290

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR 14 SEPTEMBER 1971

Progress from SALT

One of the most fearsome aspects of the Soviet-American nuclear armaments race has been that some accidental happening, such as the unintentional launching of a missile or explosion of a test-device, might trigger off a deadly retaliatory move by the other side.

Which is why the reported accord between the U.S.S.R. and the United States to set up a new communications satellite hotline for instant contact between Moscow and Washington in such cases is an encouraging sign. As reported in The Observer (London) it is a modest enough first result from the strategic arms limitation talks (SALT) which have stretched out now for two years. But no one who grasped the complexities and the profound mutual distrust between the two superpowers ever expected the talks to be easy or to bear quick results.

According to The Observer's correspondent, writing out of Moscow, the accord was reached in Helsinki in August. In addition to a satellite hotline, which will presumably be more dependable than the present under-ocean cable and European overland wire system, the accord provides for mutual commitment to refrain from

nuclear retaliation pending consultation between the two capitals, and for a subsequent joint investigation of such accidents.

Based on the limited information at hand, the move appears to be a useful and positive one. But it falls far short of being a true "failsafe" system. And it comes no way near the "breakthrough" announced last May in a joint United States-Soviet statement.

The world still waits for positive results from SALT in terms of limiting the spread of defensive antiballistic missiles, as well as an accord—hopefully an outright ban—on the buildup of offensive weapons. Most observers consider these objectives still remote.

In the context of recent lessening of tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States, with the Berlin agreement and the decision to start negotiations next month on preventing incidents in international waters, there is reason to hope for that promised breakthrough. Meanwhile, we are thankful for any step that helps to lift the prospect of holocaust-by-accident that has hung over mankind for too many years.

291

THURSDAY MORNING, 16 SEPTEMBER 1971

A14 Thursday, Sept. 16, 1971

THE WASHINGTON POST

# Accident Pacts Were To Be P.S. to SALT

By Marylin Berger

Washington Post Staff Writer

Dual agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union to deal jointly with nuclear accidents and to develop instantaneous communications for immediate consultation was to have been a postscript to an agreement on limiting strategic arms.

Instead, it has become a cur-
tain raiser while haggling over
the central arms control
agreement continues across
the conference table in Hel-
sinki, informed official
sources said.

The United Staes had pro-
posed a joint official an-
nouncement of the dual agree-
ments for today and officials
left open the possibility that
this may yet be forthcoming.
Moscow is understood to have
made a counterproposal.

Signing is expected in Wash-
ington toward the end of this
month by Secretary of State
William P. Rogers and Soviet
Foreign Minister Andrei A.
Gromyko.

The two agreements were
negotiated by technical ex-
perts of both countries at-
tached to the Strategic Arms
Limitation Talks (SALT), in-
formed officials said. They
said that early in the talks it
was decided that these techni-
cians should meet to deter-
mine whether it would be pos-
sible to improve methods for
exchange of information. It
was reasoned that in this way
both countries could "get to
know each other better" and it
could be determined if any

strategic arms agreement
could feasibly be carried out.

The technicians, who started
their talks in Vienna in
March, made quicker progress
than the main delegations
dealing with the highly com-
plicated issues of finding equi-
valencies on both defensive
and offensive missiles. As a re-
sult, the technicians came up
with their agreements first
and it was decided to go ahead
with the announcement, in
part to provide some public
evidence that limited progress
is being made in SALT.

One of the agreements pro-
vides for immediate consulta-
tion in the case of a nuclear
accident with each side pledg-
ing to refrain from immediate
retaliation. Consultations will
be facilitated by the terms of
the other agreement which
provides for communications
satellites for instantaneous
communication between the
two countries. This will re-
place the sometimes-faulty hot
line that has been in operation
for nine years.

There is a provision for
joint investigation of nuclear
accidents, but not for a system
of on-site inspections, to which
the Russians long have main-
tained opposition, informed of-
ficials said.

It was hoped by some of
these officials that the satel-
lite system could also be used
by each country for its own
communications with its em-
bassy.

While there never has been
an accidental launch of a mis-
sile, the agreements provide a
fail-safe system. Informed offi-

cial sources said it made no
difference, for the purposes of
the agreements, whether a
missile that goes out of con-
trol is armed, since it is impos-
sible for the other country to
know on launch whether the
nuclear warhead is emplaced
or not.

This system provides a
means of informing the other
side of the accident, with the
hope that the weapon can be
destroyed before it does any
damage and, finally, that there
be no retaliation whatever the
outcome.

Negotiations on the larger
issues are still being carried
on in Helsinki. It is under-
stood that the major portion
of the talks is being devoted
to an agreement on limiting
defensive missiles with the So-
viets trying to get a deal in-
volving a single-site ABM sys-
tem in the United States, in
return for one site around
Moscow.

It is understood that the
agreement would specify the
number of ABM launchers —
probably about 100.

The United States is under-
stood to prefer a deal limiting
the number of launchers only,
leaving to each side to deter-
mine where and at how many
sites it wants to place them.
The Russians are believed to
have preferred an arrange-
ment in which each side would
have ABMs around their na-
tional capitals only.

But the United States al-
ready had begun work on its
Safeguard system providing
for ABMs around interconti-
nental ballistic missile bases

and the program was so con-
troversial in itself that there
was concern in Washington
about prospects of getting
funds for switching over to an
entirely new system around
the capital.

President Nixon announced
on May 20 that "together with
concluding an agreement to
limit ABMs" the two sides
would "agree on certain meas-
ures with respect to the limita-
tion of offensive strategic
-weapons."

It has been learned, how-
ever, that there has been very
little progress made at SALT
on offensive weapons. Further-
more, while the United States
considers limitations on mis-
sile-carrying submarines to be
important to any agreement
on offensive weapons, the Rus-
sians are understood to be
very reluctant to discuss such
limitations.

The hope on both sides is
that some agreement can be
concluded by the end of the
year but there are indications
that the submarine issue could
extend the talks considerably.

Some officials expect the
talks in Helsinki to adjourn
soon, to be resumed in Vienna
after the delegates return
home for consultations and for
their postponed vacations. No
dates have been set.

NEW YORK TIMES

19 SEPTEMBER 1971

What Do
You Do
When You
Didn't
Mean It?

WASHINGTON. — Although still stalled in their negotiations on a limitation of strategic arms, the Soviet-American talks in Helsinki (SALT) produced progress on a related problem last week. It was disclosed that the two sides had agreed to establish a new communications system between Washington and Moscow in order to warn each other of an accidental or unauthorized missile launch.

The purpose Is to prevent
World War III from erupting be-
cause of a miscalculation.

Details of the alert system have yet to be announced and may take many months to work out, but they depend upon a satellite relay system. This will replace the old "hot line," whose underseas cables and European landlines have too many linkages to be foolproof in the frightful seconds when an aberrant ICBM —a test missile off course or an operational ICBM unleashed by accident—might be hurtling toward a target.

The chilling fact is that both
in the United States and the
Soviet Union the ICBM's are
pretargeted; magnetic instruc-
tions in the missile's mechanism
program the weapon's precise
course. An accidental launch of
Russia's mighty triple-headed
SS-9 with a "nuke" on board
could mean the descent of 15
million tons of TNT on a target
in the United States. But even
an unarmed Soviet test missile
flying out of control could pro-
duce a spasm response and
detonate World War III.

There have been no provoca-
tive missile accidents to date.
What, then, might cause one?

Nothing man can devise is
completely foolproof or invul-
nerable to human aberration. A
test missile's guidance system
might err. A commander of a
Poseidon submarine, master of
160 powerful nuclear warheads,
might go berserk. Or someone
might slip LSD into the crew's
water supply. Crews of the land-

based Minuteman ICBM's have
been known to use drugs as a
means of relief from the tension
and isolation of their lonely
tasks. The double-key launch-
control system to prevent una-
thorized launches is not ac-
cident-proof. And heaven knows
what precautions the Soviet
command and control system
encompasses.

Supposing there is an ac-
cidental launch of an operational
Soviet ICBM and we are immedi-
ately alerted by Moscow. What
then?

If the warhead is targeted on
Boston, does the American Presi-
dent give the order for Boston-
ians to seek wh. ever shelter
they can find? This is like asking
what you would tell the people
of Los Angeles if you knew for
certain there would be an earth-
quake in 15 minutes. If the
United States had an area-wide
ABM defense, it could be alerted
to shoot down the errant missile.
But the Safeguard ABM system
is confined to protecting missiles,
not people. The President could
not protect Boston. The President
would have little he could do
except pray.

But the President, knowing the
Soviet missile launch was ac-
cidental, would not touch off
World War III by pressing the
button unleashing the fury of
our missile force.

The United States has 1,710
ICBM's ready to salvo-fire at
predetermined Soviet targets,
and the Soviet Union has a some-
what larger number aimed at
United States targets. The United
States Air Force and Navy have
taken every precaution to prevent
unauthorized launches. For ex-
ample, to release nuclear weap-
ons, an elaborate command and
control system keyed to Presi-
dential authorization must be
activated. In their underground
silos, the Minuteman ICBM's
cannot explode prematurely be-
cause of a "safing" system that
employs an "inertial switch;"
this mechanism requires the G-
force of missile acceleration to
"arm" the nuclear warheads.

Once launched, missiles are
beyond recall. There is no "fail-
safe," as with strategic bombers,
allowing decision time to be
stretched out while the evidence
for a nuclear attack is evaluated.
To be sure, ICBM's could be kept
under electronic control for part
of their flight path and the war-
head de-armed by remote control.
But this would be a highly dan-
gerous technique, since the other
side might find the key to deac-
tivate the weapon, too.

Although the emphasis of the
agreement is on missiles, the
system would also communicate
news of any nuclear mishaps,
such as the one that occurred
in 1966 when a strategic-bomber
accident resulted in four nuclear
weapons landing on Spanish ter-
ritory.

While seeking to improve com-
unications in case of accidental
launches, Washington and Mos-
cow are also going ahead with
improvements in their early-
warning systems. The United
States Air Force is developing
a strategic intelligence satellite
to provide a 30-minute warning
of a missile attack—double the
present warning time.

The synchronous satellite
would hang 22,300 miles above
the Pacific Ocean, making it an
orbital observation post whose
on-board infrared sensors would
monitor the boost phase of ICBM
launches and identify them by
their exhaust plume "signatures."
Conceivably, each side might
agree to "park" such spy satel-
lites over each other's launch
areas.

As for their central task at
Helsinki, the SALT negotiators
have failed to come to grips
with the fundamental problem
of strategic arms control: offen-
sive missiles. The United States
is perturbed by the quantitative
gains in Soviet missile develop-
ment; the Soviet Union is worried
about the American qualitative
superiority, especially in MIRV,
the multiple-warhead missile,
each of whose warheads can be
targeted independently while in
flight.

SALT is now focusing on
reaching agreement on ABM's.
In August, the Soviets proposed
"zero ABM's," a plan under
which they would decommission
their Moscow ring of 64 Galosh
ABM's if the United States would
abandon its Safeguard ABM
system, which is designed to pro-
tect Minuteman ICBM's in Mon-
tana and North Dakota and pos-
sibly Missouri.

The United States rejected
the proposal. The American de-
fense industry has a great stake
in Safeguard: $5.1-billion in de-
fense contracts through this
fiscal year and the prospect of
$7-billion more in the next few
years. And President Nixon has
placed his prestige on the 'line
because of his personal endorse-
ment of Safeguard.

The United States is reported
to be favoring an ABM quota-
freeze, but the Soviets have
balked at the proposal because
it would allow the United States
more missiles than the Soviets
have around Moscow.

President Nixon has promised
the American people an ABM
pact, but the Soviets are hard
bargainers. As Gen. Bruce K.
Holloway, commander of the
Strategic Air Command, told a
Congressional committee last
spring: " . . . They will try to
give us the sleeves out of their
vests at SALT, if they possibly
can."

Maybe so, but at least both
sides have agreed on a strategic
accident pact to their mutual
advantage. And this is welcome
news.

—RALPH E. LAPP

Mr. Lapp is a nuclear physicist
turned writer-lecturer.

