9

matter, it must be our policy to reduce reliance on nuclear war to the greatest extent possible, by creating other means to resist aggression.

This requires more than exhortations, however. The United States has abolished the draft; most of our allies have reduced their terms of compulsory military service; everywhere military budgets are under pressure from increasingly insistent social demands. If we are serious about seeking to reduce the danger of nuclear weapons, we must be serious as well about military efforts in the conventional field, and must face up to the question of the adequacy of our military budgets and volunteer armies.

## Strategic Arms Limitation and Reduction

It has been NATO policy since at least the Harmel Report of 1967 that the Atlantic Alliance has two main functions: to maintain the collective defense, and to seek a more stable relationship with the East by willingness to resolve political problems through negotiations. Arms control has had a crucial role in this effort. Public support for defense and for resistance to Soviet challenges can be sustained in the democracies only by demonstrating that the West is not the cause of confrontations. We have seen in recent years that failure to observe this maxim generates massive pressure groups that then exact perhaps excessive concessions from governments belatedly recognizing their impact and suddenly eager to placate them.

To be effective, arms control must be seen as a component of security policy. Experience shows that it can ratify or stabilize a military balance, not serve as a substitute for it. Indeed, it is the stable military balance in Europe that has made possible several decades of efforts to ease tensions with the Soviet Union. If arms control comes to be perceived primarily as an exercise in moral virtue--either because advocates turn demagogic or governments self-indulgent--it becomes a form of self-paralysis. The premise of arms control must be that security can be enhanced if the balance is maintained at lower, agreed, and verifiable levels of forces.

This is why so much hope has been attached for over a decade to US-Soviet talks on strategic arms control and why President Reagan has reaffirmed the commitment of all of

10

his predecessors to limiting these weapons of mass destruction, giving special emphasis to reductions. And that is why there have emerged the various freeze proposals now under active discussion in the United States.

President Reagan's commitment to strategic arms talks marks a watershed in the American domestic debate. For nearly a decade, disputes over strategic weapons limitation have torn our domestic consensus, becoming symbolic surrogates for larger controversies over policy towards the Soviet Union. Arms control negotiations over the years have been buffeted by debates between competing philosophies sometimes only indirectly touching upon the details being negotiated. Advocates have made exorbitant claims and insisted on separating arms control from all other aspects of policy; opponents saw in them a serious weakening of Western will power and concentrated on portraying the inherent balancing of relative advantages as unilateral concessions. President Reagan, by proposing and entering a negotiation over strategic arms reduction, will have liberated our domestic debate and permitted a serious public discussion of the real issues of arms control. The delay in starting the talks, legitimately needed for preparation, is a small price to pay for opening up prospects of a successful conclusion that were not available to either of his two immediate predecessors.

There exists, then, an unprecedented opportunity. Frustration with the apparent slow pace of diplomacy and the desire for a dramatic breakthrough have produced various proposals for nuclear freezes. Experience has shown, however, that it is easy to formulate general objectives in arms control negotiations; it is much more difficult to negotiate a meaningful outcome whatever principle is finally adopted. We have, after all, the experience of the two SALT agreements which were both essentially a kind of numerical freeze. Complex negotiations went on for years over what weapons to count; how to relate multiple warheads to individual delivery vehicles; and how to relate either to airborne weapons of mass destruction. Attempting a freeze now would encounter all the old SALT dilemmas--for example, of where to draw the dividing line between "modernized" and "new" systems. Who can forget the Soviets' attempt to define all of their replacement weapons as only "modernized" and hence permitted, while all of ours were said to be "new" and hence proscribed? In short, a freeze requires a baseline; by itself it is no advance over the results of the SALT process which already exists.

The Administration, in an important speech by President Reagan last Sunday, has countered by proposing a strategic arms

11

control scheme based on reductions. This surely addresses
the concerns of many who express unhappiness at the
scale of nuclear arsenals. And the Administration is
also dealing with what is the real heart of the matter,
namely crisis stability, or diminishing the danger of the
outbreak of nuclear war. For if the reductions are merely
numerical, without concern for the composition and nature of
strategic forces, they could increase instability rather than
ease it. After all, the overwhelming new problem in the strategic
field is the existence of multiple warheads on strategic missiles.
Even if the launchers on both sides are exactly equal, the dis-
proportion between the number of attacking warheads and the
number of launcher/targets represents a standing temptation to
strike first. Reductions do not automatically change the dis-
proportion. In fact, at some levels reducing the number of
missiles without changing the proportion of warheads to missiles
increases the vulnerability of the missiles attacked; a first
strike is simplified. The Reagan Administration is surely
on the right track in striving for a proposal that combines
reductions with restrictions on other characteristics of
weapons to inhibit, rather than ease, a surprise attack.

But it is also true that such a process is enormously time-
consuming, not only in elaborating our own position but in
negotiating an agreement with the Soviet Union. It took years
of SALT negotiations to agree on numerical limits on launchers;
the negotiations now envisaged are infinitely more complex.

The gap must be bridged. There is an urgent need to
demonstrate to our publics that both sides are serious about
getting the arms race under control. Otherwise careless "quick-
fix" solutions are likely to dominate the field. In my view,
the existing SALT framework may be useful in providing the
baselines from which to negotiate over the complex reductions
that our Administration is in the process of developing. At
the same time, we must take seriously the concerns expressed
in the Senate debate on ratification of SALT II. On that oc-
casion, I supported ratification if three conditions were
fulfilled: first, if a major defense build-up were undertaken
to restore the military balance; second, if certain amendments
were made and if specific ambiguities, particularly in the
accompanying three-year Protocol, were cleared up; and third,
if the United States made clear the linkage between SALT and Soviet
geopolitical conduct. Some Senators, led by the then minority
leader Senator Howard Baker, stressed the importance of maintaining

12

the American right to build heavy ICBMs such as the Soviet Union already possessed in large numbers.

These are valid concerns, and I believe that we are at a stage where they can be met. The Reagan Administration's re-armament effort will in time balance the Soviet build-up; it is urgently needed--but in any case, the Administration has voluntarily kept it within SALT II limits. The Protocol has been overtaken by the passage of time. (The interval foreseen for it is ending in any case.) We could therefore proceed to an interim agreement using the SALT framework or, as some former opponents of the treaty such as Senator Sam Nunn have indicated, ratify the SALT II treaty. I would lean to that course, with the following additions to the existing SALT framework:

--First, spelling out an American right to build heavy ICBMs equivalent to the Soviets'. My impression is that the MX, which is permitted under the treaty, meets all current American objectives (and also that it raises enough problems of deployment in its own right). It is therefore unlikely that we would build an even heavier missile. Still, a treaty that deprives the United States of the formal right to aim for equivalence with the Soviets raises serious problems of equity. Alternatively, we could offer to trade reductions or even elimination of the MX for similar restraints on the Soviet heavy missile, the SS-18.

--Second, lowering the ceilings below the limits established by SALT II to around 2000-2100 strategic delivery vehicles. This would symbolize a commitment to reductions.

--Third, extending the agreement's duration to 1987, instead of 1985--to be superseded by a reduction agreement, of course, if concluded earlier. This would provide time for the agreement to be reflected in the weapons decisions of the parties and a sense of security for the comprehensive reductions and qualitative restrictions our Administration is properly seeking.

Reverting to the framework of SALT II as a point of departure for an interim period may seem to some to reopen partisan wounds. The answer is that the Reagan Administration is in fact observing the numerical limits agreed in SALT II. I have great difficulty understanding why it is safe to adhere to a non-ratified agreement while it is unsafe formally to ratify what one is already observing. The Soviets may in fact prefer such a posture, all the more so as non-ratification gives them at least 250 extra delivery vehicles which they would be obliged to destroy by the terms of the treaty once ratified.

13

I stress that these are the ideas of a private American
who on this subject has had next to no access to Administration
thinking. But it seems to me a reasonable way to end the
current impasse, establish a baseline for later reductions,
and end the agitation for quick fixes reflecting more passion
than analysis.

But no step forward toward arms control will advance us
decisively toward a stable peace unless we are willing to
confront two corollaries. First, we must always keep in mind
that any agreement on limiting or reducing strategic weapons
will further undermine the credibility of a strategy based
on their use. It thus reemphasizes the urgent need to redress
the imbalance in conventional forces. Western governments must
not use an agreement as an excuse to slacken their defense
effort but to redirect it. Or else SALT, or START, or any
other acronym, will multiply our perils. We should be pre-
pared to pay the price of a further conventional build-up;
we must not pretend that there is no price.

Second, important as arms control is, commitment to it
must not obscure the basic reality: as a general principle
arms do not cause political tensions; they reflect them.
It cannot be in the interest of the West to permit the Soviet
Union to use arms control talks as a safety valve to avoid the
consequences of aggressive behavior. In the past decade,
almost every Soviet aggressive move has been followed by an
offer to accelerate arms talks. In the long run, the Soviets
may be misled into believing that they can safely challenge
the global balance and escape the consequences by conciliatory
rhetoric. Even as we insulate arms talks to some degree from
political discussions, we must never forget that the cause of
tensions is the political conflict between East and West, the
clash of philosophies and the Soviet effort to expand its power
and its sphere. Sooner or later there must be a settlement
of this political conflict or all subsidiary negotiations
will ultimately become irrelevancies.

Thus, the deeper challenge to Western leaders is whether they
are willing to face complexity; whether they can educate their
peoples to the knowledge that passion can give an impetus but
only analysis can produce results, that arms control cannot
survive in conditions of permanent geopolitical challenge:
whether, in short, the democracies can muster the discipline
and the cohesion for facing their perils with a sense of purpose
instead of running from them in confusion and division.

14

Economic Relations with the Soviet Union

The allied disputes over security have had their origin in European initiatives; those over East-West trade have received their impetus from America. Two successive American administra-tions have vainly sought European support to restrict East-West trade by proscribing the sale of certain commodities or interrupting long-term projects such as the gas pipeline, first over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, then over the suppression of liberty in Poland. The resulting disagreements have left an unfortunate residue: In America, many believe that our European allies subordinate long-term strategy and even security to short-term domestic politics; in Europe, many argue that America seeks to play for geopolitical stakes with European chips, risking the domestic cohesion of friendly countries over issues with respect to which we ourselves are not prepared to make equivalent sacrifices, as the lifting of our grain embargo suggests.

Let me make a few observations.

Pressures for East-West trade grew in the late Sixties and early Seventies--ironically in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. It was argued in some quarters that despite occasional Soviet transgressions, increased East-West trade would moderate Soviet behavior by making the USSR increasingly dependent on the technology and grain of the industrial democracies. The American administration then in office, in which I served, held from the first that trade should follow prior demonstrations of Soviet commitment to a more peaceful course and should be linked to Soviet international behavior. When the Soviet Union entered into serious negotiations on Berlin, SALT, mutual force reductions and other matters, the United States gradually lifted restrictions, on a case-by-case basis and tied to specific projects. Our European allies followed in our wake and, when Congressional restrictions intervened, far surpassed us in both the scale of their trade and credit and the ease with which they made it available.

Whatever the merit of the original theories, it is now clearly demonstrated that trade and credits can moderate Soviet conduct only if the Kremlin fears that intransigence will cost it the economic benefits it seeks. Yet that is what is most insistently rejected by the domestic interest groups in all countries which gain from East-West trade and by the Western governments which they influence. More and more, the governments of the industrial democracies act on the premise that the immediate gains in employment outweigh the political risks in strengthening a hostile and aggressive political system.

15

This is all the more shortsighted, as a mounting tide of
radicalism and insecurity in the world--the inevitable con-
sequence of a growth of Soviet power unrestrained by some agreed
code of conduct--will sooner or later compound all economic
difficulties as well.

There is little doubt that over the past decade the nego-
tiating balance in East-West trade has been reversed. In
every crisis, the West invents new excuses why it would be
inappropriate to interrupt economic relations, including the
totally contradictory propositions that "sanctions never work"
and "sanctions are tantamount to an act of war"--the last an
especially dangerous legitimization of Soviet blackmail should
economic sanctions ever prove unavoidable. Economic relations,
indeed, have done much more to induce Western restraint in the face of Soviet
misconduct than to encourage Soviet restraint in its international behavior.

The inequality in bargaining positions is almost entirely
the result of the disunity of the democracies. Theoretically,
trade occurs only when it is to the mutual benefit of both
sides. But the division of the benefits is the subject of bar-
gaining; overdependence on one market or one seller tilts the
balance, especially when a centrally directed system faces a
group of countries competing with each other. This is precisely
what is happening in East-West trade. The USSR deals with its
opposite numbers in the West through a purchasing commission,
a single unit subject to strict political direction. The
West is divided into competing units sometimes prevented by
anti-trust legislation from acting together and often encouraged
by national governments which seek special benefits for their
national industries by concessional credits. Loans have been
offered or encouraged with little or no consideration of
Soviet or East European ability to use or repay the funds.
Default is avoided by "rescheduling," that is, lending more
money to pay interest on what are in effect bad loans--protecting
the lenders' balance sheet. In these circumstances it is easy
for the Kremlin to play off the Western countries, and even
industries, against each other, obtaining benefits not justified
by the economic balance of advantage, much less by political
circumstances. Against all traditional expectations the
"debtor's" bargaining position improves with his inability to
repay his debts.

