosh system, in addition to defending Moscow, afforded some protection to about three hundred ICBMS deployed within its operating area. This is called overlap, and American strategists fear and detest it. Overlap mixes area defense, which is unstable, with missile defense, which is thought not to be.

The case against three-or-one was more persuasive. In the unlikely event that Moscow were to agree to the proposal, Washington would be required to implicitly endorse a permanent Soviet advantage in offensive missiles. Nowhere in government were there people left to argue seriously that three Safeguard sites would have any strategic value, whereas a large Soviet advantage in ICBMS, especially if they

MIRVED, was a different story. The Pentagon would have relished the twelve-site Safeguard system originally planned but, by and large, was not impressed by the three-or-one deal—and

still less by two-or-one, the fallback position. In brief, a two-or-three-site Safeguard system bereft of growth potential had some appeal but not much. Many argued that three-or-one was a poor idea because it was non-negotiable and merely delayed bargaining on issues of more concern to Washington, especially SLBMS.

A sensible alternative would have been to propose a simple one-for-one deal, permitting the SALT Union to keep Galosh, and the United States its Safeguard site at Grand Forks, North Dakota, which by then was more than half completed. Besides being eminently negotiable, such an arrangement would have established parity in ABMS—a principle that Washington could use in SALT's second phase as a rationale for bargaining down the gap in ICBMS. Instead of urging this or some other sensible alternative on the White House, some members of the SALT delegation, backed by various parts of the bureaucracy, reopened the Zero option—a total ban on ABMS. Zero made sense in the abstract. If there were no ABMS, the question of cheating would virtually disappear: there would be no ABM radars to survey, no ABM tests to monitor; there would be no ABM hardware to move about, and thus fears of transportable systems would be nullified. The trouble is that Zero was never an option. Admittedly, the Russians did mention it during SALT I, but they retreated steadily from the idea thereafter, always indicating that to dismantle Galosh was out of the question. Still, much of the civilian bureaucracy clung wistfully to the one option that could reliably excise the menace of ABMS once and for all. Most of the military felt differently, and preferred to have at least one site, whether National Command Authority or Grand Forks, as a means of achieving some operational experience with ABMS and as a platform, however flimsy, on which to build if a SALT agreement fell apart.

The SALT delegation's efforts, late in July and early in August, to revive Zero were met with stiff opposition from the Joint Chiefs and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Suddenly the Pentagon was in full cry against all the earlier ABM proposals, and was urging a brand-new position. The dispute put the White House in an awkward spot. A meeting of the Verification Panel—a National Security Council committee that was handling all SALT issues—was called for August 9th. As always, Kissinger was in the chair. There were two subjects: Zero ABM and "exotic," or future, ABMS, around which another storm was brewing. One observer later

(CONTINUED NEXT PAGE)

3-F

said, "Henry took a tougher line than usual. He was very acid." The record supports this. Kissinger worried, he said, about having the greatest seminar on arms control in history and no agreement. Stiff resistance to Zero was expressed by David Packard, who was then the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and by Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The State Department, represented by the Under-Secretary, John Irwin, aligned itself with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and backed Zero. Packard and Richard Helms, director of the C.I.A., felt that in trying for Zero the United States risked giving up leverage for bargaining on offensive weapons. Kissinger asked Helms if he thought Moscow would dismantle Galosh; Helms said he didn't think so. Kissinger had seen Dobrynin at least once between July 31st and the August 9th meeting; nobody doubted that their conversation covered the Zero issue. And though Kissinger doesn't discuss his back-channel talks, he said repeatedly during the meeting that Zero ABM was not consistent with the May 20th agreement. He seemed to suggest that Dobrynin, on behalf of Moscow, had ruled out Zero. The Russians, Kissinger finally said, must be told that now is the time to get the damn thing (May 20th) moving. The fight over Zero had come to an end.

Perhaps more important than disposing of the Zero issue was the discussion on August 9th of futuristic ABMs. Strictly speaking, these are not ABMs, because the interceptors would be not ballistic missiles but more esoteric devices, like lasers, charged particles, or elettromagnetic waves. Within government, they are lumped together as "exotics." Though it would take many years—certainly more than a decade—to develop, test, and deploy any one of the exotics, heading them off was priority business. During the August 9th meeting, the State Department, the C.I.A., and the Arms Control agency all urged a ban on everything of an exotic nature. The Joint Chiefs opposed the ban, while the Office of the Secretary of Defense favored banning novel interceptors but not some of the related hardware, like sensors. The White House staff wished to ban everything except certain research and development; the staff reasoned that it would be wise to have some grasp of the technologies, in order to know what to watch out for. Officials of the Arms Control agency conceded that a research-and-development ban on exotics could not be verified. The discussion was about as arcane as one might suppose. The Presi-

dent's scientific adviser, Dr. Edward E. David, Jr., was called in, and imparted what one observer called a "Buck Rogers flavor" to the meeting. At one point, he unveiled the prospect of a "carbon-dioxide laser with a recirculating medium," in response to which Kissinger, doubtless speaking for everyone, confessed to knowing about carbon dioxide but about recirculating mediums not at all. The White House staff prevailed.

Three days later, on August 12th, Decision Memorandum 127 was issued. It reaffirmed the three-or-one ABM position, and added, rhetorically, that a ban on all ABM deployments "remains an ultimate U.S. objective and will be a subject for negotiations after we have reached an agreement on defensive limitations and an interim agreement on offensive limitations." Regarding exotics, Decision Memorandum 127 proposed banning everything except research and development on fixed land-based systems. It remained to convince Moscow that the great powers should remove exotic future threats to stability as well as the immediate ones.

The tempest spent itself quickly after August 9th. The disaffected had lost the day; signs of rebellion disappeared. Yet while the meeting had cleared the air, it couldn't efface the bitterness and tension that were agitating the conduct of SALT. The White House, confident again of its control, cared little—and, indeed, felt confirmed in its suspicion that on some issues the delegation was unreliable.

Compared with earlier rounds, SALT V in Helsinki was showing some progress, though not yet on major issues. The Soviets still avoided discussion of offensive weapons. They were reluctant to be diverted until some progress on ABMs had been recorded. The extravagantly complex ABM issue probably did require more attention, but the Americans were anxious to discuss offense—chiefly to insinuate SLBMs onto the agenda. For some time, they were stonewalled. Vladimir S. Semenov, the head of the Soviet delegation, protested vigorously that SLBMs had not been covered by the May 20th understanding. He was well aware that Smith had not been told beforehand about the understanding, so Smith informed him one day that he had read the secret correspondence relating to it, which did not necessarily exclude SLBMs. Semenov took a somewhat more subdued line on the SLBM issue after that.