292

LIFE MAGAZINE
24 SEPT 71 (23)

GUEST PRIVILEGE:
CHARLES YOST

A letter
to a Soviet
friend

Military competition between your country and mine has led both astray and plagued the world for a quarter of a century. We have both made serious errors of judgment.

In establishing political and military control over the countries of Eastern Europe, you no doubt thought you were strengthening your security and building a barrier against "revenge-seeking" Germans and the "imperialists." Instead, you undermined European security, including your own, by fostering deep-seated fears of your ultimate intentions. You created and repeatedly invigorated a great defensive alliance against you.

Your worst mistake was to support the North Korean attack on South Korea. This extended the cold war from Europe to Asia, broke the post-war taboo against overt aggression across frontiers and persuaded the West that you could be deterred from similar adventures in Europe only by the mobilization of superior military force there.

Our mistake was to extrapolate from Eastern Europe and Korea a reckless master plan of military expansion which was quite alien to the unscrupulous but cautious nature and policy of Stalin. It seems extremely unlikely that he or his successors ever had the slightest intention of marching their armies to the English Channel. For one thing, they must have shuddered at the ideological competition which would have resulted from exposing the Soviet soldier to the prosperity and fleshpots of Western Europe.

Another American mistake was repeatedly to overestimate Soviet strategic capabilities, to build up frantically to overcome a mythical "missile gap," to invent and deploy ever new generations of costly weapons, which were of course shortly matched and multiplied by your side. The famous Cuban crisis, so often cited as a model of "conflict resolution," was in fact a Pyrrhic victory for America. It convinced your leaders that they must never again permit themselves to be in a position of strategic inferiority, and so induced them to embark on their present frantic pursuit of military "equality."

The final and presently most conspicuous American mistake was to suppose that it is our inescapable responsibility to resist, by military force if necessary, any change in the global status quo which seems to the advantage of your side and to believe that, despite the spectacular fragmentation of Communism over the past ten years, any

victory anywhere in its name will set the dominoes falling helter-skelter. Indeed, it could plausibly be argued that the two chief architects of American foreign policy since World War II were Joseph Stalin and Joseph McCarthy, the first because he foolishly aroused the fears which prompted the policy, the second because he created in the United States an enduring dread, which has terrified every President from Truman to Nixon, of being held responsible for "losing" another country to Communism.

Well, dear friend, enough of the past. What worries me is the future.

As of this writing, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between us seem to be going well. I hope that they will quickly produce limited agreements before new and more uncontrollable weapons are developed, and that these limited agreements will be followed by more comprehensive agreements in the future. I also hope that before long there may be some agreed mutual force reductions in Europe, though in this I am less sanguine of early progress.

What concerns me most at the moment, however, is a growing apprehension that our military competition might flare up elsewhere to chill any new climate of détente. I speak primarily of the possibility of naval competition in the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, and of U.S.-Soviet competition by proxy in the Third World.

It is, of course, perfectly true that the United States has set the example both of worldwide deployments, sometimes in areas, like the Mediterranean, much closer to the Soviet Union than to the United States, and of large-scale military and economic assistance to countries in the Third World, including the Middle East. These countries, rightly or wrongly, felt themselves threatened by you or your allies and asked for the protection of our fleet and our aid. Now, of course, a number of Arab countries are asking for your protection and aid.

No one could or would contest your "right" to achieve "equality" with the U.S. in naval or any other type of armaments, to deploy your navy wherever you choose, subject to the consent of other states involved, or to provide whatever military and economic aid Third World countries may ask of you. The vital question is whether it is not very much in your and our interest for both of us, whatever our sovereign rights may be, to exercise the greatest prudence and restraint in these relatively new areas of potential military competition.

I think that we are both aware that military men—perhaps we should not blame them for it—are rarely satisfied that their weapons are "equal" to those of a potential adversary. We can be quite sure that, if and when your admirals thought they were approaching equality with us, our admirals would have long since been claiming that you were outdistancing us disastrously. As students of history, we both recall the damage to European security and to Germany itself caused before World War I by Kaiser Wilhelm's insistence on building up a strong navy when he already had the strongest army on the continent.

As you are aware, the Vietnam war has brought about a radical shift in American opinion in regard to overseas military commitments and deployments. If this fresh, climate of opinion is allowed to develop undisturbed over a period of years, competition and tensions of all kinds between us could be considerably reduced. There is already an inclination on the part of my government

to extend a much larger proportion of U.S. economic aid to Third World countries through United Nations agencies. There could also easily develop a similar disposition to deal with serious Third World conflicts through U.N. peacekeeping under the aegis of the Security Council, rather than by unilateral military intervention or assistance. Our joint efforts to bring about a peace settlement in the Middle East under U.N. auspices have not yet succeeded, but the necessity of avoiding a confrontation between us is crystal clear, and you can be certain our efforts for a just settlement will continue.

I must, however, say very candidly as a friend that this new climate in the United States is still very fragile and precarious. It could easily be positioned and dissipated if, for example, we should permit the interests of our respective friends in the Middle East to draw us directly into the maelstrom, or if in pursuit of "equality" or "sufficiency" we should slide into a new naval competition, with our fleets cutting provocatively across each other's bows on every ocean on the globe, or if in one of those unhappily inevitable conflicts in Asia or Africa you should raise the banner of "socialism" on one side and we that of the "free world" on the other, and both place our fate in the hands of people we are far from controlling. Any of these blunders would be an unmitigated and wholly unnecessary catastrophe.

So, dear friend, I conclude by appealing to you to urge your government, as I shall mine, to resist the temptation to slip into new areas of military competition just as we may be emerging from some of the older ones. Distrust is unfortunately still great between our governments and between our peoples. Let us seek modestly but indefatigably to diminish it. But, most of all, let us not confound it by new adventures and crusades which would be the greatest threat to the basic interests of both the Soviet and American people.

Charles Yost is the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. This summer he was one of a group of Americans, including David Rockefeller, Milton Eisenhower and Senators Church and Hatfield, who met informally with prominent Russians at Kiev. Later he joined other members of the group in a two-hour conversation with Premier Kosygin.

233

294

ADV FOR 630 AM FDT **FRIDAY MORNING, 24 SEPTEMBER 1971**

BY JOHN HALL

WASHINGTON (UPI) --CALLING FOR AN END TO THE INTERNATIONAL "DRAMA OF INCORRECT ASSESSMENTS AND LUST FOR SUPERIORITY," SEN. HUBERT H. HUMPHREY, D-MINN., ASKED THE SENATE TODAY TO SURREND DEPLOYMENT OF THE NATION'S NEWEST MISSILE SYSTEM.

HUMPHREY CALLED UP HIS AMENDMENT TO PLACE FUNDS FOR THE MULTIFILE, INDEPENDENTLY TARGETABLE RE-ENTRY VEHICLE (MIRV) INTO RESERVE TO AWAIT THE REACTION FROM MOSCOW.

HUMPHREY'S AMENDMENT WAS INTRODUCED TO A $21 BILLION MILITARY PROCUREMENT AUTHORIZATION BILL -- THE ANNUAL PENTAGON WEAPONS MEASURE.

HUMPHREY ACKNOWLEDGED THAT THE STEI WOULD BE UNILATERAL BUT IF SAID THE UNITED STATES MUST DISPLAY "SOFISTICATION" IF THE WORLD IS EVER TO END THE NUCLEAR ARMS RACE.

ON THE EIVE OF THE VOTE, VICE PRESIDENT SPIRO T. AGNEW SHARPLY CRITICIZED HUMPHREY AND OTHER POTENTIAL DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CONFERENCES FOR ADVOCATING WHAT HE CALLED "AN INFERIOR STATE OF READINESS." AGNEW SAID HUMPHREY WAS GUILTY OF "RECKLESS AND ATTAINING" TALK IN URGING A CUT IN THE DEFENSE BUDGET AND WARNED THE DEMOCRATS THEY "SHOULD BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE IF THEY DISASTROUSLY TAMPER WITH THE NATIONAL SECURITY."

UNDER HUMPHREY'S AMENDMENT, FUNDS FARMARKED FOR MIRV COULD NOT BE TENT FOR ONE YEAR OR UNTIL CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT DETERMINE THAT THE SOVIET UNION IS DEPLOYING A MIRV SYSTEM OF ITS OWN, IS BUILDING A LARGE SCALE ANTIBALLISTIC MISSILE SYSTEM (ABM) OR TAKING OTHER ACTIONS THAT REQUIRE A FURTHER U.S. NUCLEAR BUILDING.

THE MIRV IS A CLUSTER OF NUCLEAR WARHEADS PLACED IN THE NOSE CONE OF A SINGLE BALLISTIC MISSILE. IT IS BEING DEPLOYED AT SEA ON SUBMARINES WITH 12 WARHEADS ATOP EACH MISSILE, AND ON LAND, WITH THREE WARHEADS CARRIED BY EACH MINUTEMAN MISSILE.

THE SYSTEM WAS DEVELOPED DURING THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION WHEN HUMPHREY WAS VICE PRESIDENT.

BUT HUMPHREY, LONG AN ADVOCATE OF ARMS CONTROL, SAID THE SYSTEM MUST BE SUSPENDED WHILE THE UNITED STATES AND THE SOVIET UNION SEEK TO NEGOTIATE A TREATY LIMITING NUCLEAR ARMS. HE SAID THE TWO COUNTRIES NOW ARE WORKING ON AN AGREEMENT TO STOP THE ABM. SINCE THE MIRV ORIGINALLY WAS DESIGNED TO PENETRATE AN ABM DEFENSE BY RAINING MORE MISSILES ON AN ENEMY THAN COULD BE KNOCKED DOWN, HUMPHREY SAID THERE WOULD BE NO REASON FOR MIRV IF AN AGREEMENT IS REACHED.

THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT CONTENDS THAT THE MIRV IS NEEDED FOR AN ADDITIONAL REASON -- TO MAKE SURE THAT ENOUGH U.S. MISSILES SURVIVE TO RETAIN AGAINST A SOVIET PRE-EMTIVE STRIKE AGAINST U.S. MINUTEMAN MISSILES.

"THE LINE OF REASONING APPLIED THERE IS SOMETHING LIKE THOSE FOR THE EMFORER'S NEW CLOTHES," HUMPHREY SAID, CONTENDING THERE WAS NO CONVINCING EVIDENCE THAT AMERICAN RETIATORY CAPACITY WAS TREATED BY THE RECENT BUILDUP OF SOVIET OFFENSIVE MISSILES. ADV FOR 630 AM FDT

295

Hot-line perspectives

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR - 24 SEPT. 1971

# A little SALT, but not enough

By Lucia Mouat
Staff correspondent of
The Christian Science Monitor

Washington

Interim accords reached at the strategic-arms-limitation talks (SALT) on development of a new hot line in space and a procedure to keep the effects of nuclear "accidents" to a minimum are viewed here as encouraging — but very small steps toward SALT's major goals.

The sober conclusion of those who keep close watch on arms-control efforts is that the developments speak more for common sense than negotiating skill, and do little to advance the U.S. and the Soviet Union toward SALT's main aim of freezing and eventually reducing strategic-arms supplies.

Washington SALT watchers admit that improved bilateral communications are all to the good. However, they point out that the eight-year-old underground and land hot line, and only during the Arab-Israeli crisis of and broken at least once by a farmer's sow, was due for major improvements with or without SALT.

Now satellites operating in stationary orbits 22,300 miles above the earth will increase the possibilities for smooth contact if a crisis develops.

The accords, reached in late August and presumably leaked by the Soviets in response to an earlier leak of the U.S. draft on limiting antiballistic missile (ABM) systems, also pin down a safety procedure in the event of any unintended strategic arms activity.

Both powers pledge to hold back on any nuclear retaliation pending joint consultation. There is also a provision, for joint investigation of such "accidents" but one which does not include on-site inspection.

Although no missile has yet been fired by mistake, the Soviets have long considered a safeguard procedure important. Students of arms control here in Washington say the possibilities of such mistakes are remote and that the accord is little more than natural logic on paper.