The result has been an anomaly. By any objective analysis,
the Soviet Union and its satellites are infinitely more dependent
on East-West trade than their trading partners, the industrial
democracies. The Soviet Union cannot feed itself without
the non-Communist world's grain; it desperately needs Western
technology. The typical Western product for sale in the East
contains new ideas; what the Soviet Union has to offer in

16

return is raw materials--products which contain no conceptual input. The inequality in benefits would long since have reduced trade to a trickle had not Western governments stepped in with direct or hidden credits, which now amount to nearly $90 billion for the Communist world. In addition, many export prices are subsidized by governments directly or indirectly. The Communist countries thus are not only gaining a relative advantage in trade but they are being financed by the nations against whom they are simultaneously conducting a geopolitical offensive. Lenin's dictum that capitalists would compete to sell the rope with which they are to be hanged is coming true with a vengeance--for Lenin never guessed that Western governments would provide the money to buy the rope and subsidize the price to facilitate the purchase.

It is unthinkable that the West should continue to use its overwhelming share of the world's economic power so frivolously. We are on the defensive not because we lack resources but because we have failed to muster the will or the leadership to organize a coherent response. We have tried stop-and-go sanctions. They have failed because they affected various countries and different sectors of the economy unequally. And it was difficult to relate them to a concrete political program or to determine under what circumstances they might be ended. They have turned into pinpricks dramatizing the West's weakness rather than its mastery of the situation.

The issue has further been clouded by the extreme manner in which the choices have been stated. Some opponents of East-West trade intimate that a total denial of economic benefits will force the collapse of the Soviet system. This theory is disproved by history. The Soviet system survived several decades of economic isolation and did not crumble. And it runs counter to the domestic pressures for seeking negotiations on a broad front. The last 18 months show that the Alliance will not sustain a policy of confrontation for its own sake unrelieved by any hope of diplomatic progress.

But the opposite theory, of the automatic mellowing effect of trade, has also been demonstrated to be fallacious. Soviet behavior in recent years has given the lie to the argument that trade and credits by themselves will bring about the benign evolution of the Soviet system. Soviet/Cuban intervention in Angola, in Ethiopia, and in South Yemen; the invasion of Afghanistan; the suppression of Solidarity in Poland; and the use of toxic chemical and biological warfare in Afghanistan

17

and Southeast Asia have all occurred in precisely the period
of expanded East-West economic cooperation.

If the democracies continue to make available their hard-
earned resources for an assault on the geopolitical balance, they
must not be surprised at the inevitable decline in their security
and prosperity. It simply cannot be beyond the political
imagination and will of the democracies to exact a penalty for
intransigent and aggressive Soviet conduct. Or, to put it
positively: So long as the Soviet Union asks us for help in
solving its economic problems by what amounts to Western aid,
the industrial democracies have the right and indeed the duty
to insist on restraint and stability in international conduct
in return.

The industrial democracies are in a position to use their
economic strength positively and creatively. There exists
a sensible rationale for East-West trade, which is neither
unrestricted economic warfare nor uncontrolled Soviet access to
Western trade, credit, and technology. If the democracies
cannot concert unified political criteria, they should be able
at least to agree on letting market conditions determine the level
of East-West trade and credit. If government-guaranteed credits
and subsidies were to end, East-West trade would be reduced to
the level of reciprocal economic benefit--or a small fraction
of what now exists. If the Soviets want to go beyond this--if
they seek credits or subsidized prices--the West should insist
on a political quid pro quo.

To this end, the industrial democracies should jointly
take the position that they are prepared over the long term
to engage in economic cooperation even on an augmented scale
if, but only if, there is in return a comprehensive political
understanding providing for settlement of the most serious
outstanding problems, specific restraint in superpower conduct,
and major steps toward arms reduction. The conditions should
not be pious platitudes but should be spelled out in concrete
detail. Nor should we delude ourselves: This cannot be achieved
without a period, perhaps of some years, of disciplined coor-
dination and restraint among the democracies to convince the
Soviets that we are serious. Specifically:

--The democracies should start by clarifying and specifying
their objectives in the political area to provide clear-cut
criteria for progress. This could be embodied in a declaration
that the West conceives its relations with the Soviet Union
to go deeper than purely technical or economic exchanges. The
most important message would be that the industrial democracies
propose to speak with the East with one voice on economic
issues and that they will demand political reciprocity for
governmentally-encouraged trade.

18

--Second, there should be an urgent review and modernization of the list of prohibited strategic exports together with a determination to stick to it.

--Third, democracies should examine at the highest level on what political terms the Soviet Union and the nations in its system will enjoy governmentally-supported access to Western trade and financial resources. Policies on export credits and financial guarantees should be reviewed periodically, based on a commitment to establish a common and non-competitive policy among all OECD members.

--Fourth, the democracies should agree to end progressively all government subsidies and guarantees for private bank credits to Eastern Europe. Given the nearly catastrophic performance of Communist economies, the marketplace would determine the proper flow of private credit, probably to restrict if not eliminate it. The same principle should apply to subsidized prices.

--Concurrently, there should be an agreement that rescheduling of existing debts will be heavily influenced by behavior of the countries concerned, especially in the field of foreign policy but including an end of martial law in Poland.

--Fifth, an urgent review of the grain export policy of the major grain-producing nations to determine how it can serve the strategy sketched here without undue hardship to the farmers in all our countries.

--Finally, there must be a consensus among the democracies as to what form of expanded economic cooperation we are prepared to undertake with the Communist world if this strategy of Western economic coordination leads to a broad East-West political understanding.

The Versailles summit would seem to provide a useful forum to begin such a process of coordinating and unifying the policies of the industrial democracies.

It may be argued that these measures are utopian; that the West will never muster the discipline and mutual confidence for such a course. But what these measures suggest is in the long-term interest of both East and West. It discourages Soviet adventurism grounded in the belief that the West is too weak, too selfish, or too divided to defend its interests with its best weapons. It thus forces the Soviets to make real choices at a time when their succession struggle will

19

inevitably involve an internal debate over priorities and a
possible desire to ease outside pressures. If it leads to
the sort of political settlement that precludes later reversal,
trade and credit can safely be expanded. If such a settlement
is unattainable, continuing our present trade and credit prac-
tices will in effect accelerate our crisis. In that case,
future generations will not be able to explain what possessed
their predecessors to engineer their own decline by lassitude,
greed, and lack of leadership.

If the industrial democracies wish to subsidize their
exports by easy credit or pricing policies, the creative area
for such efforts is not in the Communist countries but in
the Third World--especially among its moderate, market-
oriented governments.

## Conclusion

Existing trends may sometimes appear bleak, but let us not
forget that they are the result of decisions by free societies
and can therefore be reversed by free decisions. For if we
use our intelligence and consider our potential, we have every
reason for hope. The Soviet Union is a system with no legitimate
method of succession, a stagnant economy, a demographic challenge
in the growth of its non-Russian population, and ideological
claims whose bankruptcy is being proven by the working class
of Poland in the streets of Polish cities. The joke of
history is that the only spontaneous revolutions in industrialized
countries have been against Communist governments.

A system that feels so threatened by even the most elemen-
tary liberties, a system so structurally unsound and inefficient,
so patently contrary to the human spirit, can prevail only
by our inadequacies, not by its own efforts. The West, which
over centuries has shaped a great civilization--of culture,
philosophy, inventiveness, and well-being--must not now ab-
dicate control of its own destiny to short-term calculations.
Democracy requires above all clarity of thought, fortitude, and
leaders willing to present the facts to their people and pre-
pared to deal with complexity. If our problems were simple,
they would long since have been solved. The statesman always
faces the dilemma that he must approach his goal in stages;

20

he is responsible not only for the best that can happen but
also for the worst. Perfection will therefore elude him at
each stage; demagogues have no great difficulty attacking
any step by comparing it with some conjectural utopia. But
democracy cannot survive if debates are driven by such
attitudes. It is a disservice to serious moral concerns to
pretend that there is no practical dimension, just as it
falsifies practical solutions to separate them from their
moral content. There is no room for self-righteousness on
either side of the Atlantic or within any of our countries.
Any real progress, therefore, must begin within ourselves.
Our values are worth defending; our unity remains a moral
as well as political necessity. If we muster that much faith
and purpose, liberty will thrive and the future will be shaped
by the free.

Thank you.

# Sadat

## A Man with a Passion for Peace

BY HENRY A. KISSINGER

Few if any world figures were as close to Anwar Sadat as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. During 21 months of shuttling between Egypt and Israel in 1974 and 1975 in his effort to bring peace to the Middle East, Kissinger met Sadat literally dozens of times, and the two men achieved a rapport that went far beyond the often forced friendliness of most diplomatic relationships. In the following piece, Kissinger movingly describes the characteristics that propelled Sadat to the center of the world's stage, and kept him there. Kissinger is currently working on the second volume of his memoirs, Years of Upheaval, which TIME will excerpt, and which will be published by Little, Brown in March 1982.

Isaiah Berlin once wrote that greatness is the ability to transform paradox into platitude.

When Anwar Sadat appeared on the scene, the Arab countries had too little confidence in their arms and too much faith in their rhetoric. The majority of them relied on the Soviet Union, which could supply them with weapons for futile wars but no programs for progress in diplomacy. Negotiations consisted of exalted slogans incapable of achievement; the Arab countries wanted the fruits of peace without daring to pronounce the word. The nations of the West stood on the sidelines, observers at a drama that affected their destiny but seemingly without the capacity to influence it.

Within a few years, Sadat managed to overcome these riddles. He went to war when no one thought it possible and, having restored Arab self-respect, he made a peace that no one had dared to imagine. He moved his people toward a partnership with the West, recognizing that a sense of shared values is a more certain spur to support than a defiance based on striking poses. He eschewed romantic posturing in favor of attainable steps. And he shaped the attainable with a fine sense for the dramatic. He understood that a heroic gesture can create a new reality.

When he died, the peace process was a commonplace; Egypt's friendship with America was a cornerstone of Mideast stability. By his journey to Jerusalem he had demonstrated to our country, obsessed with the tangible, the transcendence of nobility. In the process he had accomplished more for the Arab cause than those of his brethren whose specialty was belligerent rhetoric. He had recovered more territory, obtained more help from the West, and done more to make the Arab case reputable interna-

tionally than any of the leaders who regularly abused him at meetings of the so-called rejectionist front.

Sadat bore with fortitude the loneliness that is inseparable from moving the world from familiar categories toward where it has never been. He raised our gaze toward heretofore unimaginable horizons. And when he had transformed the paradox and solved the riddle, he was killed by the apostles of the ordinary, the fearful, the merchants of the ritualistic whom he shamed by being at once out of scale and impervious to their meanness of spirit.

Sadat was a very great man who made the difficult seem effortless. The difference between great and ordinary leaders is rarely formal intellect but insight. The

great man understands the essence of a problem; the ordinary leader grasps only the symptoms. The great man focuses on the relationship of events to each other; the ordinary leader sees only a series of seemingly disconnected events. The great man has a vision of the future that enables him to place obstacles into perspective; the ordinary leader turns pebbles in the road into boulders.

Sadat was a noble man with a passion for peace. One day I sat with him in the study of the modest sandstone house that he used in Aswan. As occasionally happened, Sadat was brooding about something or other, puffing on his pipe. One could see the dhows on the Nile, the mighty river bisecting a very narrow strip of green and flanked on both sides by the vast dunes of a seemingly endless desert. The silence was interrupted by an aide, who whispered something into Sadat's ear. Sadat rose with tears in his eyes, and I got up as well. He embraced me for the first time and said: "They have just signed the disengagement agreement. Today I

will take off my uniform. I hope never to have to wear it again." On another occasion, in a military hospital that he was inspecting, he spoke movingly to me of how much Egypt had suffered, how an end had to be put to pointless conflict, how he did not want to send any more young men to die. Egypt needed no more heroes.

But a statesman must never be viewed as starry-eyed. He must have vision and depth; he must also translate his intuition into reality against sometimes resistant material. Sadat was neither starry-eyed nor soft. He was not a pacifist. He did not believe in peace at any price. I never doubted that in the end he would create heroes if no other course he considered honorable was left to him.