Weeks before SALT V ended, on September 23rd, the Americans had fallen back from the three-or-one notion to two-or-one. Moscow, unimpressed, was insisting on parity. After talking with various concoctions, the Soviets formally counter-proposed a plus-one arrangement. It provided

that they would have Galosh plus some- thing else, while the United States would have its Grand Forks Safeguard site plus National Command Authority. The Americans said no, partly because they would not be ready to accept parity in ABMs until the link with offense was in place, partly because the offer revived National Command Authority, partly because of the offer's considerable ambiguity. Moscow's something else seemed to mean ABM protection of some portion of its ICBM force—something roughly equivalent to one American Safeguard site. The United States delegation immediately asked if the second Soviet ABM site would be situated in one of the SS-9 fields, east of the Urals. An ABM installation in this sparsely populated region would trouble Washington far less than one situated in an SS-11 field in western Russia, where it would provide a fair amount of area defense, especially if it were tied in with Galosh. This, again, is the overlap problem, which so disturbs nuclear strategists. A second Soviet ABM site in western Russia was therefore utterly non-negotiable. Yet, as SALT V ended, the Soviets were still refusing to say where the second site would be.

Despite some measurable progress, the events of the summer left a heavy deposit of despondency, frustration, and resignation—at least, within the American SALT bureaucracy. The military complained (as they complain now) that the Minuteman-vulnerability problem was being shortchanged. Bureaucrats in all departments worried that the link between offense and defense was still promissory. Some were disturbed because the last Soviet proposal hinted that the May 20th understanding hadn't really, shelved National Command Authority. It also suggested something more interesting: the Americans, thanks to their patient exposition of the virtues of missile defense, as distinct from area defense, had sold the concept to the Soviet military. Moscow's one-plus-one proposal was a sign of this. The keen interest in ICBM defense suddenly shown by General Konstantin A. Trusov, a Soviet military delegate, and his fellow-officers in Helsinki was another sign. What's more, with Safeguard in declining fashion in the United States, both Americans and Russians had begun to discuss the merits of hard-site defense—that is, the defense of ICBMs with an ABM system (whose components, unlike Safeguard's, are designed solely for this purpose). All this was disturbing to those who hoped to choke off ABMs at a low, virtually meaningless level. It seemed marvelously ironic that after years of neglect the hard-site alternative came alive just as the great powers were moving toward an ABM

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treaty. Finally, SALT V proved again that in government, as elsewhere, ignorance breeds frustration and confusion. The delegations had been working in the front channel, but nobody doubted that the back channel was very much alive, as indeed it was. Nixon was in direct contact with Brezhnev, and now seemed committed to a summit conference in Moscow following the trip to Peking. His intention of crowning these "journeys for peace" by signing a SALT agreement was taken for granted. But just what the agreement would contain was a source of deep anxiety to skeptical bureaucrats, who suspected that Moscow would steadily raise the price as the summit meeting drew near. Nixon and Kissinger, they feared, had maneuvered themselves and SALT into a bind.

The sixth round of SALT, to begin in Vienna on November 15th, would be a prelude—but to what? That was what many people in the government wondered. A divided Administration approached the resumption of talks nervous about where it had got to in SALT, how it had got there, and what would happen. The concern was general. Other Western governments complained that the White House was ignoring alliance problems in favor of the new triangular politics, which might produce little more than a bad SALT agreement and increased tensions, if not an open split, between Europe and America. "If Nixon is diddled and has to negotiate himself in Moscow," it would be terrible," one Washington-based diplomat observed. "Nixon is running a great risk." And Henry Kissinger, he complained bitterly, was "consumed by la folie des grandeurs." Many officials also worried aloud that a "soft" SALT agreement would erode the future United States bargaining position with Moscow. By this they meant that in return for very little the United States would have played its best cards. Some of the concern was well founded. Such traditionally primary concerns as relations with Europe and Japan had been eclipsed—for how long, no one could say—by summit diplomacy. The old conventions of realpolitik were ascendant. "Triangular politics" is a euphemism for a policy aimed at moderating relations with Russia and China by playing them off against each other. There would be no major concessions or movement on SALT—not, at least, by the Americans—until Nixon's February trip to China, which, among other things, would, to quote one official, "keep the Russians honest." It was a complicated game plan, as Nixon might have put it.

On October 12th, Nixon

opened a news conference by announcing that the Moscow summit was laid on for May. Kissinger would soon revisit Peking, the time to work out a date and other details for the Presidential trip to China. He left on October 20th. The White House was betting that Brezhnev's interest in a successful summit matched its own—that from his point of view a SALT agreement would put China's role and Chinese pretensions in perspective as nothing else could. Nixon could go to Peking, but the major business on the East-West agenda could be performed only by the superpowers— in some cases, working with their allies. The Berlin negotiation offered a first, splendid example of spinoff from triangular politics. The four-power ambassadorial talks aimed at improving Western access to the city and formalizing its legal status had been stalled from their beginnings, in March, 1970. Then, in August, 1971, the Russians joined the Americans in pressing for marathon sessions, and by the end of the month an agreement was pinned down at the ambassadorial level. There is little doubt that Kissinger's first trip to China and Nixon's commitment to go there himself aroused Brezhnev to hasten the sluggish pace of his détente diplomacy. Few concepts are more detested in Moscow than that of a multipolar world.

As SALT VI got under way, in November, the United States SALT position was still not fully formed. Nixon and Kissinger were concentrating on the China trip and postponing big SALT decisions, their calculation being, of course, that a successful China trip would put added pressure on the Russians to be amenable on SALT. Progress in Vienna, under these circumstances, was good. The delegations had quickly begun to draft language for a joint text on both the defensive and the offensive agreement. They had settled many of the minor issues and left brackets around the unresolved major problems. These included ABM levels, radar controls, the duration of the offensive agreement, the freeze dates, and the SLB issue.

The plenary sessions had now been wholly superseded by a pattern of troikas, working groups, and working lunches. So-called mini-plenary sessions were used to record agreement, or agreement in principle, worked out in these other informal settings. With the plenary sessions all but scrapped, some Americans and Russians rarely saw each other. The stress was still on defense. The two sides were sparring, each seeking a one-site advantage in ABMs. The Americans had changed course and were arguing that both sides should simply complete what they had—a notion that would have left the Soviets

with Galosh and the United States with the two Safeguard sites then under way. The Russians were pressing a different two-to-one arrangement, arguing that, besides Galosh, defending Moscow, they, too, should have one site for defending ICBMS. Their proposal would have left the United States with just the Grand Forks Safeguard site.