Experts such as Dr. Jeremy Stone, director of the Federation of American Scientists, say the space hot line is more apt to be—and would be more wisely—used for other, more important communications needs. He cites the reciprocal fear of surprise attack, a phrase coined by Harvard's Dr. Thomas Schelling, as a much more realistic possibility for use of the line.

The concept refers to the continued buildup of weapons by both sides and the idea that if war is coming, one is better off to be the first on the offensive. In such a situation, a little advance communication can go a long way, Dr. Stone suggests.

He also mentions the possibility of helping to prevent as well as to control nuclear "accidents," by sharing U.S. technology for the electronic lockup of U.S. weaponry. Dr. Stone suggests Soviet suspicions of the possibility of a mistake might be allayed if they knew it was virtually impossible for any but the commander in chief, in effect, to "pull the switch."

In any event, by most assessments here, the secret SALT talks, recessed in Helsinki Sept. 24 and due to resume in November in Vienna, are still far from the goal they have been talking toward for the past two years.

Some feel that President Nixon should have seized the opportunity more than a year ago when the Soviet Union indicated it would consider limitation of ABMs only, as the U.S. had been avocating. Instead the U.S. shifted gears, insisting on some agreement on offensive weapons as well.

"ABM is a half loaf Nixon could have had a year or so ago," comments John Silard, counsel for the Task Force for the Nuclear Test Ban, "and unless he wanted an ABM race instead of a freeze, it's impossible to see what led the U.S. to drag its feet on this."

Most predictions here are that an agreement will come. The question is rather when and at what price. Most students of arms-control efforts say they doubt it will live up to optimistic hopes generated in the President's dramatic May 20 announcement.

He said that Washington and Moscow had agreed to concentrate this year in SALT deliberations on trying to limit deployment of ABMs and with such an agreement will agree on certain measures to limit offensive weapons as well.

The predominant feeling here is that the Soviet Union, with a lead already of some 60 percent in the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles and rapidly adding to its overall strategic-arms stockpile as the talks go on, has time on its side.

WASHINGTON POST

25 September 1971 P2

# Scientists Ask Halt Of A-Test

By Stuart Auerbach
Washington Post Staff Writer

Six leading scientists and experts in arms control yesterday urged President Nixon to cancel the large-scale nuclear test scheduled for Alaska next month because of its "physical and political risks."

They said the explosion of a five-megaton bomb, equivalent to the force of five million tons of TNT, under Amchitka Island, "creates physical and political risks that outweigh whatever possible advantages there might be to our weapons development program."

The White House has said that President Nixon is studying the test, which is favored by the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense.

Reportedly, the White House's Office of Science and Technology and government environmental agencies have recommended against the test, but their reports have been kept secret.

Among the signers of yesterday's letter to President Nixon were Dr. George Kistianowsky, former science adviser to President Eisenhower; James J. Wadsworth, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who helped negotiate a 1954 test ban treaty; Dr. Bernard Field, an MIT physicist; Adrian Fisher, former deputy director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and Dr. Franklin Long of Cornell University.

They called OperationCNikin "potentially the most destructive man-made underground explosion in history."

They said the blast at the bottom of a 6,000-foot-deep

hole could allow dangerous radioactive wastes to escape into the air, oceans and underground waterways. They also feared that the force of the explosion could trigger an earthquake in Alaska.

But a government expert reported in Science Magazine yesterday that his studies of past atomic tests and the natural earthquake activities around Amchitka shows that it "appears unlikely" that Cannikin would cause a major earthquake.

E. R. Engdahl of the government's Environmental Research Laboratories in Boulder, Colo., said that Operation Kilrow, a one-megaton nuclear blast two years ago, produced no major earthquakes. He also said that Amchitka is not in an earthquake zone.

Besides the environmental dangers, the scientists and diplomats warned President Nixon that the explosion could hurt the chances of achieving nuclear disarmament and arms limitation.

296

WASHINGTON POST

25 September 1971 P1

## Arms Talk
Progress
Claimed

By Marilyn Berger

Washington Post Staff Writer

The United States and the Soviet Union yesterday concluded the fifth round of their strategic arms limitation talks with the announcement that they had found "certain areas of common ground."

But a joint communique issued in Helsinki also noted that "a clearer understanding was achieved concerning issues to be resolved," indicating that substantial differences remain before any agreements can be completed.

In the seven weeks before the talks resume in Vienna Nov. 15, officials in Moscow and Washington will be studying each other's negotiating positions to see where compromises are necessary and where give may be expected from the other side.

U.S. chief negotiator Gerard Smith said on leaving Helsinki that "the prospect of reaching an agreement on limiting defensive arms in Vienna is not bad."

The White House, meanwhile, formally announced yesterday approval of two agreements negotiated by experts at the SALT discussions to reduce the risk of accidental nuclear war and to improve the hot line link between the two countries. These agreements are the first concrete measures to come out of the SALT negotiations.

The White House said they will be signed here next Thursday by Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko.

These agreements were meant to be the icing on the cake of a strategic arms limitation treaty, but were completed first while the more complicated negotiations on defensive and offensive weapons were carried on in numerous working groups and at the main conference table.

The major emphasis in the negotiations, under a Soviet-American announcement on May 20, was on working out an agreement to limit antibal listic missile systems.

Officials said the Soviets are seeking an agreement to limit ABM's to approximately 100 launchers around one site, preferably at the two national capitals. Such a system is already under construction around Moscow, and Pentagon sources say it is being expanded.

In July, Washington proposed a limitation of ABM's to 300 at three sites around U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) bases as a balance for the Moscow system. The Soviets have made it clear that they consider missile-base protection unequal to protection of a capital.

According to the White House, the U.S. Safeguard ABM system at Grand Forks Air Force Base, S.D., is about half complete. Construction at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont., is in an earlier stage. The number of ABM launchers planned for each site has never been disclosed.

The project has been controversial from the start, making it most unlikely, in the view of most officials, that Congress would approve funds to shift the system to protect Washington.

As the talks adjourned yesterday, it is understood that the Soviets continued to insist on one site each, with an equal number of ABM launchers in each country. The United States, according to informed officials, has reduced its demand to two ABM sites at U.S. ICBM bases.

Thus the two sides have moved somewhat closer, but basic issues remain unresolved. It is believed in some quarters that the Soviets would agree in the end to balance their Moscow system against a U.S. ABM complex protecting one single ICBM missile site, provided that the number of Soviet and American missiles is equal.

There is considerable doubt, however, that the United States is ready to concede that much. In seeking a greater number of ABM's than the Soviets, the United States has noted that Washington is being asked to accept what one informed source called "gross inequality" in the number of offensive weapons.

Because of this inequality, the reasoning goes, it is necessary to protect the American second-strike capacity by placing ABM's around missile bases.

It is also noted that the Soviet Galosh ABM system around Moscow covers an important industrial and population center, as well as a number of offensive missile sites.

Discussions on defensive weapons also dealt with limiting the number and placement of radars in an antibal listic missile system. Radars are considered as important as the launchers because they can provide the basis for expansion.

Talks on offensive weapons are understood to be even further from a conclusion. The United States has been seeking ICBM's, plus submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM's). Under such a ceiling a nation wanting to increase the number of SLBM's would have to reduce its ICBM's.

The Soviets have balked at limits on submarines and have undertaken a construction program, apparently aimed at catching up with or surpassing the Americans. The United States has 41 missile-firing submarines compared with about 25 Soviet ones.

Numerical limits on the number of offensive launchers would not prevent either side from adding multiple warheads.

The Russians, according to informed diplomatic sources, have agreed to the idea of quantitative limits on ICBM's, with a sublimit on the powerful SS-9. But when the Americans raised the subject of submarines, the Russians reportedly revived their demand for limits on so-called forward based systems.

Moscow's argument is that American nuclear weapons stationed in Europe can reach the Soviet Union and should, therefore, be considered strategic. The United States has maintained that these weapons are part of a NATO defense system and cannot be included in a purely bilateral pact.

The United States has 1,054 ICBM's to the Soviet Union's 1,500 operational or under construction.

In view of Moscow's current drive to expand diplomatic contacts and to develop competence in Europe, some foreign

diplomats in Washington suggest that Moscow may be ready to make significant concessions to get an agreement before President Nixon's trip to Peking. Others suggest that it may be Mr. Nixon who is most eager and who will make the concessions.

In an interview yesterday with Michael Getler of The Washington Post, Sen. John Sherman Cooper (R-Ky.), who has recently returned from a visit to Helsinki, also expressed belief that the SALT talks will lead to a "sizable" and "meaningful" agreement.

Cooper had been one of the leaders in the fight against the administration's Safeguard ABM project for the past two years.

This year, however, he has dropped his opposition to the project, partly, he said, because of his discussions with U.S. and Soviet officials at Helsinki, and partly because the Senate Armed Services Committee has already trimmed the ABM project to a size consistent with the U.S. negotiating position.

The senator, who spent more than a week in Helsinki late last month, said "I came away with the impression — and not just a fleeting impression — that at this last meeting they reached an understanding, without any propaganda or polemics, that an agreement can be reached. I must say there are still some problems, but the progress that's been made, the pace and the whole atmosphere gave me that impression."

Asked if an initial agreement could come in time to make the year-end goal set last May by the U.S. and Soviet governments, Cooper said this was "possible, even probable."

Cooper said that moving on "to agreement of offensive systems hinges on an agreement on defense. This coming to terms on defensive systems is crucial," he said, because "then there is an agreement that they will proceed to offensive weapons."

Cooper added that an agreement that limits ABM's but is not also followed by constraints on offensive systems would be unacceptable.

297

WASHINGTON STAR

28 September 1971

2 Senators
Ease Fight
On ABM

United Press International

For the first time since he took office, President Nixon will not have to worry this year about a Senate move to stop the Safeguard antiballistic missile system.

Sens. John Sherman Cooper, R-Ky., and Philip A. Hart, D-Mich., have decided not to renew their annual fight against the ABM mainly because of the improving prospects for a Soviet-American agreement to limit deployment of the defensive weapon.

The two senators plan to make major floor speeches this week outlining their reasons for dropping the struggle. A decision by the Senate Armed Services Committee to confine deployment of the ABM to two initial sites is believed to have been a factor in their decision.

Major Tests Ahead

The two senators' acquiescence to this year's $1.1 billion outlay for the ABM smoothed the path for the pending $21 billion authorized bill for procurement, research and development of new weapons. Major tests are still ahead, however, on amendments to cut back tactical weapons, including the Navy's F14 fighter and a new Army super tank, the XM303, which will cost more than $1 million apiece.

In addition, Senate Democrat-
ic Leader Mike Mansfield,
D-Mont., probably will call up
Thursday his amendment setting
a six-month time limitation on
U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Except for a shortened timetable, Mansfield's amendment is identical to the one that led to a congressional impasse over extension of the draft. The draft legislation finally passed last week included a much softer version of his proposal, which called for a U.S. pullout from Vietnam in nine months.

Mansfield's proposal has as its
only condition the simultaneous
release of U.S. prisoners by
North Vietnam and an account-
ing of those missing in action.

Introducing his new amend-
ment yesterday, Mansfield said,
"I want no more blood on my
hands. I want to see these men
brought home."

Opposed Since 1968

Cooper and Hart have been
leading the bipartisan struggle
against the ABM since 1968.
They came within one vote of
winning in a 1969 senate roll call
that ended in a 50-50 tie.

Cooper and Hart have argued that the weapon constitutes a major new plateau in the international struggle for arms superiority that could touch off billions in new expenditures for counter-weapons and dangerously destabilize the balance of terror.

The ABM, possibly the most
complex weapon ever designed,
consists of, radars, computers
and nuclear-tipped interceptor
missiles which destroy incoming
enemy rockets with x-rays and
neutrons. The current mission of
Safeguard is to protect minute-
man missile silos against a
pre-emptive Soviet strike.

239

WASHINGTON POST

1 OCT 1971 Pg 1

# Colleagues Criticize
Anti-ABM Scientists

By Michael Getler
Washington Post Staff Writer

Prominent scientists who led the attack two years ago against the Safeguard ABM project have now been criticized for the quality of their presentations before Congress and in the press during the ABM debate.