Any simple assessment of Sadat is therefore likely to be mistaken. Dozens of visiting Americans were charmed by him. But he was also aloof and reflective and withdrawn. Like many men of power, he had an almost carnal relationship with authority. He could hold his own with small talk, but on deeper acquaintance it became clear that it bored him. He much preferred to spend his idle time in solitary reflection in his restless peregrinations around his beloved country.

His urbanity made it easy to forget his antecedents as a revolutionary struggling for his country's independence and suffering for it in a succession of prisons. Such men are never "regular fellows," however charmingly they present themselves. Revolutionary leadership is a career that can attract only the deeply dedicated. Aloof, pensive, calculating, he took a long view, but he would also insist on achieving it.

Sadat had an uncanny discernment. He handled four American Presidents with consummate psychological skill. He treated Nixon as a great statesman, Ford as a living manifestation of good will, Carter as a missionary almost too decent for this world and Reagan as the benevolent leader of a popular revolution, subtly appealing to each man's conception of himself and gaining the confidence of each. He worked at identifying America's interest with his own.

Sadat analyzed correctly that Arab radicalism tended to reinforce America's special relationship with Israel. This offered America no alternative: it added the argument of strategic necessity to the existing emotional ties. So Sadat set out on a course that would have been considered mad until he proved it possible: to woo the U.S. into a more "evenhanded" posture, to create an emotional bond that would produce an incentive for American assistance in recovering lands the Arabs considered theirs. In this sense the 1977 journey to Jerusalem was at one and the same time an act of nobility and a method of disarming Israel psychologically: a unique gesture of rec-

SAHM DOHERTY

Chatting at Sadat's home in Mit Abu el Kom last year

A rapport far beyond diplomacy's forced friendliness.

© 1981 by Henry A. Kissinger

TIME, OCTOBER 19, 1981

conciliation and a device to isolate the Jewish state.

This explains Israel's ambivalence toward Sadat. The Israelis, who for decades had been the objects of their neighbors' unremitting hostility, greeted Sadat's overtures at first with incredulity, later with hope, even exaltation. But there was also the gnawing fear that his seduction of the U.S. would ultimately leave Israel alone and friendless in a hostile world. Therefore Israel was torn between embracing Sadat's overture and haggling over its terms, between its own hopes and nightmares. And the last page has not yet been written in a history in which both Israel's hopes and its nightmares could indeed come true.

Sadat was more than the sum of his parts. By one of the miracles of creation, the peasant's son, the originally underestimated politician, had the wisdom and courage of the statesman and occasionally the insight of the prophet. He defied his enemies: when abused by them he moved further in the direction he had chosen, to drive home the point that they were powerless to stop him. He transformed our world by an act of will, shaping history according to his own vision, daring to do what all thought impossible.

And there was always the pervasive humanity. When I visited Egypt recently, he invited my wife, my son and me to dinner at his villa by the sea in Alexandria. The table had been set at the exact spot on the lawn where he had negotiated and signed the second disengagement agreement. During the course of the evening, I said that all Americans who had worked with Sadat owed him a great debt; he had made all of us look good. The remark disturbed Sadat; he kept coming back to it. He did not want his labors to be considered personal; it was his duty, not his preference, to restore dignity to his people and give hope to his country and perhaps the world.

I do not want to pursue the argument with my fallen friend. But for once he was wrong. He did make us look good. Only he made it seem too easy, too natural, so that we took him too much for granted. And now that he is no longer with us and we have to journey toward peace alone, it is clear how much we needed him. Whether we will get there falteringly or with a steady stride depends on us. But none who know history will ever forget that we would not be on the journey at all had it not been for Anwar Sadat.

No other people have been so obsessed with immortality as the Egyptians: none have sought to capture time so persistently —at times with defiant boldness, at times passively; now relying on endurance rather than the grand assault, now raising tremendous edifices to faith in the future. In his own way Sadat has moved toward the age-old Egyptian dream of immortality; peace will be his pyramid.

It has been an honor to be one of his contemporaries. ■

TIME, OCTOBER 19, 1981

PREFACE

THE CENTER is pleased to reprint in its *Significant Issues Series*, the full prepared text of the testimony presented by Dr. Henry A. Kissinger to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee July 31, 1979 on SALT II.

CSIS has undertaken reproduction and distribution of this text because of the widespread comment the testimony provoked among members of the Committee, the public, and the media. Dr. Kissinger's oral testimony was only a partial presentation of this comprehensive document. We are therefore happy to make available the full text under Center auspices because it reflects a very important part of Dr. Kissinger's thinking from which we at the Center have benefited in the course of his tenure as our Resident Counselor. This document is also intended to meet the demands of the many scholars and specialists who follow arms control and strategic balance issues both here and abroad.

Robert G. Neumann
Editor, Significant Issues Series

TABLE OF CONTENTS

<table><tr><td>Preface</td><td>iii</td></tr><tr><td>The Problem of Security</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>The Shifting Strategic Balance</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>SALT in the Context of American Strategy</td><td>11</td></tr><tr><td>The Vienna Treaty: How Does it Affect the Strategic Balance?</td><td>17</td></tr><tr><td>The Geopolitical Problem</td><td>23</td></tr><tr><td>A. The Soviet Union</td><td>23</td></tr><tr><td>B. The Concern of Allies</td><td>27</td></tr><tr><td>Recommendations</td><td>29</td></tr><tr><td>A. To Redress the Military Balance</td><td>31</td></tr><tr><td>B. Clarifying the Treaty and Protocol</td><td>32</td></tr><tr><td>C. To Address the Geopolitical Problem</td><td>33</td></tr><tr><td>Conclusion</td><td>34</td></tr></table>

The Problem of Security

In his essay *Perpetual Peace* the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that world peace would come about in one of two ways: after a cycle of wars of ever increasing violence, or by an act of moral insight in which the nations of the world renounced the bitter competition bound to lead to self-destruction.

Our age faces precisely that choice. For the first time in history two nations have the capacity to inflict on each other and on mankind a level of destruction tantamount to ending civilized life; yet they have also before them unprecedented possibilities of cooperation to harness the wonders of technology to improve the human condition.

Both mankind's hopes and fears are bound up with the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. These two countries possess huge nuclear arsenals; they also espouse sharply opposing concepts of justice and hold conflicting visions of the future. The ideology of Soviet leaders does not make them content to practice their preferred social system at home; they strive for its victory worldwide. Hence the Soviet Union and America clash in areas that each considers vital. We have allies whose interests we will not sacrifice. Soviet allies such as Vietnam and Cuba are quite capable of generating crises of their own, all too frequently encouraged by Moscow to do so.

The peace we seek therefore must rest on something more tangible than a hope or a fear of holocaust. It must also reflect a military and geopolitical equilibrium. The notion of balance of power has always been unfashionable in America. But it is the precondition of security, and even of progress. If the mere avoidance of conflict becomes our overriding objective, and if our own military power is disparaged, the international system will be at the mercy of the most ruthless. If the desire to conciliate becomes the sole operational basis of policy, we run the risk that the threat of war will become a weapon of blackmail; our allies and our moral values will both be permanently in danger. The desire for peace will be transformed into a caricature of itself, and become instead the beginning of appeasement. How to strive for both peace and our moral principles; how to avoid nuclear

1

war without succumbing to nuclear blackmail—this is the overwhelming problem of our period.

The United States must proceed simultaneously on three fronts:

First, we must maintain a military balance that does not tempt aggression against our friends or allies, against our vital interests, or in the extreme case against ourselves.

Secondly, beyond resisting naked aggression, we have a stake in the principle that political or economic pressure, or military or terrorist blackmail, not become the arbiter of the world's political disputes. The geopolitical equilibrium must be maintained lest radical forces hostile to the West gain such momentum that they appear as the irresistible wave of the future.

And thirdly, on the basis of a balance thus achieved and preserved, we must be ready to explore routes to genuine peaceful coexistence. The great powers, having learned that they cannot dominate each other, must practice moderation and ultimately cooperation. The creativity of a world of diversity and peaceful competition can be the basis of unparalleled human progress. A stable balance is the most hopeful—perhaps the only—basis for the control and ultimately the reduction of weapons of mass destruction.

Too often these requirements are posed in the alternative. But the quest for security and for peace are inseparable; we cannot achieve one without the other. No democracy can court conflict. Our government will have support in resisting challenges to our vital interests only if confrontation is seen to have been unavoidable. Our people have a right to expect of their government that it will explore all avenues to a genuine peace. And our allies will insist on it.

The new Treaty poses a particularly complex problem for me. When I was a professor, I participated in the academic discussions of military doctrine and strategy that underlay early initiatives in arms control. I helped design the first SALT agreements in 1972. I was involved in the negotiations of the Vladivostok accord of 1974 which marked the first breakthrough of SALT II; I played a major role in the negotiations which came close to completing an agreement in January 1976. I have a long-standing personal commitment to the process of limiting strategic nuclear arms. As an his-

2

torian I am conscious of the lessons of World War II when a
global war resulted because the democracies disdained to
maintain the balance of power. But equally we must not
forget the tragedy of World War I: when disaster resulted
even with an equilibrium of power, when technology and
rivalry outran the control of statesmen.

Thus SALT cannot be considered in isolation. It is one
element in our overall national security policy. It must be
viewed in the context of the global balance that it reflects,
or purports to affect.

Thus I regret to have to say that the present Treaty comes
up for ratification at a time of grave danger to our national
security and to the global equilibrium. The military balance
is beginning to tilt ominously against the United States in
too many significant categories of weaponry. The unprece-
dented Soviet use of proxy forces in Africa, the Middle East,
and Southeast Asia, and the turmoil caused by radical forces
and terrorist organizations sponsored by Moscow's friends,
mark ours as a time of profound upheaval. We have learned
painfully that we alone cannot be the world's policeman. But
neither our moral values nor our safety can tolerate the
Soviet Union's increasing tendency toward global interven-
tion. As the United States nurses its wounds after Vietnam,
radical forces are threatening regional stability and attempt-
ing the violent overthrow of moderate governments friendly
to the West. If present trends continue, we face the chilling
prospect of a world sliding gradually out of control, with our
relative military power declining, with our economic lifeline
vulnerable to blackmail, with hostile forces growing more
rapidly than our ability to deal with them, and with fewer
and fewer nations friendly to us surviving.

In addressing the Treaty before you, I respectfully submit,
the Senate has a responsibility to examine the broader con-
dition of our national security. The Senate has an opportu-
nity at least to begin to reverse the unfavorable trends in
the military balance and to put the Soviet Union on notice
that we consider the constant probing of every regional equi-
librium and the encouragement of subversive and terrorist
groups as incompatible with any definition of coexistence.
Without such an affirmation, SALT will become a soporific,

3

a form of escapism. I shall submit specific proposals to
achieve this, later in the statement.

The Shifting Strategic Balance

The basic technical facts about the current military bal-
ance have been presented in great detail before this and
other committees. Let me concentrate first on the serious
transformation, adverse to our interests, that has taken place
in the overall strategic balance during the last decade and
a half.

For about the first twenty-five years of the postwar period, the problem of maintaining the military equilibrium was relatively straightforward. The Soviet Union was always superior in ground forces on the Eurasian continent; we were vastly ahead in strategic striking power as well as in theater nuclear forces. The reach of the Soviet Union was limited to regions accessible to motorized ground transport, generally adjacent territories in Europe and to some extent China. Africa, most of the Middle East, even Southeast Asia were beyond the capacity of major Soviet military intervention. And the areas which were hostage to Soviet ground armies were protected by three factors:

-First, by the American preponderance in strategic nuclear striking power capable of disarming the Soviet Union or at least reducing its counterblow to tolerable levels while still retaining large residual forces for attacks on industrial targets;

-Second, by a vast American superiority in so-called theater nuclear forces everywhere around the Soviet periphery.

And thirdly, in Europe by substantial American and
allied ground forces that posed at least a major proba-
bility that Soviet ground attack would trigger the nu-
clear retaliation of the United States.

Not surprisingly, the major crises in the first twenty years
of the postwar period—whether in Berlin, Korea, or Cuba—
were ultimately contained, because the risks of pushing them
beyond a certain point always appeared exorbitant to Mos-
cow.

4

This state of affairs will soon have ceased to exist. Starting in the 1960's, the military balance began to change—almost imperceptibly at first, so great was our superiority—but with growing momentum in recent years. It is imperative that we recognize without illusion the dangerous trends that are emerging. It is crucial that we begin now to rectify them.