The Americans were fascinated by diverging attitudes on the Soviet side. General Trusov and the other military members of the Soviet delegation were becoming steadily more enamored of the American hard-site concept for defending ICBMS. Indeed, by then some of these officers were using the American term "hard-site" instead of a Russian equivalent. They had obviously learned a good deal about hard-site from their opposite numbers on the American side. The Soviet civilians, on the other hand, had still not given up on a National Command Authority arrangement. "They not only want us to have National Command Authority but seem almost insistent," said one American. "Why? Probably, they want to see Washington protected against accidents or what they call provocative attacks, and they feel that they know the Chinese better than we do. In any case, their suspicions of China are deeper and certainly more irrational than ours." Another closely involved American said, "They can't seem to understand why we are concerned less with protecting our leadership than with protecting a small portion of our missile force. They argue the point in terms of stability; leadership, they say, must be protected."

Although the basic ABM agreement would be left for an eleventh-hour White House decision, the delegation managed a major breakthrough near the end of January, 1972, when the Soviets accepted the United States position on exotic systems. Back in the summer, Moscow's attitude, as its delegation reflected it, had been sympathetic. Then, in the autumn, it hardened, probably under pressure from the military bureaucracy. Washington was accused of injecting an entirely new issue. Moscow would not agree to a ban on any future defensive systems except those that might be space-based, sea-based, air-based, or mobile land-based. The United States delegation persisted and was rewarded. Fixed land-based exotics would also be banned. The front channel had produced an achievement of incalculable value.

By now, much the most sensitive issue was whether SLBMs would be covered. The Americans were proposing parity in numbers of boats and rough parity in numbers of "tubes"—

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that is, the launchers themselves. The Russians argued that the Soviet Union needed more boats, because of the heavy geographical penalty on its sea-based operations. The transit time of Russian submarines from port to their stations in North American coastal waters is very long. And the Russians don't have forward bases, like the ones the Americans have, at Holy Loch, Scotland, and Rota, Spain. The Soviet delegates—at least, the civilians—were poorly informed on their own SLBMS, as on other such matters. They didn't know the number of submarines they had operational and under construction. They didn't know that soon, given a construction rate of eight per year, their government would have more Polaris-type subs than the United States. So in January, 1972, more than two years after the talks had started, Gerard Smith took Semenov aside and gave him the relevant figures on Soviet submarines. The assertion of a need for superior numbers of submarines, however deeply felt, may have been a tactic designed to discourage the Americans on an issue to which Moscow never expected them to cling. In any case, the SLBM problem was well beyond the competence of the delegations; it was, par excellence, an issue for the back channel—and there it was eventually resolved.

The front channel fared better in coping with an older, less complex, but equally sensitive issue—the sublimit on very large missiles, like the SS-9. As SALT recessed briefly for Christmas, the Russians were still balking at the sublimit and the Americans were still pushing, but without much hope. A failure to get the sublimit was among the gloomiest of prospects. Signing a SALT agreement bereft of this, his heaviest priority, could have cost Nixon the support of the American military, and perhaps other parts of the government as well. No one can say whether he would have taken the risk. Happily, Moscow removed it in January, in Vienna, by agreeing in principle to language that gave the Americans their sublimit. One may well wonder why the Russians accepted a limitation on their biggest missiles at that precise moment. Surely they were tempted to hold this concession for the tough back-channel bargaining that lay ahead. A reasonable guess is that they were sending the White House a signal. Nixon was now giving Moscow more to worry about than just his visit to China. Looking ahead to a SALT agreement that would leave the Russians with the greater number of offensive missiles, the White House began thinking in the autumn about improving American strategic forces and sharpening their "visibility," as one Kissinger staff aide

put it. That meant spending money. In his new defense budget, Nixon sought an increase of one billion two hundred million dollars in spending on strategic arms. This, it should be noted, was the first time in years that Washington had raised the strategic-arms budget, in terms of constant dollars. As it entered an election year, the Administration was notifying the country and the world that neither a SALT agreement nor Soviet arms production would leave America lagging behind, or even appearing to lag behind. Much the largest part of the increase would be absorbed by the Navy's Trident, a submarine, not yet out of the design stage, that will carry new, longer-range SLBMS. The Soviet Union's submarines and the SLBMS they carry are already conspicuously inferior to America's. This is another—and unstated—reason the Russians sought a formal right to deploy more nuclear submarines than America. Finally, an even more ominous prospect loomed before the Soviet leadership that January. The Pentagon, preoccupied, as always, with Minuteman vulnerability, was pressing to keep open the option of hard-site defense. Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird had taken on the leadership of this enterprise, and was urging hard-site on both the Congress and the President. In mid-January, he told Nixon in a letter that he was "deeply disturbed about our SALT position," which he felt would leave Minuteman inadequately defended and hence make an agreement more difficult for Congress and the public to accept. The Pentagon wanted to write into the SALT agreement the option of deploying hard-site defense in three years. By now, some part of the Soviet military establishment was also very much interested in hard-site, and was doubtless applying who knows how much pressure on the leadership to do something about it. But Moscow's interest, as it had made clear, lay in setting a very low limit on ABMS. Hard-site defense would confound such a goal as nothing else could; an effective system would require numerous installations and thousands of interceptor missiles. Quite possibly, the Russians decided in January that accepting a limit on their big offensive missiles would lighten pressure on the White House to approve hard-site; this, in turn, would lighten pressure on Moscow to do something it did not want to do.

SALT VI ended on February 4th, with both sides looking ahead to the next, and decisive, round—above all, to the summit conference and a SALT agreement. Nixon was under pressure in an election year to obtain an agreement, to which he was personally committed. Brezhnev was under pressure

to give more substance to Moscow's trumpet calls for détente, so that the dividends might start coming in. He and Nixon were spending some additional money on strategic arms, partly to impress each other, but each was hoping to discourage another round in the arms competition and the heavy spending that would go with it. Nixon and Kissinger were preparing to go to China. Dobrynin had just returned from a long trip to Moscow, where he was presumably given fresh instructions for SALT. With a successful China trip behind them, Nixon and Kissinger would reopen the back channel with Moscow. Kissinger and Dobrynin were expected to start negotiating the broad lines of a SALT agreement, with the delegations supplying precise language and otherwise filling in the blanks.