The criticism is contained in a lengthy report, to be released today, by a seven-member Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Standards of the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA).

Among those scientists whose work has been specifically challenged in the 135-page report are: Dr. Jerome B. Wiesner, provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Dr. George W. Rathjens visiting professor of political science at MIT; Dr. Steven Weinberg, a physics professor at MIT, and Dr. Ralph Lapp, an author and nuclear physicist.

In a summary of its findings after 21 months of studying the record of the ABM debate, the committee states:

> "The evidence strongly supports the disturbing conclusion that when prominent experts outside the administration supported their opinions on Safeguard development with arguments or results of an operations-research nature, these analyses were often inappropriate, misleading or factually in error."

> "Quite often," the report goes on, "the misleading nature of an analysis is not apparent on a superficial reading. Because of this, poor analysis can be quite effective in public debate."

The committee said it also found some "shortcomings in the analysis of the ABM situation provided by Pentagon officials and their supporters. But "they nowhere near equalled the cumulative mass of inadequacies compiled by the operation."

The 1969 fight over the Safeguard system to defend U.S. land-based missiles against Soviet attack was the most intensive battle ever waged in Congress over a single weapon system. The administration,

which supported the development of Safeguard, won that battle by a vote of 51-50. Vice President Agnew cast the deciding vote.

The pro and anti-Safeguard forces used many devices to affect the outcome. There were campaigns to fill up newspaper letters-to-the-editor columns. There were full-page newspaper advertisements, books, magazine articles, television debates. And through it all there was a procession of prominent scientists lining up on both sides of the issue. Rathjens, Weisner, Weinberg and Lapp led the scientific assault against Safeguard.

The stakes seemed to be enormous. On the one hand, billions of dollars in defense contracts were involved and that meant many thousands of jobs as well as profit potentials.

Beyond that, the debate had heavy political overtones. It pitted the Nixon administration against its critics, the "military-industrial complex" against those who would divert military funds to domestic purposes. In a vague sense, it was a "liberal" versus "conservative" confrontation.

Finally, there was the issue of "national survival." Safeguard, said the administration, was essential to the security of the nation. Its critics said it was an unworkable weapons system that would merely fuel the arms race and add to insecurity.

The report by the ORSA committee was, in effect, aprimand to the several scientists criticized. It was administered by a body of their peers.

ORSA undertook its investigation of the matter at the suggestion of Dr. Albert Wohlstetter, a University of Chicago professor. Who's stetter, one of the prominent academicians who supported the Safeguard project, said the study should deal with "professional standards and professional ethics and the responsibility of those who engage in operations research not to mislead . . . (the) lay public by distortion of facts . . ."

He urged that the study not focus on the merits of Safeguard and the ORSA committee says it followed his advice. It dealt only with "faulty professional practices" and was unanimous in its findings on the performance of Rathjens. Wiesner and others in the debate. But the organization's president, Robert E. Machol, said in an introduction to the findings that the committee was still "divided on the merits of "Safeguard."

Machol had one compliment for the scientists criticized by the ORSA committee. The

country, he said, owes a "debt of gratitude" to all the "public-spirited men" who took part in the ABM debate.

ORSA founded in 1952, has about 8,000 members. They are employed by universities, private companies and the government. Their work involves observation, analysis and predictions about the workability of highly complex systems. The government is a major purchaser of their services.

The ORSA committee focused its study on one central issue in the Safeguard debate: Would the 1,000 U.S. Minute-man missiles be vulnerable to an attack by Soviet missiles without the protection of Safeguard?

On that point, the committee concluded that Rathjens, in his anti-Safeguard arguments. "ignored readily available classified material and used instead nonrelevant unclassified material in situations in which the more valid classified data would have substantially weakened his case."

Another conclusion was that Rathjens used a faulty method in arriving at an estimate of the numbers of individual warheads that could be carried by a single Soviet SS-9 missile. As a result, the committee said, Rathjens wound up "substantially underestimating the SS-9 delivery capability".

Other committee criticisms of Rathjens included a judgment that he overestimated the ability of Minuteman silos to withstand attack, that he used "invalid" techniques in estimating the effectiveness of Soviet missiles against U.S. missile silos and that he was over-optimistic in his estimates of how many U. S. missiles could survive a Soviet attack. Rathjens said in the debates that 25 per cent of the Minuteman missiles could sur-

(CONTINUED)

300

COLLEAGUES CRITICIZE ANTI-ABM SCIENTISTS -- CONTINUED

vive an attack by 500 SS-9s
without Safeguard. Wohlstet-
ter, whose techniques were ap-
proved by the review commit-
tee, put the number at 5 per
cent.

The committee criticized
Wiesner of MIT for accusing
the Defense Department's top
scientist, Dr. John S. Foster,
of having "altered" data to
gain support for Safeguard.
Wiesner made the accusation
at a Senate hearing on May
14, 1969. He said Foster at one
point claimed that Soviets had
only 500 SS-9 missiles and at
another point raised the fig-
ure to 600.

The charge was unfair, the
committee said, since Foster
was talking about estimates
for different years.

Wiesner and Dr. Steven
Weinberg were further criti-
cized for "ascribing official va-
lidity" to an estimate of the
"kill probability of an SS-9 if
they were used against Min-
uteman silos. The committee
points out that the Pentagon
provided a range of estimates
and that some of them were
higher than the one picked by

the MIT scientists.

The criticism of Lapp, a
popular author on scientific
subjects, involved three mat-
ters. The committee said Lapp
underestimated the number of
multiple-warheads the Soviets
would have and the reliability
of their missiles He also is ac-
cused of assigning a "grossly
inefficient" targeting doctrine
to Soviet war planners.

Wiesner, Rathjens and
Weinberg, none of whom are
ORSA members, were asked
to comment on the report by
the committee, but declined
to do so. The three MIT
scientists said they "found
nothing in the report to caus-
us to change our views"—as
outlined in a letter on Dec. 22
1969, at the outset of the proj-
ect — "About the absurdity of
the enterprise."

In their 1969 letter to
ORSA, the MIT scientists
maintained that the ABM de-
bate could not be judged ac-
cording to the standards of op-
erations research, and that it
was doubtful ORSA had the
resources to carry out such an
inquiry.

Such an inquiry, they main-
tained, would have to deal
with the administration's shift-
ing rationale for Safeguard,
derivation of intelligence esti-
mates, "and the possibility
that it selectively released
classified information to make
its case."

The trio said that it is also
important to find out
"whether or not administra-
tion statements, regarding the
threat to our total realiatory
capability and Safeguard's
effectiveness in countering
any such threat, were mislead-
ing to the Congress and the
public."

"We believe," the MIT
group wrote in 1969, "that the
ABM debate has been one of
the most salutary develop-
ments in American political
life." Such an inquiry as was
then being proposed, they
wrote, "could well appear to
the nation as an ugly resur-
gence of those attacks on civil
liberties and dissent that were
far too common 15 years ago."

The committee, in its study,
did investigate Dr. Foster's
presentations and did criticize
the defense research chief for
"using a type of model and a
set of data that tended to un-
derestimate the expected num-
ber of surviving Minutemen."
The net result of Foster's al-
leged errors, however did not
amount to much.

The seven-man ad hoc com-
mittee included four former
presidents of the ORSA.

Chairman was Thomas E.
Caywood of the Caywood-
Schiller Div. of A.T. Kerney &
Co. Other members, in addi-
tion to Berger, were Joseph
H. Engel, University of Chi-
cago; John F. Magee, Arthur
D. Little, Inc.; Hugh J. Miser,
University of Massachusetts;
and Robert M. Thrall, Rice
University.

301

THE NEW REPUBLIC 2 OCTOBER 1971

A Soviet First Strike?

by Herbert Scoville, Jr.

303

Now that the US and the USSR have agreed at the highest level to "concentrate this year on working out an agreement to limit the deployment of ABMs" and "to agree on certain measures with respect to the limitations of offensive strategic weapons," it is timely to clear away some of the myths which have been hampering success at SALT and providing fuel for the arms race. One such myth has been the widely trumpeted charges that the Russians were preparing a first strike against the US - a strategic attack on this country which would destroy a sufficient proportion of our strategic retaliatory forces that we would be either unable or unwilling to respond. If the Soviets or we came to believe that they had this capability, then our deterrent, the heart of our strategic security, would have lost its credibility. Nuclear war would have become more likely and our vulnerability to nuclear blackmail a reality. This fear of a first strike against our Minuteman ICBMs was a major factor in President Nixon's previous reluctance, (which now appears to have beer. partially overcome) to negotiate an ABM agreement without a simultaneous limitation on offensive weapons. [Laird said September 18 that the Russians in the last 10 months have undertaken, with "tremendous momentum," a buildup of both land- and sea-based missiles. When Laird gets specific in his report to Congress next January on the military budget, there will be, he predicts, no further talk of budget cutting, for the American people don't want to be "militarily inferior." Government officials, it is reported, say that 80 ICBM silos are being built in the Soviet Union, that the Soviet ICBMs already outnumber ours - 1500 to 1054 - and that they have or soon will have 25 operational missile-firing submarines (the US has 41; Numbers, of course, say nothing definitive about a first strike capability or intent. - The Editors]

Secretary Laird first raised the first-strike alarm in justifying the Safeguard ABM when he said on March 21, 1969 that the Soviet Union is "going for a first strike capability, and, there is no question about it." However, later, after testimony by Secretary Rogers and CIA Director Helms, he retreated to the position that the Russians were acquiring the forces that would provide them with such a capability.

Although we have no way of divining Soviet intentions, we must attempt to visualize a first-strike policy from the Soviet point of view. We must remember that a first strike that is only 50 percent or even 95 percent effective is a disaster for the Soviet Union, since few - or even one - thermonuclear explosions on its cities in retaliation would be a catastrophe. Knocking out all our Minuteman missiles but leaving us with a strong retaliatory force of submarine missiles and bombers is only an invitation to national suicide. Even if all our intercontinental bombers were also destroyed by Soviet submarine missiles, we would still be left with a retaliatory capability which could devastate the USSR. Thus, if the Soviets are serious in attempting to develop a first-strike capability, they must find some way to neutralize our Polaris submarines, to say nothing of our bombers based on carriers or overseas.

While the Soviets have a modest anti-submarine warfare program, they could not have a force which could destroy the Polaris fleet in this decade or probably the next and have apparently not even made a major effort to have one. Their only protection from Polaris missiles in the foreseeable future would be through an extensive nationwide ABM system that could shoot down essentially all retaliatory missiles; yet strangely, some time before Secretary Laird announced the Soviet intention to achieve a first-strike capability, the Russians stopped the deployment of their only ABM system, that around Moscow. They have only recently, more than three years later, resumed that deployment, but they could not have in this decade, and probably never, an operational system which they could count on for protection from completely unacceptable damage from the Polaris fleet alone.

The continued Soviet construction of about 50 to 60 very large SS-9 missile launchers a year was the primary evidence used to support the conclusion that the Soviets were seeking a first-strike capability. It was feared that about 500 of these missiles, each equipped with three MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles), could destroy 95 percent of the US Minuteman force in a first strike. The Russians had tested the SS-9 with three reentry vehicles beginning in August 1968, and US defense authorities suggested in 1969 that these were designed to knock out our Minuteman silos. They further argued that the only logical explanation for the continuing SS-9 buildup was a Soviet desire to achieve a first-strike capability. As time passed, this assumption evolved from theory to unquestioned gospel.

But is the desire to obtain a first-strike capability the only or even the most logical explanation for the Soviet SS-9 program? As background, note that the Russians have over the years been prejudiced in the direction of very large weapons systems. Their first ICBM, the SS-6, had several times the payload of the original US Atlas. The Soviets also carried out several nuclear weapons tests with yields above 20 megatons, one bomb even having a potential of 100 megatons.

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

A SOVIET FIRST STRIKE? ... CONTINUED

304

US defense planners have long since discarded the notion that such high-yield bombs serve any useful military purpose, even for a first strike; a multiplicity of smaller weapons is much more efficient. But, with the history of the desire of the Russian military to have the biggest weapons, it should not surprise us that they would deploy a very large missile.