The growth of Soviet strategic nuclear forces has been inexorable for a decade and a half. In 1965 the Soviet strategic arsenal comprised about 220 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) and 100 Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs). By 1968 the number had grown to 860 ICBMs and over 120 SLBMs. We had stopped our build-up at 1054 ICBMs and 656 SLBMs in 1967. By mid-1970 the Soviets had caught up with us in numbers of launchers. Our intelligence estimates of their plans invariably turned out to be too low; contrary to popular mythology the Soviets *did* build on the scale of the "worst case" hypothesis of our intelligence community and not to the level that was defined as "most probable."¹ Instead of stopping when they reached parity with us, as the Johnson Administration expected, the Soviets *continued* their missile build-up—until they were frozen at the levels of the ceilings established by the first SALT agreement in May 1972. Then they switched energetically to qualitative improvements in their missile forces.

Our problem derives not only from the larger number of warheads on Soviet ICBMs but above all from the difference in the types of weaponry emphasized by the two sides. In the Sixties, the United States unilaterally decided to base its strategic forces on light by highly accurate ICBMs, the less vulnerable but also less accurate SLBMs, and the more versatile but more vulnerable manned bombers. The Soviets made the opposite decision, relying on large land-based missiles capable of delivering a far heavier payload. At first the crudeness of their technology and the lack of accuracy deprived these weapons of effectiveness against military targets. But as Soviet technology improved, its advantage in

¹ See Albert Wohlstetter, "Is There a Strategic Arms Race?" *Foreign Policy*, no. 15 (Summer 1974), pp. 3-20; "Rivals, But No 'Race,'" *Foreign Policy*, no. 16 (Fall 1974), pp. 48-81.

5

numbers and missile payload was bound to tell. For the land-based ICBM is always likely to be the most accurate and powerful strategic weapon, and the one most capable of rapid attack against the military targets of the other side. In short the Soviets have emphasized quick reaction forces by modernizing their ICBMs; we concentrated on slow-reacting forces like air-launched cruise missiles. Thus the asymmetry in the capacity of the two sides to destroy each other's military targets has grown with every passing year.

There is now general agreement that their improvements in missile accuracy and warhead technology will put the Soviets in a position to wipe out our land-based forces of Minuteman ICBMs by 1982. Whether this capability is ever exercised or not—and I consider it improbable—it reverses and hence revolutionizes the strategic equation on which our security and that of our friends have depended through most of the postwar period.

The revolution in the strategic balance is aggravated by a comparable build-up of Soviet aircraft and missiles that threatens to overturn the American advantage in theater-based nuclear forces. The Soviet Union has deployed scores of new missiles of 2000-mile range—the SS-20—which carries a MIRVed warhead of three reentry vehicles. Several hundred supersonic Backfire bombers will threaten all peripheral areas in the Eighties (leaving aside for the moment their utility for intercontinental missions). A Soviet superiority in theater striking forces is therefore upon us. The inequality is demonstrated by the fact that we have had to assign part of our strategic forces—a number of Poseidon boats—to cover targets threatening NATO. Thus in case of war we are likely to be strained either with respect to our strategic or with respect to our theater nuclear coverage.

All this has been accomplished while the Soviet advantage in conventional forces has grown, and while the reach of Soviet power has been extended enormously by the rapid development of the Soviet Navy, an expanding long-range airlift capability, the acquisition of Soviet bases in countries like South Yemen and Vietnam, and the establishment of vast Soviet arms depots in such countries as Libya and Ethiopia, which will enable the Soviet Union to move its own or proxy troops rapidly to their prepositioned weapons. At the

6

same time our Navy declines and our access to overseas bases shrinks.

Rarely in history has a nation so passively accepted such a radical change in the military balance. If we are to remedy it, we must first recognize the fact that we have placed ourselves at a significant disadvantage voluntarily. This is *not* the result of SALT: it is the consequence of unilateral decisions extending over a decade and a half: by a strategic doctrine adopted in the Sixties, by the bitter domestic divisions growing out of the war in Vietnam, and by choices of the present Administration. All these actions were unilateral, hence avoidable. They were not extracted from us by clever Soviet negotiators; we imposed them on ourselves by our choices, theories, and domestic turmoil. It is therefore in our power to alter them.

The prevailing American strategic doctrine of the Sixties went under the modest name of "assured destruction." According to it, deterrence was guaranteed so long as we possessed the ability to destroy a predetermined percentage of Soviet population and industrial capacity. Strategy thereby turned into an engineering problem, an economic analysis essentially independent of the size of the opposing forces. So long as enough of our weapons survived to wreak the theoretically calculated havoc, deterrence would be maintained; our military effectiveness was essentially independent of the threat we faced; the vulnerability of part of our forces—such as our ICBMs—was irrelevant so long as enough warheads would remain to inflict an "unacceptable" amount of damage on the Soviet Union.

This doctrine not only took for granted continued Soviet inferiority in technology; it also ignored the psychological inhibitions in the way of implementing such a strategy. The targeting scenarios developed from this doctrine left a President with no other options in a crisis but the mass extermination of civilians, or capitulation. This strategy was morally questionable even in an era when we had superiority. In an age of strategic equality it would be a formula for mutual suicide.

The emergence of a new strategic nuclear environment should have forced a reconsideration of this targeting doctrine and a renewed attention to regional nuclear and con-

7

ventional balances. Unfortunately, at the precise moment
that such a reexamination became urgently necessary, all
our defense programs came under systematic attack as a
byproduct of the bitter domestic debate over Vietnam. On
the one hand, the Vietnam war reduced funds available for
modernization of our military forces; even more important,
the wholesale assault on defense spending and programs
jeopardized even those major projects for which funds were
available and budgeted. New weapons were decried as ex-
cessive, as symptoms of a military psychosis, as wasteful and
dangerous. "Reordering national priorities" was the slogan
of the day; it was the euphemism for cutting the defense
budget. The ABM passed by only one vote and was then
emasculated in the appropriations process; the C-5A trans-
port aircraft which later saved an ally in the 1973 Middle
East war was challenged repeatedly on budgetary grounds;
MIRV's, the only strategic system available to us to offset
the Soviet numerical superiority in the 1970's, were under
constant attack. In the realm of strategic doctrine, paradox-
ically it was those most alarmed at the arms race who clung
to the most bloodthirsty targeting strategies, in the hope
that these would obviate the need to strengthen or increase
our strategic forces.

In this atmosphere, maintaining even the strategic forces
inherited from the Sixties absorbed the energies of the Ad-
ministrations up to the end of the Vietnam war; obtaining
funds for new programs was enormously difficult. The best
that could be accomplished in the early 1970's was to alter
the older strategic doctrine and shift targeting from civilian
to military objectives. (Paradoxically, however, the decline
of our *capability* for a counterforce strategy turned even the
more sophisticated targeting into a high-risk tit-for-tat op-
tion with no logical stopping place.)

After the end of our involvement in Vietnam, new strategic
programs could at last be funded: the B-1 manned strategic
bomber, to become operational in 1978; the MX ICBM, to
become operational in 1983; the Trident submarine and mis-
sile, expected to become operational in 1979; various kinds
of cruise missiles for the 1980's—all of which would give the
United States greater options and some of which would bring
about a new counterforce capability.

8

Every one of these programs has been cancelled, delayed, or stretched out by the current Administration, so that we are at a point where only the Trident (with only the most limited counterforce capability) can be operational during the period of the projected SALT Treaty. In addition, even the Minuteman production line was closed down, leaving us without an emergency hedge for rapid build-up in unexpected contingencies. We now face the challenge of the early Eighties with forces designed in the Sixties. We have been able to develop new programs in only four years out of the last fifteen, and most of them have been held in abeyance since 1977.

Furthermore, a remedy will be more difficult if the Administration intends to return to the pure "assured destruction" strategic doctrine. In his State of the Union address last January 23, President Carter proclaimed that "just one of our relatively invulnerable Poseidon submarines ... carries enough warheads to destroy every large and medium-sized city in the Soviet Union."

But this truism demonstrates rather than solves our strategic dilemma. Even under SALT conditions we will have in the early Eighties at best equality in the capacity of our strategic forces to inflict civilian damage, and a clear inferiority in the ability to attack and destroy the land-based missiles of the other side. Our Minuteman missiles do not carry sufficient warheads or possess adequate throwweight for a disarming attack against Soviet ICBMs; our present strategic forces can put at risk less than one-half of Soviet ICBMs. All of our ICBMs will in the Eighties be vulnerable to an attack by the greater numbers of missiles and warheads, and improving accuracy, of Soviet land-based missiles.

Since our modern military doctrine and strategy have depended much more on strategic forces than those of the Soviets, even overall equality revolutionizes the postwar security and geopolitical structure. But in fact the situation is worse. My principal worry is not only the growing vulnerability of our land-based forces—though this must be remedied—but the growing *in*vulnerability of Soviet land-based forces. The deterrent effect of our strategic forces in defense of allies will continually decline; our strategic forces will

9

surely lose their ability to offset the Soviet capacity for regional intervention. And this capacity will be reinforced by the growing edge in Soviet theater nuclear forces, a naval and airlift capability which immeasurably extends the reach and preponderance of Soviet conventional power.

I want to reiterate that it is not necessary for present purposes to debate whether the Soviet Union would in fact run a risk of war on the global level; it will be grave enough if the Soviet willingness to run risks in regional conflicts is magnified. And that seems to me the minimum consequence of what is ahead. The side that can defend its interests only by threatening to initiate the mutual mass extermination of civilians will gradually slide towards strategic, and therefore eventually geopolitical, paralysis. The consequence, to put it bluntly, is that in the 1980's regional conflicts—whether deliberately promoted or not—threaten increasingly to grow out of control unless we drastically reverse the trend. We cannot possibly continue to gamble with inferior forces for regional defense, a shifting balance in theater nuclear forces, vulnerable land-based strategic forces, and invulnerable Soviet ICBMs without courting the gravest dangers. The decline in relative power *must* be dramatically reversed.

Even more important is a strategic doctrine which answers the following questions:

(1) How in the Eighties will we safeguard our national security when we face adverse trends in every significant military category?

(2) How will we fulfill our commitments to our allies in the absence of a significant counterforce capability, when strategic parity is at best tenuous and the theater nuclear balance is turning against us?

(3) How will we protect our vital interests in areas such as the Middle East with our present conventional forces, airlift, and declining naval capability?

(4) How will we prevent global blackmail?

Our safety and that of all of those who depend on us depends on the response. Every day we delay in dealing with the issue magnifies our peril.

10

The Senate therefore cannot deal with the SALT Treaty in a vacuum; it must simultaneously seek to restore the military and geopolitical balance. No responsible leader can want to face the 1980's with the present military prospects. This, and not SALT in isolation, is the principal problem facing us.

## SALT in the Context of American Strategy

The idea of arms control developed in the late Fifties and early Sixties. The underlying rationale derived from the in-disputable fact that thermonuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles have added a new dimension of peril to the historical problem of military rivalry. In the past it could be argued that weapons were a symptom rather than a cause of tension. Indeed it is difficult to find an historical example for the cliché that arms races cause wars. (What caused World War I was mobilization schedules, not the rate of increase of armaments.) But today, indeed, the nuclear age combined weapons of unprecedented destructive power, extremely rapid modes of delivery of intercontinental range, and high vulnerability to a surprise attack.

In these new and unprecedented circumstances, the conclusion seemed inescapable that the side whose capacity for retaliation was vulnerable must react in crises in ways which would heighten the likelihood of cataclysm; a country whose strategic forces were not secure could be driven, even against its will, to strike first rather than await the opponent's attack which it would know it could not survive. In the late Fifties, one of the most brilliant students of deterrence, Albert Wohlstetter, correctly perceived that what Churchill called the "balance of terror" was perilously delicate. Arms control sought to circumscribe and if possible eliminate this danger by measures that would enhance each side's "second-strike capability," that is, its secure capacity to retaliate, thereby reducing the incentive and capacity for surprise attack.

This analysis was essentially correct. At the same time this novel military doctrine—according to which an adversary's invulnerability was thought to add to stability—was combined with "assured destruction" reasoning to produce a kind of "minimum deterrence" theory by which we allegedly

11

had no need to consider the threat posed by the level of Soviet forces. Even theorists of arms control who valued maintaining the strategic balance only dimly perceived that the strategic stability they sought implied a strategic revolution. For if attained, it would greatly magnify the danger at levels of violence below that of general nuclear exchange. If crises no longer produced fear of escalation to all-out war, they would also grow more likely. Thus even strategic stability (not to speak of a Soviet edge) would require new major military efforts by us on the regional level or else major political weakness would result. Above all it was erroneously assumed the Soviets held a similar view. In fact, there was no evidence that Soviet strategic planners—almost all military men—subscribed to the academic subtleties of American strategic theory. As Secretary Harold Brown has said, our unilateral restraint does not seem to be reciprocated by the Soviets: "We have found that when we build weapons, they build; when we stop, they nevertheless continue to build. . . ."²

As one of the architects of SALT, I am conscience-bound to point out that—against all previous hopes—the SALT process does not seem to have slowed down Soviet strategic competition, and in some sense may have accelerated it. The Soviets worked hard and successfully to enhance the first-strike capabilities of their land-based ICBMs despite our restraint and within the framework of SALT. The Administration of the early 1970's of which I was a member sought to use SALT to demonstrate their commitment to easing tensions and thereby restore a public consensus behind a strong national defense; to some extent we succeeded. But we will not draw the appropriate conclusion if we do not also admit that SALT may have had a perverse effect on the willingness of some in the Congress, key opinion makers, and even Administration officials to face fully the relentless Soviet military build-up.