KISSINGER wasted no time. En route to China in February, he instructed his staff by telephone from Guam to prepare some precise recommendations on the major SALT issues. Their chief recommendation was to accept equality in ABM sites as a means of getting a Soviet agreement to limit both SLBMS and land-based mobile missiles. The staff felt that a good offer on ABMS would capture either SLBMS or mobiles, and possibly both. The delegation agreed that such an offer should be made but expressed doubt about whether Moscow would bend on SLBMS. Part of the staff urged a simple ABM proposal, leaving the Soviet Union with Galosh and the United States with the Grand Forks Safeguard site. Kissinger and other staff members seemed to favor a two-and-two arrangement, which would leave the United States with both the Grand Forks and the Malinstrom Air Force Base Safeguard site, and Moscow with Galosh and a single ICBM defense site.

SALT VII would begin in Helsinki on March 28th, so the United States had little time in which to work up a position. A meeting of the Verification Panel on March 8th was largely devoted to an inconclusive discussion of hard-site. The National Security Council met on Friday, March 17th, with all participants agreed that SLBMS should be in the agreement. The Joint Chiefs were by now very tough and very articulate on this point. By March 23rd, the White House had made its decision, and set forth its position in Decision Memorandum 158, dated that day. The Americans would propose equality in ABMS—specifically, the two-and-two arrangement—provided the Russians agreed to put SLBMS in

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the package. Otherwise, Washington
would insist on a two-to-one arrange-
ment, leaving the United States with a
one-site advantage in ABMS (for what-
ever that might be worth). The delec-
gation was given no fallback position.

If the proposal met resistance, as was expected, Smith had instructions to return to Washington within three weeks to make new recommendations. He and the other delegates were not pleased by these instructions. They wanted fall-backs. They wanted to be able to conclude the agreement before the Moscow summit, so that Nixon would have only to sign it. Much of the government felt the same way. The White House had a purpose in denying the delegation a fallback position: it wanted to create an aura of "hanging tough on SLBMS," as one participant put it, since the Russians still doubted Washington's strength of purpose on this issue.

The delegation left for Helsinki the day after Decision Memorandum 158 was signed. Smith quickly made a number of minor concessions to the Soviet position. Then, acting on his instructions, he put forward the new American proposal linking ABMS and SLBMS. At that point, he had exhausted his authority and could only argue the case. The Russians were disconcerted by the unyielding American line on SLBMS. They had apparently assumed that Washington would drop the SLBM issue as the summit drew near. On Friday, April 14th, Semenov, Trusov, and Alexander N. Shchukin, the major figures of the Soviet delegation, were recalled to Moscow. The Americans were champing at the bit. They had nothing more to offer and, in any case, nobody to negotiate with. They cabled Washington on April 14th a recommendation to hold firm on SLBMS but to accept the Soviet ABM proposal called one-plus-one, first made back in September. It would allow the United States to keep the Grand Forks site and to build a National Command Authority system, while allowing Moscow to keep Galosh and to build one ICBM defense site. The Russians disliked Washington's two-and-two offer, because it would allow the United States to defend many more ICBMS than the Russians. The ABM agreement was to be a treaty of unlimited duration, with a standard provision for review at five-year intervals. The agreement on offense was to be an interim arrangement, but the parties were at issue on its duration. The Soviets had alternately proposed eighteen months and two years. The Americans couldn't agree among themselves. The Joint Chiefs, like the

Russians, wanted the shortest possible interim agreement. The White House staff was urging five years. It would take the United States even longer than that to deploy any of the new weapons it was considering. More important, the staff argued, to accept the Soviet proposal would be to accept the near equivalent of an ABM-only agreement. The delegation, except for former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul H. Nitze, favored three years; he wanted five. Like SLBMS, this was an issue for the back channel.

It was put about Washington that an important meeting, presumably on Vietnam, would be held at Camp David on a long weekend beginning Thursday, April 20th. Everyone, including most Cabinet officers and the White House staff, assumed that such a meeting had taken place until it was announced on Tuesday, April 25th, that Henry Kissinger had returned the day before from Moscow, where he had been negotiating with the Soviet leadership over the past four days. As usual, the secretary had been immaculate. Kissinger had taken along his senior deputy for the Soviet Union and Europe, Helmut Sonnenfeldt; his principal deputy for Vietnam; two other staff members; and Ambassador Dobrynin. Nobody, it seems, remarked the absence of any of them. The Camp David cover story worked so well that some people (including Smith, in Helsinki) tried to telephone Kissinger there.

Kissinger wasn't starting from scratch in Moscow. Besides his periodic meetings with Dobrynin, there had been about a dozen messages between Nixon and Brezhnev. Among other things, the trip showed a keen awareness on both sides that summit meetings are notoriously accident-prone. The Paris summit in May, 1960, fell to pieces on the wings of Captain Powers' U-2. Thirteen months later, Kennedy was greeted by Khrushchev in Vienna with a Berlin crisis. Johnson's Moscow trip was a casualty of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Now, in mid-April, 1972, the ground beneath Nixon's Moscow project began to tremble. Damage to four Soviet ships by American aircraft bombing Haiphong Harbor was protested, but mildly. Still, North Vietnam's spring offensive was going very well at that time, and Nixon, it was feared, might feel obliged to take steps that Hanoi's chief ally and arms supplier would find inconsistent with summits. Fortunately, Vietnam was not the only major drama then playing the theatre of world politics. The West German Bundestag was moving slowly and with great uncertainty toward a vote on ratification of a nonaggression treaty with the Soviet Union. Chancellor Willy Brandt's majority in favor of

the treaty appeared to be perilously thin. Brezhnev and his immediate colleagues wanted few things more than this treaty—seen as a stride toward broader Soviet access to Western European technology and commerce, and perhaps political influence as well. To cancel the summit meeting would be to risk losing both a SALT agreement and the treaty with West Germany. Diplomats in Moscow doubted whether the leadership would accept that risk, whatever happened in Vietnam.

In Moscow, Brezhnev took the initiative by presenting Kissinger with two memorandums—a three-page statement on offense and a one-page statement on ABMS. The statement on offense broke the back of the SLBM issue. Moscow would accept a freeze in return for numerical superiority in submarines and tubes. The now famous numbers were sixty-two submarines and nine hundred and fifty tubes, compared with America's forty-one submarines and six hundred and fifty-six tubes. Here indeed was something for Washington to chew on. Some of the language on SLBMS was vague and, if it were to be accepted, would require considerable negotiation. But clear profit turned up in a Soviet willingness to meet the White House preference for an interim agreement that would last for five years. The ABM statement repeated the one-plus-one proposal that Semenov had been pressing in Helsinki, and specified that no more than a hundred interceptor missiles could be deployed at any of the sites. Although Kissinger had no great difficulty with this approach, it, too, would require considerable negotiation in Helsinki. The statement ignored geographical constraints, and the Americans still insisted that the second Soviet site would have to be situated east of the Urals, well away from population centers. Also, the horrendous problem of radar controls was still far from thrashed out.