It is also important to evaluate the strictly military reasons for acquiring large missile payloads. First, it should be remembered that the greater the payload of an offensive missile, the greater the capability for insuring penetration or saturation of an ABM system with decoys, electronic countermeasures or even multiple warheads. In September 1967, the US announced the decision to go ahead with a nationwide Sentinel ABM, and this was just about the time the Soviets must have been making the decision to expand their SS-9 program. One justification which the Russian military may have used to obtain the funds from the Kremlin leaders may well have been the strategic requirement to neutralize our Sentinel. A similar argument was used in the US to justify the replacement of Polaris missiles by Poseidon with three times the payload.

An alternate explanation could have been a Soviet desire to obtain a second strike counterforce capability, i.e., an ability to retaliate and destroy any enemy weapons not expended in an initial attack. On September 22, 1970, General Ryan, Chief of Staff of the US Air Force, extolled the US Minuteman III with MIRVs because of its ability to destroy the long-range weapons of the enemy (Soviet ICBMs). When Secretary Laird was quizzed on this subject by Senator Brooke, he replied that "we were not seeking to develop a weapons system having, or which could reasonably be construed has having, a first-strike potential," namely, weapons which might be used to attack Soviet strategic forces in an initial attack. Presumably, our MIRV was thus designed to provide a second-strike counter weapons capability. Senior Defense officials have over the years supported our MIRV programs on the basis of enhanced effectiveness against hard targets. President Nixon in both his State of the World messages referred to the desire to have some other option in response to challenges or Soviet attacks than the resort to the indiscriminate mass destruction of enemy civilians. Why couldn't the Russians be seeking to achieve a similar option with their large SS-9s? A Soviet second-strike counterforce capability would not look different to us than a first-strike one, much the same as our MIRV deployment must look like a first-strike force to them. We ought not to automatically attribute sinister motives to Soviet attempts to emulate US programs to which we ascribe purely defensive purposes.

Furthermore the evidence from Russian missile programs does not support a first-strike capability as a priority objective. If the Soviets were seeking an early knockout blow against Minuteman with their SS-9s, they would have had to press the development of a true MIRV, preferably with more than three warheads per missile. US fears in 1969 that the Soviets had tested MIRVs proved illusory. Instead the tests proved, as many experts predicted, not to involve a multiple target capability, and not to be a threat to Minuteman. They may have been multiple warheads, which could be used to exhaust the US Sprint ABM interceptors. The Russians have never tested a missile with more than three reentry vehicles. Evidence is mounting that they have never even tested any MIRV which could be used to threaten Minuteman. General Ryan testified last March that the SS-9 would have to have a new guidance system and a more efficient reentry vehicle in order to do so. Previous alarms were based on premature release of unevaluated intelligence. This failure to test a true MIRV is strong evidence that the Soviets are not racing to achieve an early first-strike capability.

The new large holes in the ground or missile launchers, to which Secretary Laird and Senator Jackson pointed with such alarm in the early spring, are also evidence against this objective. The Defense Department has admitted that a large fraction of these are not even for large missiles. It is quite likely that they are a form of increased hardening (protection against a US attack) for both the SS-9s and the SS-11s, a characteristic that would make no sense if a first strike rather than a retaliatory capability were being sought. This explanation would be consistent with the apparent absence of tests of any new missile for these launchers. The Laird-Jackson alarm is just another example of publishing partially analyzed intelligence before all the facts are available and their implications realistically considered.

In sum, it would appear that the thesis that the Soviets are seeking to acquire a first-strike capability is unsupported by any evidence and is a pretext composed to justify Safeguard and other weapons programs. They have not carried out the programs needed to provide such a threat, and their existing deployments can be readily explained by alternative strategies. It is time that we stop creating, and giving credibility to, myths which only serve to divert our attention from the real security risks of the continued arms race. Unless we do, President Nixon's hopes for a meaningful SALT agreement this year will prove a mirage.

HERBERT SCOVILLE, JR. is Chairman of the Federation of American Scientists' Strategic Weapons Panel. Formerly he was Deputy Director for Research, CIA and Assistant Director for Science and Technology of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Part II of this report will appear in a forthcoming issue.

305

## AVIATION WEEK

4 OCTOBER 1971

# The Growing Threat

The United States has lost its significant margin of strategic military superiority over the Soviet Union in the last two years and is in serious danger of sinking into a perilous position of inferiority by 1975. This dramatic switch in the global balance of military power has gone largely unnoticed by the American public. But it is a matter of growing concern in the governments of western Europe and Asia whose security has rested on unquestioned U.S. superiority since the end of World War 2.

The key factors in this shifting military equation are well known to the President of the United States. his chief advisers and the top levels of the Pentagon. But they are not sufficiently known or understood by either the great masses of American people, whose security and future well-being are dependent on them, or the legislators that are currently trying to formulate domestic and foreign policy. For this reason, AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY is marshaling all of these key developments into a five-part series, beginning in this issue on page 12, outlining the specific dimensions of the growing Soviet threat in military technology.

Although the facts in this series have special portent for the aerospace industry that will ultimately face the responsibility for meeting this threat or be smeared with the blame for failure to do so, we recommend them to the study of every single citizen in this land who has any concern for the future of this country and his children who will live in it.

For more than 20 years, ever since the Soviets revealed the first blinding flashes of their new-found technical capability in their explosions of nuclear and thermonuclear bombs, their firing of intercontinental ballistic missiles and the orbiting of the first earth satellites, the tocsin has been sounding in this nation with varying pitches of alarm.

It is now the fashion in certain political quarters and academic groves to sneer that these were false alarms and cite as proof that none of the predicted doomsdays has yet arrived. This is a dangerous falsehood. The alarms were genuine. The doomsdays would have long since been with us except for the fact that, for at least a decade, there was a strong national technological response to the Soviet challenge that outstripped it and kept the U.S. margin of superiority significantly clear.

When the Soviet Union, stimulated no doubt by the heady wine of its surprising technological progress, chose to lay down a naked challenge to the U.S. by deploying ballistic missiles to Cuba in the fall of 1962, the superior strategic power of the U.S. and the demonstrated will to use it forced an ignominious Russian retreat.

The United States has basked in the euphoria of this triumph for a decade, soothed further by the fruition of the great technical plunges taken in military and space technology early in that decade that produced the Minuteman and Polaris missile forces and the Apollo manned moon landing. During the last half of the 1960s, the U.S. technological effort diminished substantially, primarily because of the insatiable financial demands of the war in Southeast Asia but also because of some incredible top-level management decisions by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his "whiz kids." The Asian war required only peripheral new technology and squandered available national funds on vast quantities of expendable equipment.

In contrast, the Soviet Union embarked on a vast program of military-technological development, including new portions of the spectrum to which it had traditionally devoted only token efforts. It was an incredibly forceful effort aimed at wiping out the margin of U.S. military superiority to achieve first parity and then superiority as the muscle with which to impose its international will. As the decade ended, it had achieved its goal of parity with the U.S. in most significant areas. But as the 1970s began, the trend of a rising Soviet effort and a diminishing U.S. effort portended a reversal of roles by mid-decade with the Russians enjoying the type of superiority the U.S. had during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

## Shifting Balance

This is not just our opinion. It is the universal conclusion of most knowledgeable civilian groups that have studied the problem in detail during the past two years.

"It is not too much to say that in the 1970s neither the vital interests of the United States nor the lives and freedom of its citizens will be secure," concluded a group of distinguished civilians on the President's Blue Ribbon Defense Panel. This group, which included no military personnel, was so alarmed by its study that it filed a special supplemental report entitled, "The Shifting Balance of Military Power," from which the foregoing quotation was extracted.

"It is irrational to think, with the balance of military power shifting in its favor, that the policies of the Soviet Union will be less hostile, disruptive and imperialistic. The consequences of being second rate, even if national survival is not threatened, could be seriously detrimental to the most vital diplomatic and economic interests of this country," the Blue Ribbon Panel reported to President Nixon.

"The road to peace has never been through appeasement, unilateral disarmament or negotiation from weakness. The entire recorded history of mankind is precisely to the contrary. Among the great nations of the world only the strong survive. Weakness of the United States—of its military capability and its will—could be the gravest threat to the peace of the world."
—Robert Hotz

# React Calmly to the 'Red Menace'

By ORR KELLY

WASHINGTON STAR

5 October 1971

306

The current wave of antimilitarism and overemphasis on the costs of defense has barely reached its peak. And yet there already are ominous signs of the next wave — a sudden awakening to the Red Menace.

The signs so far are rather slim, but there they are just the same.

Life magazine, rather dovish in recent years, gave considerable attention to a report on recent Soviet military developments. The New York Times, even more dovish, gave front-page treatment to a story on a new Russian bomber — the same bomber no one got excited about when the late Rep. L. Mendel Rivers was talking about it two years ago.

The news media gave unwarranted attention to the recent report of the Institute for Strategic Studies when it reported — as Pentagon officials had done six months earlier — that the Soviet Union now has substantially more land-based missiles than the United States.

The obvious danger in this kind of thing is that there may be a sudden public demand to do something about the Russians.

A much more rational approach — but one that demands continuing public and congressional attention — is to react calmly and cautiously to Soviet defense efforts, with the full realization that the balance of arms between the two superpowers is an extremely complex affair and that the arms race, if indeed it is a race, has more the rhythm of a minuet than of a 100-yard dash.

Here, to provide some perspective, is an outline of the way the Soviets stack up against the United States:

**STRATEGIC FORCES.** The Soviets are well ahead of the United States in numbers of land-based nuclear missiles — 1,550 to 1,068 — with a very substantial lead in nuclear megatonnage. The United States is ahead in numbers of warheads, especially in the new independently targetable technology, and in numbers of bombers. The United States also is well ahead in numbers and quality of strategic missile submarines. While the Soviets have now deployed about 20 such subs, the United States has long had a fleet of 41 and

is converting 31 of them to carry a much more advanced multiple-warhead missile.

The Soviets apparently have finished work on their older SS9 and SS11 missiles and are deploying a modified version of the older weapons or a new family of strategic weapons. Exactly what the Russians are up to is still in doubt here.

**CONVENTIONAL FORCES.** The Soviet Union has a large standing army and large reserve forces. The invasion of Czechoslovakia showed they are able to move rapidly with impressive coordination—but it also showed that, if there had been resistance or if the operation had continued for a few more days, the Soviet forces would have run out of food and fuel.

Much of the Soviet force is oriented toward China, but the United States considers the total force in computing the possible threat to Western Europe. In comparing the forces of the two sides, the amount the Russians devote to what they consider the threat from China probably should be deducted in the same way the United States tends to subtract the amount being spent in Southeast Asia.

**NAVAL FORCES.** The Soviet navy has grown rapidly in recent years, both in numbers and in quality. Because of its geographic situation, the Soviet Union is forced to maintain four essentially separate fleets, so it is not surprising that it should feel the need for a large navy. The difficulty for U.S. defense planners is that, even if these ships are being built exclusively for defense purposes, they could, if concentrated properly, also form a major offensive threat.

**HOMELAND DEFENSE.** The Russians have been traditionally defense-minded—apparently believing that the best defense is a good defense. They have built an antiballistic missile system of questionable value to defend the western industrial and population centers of their nation. They have deployed 10,000 surface-to-air missiles—in such profusion that some U.S. experts think they are intended to be part of a more elaborate ABM system. And they have built thousands of short-range interceptor planes.

All of this could be simply defensive. But it also could be part of an elaborate plan to gain world domination—by nonmilitary means if possible; by arms if necessary. Whatever it is, it has not happened so suddenly as to demand a sudden, spasm-like response from the United States.

**RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT.** This is the area in which something could happen suddenly. There is a major debate among scientists over the level of Soviet R&D effort. But all the estimates indicate that it is substantial and, given the shield of secrecy behind which Soviet scientists work, it certainly is capable of producing some surprises. The debate is over how big they may be and how many.

The Russians are neither 10-foot giants nor 3-foot pygmies. They are somewhere in between—precisely where, we are not quite sure.