New weapons systems have long had to overcome the traditional objection of advocates of "minimum deterrence" that they were unnecessary (because we already possessed an

² Statement of Secretary Brown before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, July 9, 1979.

"overkill" capability); they were now also attacked by arms control experts as endangering the prospects of SALT. Indeed, many new programs could be put through Congress less on their merits than as a "bargaining chip"; they were needed, various Administrations argued, so that they could be traded in a negotiation. Whatever the tactical utility of this argument, it tended to reduce the energy with which such programs were pursued. The Pentagon found it difficult to muster enthusiasm—or scarce resources—for programs which were ephemeral by definition. After a while the Soviet Union began to play the game deliberately: from ABM to cruise missiles it systematically sought to use SALT to inhibit our military and technological development; it tried to fuel our domestic debate, adding its own propaganda pressures to domestic pressures against new weapons systems.

The theory that new American weapons weakened the prospects of arms control thrived despite all evidence to the contrary. In 1967, before we had an ABM program, when President Johnson suggested to Soviet Premier Kosygin at Glassboro that both sides renounce ABMs, Kosygin contemptuously dismissed the idea as one of the most ridiculous he had ever heard. By 1970, after the Nixon Administration had narrowly won its Congressional battle for funding of an ABM, Soviet SALT negotiators refused to discuss any subject except ABM, and it required the most strenuous negotiating efforts to maintain the crucial linkage between offensive and defensive limitations. Conversely, neither the abandonment of the B-1 by the current Administration, nor its stretch-out of the MX missile, nor the slowdown in the Trident program, speeded up SALT negotiations or improved the terms.

The SALT negotiations have always proceeded against the background of the strategic balance as it existed, and must be considered in this context.

The negotiations for SALT I grew out of the ABM debate of the 1960s: whether the US should follow the Soviet lead and build a defense against ballistic missiles, or try to head off such a new competition by negotiating some limits with the USSR. After considerable Soviet stalling, to see whether Congress might kill the ABM without any need for Soviet reciprocity, the SALT negotiations began in November 1969. Almost from the outset it was apparent that the *only* system

13

the Soviets were eager to limit by negotiation was the *sole* system we were building—the ABM. In the 1972 ABM treaty both sides agreed in effect to leave themselves indefinitely vulnerable to missile attacks; ABMs were restricted to a token deployment at one site (which we then unilaterally abandoned for budgetary reasons). In effect we traded our superior ABM technology for a halt to the numerical build-up of Soviet offensive forces.

To restore equality in this critical area—strategic offensive forces—proved to be enormously difficult, largely due to the unilateral decisions of the Sixties that stopped both our ICBM and SLBM programs by 1967. As I have said, in pure numbers of offensive missiles the Soviets passed the United States in 1970; in this category we had no bargaining chips. Our only active program was adding multiple warheads (MIRVs) to our land- and sea-based missiles. The Soviet numerical building program was so considerable, and Congressional opposition to comparable American programs was so unrelenting, that it was the Defense Department which in July 1970 and then again in January 1972 urged a five-year mutual freeze on offensive weapons, primarily to arrest the momentum of the Soviet build-up and to give us an opportunity to catch up.

The first SALT agreement on offensive weapons was thus a photograph of the existing balance, not an alteration of it: it froze the numbers of American and Soviet land- and sea-based missiles for five years. The numerical balance was favorable to the USSR in the same proportion that the previous decade of unrestricted arms competition had produced. Because of our MIRV program, the United States retained a substantial advantage in numbers of warheads for the lifetime of the Interim Agreement and beyond. The criticism later heard, that SALT I "gave" the Soviets unequal numbers, missed the central point: what had produced the Soviet numerical edge was not SALT I but the unilateral American decisions of the Sixties to stop our strategic building programs, and then the Congressional and public attacks on the defense budget growing out of the Vietnam war. The 1972 SALT agreement curtailed no American offensive program; it did halt the numerical growth of the Soviet strategic forces. It gave us an opportunity to catch up—which we

14

sought to do by pushing the development of the B-1 slated
to be operational in 1978, the Trident submarine and missile
planned for 1979, the MX missile for 1983, and a variety of
cruise missiles for the early Eighties.

But the simple Interim Agreement of SALT I could not
deal with—nor did it pretend to address—the rapid evolution
of technology. Modernization of existing weapons was al-
lowed, and both sides proceeded apace with new programs.
The US funded its MIRV program, and the Soviets developed
a new generation of ICBMs; in doing so they pushed to its
outer limit the SALT I provision restricting conversion of
“light” to “heavy” missiles. It was these larger missiles (the
SS-17, 18 and 19), soon equipped with MIRVs, and with the
potential of greatly improved accuracy, that were bound to
give the Soviets for the first time in history a capacity to
launch a first strike against our land-based missiles.

These trends, which would eventually put our force of
ICBMs into jeopardy, led us first to undertake a complex but
eventually fruitless negotiation to set a low, long-term ceil-
ing on Soviet missile capabilities both in numbers and in
quality. For a time these negotiations seemed promising; but
they fell victim to the collapse of executive authority result-
ing from Watergate. In the wake of President Nixon's res-
ignation, it seemed prudent to pick up the thread of a simpler
agreement that at least consolidated numerical equality, and
then to move as quickly as possible in SALT III into the
more intricate discussion of the qualitative factors (missile
accuracy, throwweight, number of warheads, testing limits
and so forth). Thus, in November 1974 in Vladivostok, Pres-
ident Ford pressed for an agreement based on equal aggre-
gate ceilings, and the Soviet Union accepted our proposal.
A framework accord was reached specifying strict equality
of 2400 missiles and strategic bombers for each side, and an
equal limit of 1320 missiles with MIRVs, in an agreement
to run through 1985.

The Ford Administration had first hoped that a treaty
implementing the Vladivostok accord could be completed in
1975. But two new issues intervened to slow down the talks:
first was the Soviet insistence that cruise missiles be entirely
banned if they had a range of more than 600 kilometers (350
miles); second was the US counterdemand that the Soviet

15

aircraft called the "Backfire" be counted as a "heavy" bomber and thus be included in the SALT totals. Inevitably the two systems became linked in the talks. Throughout 1975 and into early 1976, the US and the USSR made proposals to resolve the dispute. Basically, the Ford Administration was prepared to limit the range and number of some cruise missiles provided the Soviets would reciprocate by limiting the Backfire bomber in some comparable manner. In January 1976, we were close to a compromise along these lines which also would have lowered the Vladivostok ceilings of 2400 to "below 2300."

Two events prevented the completion of the negotiations. First, the introduction of 25,000 Cuban proxy troops in Angola raised serious doubts about Soviet motives and fueled a whole new debate in this country about US-Soviet relations. And the imminent American Presidential election convinced President Ford that it would be best to keep SALT from turning into a partisan issue and so to wait to conclude an agreement after the election.

The advent of a new Administration brought with it the obligatory new approach. The first proposal to Moscow in March 1977 abandoned the negotiations as they then stood. An entirely new proposal was submitted, immediately rejected, and quickly withdrawn. The parties returned to earlier proposals, and over two more years were spent refining the agreement. Meanwhile the presuppositions of that agreement were daily challenged by technological change, the pace of the Soviet build-up, and the unilateral abandonment or stretching out of major American weapons systems, all of which further tilted the strategic balance dangerously against us.

Three conclusions emerge: The imbalances we now face, and which concern so many, stem in essence from unilateral American decisions rather than from the SALT negotiating process. This is important when we consider the provisions of the SALT Treaty. No negotiation can achieve through diplomacy that for which we have been unwilling to make unilateral efforts.

Second, SALT by itself cannot bring about parity; it can only ratify trends which exist. SALT cannot be a substitute for defense programs. If we fall behind by our own actions,

16

SALT runs the risk of perpetuating an inequality. But whether that comes about is up to us; and to avoid it must be a principal concern of the Senate.

Third, SALT III cannot simply be an extension of the previous process. It must be explicitly related to our long-term strategic program. Its principles must be clearly worked out between the Administration and the Congress and settled with our allies *before* we launch ourselves into it.

## The Vienna Treaty: How Does It Affect the Strategic Balance?

We must now ask, how does the SALT II agreement affect the strategic balance? The agreement is composed of three documents:

- The Treaty itself, running until the end of 1985, would limit the total numbers of ICBM and SLBM launchers (though the term is not defined); heavy bombers; MIRVed missiles; and land-based MIRVed missiles. It also defines counting rules for MIRVed missiles and for heavy bombers equipped with air-launched cruise missiles.

- Second is a Protocol that restricts cruise missiles other than on heavy bombers to a range of 600 kilometers (or 350 miles) and bans the testing and deployment of mobile ICBMs. The Protocol is supposed to expire on December 31, 1981.

- Third is a set of principles to guide the negotiations for SALT III.

Any fair-minded analysis must recognize the beneficial aspects of the SALT II agreements. The overall ceiling of 2250 will force the Soviets to get rid of 250 strategic systems, including some modern ones, while giving us the right to equalize the numbers. The permitted number of land-based Soviet MIRVs (820) is some 100 below the maximum number that they probably intended to build in the absence of SALT. There are some restrictions on missile testing procedures. There are limits on numbers of missile warheads on ICBMs and a prohibition on more than one "new" ICBM. There is for the first time an agreed baseline of information of the

17

Soviet forces. The counting rules are a useful way of dealing with the MIRV problem.

Regrettably none of these very real achievements affects the grave strategic situation which I have described and which must urgently be reversed. The Treaty does not reduce the Soviet first-strike capability against our land-based forces, or improve our ability to survive a first strike. It does not diminish the Soviet residual capability to destroy civilian targets in the United States. And it does not enhance-indeed it may slightly inhibit-the possibility for the United States to catch up in the capacity of our strategic forces to attack military targets.

To be sure, the Soviets will be obligated after 1981 to reduce the total number of their launchers by about 250. But the new ceiling of 2250 will not limit the Soviets' ability to destroy our ICBM force or to inflict devastating damage upon the United States. The reduction in Soviet numbers is irrelevant to our strategic problem. For the danger to our security derives from warheads, not from launchers, and the Soviet total of ICBM warheads will increase from 3200 at the time of the signing of SALT II to over 6000 even after the reduction in Soviet launchers is supposed to take place; the total number of Soviet warheads (including SLBMs) will approach 12,000 in 1985 as compared to 8,000 at the time of the SALT signing. (In fact, if the Soviets went all out they could get 8,000 MIRVed warheads in the permitted new land-based missiles.) Moreover, the total Soviet missile throwweight will increase from about 6 million pounds at the time of the signing of SALT I, to 7 million pounds at the signing of SALT II, to 9 million pounds (compared to our 2.5 million) in 1985. And improvements in Soviet accuracy will approach ours by 1982; the practical effect of this will be to reduce the number of warheads that *need* to be aimed at our ICBM silos, freeing a larger number of the ever-increasing Soviet warheads for other targets.

The agreed ceiling, of course, is some 200 above the 2060 operational systems we now possess. We thus have some considerable room for expansion of single-warhead systems. But given the cancellation of the B-1 bomber, the delay in the operational date for MX, and the slow pace of Trident production, there is almost no chance that the United States

18

can reach the permitted total of 2250 except perhaps by
keeping in service ten older Polaris submarines (with 160
missiles); this the Navy is likely to oppose because of the
heavy cost of operation and relatively short range of its mis-
siles. The result, therefore, is that in practice the overall
aggregate numbers will continue to be unequal.

The limitation of land-based MIRVed launchers to 820, which may be some 100 below the probable Soviet program, is equally welcome and similarly without significance to our fundamental problem. The Soviet Union can destroy our land-based ICBMs with about half of the land-based MIRVs permitted by the Treaty; this would leave over 300 Soviet land-based MIRVed launchers, 380 sea-based MIRVed systems, and some 500 single-warhead systems—or well over 5,000 warheads—aimed at our civilian population and industrial potential. (By contrast, if we expended our *entire* land-based force against the Soviet ICBM silos we could destroy less than half.)*

Nor is the threat to our forces and to the overall strategic
balance reduced by the provision limiting new missiles dur-
ing the time of the Treaty. The provision is drafted so as to
permit the deployment of the MX for the United States, a
comparable new missile for the Soviet Union, and the mod-
ernization of existing missiles allowing an increase in their
volume of up to five percent in each direction. Except for
setting a precedent for qualitative restraints, these limita-
tions have little operational effect on the Soviet program—
all the less so as there seems to be no definition of baselines.
The testimony of Administration witnesses seems to confirm
that no known Soviet program is affected.