Kissinger's visit coincided with a sensational piece of news. On Saturday, April 22nd, the C.I.A. informed the White House and appropriate agencies of government that the Russians were preparing to test a new ICBM, larger than any other, even the SS-9. Washington now knew what Moscow intended to put in those twenty-five huge new holes in the SS-9 fields. The Americans also assumed that the new missile would eventually be MIRVED, and would replace the SS-9 force. Thanks to what seemed to be an improved launching technique (according to American intelligence), it was thought that the new missile might double the yield of the SS-9. On the following Sunday, at full and accurate account of the C.I.A.'s disturbing report turned up on page 1 of the New York Times, under the by-

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line of William Beecher. This kind of bad news travels fast in Washington, though usually not quite that fast. Beecher's source was presumably no friend of the SALT agreement. Yet the new missile, if anything, argued for getting the agreement and freezing Soviet ICBMS at one thousand six hundred and eighteen—the number operational plus the ninety-one new holes.

A Verification Panel meeting was scheduled for Friday, April 28th. Smith, accompanied by a fellow-delegate, Lieutenant General Royal B. Allison, immediately returned from Helsinki. Kissinger's first task was to prepare the bureaucracy for a deal on SLBMs that he and the President had apparently decided to make along the lines discussed in Moscow. A question of no great relevance but some fascination arises at this point: Did Brezhnev spring the offer of sixty-two boats and nine hundred and fifty tubes on Kissinger? Or did Kissinger, plying the back channel with Dobrynin, suggest something similar and hence invite the proposal he got in Moscow? The question cannot be answered except, probably, by Nixon and Kissinger, who do not discuss back-channel activity. Kissinger and his staff had concluded before the April Moscow trip that the Russians, if they agreed to an SLBM deal, would insist on superior numbers. Analysts had already calculated that Moscow would need roughly twenty more boats than the Americans in order to keep as many on station. So there is the possibility that Kissinger invited the proposal. On the other hand, the figure nine hundred and fifty tubes made absolutely no sense to the Americans. Most Soviet submarines carry sixteen SLBMs; some are being equipped with twelve new and larger SLBMs. Mathematically, however, a total of nine hundred and fifty tubes cannot be achieved using any combination of twelve- and sixteen-tube boats. This may suggest that the Soviets know something about their SLBM program, or their plans for it, that United States intelligence has yet to learn.

The Verification Panel meeting of April 28th would be critical. "The problem was: How do you put into the front channel a deal worked out in the back channel?" said one observer of the meeting. Kissinger ordered up a paper for the meeting with estimates of the numbers the Russians might propose if they agreed to a freeze on SLBMs. The figure sixty-two boats turned up squarely in the mid-range of possibilities. Even for Henry Kissinger, this was playing the SLBM issue very close. As the Verification Panel met, only Nixon and Kissinger, certain Na-

tional Security Council staff members, and some—probably not all—of the principals knew that Brezhnev had put forward an SLBM proposal with precise numbers.

At one point during the meeting, Kissinger and Admiral Moorer held an exchange that probably settled the SLBM issue, even if nothing was formally decided. Nixon needed the support of the Joint Chiefs for an agreement freezing Russia's numerical edge in both ICBMs and SLBMs. Moorer wanted White House support for speeding up the Trident submarine program. Trident, in a sense, was bait. The meeting soon established the Pentagon's strong preference for awaiting Trident's availability—in 1978, at the earliest—rather than building more Polaris/Poseidon boats. The Navy worried that not accelerating the Trident program could mean losing it in Congress. Kissinger asked Moorer how many submarines the Soviet Union could have by 1978 in the absence of an agreed freeze. The answer was at least eighty. Kissinger then made a number of points, among them the desirability of an agreement that would hold the Soviet Union well beneath the level of eighty submarines, especially if Trident could not be put to sea until 1978. The meeting soon adjourned, and was resumed, by a more restricted group, the following day. But the meaning of the Kissinger-Moorer exchange was clear to those who heard it: The Navy would have Trident, provided that Congress approved, and the President would have the support of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for an SLBM deal that would give the Soviet Union nearly half again as many missile-carrying submarines as America.

The climactic meeting was held in the President's office on Monday, May 1st. It lasted nearly two hours. Besides Nixon and Kissinger, the participants were Secretary of State William P. Rogers, Laird, Smith, and Admiral Moorer. Notes were taken by Major General Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Kissinger's chief deputy. An outsider might have been confused by what seemed a reversal of roles. Admiral Moorer supported the asymmetrical submarine deal, while Smith and Rogers were dubious and seemed reluctant to formalize such disparate numbers. Smith especially disliked freezing the disparity for five years; three would have bothered him less. In any case, everything of major importance had been decided. Washington at last had a complete and negotiable SALT position. Within hours after the May 1st meeting, Decision Memorandum 164 was issued. It outlined an SLBM freeze,

using both "Moscow numbers"—sixty-two boats and nine hundred and fifty tubes (even though the latter still made no sense). It also accepted the one-plus-one arrangement, thus aligning Moscow and Washington on ABMs. The front and back channels had merged. The contours of an ABM treaty and an interim agreement on offensive missiles had been accepted by both governments, and in Washington, these contours had the support—or, in some instances, the acquiescence—of the appropriate agencies. These were contours, however. The complete auvre would require a few more weeks of work. The delegations in Helsinki would perform the larger part of it; their principals would pencil in the last critical details.

Smith and Allison returned to Helsinki the day after the meeting in the President's office and immediately got down to business with the Russians. Much remained to be done. Although the ABM treaty needed attention, completing the interim agreement was now the problem. Washington had not yet abandoned hope for prohibitions on land-based mobile missiles and on silo modification. And there were other issues, of which the most intractable—and menacing—concerned the SLBM freeze. Washington agreed that the Russians could have sixty-two boats and nine hundred and fifty tubes, but not without paying a price; namely, retiring old missiles. In May, 1972, United States intelligence estimated the Soviet Y-class submarine force at between forty-one and forty-three boats, either deployed or under construction. The freeze on missiles was expected to hold the Soviet Union to that level; now it was proposed that only by "cashing in" old missiles and submarines could the Russians build toward sixty-two boats and nine hundred and fifty missiles. Thus, the new SLBMs would be replacements, not additional elements. Washington had counted about three hundred and ten vintage Soviet missiles, of which two hundred and ten were ICBMs and a hundred were SLBMs. Retiring them all could theoretically earn Moscow nineteen or twenty additional submarines.