One thing that really would help avoid the dangers of overreaction to some Soviet development—or supposed development—would be for Russia to tell us as much about their arms, their strategies and their intentions as we tell the world about ours. But that's certainly too much to hope for.

WASHINGTON POST 6 OCTOBER 1971

307

## Expressions of Optimism on Arms
# A SALT Agreement Near at Hand?

By Chalmers M. Roberts

THE strategic arms limitation talks, now 23 months old, have produced for the first time such expressions of optimism from both Americans and Russians as to indicate that at long last a SALT agreement will be consummated. Some see it by the end of 1971, others not until sometime in 1972. Inquiry leads to the conclusion that SALT indeed is in the home stretch but that some tough bargaining remains. President Nixon as well as the Kremlin leaders will have some hard decisions to make before the resumption of the talks in Vienna on Nov. 15.

Before going into details it is worth recalling that the initial American approach favored a comprehensive agreement on quantitative control of both offensive and defensive weapons systems. Qualitative control, essentially control of the multiple warheads known as MIRVs, has been touched on but hardly more. Currently any controls being considered are strictly quantitative. Not until last May 20 did the two super powers finally agree on the parameters of such a quantitative agreement. On that day they announced they had "agreed to concentrate this year on working out an agreement for the limitation of deployment of antiballistic missile systems (ABM)." Then the joint announcement added
that "they have also agreed, together with concluding an agreement to limit ABMs, they will agree on certain measures with respect to the limitation of offensive strategic weapons."

The verbal linkage on May 20 between controls over defensive and offensive systems was vague but there was a linkage. American officials insist the link is a must; there will be no agreement on ABMs, the Soviet priority item, without a hold-down on offensive missiles, landbased ICBMs and submarine-launched SLBMs, the American priority item. At the moment there is still disagreement on both items in the package. The Soviets concede the linkage but interpret it differently. Let us look at the basic premise and then at the details.

THE PREMISE is party, or equality to use the word most currently in style. Both nations agree but they differ on what constitutes equality. On the ABM issue Moscow wants to match its Galosh system protecting the command and control structure of the capital (and peripherally protecting some of its offensive missiles in the area to a degree dependent on the ABM limits to be agreed upon) with an American ABM protection of one of the existing Minuteman ICBM systems. The United States (which has given up on a comparable protection of the Washing-

ton area in part, because the administration figures it cannot get the money from Congress) wants to protect at least two, maybe three, of its Minutemen fields. The simplest solution, of course, would be for each side to go to "zero ABMs" but this idea has been abandoned. Russians say they offered zero ABM but the Americans rejected it; some Americans say it was the Russians who refused but others concede that the real negative came from Washington.

A key figure in the American insistence on protecting Minuteman missiles is Sen. Henry M. Jackson, the budding Democratic presidential candidate whom President Nixon tried to recruit as his Secretary of Defense. Jackson says that "I've conveyed my views" to the administration "about the necessity to provide that protection." But he won't comment on a report that he wrote Mr. Nixon that the Senate would not ratify a SALT treaty unless it included protection for at least two Minuteman fields. Jackson has consistently called for such ABM protection, rejecting the contention of ABM opponents that the system is worthless or next to worthless. Some argue that there can be no treaty without Jackson's approval and they recall how President Kennedy had to agree to a big test preparedness program to win Jackson's support for the partial nuclear test ban in 1963. Maybe Jackson could not stop a SALT agreement but he certainly could make it difficult.

THE ABM PART of the SALT argument includes both the number of Minuteman sites to match against Galosh and the kind of ABM deployment, both the number of missile launchers to be permitted and the scope and number of radars that are critical to the system. The United States is very inconsistent on limiting the radars. The argument is that additional missiles could be emplaced in a hurry if the radars are extensive whereas radar construction takes a long time and cannot be hidden. Strict control of

radars thus is vital to prevent a surprise Soviet shift in the ABM balance.

The ABM part of the SALT package now seems to be bargainable provided the two nations can come to terms on the "certain measures" to control offensive missiles. It is now reliably said that Moscow has agreed to freeze the number of its ICBMs and to include in that a sub-ceiling of around 300, the current figure, on its giant SS-9s, a prime American goal for SALT. Most probably the freeze would be at the level of the day of signing the agreement.

The big dispute is over submarine-launched ballistic missiles, SLBMs. Moscow says that the May 20 reference to "certain measures" excludes them; Washington says the wording includes them. Jackson says that "we have to have an understanding" on

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

SALT....... CONTINUED

SLBMs, that "we
can't leave that wide
open." Some U.S. of-
ficials say that the
Soviets now have
operational and under
construction as many
SLBM submarines
as does the United
States. The indica-
tions are that the U.S.
would agree to let the
Soviets complete subs
now building if Mos-
cow will accept an
SLBM freeze as part
of the offensive mis-
sile half of the SALT

package.

Two other points are important. The May 20 agreement, which American officials have said came about as the result of President Nixon's initiative, in fact was reached over the head of Gerard C. Smith, the chief U.S. negotiator at SALT, and without his knowledge until the last moment. Of course this was the President's prerogative and it does say something of his determination, for whatever reasons, to reach a SALT accord. Secondly, any SALT pact almost certainly will contain the same sort of escape clause contained in the test ban and other agreements. This permits either party to "withdraw from the treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country."

THE PROBLEM of finding parity or equality in a SALT agreement obviously is highly difficult. Currently the Soviets, their missile construction going ahead at full speed, are in a rather cocky mood. The Americans who deal with the problem sometimes wonder whether the Russians are trying to freeze the United States into a position of numerical inferiority in ICBMs (the Soviets lead by some 1,500 to 1,054) while demanding the right to build to equality in SLBMs. The Soviet answer to this numbers game is that the U.S. already is MIRVing both its Minutemen and Poseidon SLBMs so that it has many more warheads. The American counter is that since any SALT agreement will contain no restraints on MIRVs the Soviets are expected to MIRV as quickly as they can.

Since the May 20 agreement indicates that any SALT agreement will be an initial one, a limited rather than a comprehensive pact, there is a strong likelihood that some time limits will be written into the agreement. In short, the ABM part (expected to be in treaty form for Senate ratification) would be of limited duration pending a total agreement to limit offensive missiles. (The offensive missile part of the agreement is expected to be in non-treaty form, perhaps an exchange of statements).

The problem now facing Mr. Nixon and presumably the Kremlin leaders as well is how to strike a balance between an ABM pact and limitation on ICBMs plus SLBMs. The President, probably just before SALT resumes, will have to decide on what trade-offs he is prepared to accept. With Senator Jackson, and others in and out of the administration, watching hawk-like, it is not going to be an easy choice. But the nettle will have to be grasped if SALT is to come to at least an initial success.

308

NEW YORK TIMES 8 OCTOBER 1971

Sovereignty and SALT

By HENRY PAOLUCCI

If Henry Kissinger and the President he advises were committed to guarding the sovereign independence of this nation at all costs, nothing could be more conducive to the stabilizing of international relations at this time than Strategic Arms Limitations Talks with the Soviet Union.

On the other hand, if Henry Kissinger and the President he advises are committed to eliminating the possibility of a general war at all costs, then nothing could be more dangerous, nothing could be more disloyal than to veil in absolute secrecy, as the SALT meetings are indeed veiled, the negotiations whereby our sovereign independence of almost 200 years' standing may be bargained away.

Although the Soviet Union is not constituted as a nation state—although it legally and ideologically rejects the notion of occupying a “separate and equal station” among the powers of the earth—it has consistently exercised the prerogatives of sovereignty in its relations with the United States. It was not in the least tempted to make a sacrifice of its sovereign independence to purchase peace even when the United States enjoyed an absolute monopoly of atomic weapons. Certainly it is not prepared to do so now. Our atomic monopoly was reduced to a preponderance before it faded into parity. And now parity has been reduced to sufficiency, which, by definition, cannot suffice to do what preponderance or parity could do. Sufficiency is a move downward.

What are the Soviets disposed to sacrifice in the SALT negotiations to spare mankind the risks of a nuclear holocaust? We can be certain of this: they will not sacrifice their sovereign independence with all the prerogatives of their major power status.

One way the Government of the United States could purchase a "secure peace" with the Soviets would be by a sacrifice of the prerogatives of sovereign nationhood. Is it conceivable that Henry Kissinger and the President he advises might, for reasons best known to the great brain-trust of civilian war strategists who have advised our Presidents since 1961, contemplate such a sacrifice? Today, because of the shift of focus in our war-peace debate — a shift brought to unexplored frontiers by the Pentagon Papers affair — Walt Rostow can now be represented as some sort of hard-line traditionalist, whereas, when he came to Washington in 1961, he was clearly a revolutionary in his concept of "security" in the nuclear age. He wrote in 1960:

"It is a legitimate American national objective to see removed from all nations—including the United States—the right to use substantial military

force to pursue their own interests. Since this residual right is the root of national sovereignty and the basis for the existence of an international arena of power, it is therefore an American interest to see an end to nationhood as it has been historically defined."

Despite its academic articulation, that is a highly revolutionary doctrine. The legitimacy claimed for it is certainly not an American constitutional legitimacy.

McGeorge Bundy shared Rostow's view of the matter. And Henry Kissinger, too, expressed as recently as 1965 the conviction that the time was at hand for a surrender of nationhood because "institutions based on present concepts of national sovereignty are not enough."

Bundy, Rostow and Kissinger have put their theory into practice in their increasingly powerful service as chief Presidential advisers for national security affairs under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.

Is the time now ripe for negotiation to put an end to our nationhood, for taking the step beyond the nation-state? If it is done in secrecy, while The Times and its powerful allies are celebrating an end to secrecy, it will have to be registered in the annals of history as the greatest betrayal of public trust ever perpetrated in a civilized nation.

That is the great danger of the secret SALT negotiations. The "temptations" not to lose the Vietnam war experienced by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson have been extravagantly publicized. Now we ought to have comparable publicity on "temptations" of Henry Kissinger, and the "devoted pacifist" he advises, to put an end to our nationhood as it has been historically defined.

If the Soviets are assured, through secret SALT negotiations, that our posture of nuclear deterrence is indeed what the Nixon-Kissinger messages say it is, then that "American interest," of which Rostow wrote, "to see an end to our nationhood as it has been historically defined" will have been realized.

If we have not the will to do what McNamara defined as the essence of deterrence then we have no deterrence. We invite the ultimate form of nuclear blackmail.

Needless to say, if the secret papers on this subject are published, and, by some act of military boldness, our armed forces prevent an American surrender to blackmail, there are bound to be recriminations,

Prof. Henry Paolucci of St. John's University is president of the Walter Bagehot Research Council on National Sovereignty and vice chairman of the New York State Conservative party.

309

NEWSWEEK 11 OCTOBER 1971

BY ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI

THE GREAT SQUEEZE

Suppose there were 800 million Mexicans on the southern border of the U.S. . . . recalling bitterly that Americans stole large slices of Mexican territory . . . condemning daily the American social system as decadent and ripe for the ash can of history . . . arming themselves with nuclear weapons . . . and it was suddenly announced that Mr. Brezhnev is to pay a call on the Mexican leaders . . . What would be the U.S. reaction?

It is only when we ponder such imaginary analogies to the Russo-Chinese relationship that we can appreciate the depth of the Soviet anxiety over Mr. Nixon's China initiative. On the official level the Soviet leaders have tried to mask their concern; on the comically propagandistic plane the middle-level party functionary in charge of American studies, Georgi Arbaçov, has even argued in Pravda that the U.S. should now reassure the Soviets by making concessions on such matters as the Middle East (while blaming "belligerent Zionist elements" for encouraging the U.S. initiative). But at the same time the Soviet press has conceded that there has been no progress in Soviet-Chinese talks on border issues.

TERRITORIAL EQUITY

Soviet anxiety has deep historical roots and longer-range demographic-territorial causes. There is no natural frontier between Russia and China; it has changed through history and it is currently based on Russian conquests. As a result, Russia fears historical retribution from the East, and this applies to both China and Japan. As far back as 1900 a Russian philoso-pher-historian, Vladimir Soloviev, published a "futurological" account of the conquest of Russia by a joint Japanese-Chinese superstate, which, by Soloviev's reckoning, would by the end of this century have combined the demographic mass of China with the industrial know-now of Japan.