In short, the Vienna Treaty will not diminish the threat
to the strategic balance. During the life of the Treaty the

* Though the permitted total of land-based MIRV's is some 300 above what we possess, we cannot expand our land-based MIRVs significantly since the Treaty also contains a subceiling of 1200 permitted MIRVed vehicles. We could thus increase the number of our land-based missiles only by reducing the number of submarine-based missiles. That sublimit will also force us to dismantle either one Poseidon boat (or 14 Minuteman III) when the seventh Trident submarine goes on sea trials, probably by 1983. If the eighth and ninth Trident were to become operational before December 1985, three more Poseidon boats or 48 Minuteman II or some combination of the two would have to be dismantled.

19

Soviets will complete their counterforce capability against our ICBMs. This will coincide exactly with our period of maximum danger. To be sure, a good case can be made for the proposition that in the absence of the Treaty the relative numbers will be even worse. But the analysis here suggests that what is allowed to the Soviets will meet all their foreseeable counterforce and residual needs.

But I must repeat: *any* SALT treaty is likely to ratify existing strategic trends. SALT negotiators cannot produce what our military programs—for whatever reason—have neglected. The Soviets will never agree to unilateral reductions. If we want equality, we must build to equality. We must reverse the strategic trends if we are serious about an equitable SALT treaty. Nothing in the Vienna Treaty diminishes the need for a substantial military build-up by the United States. In fact, the situation which SALT reflects makes such a build-up imperative.

In fairness, it must be pointed out that the same was true of the SALT II aggregates worked out in the previous Administration. There are nevertheless three essential differences: first, the rate of advance of Soviet technology which has been unexpectedly rapid (the estimate at Vladivostok was that Minuteman would not become vulnerable to a Soviet counterforce strike until after 1985); second, the unilateral abandonment or stretch-out of almost every American strategic program inherited by the Carter Administration, which makes the Soviet threat even more ominous; and third, the Soviet geopolitical offensive in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia which has gained momentum since. But to help a bipartisan solution I am willing to concede that the problem we face has origins going back at least 15 years.*

* On at least one occasion I contributed to the existing ambivalence. After an exhausting negotiation in July 1974 I gave an answer to a question at a press conference which I have come to regret: "What in the name of God is strategic superiority?" I asked. "What is the significance of it . . . at these levels of numbers? What do you do with it?" My statement reflected fatigue and exasperation, not analysis. If both sides maintain the balance, then indeed the race becomes futile and SALT has its place in strengthening stability. But if we opt out of the race unilaterally, we will probably be faced eventually with a younger group of Soviet leaders who will figure out what can be done with strategic superiority.

20

The novel—and to me the most disturbing—feature of the current Treaty is its negative impact on the theater nuclear balance. The Soviet Backfire bomber is limited to production of no more than 30 per year, through an oral agreement outside the Treaty or Protocol. There has been dispute about the utility of the Backfire in carrying out unrefueled attacks against the United States. There is no doubt of its ability to threaten all our allies as well as China and the sea approaches to Eurasia. In addition, the Soviet Union is developing a large number of SS-20 missiles each with a range of 2000 miles and three MIRV warheads. Like the Backfire, the SS-20 is convertible to intercontinental range—in the case of the Backfire by adding fuel tanks, or an aerial refueling capability; in the case of the SS-20 by adding another stage, thereby converting it into the already tested mobile SS-16. These actions are prohibited by SALT II but they are not easily verifiable, and in any event they represent a rapid break-out potential should the Treaty be broken or lapse.

The most immediately available American counter to these weapons has been cruise missiles. In the negotiations conducted by the Ford Administration, proposed restrictions on cruise missiles were made conditional on comparable restrictions on the Backfire. The concept was to limit the number of cruise missiles of more than 600-kilometer range in some relationship to limits on the Backfire. The Protocol, on the other hand, prohibits the deployment of land- and sea-based cruise missiles and of air-launched cruise missiles of more than 600-kilometer range on other than heavy bombers altogether—even when they carry conventional warheads. The same Protocol prohibits the testing and deployment of mobile ICBM launchers, even though the Soviets have already tested a mobile system (the SS-16) and we have neither tested nor developed a comparable weapon.

The provisions of the Protocol with respect to cruise missiles, especially, restrict exclusively American programs; they affect not a single Soviet program. They amount to a unilateral renunciation of an American capability. The Protocol also for the first time limits American weapons relevant primarily to the theater nuclear balance—thus affecting important interests of our allies—in return at best for restrictions relevant primarily to the United States. This is some-

21

thing we have heretofore consistently refused to do as a
matter of principle in the decade that SALT negotiations
have been taking place. It is a dangerous precedent.

Two arguments are advanced on behalf of the Protocol:
First, that it was necessary to induce the Soviet Union to go
along with limits in the overall Treaty; second, that since
the Protocol will lapse at the end of 1981 and since we will
have no cruise missiles of more than 600-kilometer range
before then, no real concession is involved. These proposi-
tions are mutually inconsistent; if the Protocol restrains
nothing we can do before the end of 1981 and will lapse, then
why are the Soviets so insistent on it?

The answer is that the Soviets know the history of mora-
toria and protocols very well; they are aware that such "pro-
visional" agreements almost never end on their expiration
date, especially if a negotiation is then taking place. At a
minimum the Protocol's terms will be the point of departure
for the next round of negotiations. The Soviets will have the
option of offering a seeming concession—for example, reduc-
ing the SALT totals to 2150 (which we know they can accept
since at one stage in the current negotiations they suggested
it), or even lower. They can conversely threaten to abandon
whatever negotiation is then taking place. Will we then
insist on pursuing the development of cruise missiles, with-
out which we have done for nearly three years? And if we
do extend the moratorium, we will then have explicitly
traded theater capabilities important to our allies in return
for marginally reducing the threat against ourselves.

This deficiency of the Protocol would not be cured by a
proposed Senate amendment or reservation stating that it
may not be extended except with the Senate's approval. Such
an amendment, to begin with, implies that the Protocol with
its existing one-sided terms might well be extended, albeit
with the Senate's consent. This will make it more difficult
to appropriate significant sums for cruise missile programs
which may at any moment be ended by an extension of the
Protocol.* Moreover, if the Protocol comes up for extension

* Apparently the Navy has virtually abandoned the development of cruise missiles aimed at land targets—a role still considered important enough in the Ford Administration to cause the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1976 to withhold their consent to an agreement which did not protect that capability.

22

independently of a broader consideration of the strategic
balance, the temptation to extend it could easily be over-
whelming.

To sum up: I have serious reservations about the Protocol.
As for the Treaty, I conclude that its terms do not improve
our strategic situation but neither do they prevent our rem-
edying it during the remaining six years of its life. Undoubt-
edly it imposes some inhibitions on us—the prohibition
against "heavy" missiles for the United States, for example,
as well as the Protocol's ban on mobile missiles through
1981. But I believe that the Senate can deal with these during
the ratification process. (The issue of heavy missiles seems
to me most relevant to the period *after* the expiration of the
Treaty since we could not build any before 1985 and since
MX should take care of immediate needs.)

The crucial question is whether we can unite behind what
is clearly necessary. Ratifying SALT—or rejecting SALT—
makes sense *only* if it prompts dedication to our national
defense and security. The Senate's judgment of the Vienna
Treaty should hinge, in my view, on what will be done to
remedy existing trends and on the international impact of
ratification or rejection.

Let me turn, therefore, to the broader political context of
this SALT II agreement.

The Geopolitical Problem

A. The Soviet Union

The awesomeness of modern weapons, and the aspirations
of all peoples for peace, impose the imperative of peaceful
coexistence. No democratic leader deserves the public trust
if he fails to make a genuine effort to reduce the dangers of
nuclear holocaust, and to free national energies for dealing
with the many urgent problems of mankind. The temptation
is overwhelming to view this common stake in peace as a
common bond between us and the Soviet Union. It should
be and someday it must be if a cataclysm is to be avoided.
But we cannot in good conscience say that current evidence
supports the proposition that the time has yet arrived.

23

For a too brief period in 1972 and 1973, our insistence on restraint in the conduct of international relations seemed to bear fruit. SALT I was accompanied by a declaration of principles signed by the United States and the Soviet Union. It affirmed the necessity of avoiding confrontation, the imperative of mutual restraint, the rejection of attempts to exploit tensions to gain unilateral advantage, the renunciation of claims to special influence in any region of the world. These principles, of course, reflected an aspiration, not a contract; they defined a yardstick by which to assess Soviet behavior. The strategy of detente was to encourage observance of these standards by a combination of positive incentives for constructive behavior and firm responses to block adventurism. The principles agreed in Moscow were a paradigm of conduct which the Soviet Union could violate only to its political cost.

Whether the Soviet Union ever intended to comply with them, or whether it was tempted into an adventurous course by the collapse of our executive authority as a result of Watergate (which deprived us of both incentives and penalties), or whether a combination of all these factors was responsible, will never be known.

Whatever the cause, the fact is that since 1975 there has been an unprecedented Soviet assault on the international equilibrium. 1975 saw the introduction of Cuban combat forces into Angola, eventually reaching 40,000, backed by Soviet financing, airlift, and policy support. By 1977 Soviet planes and pilots were flying air defense missions out of Cuba so that the Cuban airforce could operate in Africa. 1977 witnessed the spread of Cuban forces to Ethiopia. East German military and intelligence advisers have now joined the Cubans all over Africa and the Middle East. There have been two invasions of Zaire—and there may yet be a third; there have been Communist coups in Afghanistan and South Yemen and the occupation of Cambodia by Vietnam, preceded by a Soviet Friendship Treaty designed to secure Hanoi's rear during its aggression. Soviet arms depots in Libya and Ethiopia fuel insurgencies all over Africa. While the collapse of the Shah of Iran had many causes, one contributing factor surely was the demoralization of a pro-Western leadership group by the gradual and unopposed growth of Soviet power in nearby areas.

24

Nor is this all. Terrorist organizations supported by Communist funds, armed by Communist weapons, and trained by Communist instructors are becoming a systematic instrument of anti-Western policy threatening countries friendly to us on several continents. They are not, to be sure, all controlled by Moscow; but someone who has started a rockslide cannot avoid responsibility by claiming that the rock he threw was not the one that ultimately killed bystanders. These tactics, reinforced by a Soviet military build-up clearly threatening the strategic, theater, and conventional balances, are incompatible with any notion of detente or coexistence.

Some argue that SALT is necessary lest we risk a return to the Cold War. This is a curious argument. Whatever label we give to recent Soviet conduct—whether "Cold War" or opportunism—it must be ended if there are to be any prospects for East-West coexistence or cooperation. No leader serves his people by pretending that SALT is needed to perpetuate an acceptable state of affairs. It is *not* an acceptable state of affairs, and it cannot be continued.

The Vienna summit recorded no progress toward a clear understanding with the Soviet Union on the key issue of political restraint. It was not possible, of course, to settle in the space of three days all the outstanding issues of Africa, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia. Nor can the Senate responsibly delay SALT until these vexing matters are settled; they must be dealt with by intelligent and patient diplomacy and firm resistance to pressure. But it would have been important to give at least symbolic expression to what is the overwhelming political challenge of our period: the ultimate test of an improved relationship—the real turning away from the Cold War—must be restrained Soviet international conduct. The refusal of the Soviets even to discuss the subject at Vienna, the reiteration by Brezhnev of the commitment to so-called struggles of liberation, is worrisome indeed.

What is involved here is a profound issue in US-Soviet relations which is both philosophical and practical. Can peace be realized exclusively by restraint in the field of arms?

25

Or does the structure of peace require a geopolitical dimen-
sion as well? Is it possible to proceed in separate negotiations
on their merits, or must there be some relationship between
all the various interactions of two superpowers in the field
of foreign policy? In the language of recent controversies,
should there be "linkage" or not?

In my view, to seek to separate US-Soviet relations into
discrete compartments runs the risk of encouraging Soviet
leaders to believe that they can use East-West cooperation
in one area as a safety valve while striving for unilateral
advantage elsewhere. The Administration, imagining that
linkage was a personal idiosyncrasy of previous administra-
tions, decided to "abolish" it. SALT was pursued for its own
sake, unaffected by Cuban troops in Ethiopia and East Ger-
man auxiliaries in Mozambique; by Communist coups in
Afghanistan and South Yemen; or by Soviet Friendship
Treaties such as the one with Vietnam that was a prelude
to the occupation of Cambodia.