The U.S.S.R. accepted the replacement condition but not the American calculations of its submarine strength or the American assumptions about which old missiles, or how many, would have to be retired. The equation was mind-bending, but not the issue. Washington was simply trying to maximize the number of old Soviet weapons to be retired, Moscow to minimize it. In Helsinki, the Russians abruptly laid claim to an SLBM program of forty-eight boats. This was from five to seven more boats than the Americans had

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ments would have to be signed that
day. This seemed to amount virtually
to a condition. The Americans didn't
understand why Brezhnev was mov-
ing in such haste, and became worried
that the two delegations in Helsinki
would not have time to draft the proto-
col on SLBMs and get to Moscow in
time for the signing ceremony, which
was now scheduled for 5 P.M. It soon
became clear that indeed this could not
be done, and the signing ceremony was
rescheduled for later that evening.
The President was planning to hold a
dinner at Spaso House, the American
ambassador's residence, for his hosts at
seven o'clock, and the Americans tried
to gain time by moving the hour back
to eight-thirty.

It was 12:30 P.M. in Moscow when
messages reached Washington and
Helsinki that the breakthrough had
been made. The delegations were in-
structed to draft the protocol and get
themselves and the completed docu-
ments to Moscow as soon as possible.
Kissinger thought, as he said later in
the day, that "it was the first time in
the history of Soviet-American rela-
tions that joint instructions were sent
to two delegations, so that no misun-
derstandings could occur, and where
we were kept informed by the Soviet
side about meetings going on in the
Soviet delegation in order to speed up
the drafting process."

The American delegation got the
twelve-thirty message by telephone, but
a written account of the SLBM settle-
ment didn't reach it, by telegram, until
two-thirty. The Soviet delegation got
theirs much sooner. Garthoff, Kishilov,
and Oleg Grinevsky, a Soviet delegate
and a Foreign Ministry official, im-
mediately began drafting the protocol
and making the relevant section of the
interim agreement conform to it. The
deliberations labored through the after-
noon on agreed interpretations of some
parts of the agreements. They left for
Moscow as soon as the new material
had been typed in English and Russian.

The signing ceremony was now
scheduled for eleven o'clock eve-
ning. The Soviet delegation accompa-
nied Smith, Nitze, Allison, and Gart-
hoff on the American plane, where, as
someone put it, the last plenary—de-
voted to working out some of the
agreed interpretations—was held. The
plane landed at 9 P.M. The Russians
sent a car to meet Smith, who raced
off to the Kremlin with a motorcycle
escort. He arrived to find no one there,
because the ceremonial dinner at Spaso
House was under way. The three oth-
er Americans headed for the V.I.P.
lounge, assuming, correctly, that the
Embassy must have sent people to meet
Smith. They found that two Embassy
staff members who had been instructed

to meet Smith had leaped into their car
to give chase when they saw him
scooped up on the tarmac by the Rus-
sians. Fortunately, cars had been sent
for the remaining Americans as well.

Garthoff was carrying the docu-
ments. He had forehandedly arranged
to have an I.B.M. electric typewriter
crated and sent along on the airplane,
for he had guessed that the documents
might contain typos or other mistakes
and so would have to be retyped before
the signing ceremony. He was right.
Mistakes had been discovered on the
plane. A preposition was missing from
Article III of the interim agreement.
Another error did violence to conven-
tion: of two English-language copies
that were to be signed, one should have
given this country's name precedence
throughout and the other should have
had it appear second (the same was
true of two Russian-language copies),
but in both English versions of the pro-
tocol to the interim agreement the
United States of America was named

before the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. Finally,
in another document the
words "of America" were
missing after "the United
States." All this meant a
good deal of retyping in
Moscow. Garthoff took leave of
Nitz and Allison, had
the typewriter uncrated, and
drove off to the Soviet For-
eign Ministry with Grinev-
sky. He was taken to the
Office of American Affairs,

from which he called the Embassy for
a typist. There wasn't much time. The
power in the American section of the
Foreign Ministry had been turned off,
so the typewriter was transferred to an-
other office and plugged in. Garthoff
waited. The typist didn't appear. There
had been a misunderstanding, and in-
stead of going to the Foreign Ministry
she had gone to the Ministry's guest-
house. Garthoff could not wait for very
long. He had to take the documents to
St. Vladimir's Hall in the Kremlin for
the signing ceremony.

Meanwhile, Nitze and Allison had
managed to reach Spaso House before
the dinner was over, but only Allison
had pierced both the Soviet and the
American security network around the
ambassador's residence. Allison had
been instructed to appear at the signing
ceremony in uniform—presumably to
symbolize the support of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff for the agreements—so
he had no difficulty with security.
Nitze, on the other hand, not only was
not admitted but was detained out on
the street for a brief time. This former
Secretary of the Navy and Deputy
Secretary of Defense was unable to per-
suade the United States security people

that he had indeed been invited to din-
er by the President. Fortunately,
Nitze was rescued by a Soviet Foreign
Ministry official, who obliquely drove
him to the Kremlin and maneuvered
him through the security cordon there
and into St. Vladimir's Hall.

By the time Smith reached Spaso
House, the dinner was over. He went
on to the Embassy and joined Kiss-
singer, who was in the Embassy snack
bar, about to begin the first of two
press conferences he held that evening.
Smith had been working since 5 A.M.
He weakly told the American press that
he and Semenov had continued their
labors on the plane. "So," he said, "this
is about the freshest treaty that I have
ever talked about." The reporters
pressed him for details of the morning
agreement; their specific interest was in
getting the numbers of Soviet sub-

marines and SLBMs, from
which to make reasonable
evaluations of the agreement.
Most of them were frankly
irritated by the secrecy that
continued to obscure SALT.
Smith declined to talk about
Soviet submarines. The at-
mosphere in the snack bar
suddenly became quite tense.
Kissinger spoke up and tried
to offer some guidance on
Soviet SLBMs without using
precise numbers. One report-

er responded with a *cri de courr*
"Could I make a plea to you, and
Ron [Press Secretary Ronald Zieg-
ler] as well? It has taken thirty months
to get this treaty. The Senate of the
United States wants to know what
is in it. There is an argument about
it. We have been out of our hotel
an hour and a half. We get ten min-
utes of questions, and tomorrow it is
going to be our fault for screwing it up
and creating political trouble. Can
somebody else pass up the champagne
[i.e., the signing ceremony] and let's
keep this going?" It was ten-fifty-
five—time to leave for the signing
ceremony—but Ziegler announced that
Kissinger would be available for an ex-
tended session with the American press
afterward.