What Soloviev wrote is only partially social-science fiction. Demographic-territorial figures speak for themselves. China, with roughly half the territory of Soviet Asia, has approximately sixteen times as many people: Japan, with only one-fortieth of the land, has twice as many people. China and Japan account for about one-third of the total population of the world and they are bound to squeeze against the nearest, richest

and largest unpopulated area of the globe.

The more immediate Soviet concern, however, is the specter of Sino-American encirclement. To neutralize that danger, the Soviet leaders have undertaken to normalize relations on their western flank, particularly in Europe. At the same time, they are also trying to re-establish a political foothold in Yugoslavia, thereby isolating Rumania, in order to consolidate their over-all position in East Europe. A diplomatic offensive directed at Tokyo may also follow in order to prevent closer Japanese-Chinese relations; at some point Moscow may even offer to return to Japan the islands off northern Japan which the Soviets have occupied since the end of the second world war.

SOVIET COUNTERMOVES

With regard to the U.S. itself, continued arms-control negotiations are likely to be matched by quiet moves to keep the Vietnamese war alive since that war both ties down the U.S. and limits the scope of a possible U.S.-Chinese rapprochement. It is symptomatic that Moscow has been most pointed in its charge that the invitation of Mr. Nixon to Peking constitutes a betrayal of the North Vietnamese. Soviet efforts to maintain and expand their position in the Middle East will continue, in part to obtain valuable bargaining leverage with the U.S. and in part because of intrinsic regional benefits.

Finally, Moscow must be watching carefully the present developments in Peking, and an assertive move by the Soviet Union to influence the outcome of internal struggles in China is not to be excluded. Accordingly, there is reason to believe that the Nixon Administration would not view adversely a discreet Chinese request for indirect arms assistance—though an open request at this time would clearly be inexpedient.

In any case, much Soviet energy will henceforth be expended on impeding further U.S.-Chinese accommodation and on acquiring offsetting benefits, particularly in West Europe and Japan. This is why Mr. Nixon's initiative toward China should be accompanied by major political initiatives toward both West Europe and Japan. The emergence of a community of the developed nations must still remain the central goal of U.S. policy.

310

EDITORIALS

NEW YORK TIMES

13 OCTOBER 1971

Nixon's Second Summit

The announcement by President Nixon yesterday that he will visit Moscow next May for intensive negotiations on a broad range of issues indicates that he has won the gamble he took last summer when he disclosed his planned visit to Peking. That step raised the risk of an angry reaction by Moscow to what it might interpret as a Chinese-American coalition directed against the Soviet Union. However, the U.S.S.R. has been playing it cool, as witness the recent four-power agreement on Berlin, the indications of progress at the Helsinki SALT negotiations and now Moscow's receptivity to Mr. Nixon's projected trip.

At his news conference yesterday, the President insisted there was no relationship between his Peking and Moscow journeys. The diplomatic reasons for such a denial are evident, but the intimate tie between the two meetings can hardly be doubted. Mr. Brezhnev scored a domestic political coup with his announcement that Mr. Nixon will be coming to Russia. Implicitly, that news suggested to Soviet citizens that their fears of a Chinese-American anti-Soviet alliance have been proved groundless, no doubt as a result of skillful Soviet diplomacy.

That Mao and his colleagues will be equally happy about this latest turn of events would seem improbable. However, the fact that the President will be in Moscow after he visits Peking may conceivably increase Chinese interest in making concrete progress toward normalizing Sino-American relations. It is perhaps not entirely accidental that the Moscow trip has been announced shortly before Dr. Kissinger's scheduled second flight to China.

The numerous Democrats who would like to run against Mr. Nixon in November 1972 will undoubtedly see the President's trips as purely political ploys designed to get him re-elected. Presumably not even Mr. Nixon would deny that thoughts of political advantage in 1972 do occasionally enter his mind. Nevertheless it would be wrong to look at the two rounds of summit diplomatic meetings now scheduled for the next seven months from purely parochial, partisan points of view.

What has happened is that new possibilities have been raised for a substantial improvement in United States relations with the other two great world military powers, the Chinese People's Republic and the Soviet Union. There is no guarantee, unfortunately, that these possibilities will be realized. But, as he journeys to Peking and Moscow in the cause of world peace and international security, Mr. Nixon will need the support of all Americans regardless of party and irrespective of differences on domestic issues.

13 OCTOBER 1971

311

BALTIMORE SUN

Later, Moscow

The difference between President Nixon's projected visit to China and his later trip to Moscow is that one is essentially to explore and the other is to participate in a summit meeting, with an agenda devoted to issues of immediate substance. So at any rate it appears now, and so Mr. Nixon sees it, with an admission against speculation that the two visits were planned to affect each other in any way. Strictly of course this cannot be so: plans or none, the two journeys must give rise to broad interactions among the three countries involved.

It is still true that the United States and the Soviet Union have specific questions to discuss, and that the prospects seem excellent for a further refinement of those questions by late next spring. Mr. Nixon hopes optimistically that the SALT talks, on strategic arms limitation, "may be behind us at that point," and he notes the progress on a Berlin agreement as a clincher for the decision that the time is close for a productive summit conference between himself and the Soviet leadership.

The Soviet view, though expressed by the news agency Tass in vaguer terms, is much the same --that by May sufficient work will have been done at the lower diplomatic levels to justify, or even require, a meeting at the top.

As everyone knows, summit meetings do not always live up to their promise, and for that matter can be called off. From now to May is a long time. Much could happen. But in today's situation the agreement in Washington and Moscow that a conference should be held is a good sign, suggesting as it does denote progress toward an American-Russian modus vivendi—in which we may hope mainland China can in the fullness of time be included.

312

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

13 OCTOBER 1971

Moscow on Nixon's Itinerary

President Nixon announced yesterday that he will visit Soviet leaders in Moscow next May after his trip to Communist China. He will be the first President to go to either capital while in office, the Moscow is not unfamiliar to him. As Vice President he made a state visit there in 1959 and was received by the late Premier Khrushchev and other high Soviet officials. Again, in 1967, before his election as President, he visited as a private citizen. Altho Soviet leaders declined to meet with him, he visited with many Soviet citizens in Moscow and Central Asia.

The President's addition of Moscow to his list of travels may be viewed as another indication that he will leave nothing undone in his quest for understanding among nations and a lasting peace. Among the topics he will discuss, he said, are the continuing strategic arms limitation talks, the troubled Middle East, and other areas which present the hope of "significant progress" by talks at the highest level.

The visit will have the added purpose of demonstrating to the Russians that the United States considers the Soviet Union to be of equal importance to Red China in its design to achieve world detente. In making his announcement, Mr. Nixon emphasized that neither trip is being taken for the purpose of exploiting the existing differences between the two giant Communist countries.

Summit conferences in the period since World War II have been generally unproductive. President Eisenhower met with Soviet leaders at Geneva in 1955 without visible result, and Khrushchev then came to Camp David to meet with him again, once more to no result. The Paris summit meeting of 1960 blew up over the U-2 incident. President Kennedy met with Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961, and two months later the Berlin Wall was erected. Maybe President Nixon will have better luck.

It is useful to recall Mr. Nixon's conversations with Khrushchev in 1959 to

understand some of his purposes. He said then that the United States "has considerable power, but hopes never to have to use it."

"If there is mutual respect," he said of this country and the Soviet Union. "the two could create a basis for the negotiations necessary to ease world tensions and bring about a reduction in armed forces, which both sides desire. It would be well if officials of both nations stopped talking about the balance of power between the United States and the U. S. S. R. and emphasized instead that both are powerful and want a future of peace instead of war."

He said again that all problems could be solved "on the basis of give and take." When the talk shifted to missile capability, he and Khrushchev agreed that neither power could do much without observation by the other. This is probably even more true today, when the United States observation satellites have been brought to a high degree of efficiency. Undoubtedly the Soviet Union has counterparts.

There is a high degree of consistency between Mr. Nixon's statements on detente 12 years ago and his outlook today. He has said that he hoped to move from confrontation to an era of negotiation.

But Mr. Nixon is a realist who understands Communism. This, however, does not militate against his belief that negotiation can be productive. "Where the world's super powers are concerned," he has said, "there is no acceptable alternative to peaceful negotiation . . . Despite the recent setbacks, the years just ahead can bring a breakthru for peace, they must be a time for careful probing, of intensive negotiations, of a determined search for those areas of accommodation between East and West on which a climate of mutual trust can eventually be built."

If the President fulfills these aspirations, he deserves the gratitude of men everywhere.

WALL STREET JOURNAL

14 OCTOBER 1971

Mission to Moscow

President Nixon now has paired his
prospective trip to Peking with plans
for a follow-up visit to Moscow at the
end of next May, a globe-trotting par-
lay without precedent for a President.

It would be next to impossible to predict, with any hope of accuracy, what diplomatic successes or failures might flow from the President's two-top summitry. But there is another kind of significance attached to the proposed visits: The fact that they are being scheduled reflects the most optimistic view of world politics that any President has held for a good many years. The President may also feel, with some justification, that the prospect of the two meetings may itself reduce the possibilities for new tensions over the next several months.

Underlying the travel plans is the plausible expectation that the Vietnam war will have been wound down sufficiently before the visits so as not to be a major stumbling block, at least to surface amity. Although the China visit has not yet been definitely scheduled, there appear to be good prospects that American ground troops will be out of active combat in Vietnam by the time it takes place.

That does not mean that Vietnam
will not be an issue in both sets of
talks, of course. The United States will
not have withdrawn completely and it
has not forsaken its containment policy
for Southeast Asia. The President
probably will find it necessary to warn
both China and Russia of the world-
wide repercussions that would result if
they choose to continue expansionist
policies in Asia. The festering issue of
prisoners of war also will remain.

A cause for optimism, however, is
the President's statement that prog-
ress had been made in the strategic
arms limitation talks (SALT) between
the United States and Russia. He sees
the possibility that some form of
arms-limitation agreement will have
been reached by the end of this year.

A SALT agreement could have pro-
found importance, not only in relations
between the United States and Russia,
but also to the power equation that ex-
ists within Russia itself. It might en-
able non-military segments of the So-
viet political and economic structure to
put up stronger resistance to the de-
mands of Soviet militarists for weap-
ons.

Since the militarists' demands ap-
pear to loom very large in Soviet pol-
icy at the moment, any such weaken-
ing could contribute substantially to
the cause of world peace. A visit by
President Nixon to Moscow as an ex-
pression of American good will could
contribute towards this end and per-
haps lead to further steps towards mu-
tual arms reduction. A gesture of good
will in Moscow from a President who
had recently visited Peking could also
reduce the effectiveness of the Soviet
militarists' allegations of a Sino-Amer-
can cabal.

The President undoubtedly is bet-
ting, too, that the Russians will not
promote some new adventure in the
Middle East before next May. Once a
summit meeting has been arranged, it
supplies an incentive for both sides to
try to avoid creating any serious fric-
tions in advance.

By scheduling his two summit visits
at the beginning of an election year the
President is taking a gamble. If there
is an unexpected blow-up or embar-
rassment, he might lose political sup-
port at home. If he succeeds in improv-
ing relations and even establishes a
new modus vivendi with the two na-
tions that pose the most potential dan-
ger to the U.S., it could be a significant
political victory.

The fact that the President is will-
ing to make the gamble is a concrete
expression of his own optimism. He
will be exposing himself to risks, but
he obviously believes they are worth
taking. The rest of us can only hope
that his assessment is correct and that,
come next June, it will be possible to
say that the world looks like a more
peaceful place.

313

WASHINGTON POST - 14 OCTOBER 1971 P-19

THURSDAY MORNING, 14 OCTOBER 1971

315

George C. Wilson

# Laird's Time for Alarm

## DEFENSE SECRETARY
Melvin R. Laird at his press conference yesterday gave substance to the Pentagon wise crack of the day before that "Laird will have trouble saying the Russians are coming now that Nixon is going."