This raises several problems. First of all, it is not possible
to "abolish" the simple reality that the two superpowers
impinge on each other on a broad range of issues and areas.
Moreover, the attempt to do so produces an almost compul-
sive commitment to whatever particular subject seems sus-
ceptible to solution, such as SALT, thus permitting the So-
viets to dictate the pace of negotiations and to use it to reduce
the risks of aggressiveness. And it simultaneously overloads
the issue under negotiation. If SALT must bear the whole
weight of East-West relations, it runs the risk of turning
into escapism; it will eventually crumble under the strain.

No serious person would maintain that nothing should be
settled until all issues are settled; nor should SALT become
the hostage of every passing political tension of a world in
flux. What is needed, however, is a broad recognition that
in an inter-dependent world the actions of the major nuclear
powers are inevitably related and have consequences beyond
the issue or region immediately concerned. A demonstration
of American impotence in one part of the world erodes our
credibility and hence the stability of other regions; pressures
against our friends, encouraged by the Soviet Union or its
proxies, cannot be compensated for by other negotiations
such as SALT. If we ignore these facts we paradoxically

26

enhance the attractiveness of such adventures. It surely is
not provocative to ask the Soviet Union to accompany re-
straint in arms with restraint in political conduct. Attention
to this kind of linkage ensures that no agreement stands
alone vulnerable to the next crisis, or turns into a soporific
to lull the West while adventurism runs free.

I am inclined to agree that the failure to ratify an agree-
ment negotiated over seven years by three Administrations
would have a disruptive impact on East-West relationships,
creating a crisis atmosphere for which we may have little
public or allied support. This is undoubtedly one of the telling
arguments in favor of ratification. But the Senate will also
wish to consider that to deal with SALT in isolation runs
the risk of seriously misleading the Soviet Union. Moscow
cannot have it both ways: the slogan of detente and the
reality of the systematic undermining of the geopolitical
equilibrium. We should use the SALT debate to force a de-
cision. The Senate will want to make clear that Soviet ex-
pansionism threatens the peace and that coexistence depends
above all on restrained international conduct, for which the
Senate should define some criteria.

In the long run this is also in the Soviet interest, for current
trends will make a confrontation inevitable sooner or later.
Our country will not be defeated without noticing it and
when it does take notice, it will resist. The course of inade-
quate defense preparation, gradual reduction of military ca-
pacity, and partial accommodation to Soviet expansionism
must be reversed—on a bipartisan basis and by cooperation
between the Administration and the Congress.

B. The Concern of Allies

All our allies have expressed support for ratification of the
Vienna Treaty. But their endorsement results from a com-
plex of factors of which approval of the provisions of the
Treaty is by far the least significant. Each has been urged,
if not pressed, by the Administration to express support. In
some cases the Soviets have added their entreaties. Refusal
to comply would thus risk relations with both superpowers
over an issue that is of high technical complexity and has
been under negotiation for seven years. If the Treaty failed
as a result of their opposition, our allies might find them-

27

selves in the uncomfortable position of taking on *both* super-powers. Some governments are loath to expose themselves to domestic criticism as an "obstacle to detente"—especially over a Treaty which the United States has already declared compatible with Western security. Some allies want to keep open their own individual options for detente and increased East-West trade. Some are afraid lest their objection endanger their essential defense cooperation with the United States (even while worried about the non-circumvention clauses of the Treaty). Some sense the changing military balance but, unsure of our direction and unwilling to demand domestic sacrifice, seek to mitigate their perils by accommodation with the Soviet Union, staying one step ahead of us on the road to Moscow. All are reluctant to contribute to a further weakening of American executive authority, reasoning correctly that whatever their views on particulars their ultimate security depends on the self-assurance and credibility of the American President. There is no doubt that failure to ratify the Treaty will shake European confidence in an American government that for seven years assured them that it knew what it was doing.

At the same time, allied endorsement should be seen in the context of a pervasive ambivalence. Our allies, especially in NATO, fear an exacerbation of tensions—but they are also deeply worried about the military imbalance on the European continent which the ratification of the present strategic relationship brings to the forefront of concern. The thoughtful leaders among them know that the basis of their security is eroding as our strategic superiority ebbs—but they fear there is not enough domestic support for a really significant defense effort, especially when American attitudes on that score are so ambiguous. They do not want to be perceived as an obstacle to SALT II, but they are highly uneasy about the inevitable SALT III, in which some limitation of theater-based nuclear weapons has already been placed on the agenda.

The United States thus stands in danger of being blamed by our allies at one and the same time for risking detente and for paying inadequate attention to security, for provoking the Soviet colossus and for jeopardizing the defense of the free world. It has ever been thus in the postwar period.

28

The ultimate test of our leadership cannot be a poll of our allies, which will always reflect a mixture of incommensurable motives. The test of our leadership is American willingness to give a clearcut signal of what we understand by Western security and how we intend to maintain it. No other country or group of countries, however closely associated, can take this burden from our shoulders. None of our allies will forgive us if we fail.

## Recommendations

We thus return to our original problem. The Senate is in the anomalous position of being asked to ratify a treaty which is essentially peripheral to our basic security and geopolitical concerns but whose either simple ratification or simple rejection would have a profound and dangerous symbolic impact. Failure to ratify an agreement negotiated over seven years would compromise international confidence in our ability to perceive our own interests or to harmonize the various branches of our government. But it is equally true that if the custodian of free world security neglects its task, sooner or later panic will become inevitable. The Senate in considering ratification needs urgently to address our dangers in a comprehensive way:

- First, how the Senate can take concrete steps to begin redressing the military balance;

- Second, how to deal with the specific problems in the Treaty and Protocol; and

- Third, how the Senate can put the Soviet Union on notice that continued attempts to upset the global equilibrium will not be tolerated.

Some, whose analysis I respect, have urged amendments to the Treaty to accomplish these goals. These amendments are of two kinds. The first category would not require any renegotiation with the Soviet Union. They would either express the Senate's interpretation of the meaning of ambiguous clauses of the Treaty, or instruct our negotiator on criteria to be applied in any follow-on negotiations, or reassure uneasy allies about our intentions in applying SALT provisions, for example, on non-circumvention. The second category

29

gory of amendments would seek changes in the text. These amendments *would* require renegotiation of the Vienna agreement and they again fall into two categories: One type would alter the strategic balance during the term of the Treaty, for example, by forcing a reduction of Soviet throwweight or heavy missiles. The second type would represent a claim of equal "entitlement"—such as an American right to possess 308 heavy missiles—which cannot be exercised during the life of the Treaty and would therefore represent an assertion of principle rather than a contribution to the strategic balance.

The only amendments that would make any immediate difference are the kind which go to the heart of the problem: they would remove the Soviet counterforce capability against our ICBMs (by mandating a drastic reduction of throwweight, for example). Such amendments are almost certain to be rejected by the Soviets; they would be accepted, if at all, only after an actual build-up of our forces, which in turn might well be delayed by the very fact that renegotiations were underway. If we maintained current limits while negotiating, the result would be a continuation of the existing deterioration of the strategic balance. We might thus wind up without either SALT or a strengthened defense.

After much reflection I have concluded that I can support ratification only with the following conditions:

- First, if it is coupled with a defense program representing an obligatory understanding between the Congress and the President which overcomes on an urgent basis the grave peril posed by the current military balance.

- Second, if it is accompanied by amendments—not requiring renegotiation—clearing up ambiguities in the Treaty, defining the status of the Protocol, the meaning of non-circumvention, and setting guidelines for follow-on negotiations.

- And third, if it is accomplished by a vigorous expression of the Senate's view of the linkage between SALT and Soviet geopolitical conduct.

This approach would avoid the negative consequences of a collapse of SALT. But ratification must not become an end

30

in itself. In my view it can only be justified if the Adminis-
tration is prepared to unite our country by demonstrating
its determination to restore our military strength and the
geopolitical equilibrium. This seems to me the sense of what
Senator Nunn among others has proposed, and it points the
way to a bipartisan resolution of the issue.

With respect to the military programs, I respectfully rec-
ommend that the Senate give its advice and consent to rati-
fication of the Vienna Treaty *only* after the Administration
has submitted, and the Congress has authorized and begun
appropriating, a supplemental defense budget and a revised
five-year defense program that will begin rectifying some of
the shortcomings I have identified. The Congressional recess
provides an opportunity to prepare such a program, on which
work should already be far advanced as part of the normal
budgetary process. If the Administration is unable to put
forward such a program to this session of Congress, I rec-
ommend that the Senate delay its advice and consent until
a new military program has been submitted to and autho-
rized by the next session of Congress. I would be open-minded
about other methods to achieve this end, provided they are
unambiguous, and represent an obligatory commitment by
both branches of our government.

Assurances that the Executive Branch intends to proceed
with individual weapons systems like the MX are not
enough, either for the reality of our danger or to reverse the
political and psychological trends which will make the im-
mediate future a period of great peril. Nor have the percent-
age figures of projected increases—such as the three-percent
increase agreed with NATO—proved effective, because of
ambiguities about the baseline and how to compute rates of
inflation. I am worried that if the consideration of defense
programs takes place after SALT is ratified, the debate over
the proposed defense programs may stifle remedial actions
or delay them beyond all relevance—all the more so as the
Administration seems to have a far from settled view about
the need for a strengthened defense. Witness the cancellation
of the B-1, the nuclear carrier, and the neutron bomb; the

31

closing down of the Minuteman III production line; and the
stretch-out of the MX, Trident, and cruise missile programs.
After ratification, Soviet propaganda pressures can be ex-
pected to multiply, particularly against any MX basing sys-
tem that ensures survivability. Allied doubts about the se-
curity situation—especially with respect to theater forces—
will grow.

It is not a question of balancing the insistence of conser-
vatives for higher defense with the considerations of liberals
for a reduction in our military spending. The issue is what
our country needs for its long-term security. The President
and the Congress must choose. After fifteen years of giving
inadequate priority to defense, it is time for a serious long-
term effort to prevent a menacing imbalance against us. The
program must include accelerated development of a counter-
force capability through the MX and Trident II, air defense
against Backfire, immediate steps to restore the theater nu-
clear balance, and urgent measures to beef up our capacity
for regional defense including accelerated modernization and
expansion of our Navy. Our current five-year program is
deficient in all these categories. My support for ratification
is entirely conditional on the development of a new program
and doctrine given some binding form by the Congress.

The Joint Chiefs have testified that the rapid improve-
ments required cannot be achieved at expenditures repre-
senting less than a five percent real increase over current
programs, for at least the next five years. The burden of proof
to the contrary should rest with the Administration.

In addition to these military programs, I recommend that
the Senate add the following amendments to its advice-and-
consent resolution. *None* of them requires renegotiation with
the Soviet Union:

—First, as far as cruise missiles are concerned, that
the Protocol may *not* be extended after 1981. The Senate
should stipulate that its particular limitations can be
submitted to the Congress again *only* as part of an eq-
uitable arrangement for theater nuclear forces. Specifi-
cally, no limitations may be negotiated for American

32

theater weapons—such as cruise missiles—which are not matched by similar limitations on Soviet weapons performing comparable missions. This will bring cruise missiles into some equilibrium with the Backfire and the SS-20.

—Second, the Senate should specify that as part of SALT III, the United States be entitled to *any* weapons system permitted to the Soviets in the new agreement unless the Soviets agree to some compensation by giving up a weapons system of equivalent characteristics allowed to us. This should take care of the heavy missile inequity within the only framework—that of SALT III—which will give us a real option to produce it.

—Third, that the non-circumvention clause be interpreted by the Senate as not interrupting cooperative relationships with allies with respect to technology needed to modernize their forces. No technology available to us should be barred for transfer.

I also suggest that the Senate reexamine the SALT Agreement every two years, specifically to determine its verifiability.

### C. To Address the Geopolitical Problem

Finally, I respectfully urge the Senate to use the ratification process to put the Soviet Union on notice that this country is prepared, nay eager, for peaceful coexistence that reflects true stability and equality in arms, and also political restraint. We are ready to pursue the control and reduction of arms with dedication. But we will brook no subterfuge, nor can we continue a conciliatory policy if Moscow chooses to exploit that policy as a convenient opening to Soviet predominance. The Senate should attach to its instrument of advice and consent an expression of the following principles:

—that the absence of political restraint will seriously jeopardize continuation of the SALT process.

—that the Senate understands this to include Soviet supply or encouragement of intervention by proxy military forces; the use of Soviet forces on the territory of its allies such as Cuba to free Cuban forces to fight in

33

Africa; the support, financing, or encouragement by any member of the Warsaw Pact of groups and activities seeking to undermine governments friendly to the United States; or the exacerbation of regional conflicts.

—that the Administration be required to submit an annual report to the Senate on the degree to which the Soviet Union is living up to these criteria.