The signing went off without inci-
dent. Scarcely anyone knew that Nixon
and Brezhnev were signing imperfect
documents. The retyping was done the
following morning at the White House
command post, in the Rossiya Hotel,
and Nixon and Brezhnev signed the
perfected documents privately.

The day had been long and had
provided surprise, suspense, drama, con-
fusion, pith, and moment. It wasn't
over yet. There remained Kissinger's
press conference. The time was 1 A.M.
The place was the Skylight Sky Room,
a dimly lit night club in the Intourist

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Hotel. Against a background of champagne buckets, and gazing over a raised dance floor, Kissinger sought to cope with a group of disgruntled reporters, who were becoming progressively unhappier, partly because nobody had been able to supply texts of the agreements. The fact was that there existed only the documents that had been signed, which had not yet been copied. To mollify the press, Kissinger cited figures on Soviet missiles and bombers. Almost certainly, no Moscow night-club act ever played to an audience more bemused by its surroundings or the implausibility of what it was witnessing. Kissinger himself was struck by the incongruity. After noting at one point that "the Soviet Union has been building missiles at the rate of two hundred and fifty per year," he added, "If I get arrested here for espionage, gentlemen, we will know who is to blame." He stressed repeatedly that the SLBM deal suited American interests. It did, he conceded, freeze a Soviet numerical advantage in boats and tubes, but the alternative to an agreement freezing the Russian boats at sixty-two, he said, might well be a Soviet submarine fleet of eighty or ninety boats within the five-year life of the agreement. Answering the charge that "the United States got stuck with a submarine deal," he said, "That is an absurdity. . . . It was the United States which insisted that submarines be included. The United States was in a rather complex position to recommend a submarine deal, since we were not building any and the Soviets were building eight or nine a year, which isn't the most brilliant bargaining position I would recommend people to find themselves in."

Most of the questions were about the struggle over SLBMs, and this was hardly surprising. An aura of mystery and confusion obscured the essentials of this elusive issue, which had deadlocked the talks and might have blocked agreement. Kissinger gave a good briefing on the outlines of the dispute, and even sketched in some detail. His audience learned a fair amount, but the complexity of the subject guaranteed that not much of it would creep into the daily press. It was no time for a rigorous discussion of the two agreements; everyone was exhausted. By one-forty-five, the press had no more questions, and the night-club press conference ended.

The last person to reach his bed in the Rossiya Hotel was probably Garthoff. Some time after the signing ceremony, he suddenly remembered the I.B.M. typewriter in the Soviet Foreign Ministry. He and the other members of the delegation were returning to Washington via Helsinki early in the

morning. His last contribution to the day's events was retrieving the typewriter in the dead of night.

IT was all over. An ABM treaty had at last been signed by the United States and the Soviet Union. Each side renounced the defense of its society and territory against the other's nuclear weapons—that is the treaty's historic essence. Eleven of the treaty's sixteen articles are designed to prevent any deviation, clandestine or otherwise, from this agreement. Each side will rely entirely on its reconnaissance and detection systems to verify the other's compliance with both agreements, and each formally agrees to forbear interfering with the other's surveillance systems or to conceal those of its activities which are to be checked on.

Knowing what and how to think about SALT is no easier after agreement than before. Paradox and contradiction have always agitated the enterprise. Some people worry that the agreement limiting offensive missiles will promote not stability and economy but more strategic offense and the spending that goes with it. Those who fought against Safeguard had the stronger case, and yet Soviet fears of this system that was unable to perform its major function—defending Minuteman sites—became the blue chip on the American side of the table. And who could have foreseen that a trip to China would give the talks a final burst of impulsion, which may have been essential to the kind of agreement that was reached?

Critics say that Washington could have worked out a one-plus-one ABM deal at least a year before the Moscow agreements. Possibly so, the reply goes, but the interim agreement on offense could not have been pushed any faster. That argument leaves the critics as it finds them. Although they rejoice in having an ABM treaty, they see the interim agreement as a cover for an expanded arms race; as a "hunting license for new weapons," in the words of one of them; as "worse than nothing," in the words of another. They worry that the ABM problem cannot be judged to be safely behind us, because the MIRV problem is still before us and might unhinge the treaty. With numbers of weapons no longer an issue, this reasoning goes, the military and technological bureaucracies will focus their efforts on refinement and innovation. If the critics are right, the interim agreement carries a heavy penalty.

Then, hawkish critics of the interim agreement complain that it will not stop the Soviet Union from doing anything it wants to do. Some solid technical analysis can be deployed behind their argument. But, as is often the case, such analysis misses a larger political

point. In doing a deal with the Americans on offense, Brezhnev was influenced much less by strategic calculation than by the politics of his foreign policy. Nixon and Kissinger were right to insist that he accept a link between offense and defense. To have accepted Moscow's preference for a simple ABM agreement would have cost the White House the support of largish parts of the bureaucracy and Congress, and perhaps even some members of the Administration itself. With justice, Nixon would have been accused of yielding America's prime source of bargaining strength in return for exactly nothing. In a sense, the interim agreement, as some critics complain, could be seen as legitimizing improvement and modernization of offensive weapons, but it should not inspire them. With or without agreement, the Soviet Union would reach for a MIRV capability, while Nixon in any case would move toward a followup strategic bomber and the Trident submarine and missile as well.

Those who object to the interim agreement might do well to judge it in relation to the ABM treaty, to which they do not object. The great powers were (and still may be) unwilling to put hobbles on the process of refining offensive weapons until they set limits on ABMs and numbers of offensive missiles; the negotiating history shows as much. With that accomplished, either of the two parties can, if it chooses, argue plausibly that since both the American and the Soviet people are now defenseless, there is no need to improve offensive capabilities. Each society is unambiguously a hostage to the destructive power of the other. And each side can now also argue that a parity of sorts has been acknowledged. The interim agreement leaves the Soviet Union with something like a three-to-two edge in numbers of missiles and at least three times as much strategic megatonnage, while the United States, for its part, has more than twice as many deliverable nuclear warheads (about fifty-seven hundred against twenty-five hundred) as the Soviet Union.