The reference, of course, was to President Nixon's announcement on Tuesday that he will go to Moscow next May to enhance "the prospects of world peace." Once his boss had said that, Laird could not complain very loudly about Soviet advances in weaponry.

The defense secretary while visibly exercising restraint in what he said at his press conference, did manage to make headlines by declaring the Soviets will catch up with the United States in missile submarines in 1973 instead of 1975. But here, too, Laird has a problem.

Back in the McNamara years, the catechism of the arms theologians was that the sooner the Soviets put their nuclear-tipped missiles underground or under the sea in submarines—the better. Missiles lying out in the open, went the argument, were so vulnerable that Moscow in a crisis would be tempted to fire them before they could be knocked out by Washington.

Our Polaris submarines, the arms specialists said, were a stabilizing force because they could not be destroyed in a surprise attack and thus would not be fired impulsively—only in a calculated response to a first strike by the other side. Also, missiles fired from submarines do not have pickel-barrel accuracy and thus could not destroy ICBMs buried underground. Submarines, then, have been portrayed for a long time as "second-strike" weapons.

THECRETICALLY, news that the Soviet Union is following the United States in building a second-strike missile submarine force should be comforting to those trying to walk the world back from an Armageddon of nuclear incineration.

Yet, Laird at his press conference yesterday did not talk that way at all. He said the American people would not tolerate the Soviet Union ringing this country with missile-carrying submarines the same way the United States has ringed the Soviets. He made the points that Soviet Russia is a closed society, the United

States an open one and that there would be "political" problems from a big Soviet submarine force.

It was a confusing explanation—one that seemed to conflict with the carefully stated case of the past for second-strike weapons. His concern about the Soviet submarine buildup begins to make sense only when it is examined in the context of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT).

President Nixon expressed hope Tuesday that the United States and Soviet Union through SALT will have reached agreement before the May summit meeting on limiting offensive ICBMs and defensive ballistic-missile (ABM) systems. There is a good chance, however, that submarines will not be included in the agreement.

As matters stand now, the Soviet Union under such an agreement would have more ICBMs at the ready than the United States. The Soviets have passed the United

States in numbers. Nobody expects Russia to throw away ICBMs to make things even with the United States. That is why Laird and others in the Nixon administration use the term "sufficiency" when talking about ICBMs, not "superiority."

MR. NIXON'S strategists believe the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Congress would accept a missile gap as long as it is demonstrated that the United States has all the nuclear killing power it needs and that building more ICBMs would not provide any additional security. A mutual freeze on ABM construction also is seen saleable politically.

But would the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Congress accept—on top of a missile gap—a ring of Soviet missile submarines around the United States? That is one of the big unknowns as Laird and others assess the politics of SALT.

Therefore, even though it does not make strategic sense to scream about the Soviet submarine buildup—given their second strike character — it may make political sense to try to talk Russia out of going ahead full speed with submarine construction.

Thus the politics of SALT, budget problems and the fear of many administrators, generals and politicians that Mr. Nixon is giving away too much in strategic weaponry make this the season for sounding the alarm about Soviet submarines and other strategic weaponry—Moscow trip or not.

WASHINGTON POST

15 OCTOBER 1971

# "We Can Both Agree"
## Nixon's New Tack
## In Soviet Policy

By Stephen S. Rosenfeld

MR. NIXON'S decision to go to Moscow may not be nearly so meaningful as the stated reasons why he made it. To take him at his Tuesday word, he has undergone a virtually complete transformation from cold warrior to soldier of detente. It's amazing.

Look back briefly at what the President said about the Soviet Union in his state of the world address last February. There was, if you will, the old Nixon, or a good piece of him. Watch out, he said to Moscow, and don't forget that we've got an eye on you. "The growth of Soviet power in the last several years could tempt Soviet leaders into bolder challenges," he declared, addressing head on the critical question of whether Moscow would seek to convert its strategic- and conventional-force gains into political coin. Carefully, he cautioned the Kremlin against "mistaken perception ... failure to appreciate the risks and consequences of probing for advantages or testing the limits of (American) toleration." The background, you recall included Soviet cheating on missiles at Suez, possibly egg- ing on the Syrian attack against Jordan, moving subs into the Caribbean, and tolerat- ing jabs at the access of Berlin.

Now look at what Mr. Nixon said last Tuesday, announcing his mission to Moscow. The striking thing was the complete absence of any cautionary word to the Kremlin or of any challenging of Kremlin motives. This in itself was impressive evidence of presidential seriousness: it would seem self-evident that if you are serious about negotiations, you do not open by im- pugning your prospective partner's motives.

Mr. Nixon went further, however. "I think," he said, "we can both agree that neither major power can get a decisive ad- vantage over the other, an advantage which would enable it to launch a preemptive strike, or an advantage—because it was able to launch a preemptive strike—which might enable it to engage in international black- mail."

THIS IS, in truth, the heart of the strategic matter: that "we can both agree" to forswear gaining a capacity for preemptive strike and to forswear the tactic of political blackmail which it makes possible. This is what high strategy is all about. Moreover:

"It is because we have reached the point that the competition in terms of escalating arms race cannot gain an advantage, and both of us emphasize this in our meeting, it is for that reason that now the time has come to negotiate our differences, negotiate with regard to our differences, recognizing that they are still very deep, recognizing, however, that there is no alternative to negotiation at this point."

That is to say, Mr. Nixon not only went on record unequivocally accepting the Russians as a mature and equal negotiating partner. He said that the principal political/

strategic decision- whether to negotiate a lid on the arms race—has been taken on both sides, to their mutual knowledge and satisfaction.

If this is so—ane if it is not, Mr. Nixon's words are meaningless—then it would seem to go without saying that a great deal more dialogue has been conducted between Moscow and Washington than we of the public have so far been told about.

If this is so again, then Defense Secretary Laird's recent alarms about an accelerated Soviet arms buildup become something quite different from his or his department's or his constituency's accustomed reflex actions. His alarms become part of a genuine rearguard campaign against a new policy of his chief, or perhaps—who knows?—part of a calculated administration feint designed to convey to Moscow the idea that unless a good SALT agreement is made soon, Mr. Nixon will be undone by the Pentagon. (The Kremlin, by the way, is an old hand at this particular dodge.)

TO THOSE of us who had long hoped that the President would adopt the stance indicated by his Tuesday words, it is a matter of gratification and—to confess—of some nervousness that he appears to have come around. It was, for instance, disquieting to read in an article in the New York Times that the White House had detected "a change of direction in Soviet policy" from the Polish workers uprisings of last December: supposedly the uprisings convinced the Kremlin of the need for East-West stability. I find this far too great a burden of import for such a relatively limited event to carry.

The Times' account further suggested that Mr. Nixon believed his own stern responses to Soviet moves in the Mideast and elsewhere had brought Moscow to see the light. Again, I simply do not think that the Russians (or anybody else) base whole large national policies on small tactical moves by the other side. Judgments on the firmness or flabbiness of an adversary are made, or so one must hope, not on the basis of isolated gestures but on the basis of comprehensive assessments, continually updated and reviewed.

Nonetheless, it is fair for Mr. Nixon to claim that he has made good progress on what he set out as his foreign-policy "agenda of outstanding opportunities" last February. The first item was "a more stable military relationship for the next decade"—SALT is, evidently, coming along. The second was "a peaceful settlement of the Middle East conflict"—none yet but Washington is pushing hard. The third was "an agreed framework for security in Europe"—the Berlin agreement and its sequels.

My hunch is that Mr. Nixon has in fact gotten within striking distance of the goal he has long cherished: going beyond specific agreements to build, chiefly with the Soviet Union, a "structure of peace" that will carry the United States forward into the post-Vietnam age. The dimensions and qualities of such a structure will be examined in a subsequent article.

316

LIFE MAGAZINE 15 OCTOBER 1971

# The arms race hasn't stopped

By Hugh Sidey

Back in 1962. the story goes. New York attorney John McCloy was assigned by President Kennedy to make sure that the Russians followed through on Nikita Khrushchev's promise to remove their missiles and bombers from Cuba. Not long after. McCloy and Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister V. V. Kuznetsov were sitting on a rail fence at McCloy's country place in Stamford. Conn. "We will live up to this agreement," said the intense, athletic Russian. "But we will never be caught like that again."

In a few months there began in Russia a program of arms buildup and development that, except for a few pauses, has been accelerating for almost a decade. Even as arms limitation talks went on, the Soviet Union has been producing more new weapons and at a faster rate than any nation in peacetime in history.

There is a pressing awareness today in Washington about the consequences of the Soviet effort. It does not dominate thinking or even catch the imagination in the way China does (Henry Kissinger had another of his finest hours last week announcing his latest trip to Peking). But it lurks naggingly in the background. In Kissinger's own strategic shop in the White House, for example, they calculate that we have only one more year to try for an agreement at the SALT talks. If none comes and the Russians continue their buildup, they say, in all likelihood we will be forced to rejoin the arms race.

Years ago, when our advantage was huge, some degree of unilateral disarmament by us rounded vaguely plausible. But now even Senate doves grow silent when shown the Russian figures: 550 Soviet ships on the NATO north flank alone; half again as many land-based ICBMs as we have; a nuclear sub fleet that will be bigger than ours in a couple of years. Pentagon officials say they hesitate to release all the new intelligence on Soviet arms for fear of credibility problems. A new program of Soviet missile tests, for example, has just been detected.

The Pentagon's research and development director, John Foster, paces agitatedly in his office and telesenders that new developments in Russian weaponry are now coming so fast and are so complex that it is difficult to know how to tell the press and the public about them. They run across the board, the Pentagon charts show: in missiles, planes, ships, undersea warfare, radar. Foster has gone to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird's office so frequently over the past weeks with fresh news about Soviet advances that finally he stopped and compiled a list. It had more than 20 items on it. Laird and his men then ordered a detailed study of the Russian buildup of the past ten years and a new assessment of where we stand.

Laird, Foster, the admirals and the generals expect to hear of a really major Soviet breakthrough one day soon. The Soviet military research and development budget is known to have been extremely high for years, exceeding anything necessary for mere parity with us. The Pentagon thus considers a development comparable to Sputnik in 1957 or the gigantic H-bomb of 1961 to be a virtual certainty. Suppose, suggest the experts, that one day our satellite pictures reveal in sequence how a high-powered laser beam developed by Russia instantly cuts the wings off a jet bomber? Or, they say, maybe we wake up some morning to find that the Soviets have assembled a fleet of hundreds of surface and undersea ships out in the Pacific, capable of preventing America from sending a land army beyond the shores of North America.

In such an event, Pentagon worriers say, a violent political reaction here would turn doves into hawks and hawks into vampires. Nixon's defense budget cutbacks would be denounced as blind irresponsibility, and a frenzy of arms spending would be touched off.

This kind of thinking has brought a new somberness in some levels of Washington officialdom. And the military men who go to suburbs, luncheon clubs and campuses report more receptive audiences now for their descriptions of expanding Soviet power. Not long ago their claims were being contested, even ridiculed.

Even the men most concerned in the Pentagon conclude that the United States, with its elaborate mix of weapons, still holds a slight edge over the Soviet Union. Our technology still has a two-year lead. We have begun work on new undersea weapons and a new long-range bomber. Merely to keep up with the Russians, Laird is now planning to seek an increase in defense spending for the next fiscal year, just when everyone else talks of defense cutbacks, reduced taxes and peace dividends. But grim surprises could upset even this kind of planning. At this very hour there are photographs from our unsleeping aerial cameras, say intelligence sources, showing objects and construction in Communist territory that so far have baffled all the experts.

For the last two and a half years Laird has begun each week with his Armed Forces Policy Council, gathering all the top civilian and military men around his conference table to chart the broad objectives. Inevitably, Vietnam led the list. Then one morning a few months ago the group assembled, stood up for the arrival of Laird, settled back in their chairs and scooped up the agendas laid out on the blue felt before them. The first topic on the list was the balance of strategic forces. Vietnam was fourth. It has been that way in Laird's office almost every Monday morning since then.