Most of the criticism comes from those who see too few restraints or from those who, like Senator Henry Jackson, see too many. The former argue that neither side is inhibited by the interim agreement, whereas Jackson worries that it inhibits the United States but not the Soviet Union. So far, Jackson is a lonely figure, for his allies are not especially articulate. That could change. In time, Jackson's position could be overtaken and carried beyond his concern about disparities in numbers of missiles into a generalized alarm that the Administration had

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shamefully allowed the United States to drift away from sufficiency to in- sufficiency, thus presenting the Soviet Union with a clear claim to strategic supremacy and all the political cards that go with it. If these politically troublesome disparities are not somehow narrowed during SALT's second phase, which began last November, the Ad- ministration could run into serious trou- ble. Specifically, by 1975 or 1976, or perhaps even before, an aging Ad- ministration could find itself with an aging bomber force and a submarine force said by hawkish critics to be ag- ing, and with no new weapons as re- placements. Neither Trident nor a new strategic bomber will be ready before 1978, at the earliest. By then, the Rus- sians may have started MIRVing their giant missiles, or, at the least, testing a workable MIRV. At that point, the old question of Minuteman vulnerability, which has so far been a mostly arcane internal argument, could blossom into a contentious political issue, perhaps even bringing pressure on the Adminis- tration to abrogate the ABM treaty so as to be able to defend Minuteman. Fashions change quickly in America. A growing tendency to think about secu- rity chiefly in terms of reducing defense spending could be submerged by re- newed cries of missile gap, accompanied by heavy congressional pressure to de- ploy new or improved weapons with all possible speed.

Little imagination is needed to sup- ply a scenario that could produce such a convulsion in the public mood. One or two political reversals for America, most likely in Europe, might well pro- voke a closely reasoned statement by some prominent member of the de- fense community—perhaps in the form of an Adelphi Paper, published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies—proclaiming a sharp decline in America's political and strategic power. Unlike most such papers, which reach a small, specialized audience, this one might turn up on page 1 of the *Times*—as good a launch pad as any for a heated congressional debate. After all, the American public is unused to running behind the Soviet Union and might be far less impressed than Wash- ington experts by the heavy, United States advantage in warheads; in any case, the warhead advantage can scarcely be considered permanent if one assumes, as most experts do, that Mos- cow will one day MIRV its long-range missiles.

Those among the critics who figured in the effort to launch SALT in 1967 and 1968 should acknowledge that the Moscow agreements achieve essentially what they themselves were preparing to propose in the summer of 1968: a limit on ABMs and a freeze on both land-

based and sea-based offensive missiles. The big difference is that since then the United States has lost its lead in numbers of missiles. Equally, all critics of the interim agreement should note that by freezing the number of big So- viet land-based missiles, while giving the Russians a larger number of sub- marines to build toward, the interim agreement does help to encourage the movement toward the more stable sea- based systems—an environment, more- over, in which the United States has both natural operating advantages and better weapons. In that light, the agreement is consistent with Washing- ton's position since the start of the negotiations.

Dovish critics are untroubled by su- perior Soviet numbers. They know that, whatever happens, American stra- tegic forces will remain more than ade- quate for the assured-destruction role. The edge in quality, they also know, could be a permanent—certainly a long-term—American advantage. Still, such critics need to bear in mind the fact that the peoples of the world nei- ther think nor react in entirely rational terms. Some or many may draw the wrong conclusions from the putative Soviet advantages in numbers and size of weapons; America's technological superiority is a considerably less con- spicuous asset. If the warhead gap is eventually erased, Soviet politicians, diplomats, and generals may proclaim an existing and growing strategic su- periority. And the world may listen. Or, on the other hand, it may not listen. But the risk that it will is there, and it is one that American leaders could scarcely ignore. Even parity is for Moscow as much a political as a strategic value.

In pressing to limit ABMs and ac- cepting a hold on its biggest missiles, the Soviet Union appears to be a con- vert to the macabre doctrine of assured destruction, even though there is no equivalent Soviet term—not yet, any- way. What needs to be said, however, is that nuclear-force planning is one thing, nuclear-war planning quite an- other. Like most of what passes for strateg- ic doctrine in the nuclear age, assured destruction is an abstraction, not reality. Assured destruction is es- sentially just a tool for modelling forces and isolating the heresy of outright nu- clear superiority; America's strategic forces are built around a capability of destroying some given part of Soviet urban society and industry. Yet perhaps the most interesting of the ironies of SALT—certainly the most reassuring— is that while assured destruction may have become the solemn dogma of strategy, it is unthinkable that, short of a massive nuclear attack, an American President actually *would* retaliate in-

stantly against the aggressor's cities and thus invite the destruction of his own. And there is no reason to assume that on this point Soviet leadership is less rational than American.

SALT was well served by the back- channel negotiations. The back channel is a good place for dealing with rival powers, but allies, like bureaucrats, re- sent being left out. It is too soon to bal- ance the undoubted gains of a secret trip to China against the long-run ef- fects of not alerting the Japanese. Tri- angular politics is useful, if only because the greatest single source of instability in the years ahead probably lies in the hostility between China and the Soviet Union. China draws a measure of se- curity from triangular politics, while the United States gains from it some maneuverability vis-à-vis Moscow and Peking. Moderating its difficulties with the West permits Moscow, however, to focus attention on China. Embedded as it is in triangular politics, SALT cannot be divorced from Moscow's concern with China or Washington's uneasy re- lations with Japan and Western Eu- rope.

As a political force, SALT has a dou- ble edge. It may moderate relations between the great powers, but, depend- ing on how it is handled and what agreements it produces, it could also hasten the disrepair of NATO—a pros- pect to which Moscow obviously is sensitive. SALT is the only major East- West transaction that has lacked Eu- ropean participation; because they are left out, European governments feel more dependent on America and hence more vulnerable. Their security, they know, is as much at stake as America's. Triangular politics, they fear, will re- store the world of Metternich, who told Talleyrand, "Don't speak of allies. They no longer exist."

The bureaucracy speaks of SALT in phases. The first seven rounds were Phase I. We are now in Phase II. So far, SALT appears to be a serious process as well as a continuing one. But the talks rely on the intent and nego- tiating style of the parties. The record established during Phase I is neither reassuring nor disappointing; it is in- conclusive. A modest interim agree- ment has been achieved. From the start, the two sides have engaged in a frank, open, nonpolemical dialogue on the weapons most vital to their security. That is itself a watershed. Certainly it is not to be taken lightly or taken for granted. Because it is wrapped in the theology and the other abstractions of strategy, SALT is an obscure, certainly an elusive, enterprise. Politics, nonethe- less, lies at its heart. There is much more to SALT than meets the eye of many a systems analyst. Settling the SLBM-replacement issue was not the

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