—that the Senate vote every two years its judgment whether the Soviet Union has lived up to these criteria. If the judgment is negative, the Senate should then vote whether whatever SALT negotiations are taking place should be continued.

Finally, if we thus reassess our strategic position, we must also take another look at the SALT process. Though the strategic conditions I have described result largely from unilateral American decisions, they have been reflected in the SALT process which was essentially a confirmation of them. The fact that I have participated in the process—and must share some of the responsibility—entitles me to warn against continuing it by rote. I urge that its long-term implications be carefully considered. Never in the postwar period has there been more disagreement and intellectual confusion about the requirements of strategic stability and the implications of arms control. A thorough reassessment and the fullest consultation with our allies are crucial before we launch ourselves into SALT III, which will directly affect our allies and hence may jeopardize our alliances.

## Conclusion

I recommend the approach outlined here because it gives this country an opportunity to address its dangers without abandoning an important negotiation that has already extended over seven years. And it gives us an opportunity to proceed as a united people. If the Administration rejects this approach, the Senate will have no alternative except to go the route of farther-reaching amendments, either holding the Treaty in abeyance or forcing a renegotiation. The result will almost certainly be a diplomatic stalemate until the Soviets are convinced that we are determined to restore the strategic balance; it would be an indirect—and in my view

34

less productive—route which, even if successful, would lead to the same result of a major new effort to meet our imperative security needs.

To be sure, the course I propose will make SALT II far from the turn in the arms race many of us hoped for when the negotiations were inaugurated. But too much time has been lost, too many weapons systems have been unilaterally abandoned, too many military adventures have been encouraged by the Soviet Union, the geopolitical balance has been too severely strained by Soviet pressures, for SALT to be much more than a base from which, one can hope, a new and serious effort at equitable arms reduction can be made. Concrete steps to rectify the global balance are urgently required. In this context a ratified SALT II Treaty can play a useful role as a signpost to continuing negotiations, as a beacon illuminating the path to genuine coexistence and detente, and as a means to contain current tensions. But SALT must contribute to the world's security, not insecurity.

At this moment our major obligation is to restore the confidence of all those who depend on us; to redress the military balance; to reestablish some effective link between arms control and restrained international conduct. All Americans—of either party—should share these goals.

There are deeply concerned people who want SALT but doubt the need for augmented defense. Others see in SALT an obstacle to augmented defense. Let there be serious effort to reconcile these points of view before we turn to domestic confrontation. I am prepared to do my best in this effort.

Rarely is an opportunity so clearly presented to a legislative body to determine the course of national policy in a direction vital to the future of the democracies. After the 1919 Versailles Treaty, misjudgments by the Senate *and* the Administration led to a debacle which undermined international security and doomed the world to another bloody holocaust. At this moment, the Senate and the Administration can point us in a different direction—toward a restoration of our national unity, toward the strengthening of the security of this nation and of its allies, and toward a more constructive relationship with our principal adversaries. This is America's responsibility, if we are to remain true to our trust and to the hopes of mankind.

35

HENRY A. KISSINGER

REFLECTIONS ON THE WORLD'S SITUATION

There is a remark made by Bismarck extremely difficult to translate into English: that the statesman listening attentively to the footsteps of history can at best discern the sound of the mantle of God and with luck catch a small corner of it. I believe that this is the essence of the conduct of foreign policy. The dilemma in the conduct of foreign policy is that when one's scope for action is greatest, the knowledge on which to base such action is at a minimum. And when the knowledge is greatest the scope for creative action has very often disappeared.

In 1936, one French Division could have put an end to the aggression that Hitler represented. No doubt, the world would still be debating today whether Hitler was a misunderstood nationalist or a maniac sent on world domination. Five years later, everybody knew that he was a maniac. But that knowledge had to be acquired at the cost of 20 million lives. So the statesman always has to choose between psychological or factual certainty, between waiting until events leave him no choice, or attempting to dominate events. If he chooses the latter course he will require a great deal of faith and a somewhat cohesive society because it is always possible to challenge the direction.

One of the difficulties we have had in the United States during the last decade is the result of a number of events and tragedies of domestic consensus broken down and, therefore, the self-assurance of foreign policy was bound to be diminished. But I also believe that we are now for the first time in a situation where a large area of domestic agreement exists once again, and therefore I would like to state at the

37

HENRY A. KISSINGER

beginning of my remarks that while I have kept my admiration for
the conduct of foreign policy of this Administration under very
severe restraint in the last three years and have had grave doubts
about many of the policy courses and have expressed those publicly, I
believe now that the course recently adopted by President Carter is in
the fundamental national interest of the United States and of all free
people. And whatever brought us to this point it is in everybody's
interest that this course succeeds. The United States cannot afford
another failure, nor can any other society whose survival and pro-
gress depends on our performance, and that means almost all non-
communist countries.

It is in this field that I would like to discuss some of the current
events. One hears frequently the question of whether the period in
which we live today, signals the end of détente, or whether we are
returning to the Cold War, or even whether we are at the beginning
of a series of developments that usher in perhaps even a shooting
war. With respect to the last question: the only danger of a shooting
war resides in lack of preparedness, lack of determination and lack of
foresight of the Western nations. It is therefore totally within our
control to avoid, and is in no sense inevitable, and I do not believe it
will happen.

As to the question of whether we are in a period of détente or a
period of Cold War I think it is a mistake to try to classify the rela-
tionship with the Soviet Union in slogans. After all, in the period of
the so-called Cold War, there was a great deal of ideological dispute,
but except for the Berlin crisis and the Corean War, which we invited
by drawing the defense-lines explicitly to exclude Corea, there were
no crises in the developing part of the world caused by the Soviet
Union, partly because Soviet power and reach could not yet encom-
pass these nations. And in the period of détente, of so-called détente,
we have seen a substantial expansion of Soviet military force, Soviet
proxy armies in many parts of the world, especially in Africa, and
assault on the geopolitical equilibrium.

I would therefore rather define the necessity of the relationship to
the Soviet Union in two fundamental principles. First, we must be

38

strong enough and determined enough to resist Soviet expansionism by whatever method it is pursued. At the same time, we must recognize that nuclear weapons and modern technology doom us to coexistence and that we are therefore under the obligation to explore all means of honourable adjustment of differences. We must prevent the search for peace from becoming a form of blackmail. The desire for peace cannot become a Western monopoly or we will have to yield to whoever threatens war.

But equally we must not make confrontation its own objective. In the United States it has not always been easy to reconcile both of these objectives of our foreign policy. It is easier to find advocates of one course or another, of those who identify détente with a sort of psychiatric treatment of the Soviet Union or those who identify relations with the Soviet Union simply with the acquisition of arms. But for the foreseeable future we must be able to do both. We must prevent Soviet expansion, and when the right moment comes we must be prepared to negotiate, on the basis of reciprocity, a serious pattern of co-existence.

We live in a revolutionary world, and we cannot stop the process of change. There are some factors that bring about change and are independent of Soviet policies which I will summarize briefly and then go on to East-West relationship. The structural changes are the following: There is a redistribution of power in the world. Indeed, there have been two redistributions of power since the end of World War II: first the loss of European preeminence and the emergence of a bipolar world in 1945 between the United States and the Soviet Union and in the recent decade the development of a multipolar world with several centres of power in which Europe has regained some of its former influence, Japan has become more significant and the developing countries are playing an increasing role at this time. But this multipolar world is not uniform for the first time in history. Political, military and economic powers are not necessarily commensurable. It is possible for a country to be a very strong military power without being economically extremely creative or dynamic, as for example the Soviet Union. It is possible for a country to be economi-

39

HENRY A. KISSINGER

cally extremely powerful and yet play no significant military role as is
true of most of the oil producing nations. And the incommensurability
between these types of power creates temptations, sometimes
irresponsibility.

The second problem is the loss of autarky of all nations including
ours. In the last decade, the United States has become dependent to
an increasing degree on importing energy and other sources of scarce
raw materials. Therefore the interdependence of the world, which has
been an abstract view of philosophers, has become a necessity and a
reality for modern statesmen. At the same time there have developed
problems that are common to all of mankind: the environment, the
problem of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. There is the discovery
of agricultural incompetence so that most regions of the
world are no longer able to feed themselves, rather novel phenomenon
in history. And finally, there is a delusion of confidence in economic
models in some countries, in the market economies because of
high unemployment and inflation, and in all socialist countries that
have totally failed to meet the desires of their populations. These
factors would produce a period of uncertainty and of turmoil under
all circumstances.

But they are made more complicated by the specific conduct of
Soviet foreign policy. The Soviet leaders believe in an ideology that
defines its relationship to the non-communist world as inherently
one of confrontation and of conflict. Periods of peaceful coexistence
are always justified within the Soviet Union as the best tactic to bring
about the collapse of the capitalist system. They are never explained
on the ground that peace is desirable or that compromise should be
sought for its own sake. And while one must not take all ideological
statements at face value, they affect the basic interpretation of reality.
As a result we have found consistently that the Western leaders that
have the worst relations with the Soviet Union are precisely those
who are sentimentally most attached to improving relations with the
Soviet Union. The one thing a Soviet leader cannot afford to do is to
return to the Kremlin and justify an agreement on the bases of his
personal relationship with the Western leaders. The attitude of Soviet

40

negotiators to their Western counterparts is very similar to that of Western psychiatrists to their patients. No matter what Western diplomats tell their Soviet counterparts, the Soviet negotiators think that they understand them better than they understand themselves.

The only reliable basis for negotiations with the Soviet Union is one of an unsentimental assessment of the balance of forces. It is no accident that President Nixon who was known as an opponent of communism all his life and who never pretended any great affection towards Soviet leaders, had a better relationship than any American president who believed that the psychiatric treatment of Soviet leaders, the establishment of abstract goodwill was the key to success. And we have to remember that the type of leader who achieves eminence in the Soviet Union has risen through a leadership struggle of extraordinary severity in which he has sacrificed many colleagues on his ride to eminence, and in the Soviet Union the penalty for losing in the leadership struggle is not transfer to another department but something more drastic. As a result we should always keep in mind that Soviet leaders are unlikely to treat us any better than they treat each other.

What complicates the situation even more, is that the Soviet Union is a state that has not performed well in any category except one – the military. It has never solved the problem of leadership succession. It has never solved its economic problems nor its sociological problems. The one thing the Soviet Union has done well is to accumulate military strength partly because decisions are made by rigid bureaucratic structures, and the military possessing their own communication and their own means of transport play a decisive role and can therefore exact the price for their support. Paradoxically, it may be precisely because the Soviet Union has had a massive military strength almost uninterruptedly for two decades and because its economic performance is stagnant, that it may be tempted to clean up the international environment before turning to domestic reforms. The Soviet Union faces the domestic dilemma that you cannot run a modern economy by central planning but you may not be able to run the Soviet system without central planning. Therefore, if they want to

41

HENRY A. KISSINGER

improve their economic performance they must be prepared for
significant alterations in the existing structure. Therefore, they must
be ready to assault many vested interests, and before they embark on
this they may wish to achieve some benefit from a military situation
which the West has permitted to develop in its favour. This seems to
me the fundamental cause for the brutal and provocative Soviet
behaviour of recent years.

The balance of power we have to admit has shifted in a dramatic
way as a result of Western neglect. In my testimony about the SALT
agreement last summer, long before this crisis, I said that I knew no
period in history in which a nation or group of nations permitted
such a shift in the balance of power without attempting to redress it.
And I warned that we might face a world in which events would
grow out of our control. I thought the period of crisis would begin
around 1981 or 1982. It has, I would say luckily for us, started earlier
so that we are in a better position to rectify the situation.

The second difficulty that has contributed to the contemporary
imbalance is the reluctance of Americans to think in geopolitical
terms or in terms of balance of power. If you read American text-
books on international affairs you will always see references to the
balance of power preceded by some pejorative term like "outdated",
"old-fashioned", "European" which is a pejorative term among some
liberal intellectuals. And indeed, the criticism that has often been
made by academics of my foreign policy is that I was too much con-
cerned with the balance of power. And yet while the balance of
power does not answer every question, no question can be answered
unless a nation is not dependent entirely on the goodwill of others
for its security.

All these factors have been expressed also in our nostalgia of
moving with the tides of history by adopting a moral position which
would automatically acquire the consensus of mankind. There have
been interpretations of human rights in the United States which on
the one hand undermined existing governments without having
alternatives with which to replace them, thereby objectively creating
opportunities for Soviet blackmail. And it has come to expression in

42

the reluctance to face the problem of conjecture with which I began
my remarks.

In 1975, there occurred an event which I considered of profound
geopolitical importance: When the Soviet Union sent Cuban proxy
troops to Africa we were in a new phase of Soviet risk taking and in a
new period of international relations. When a small Caribbean
country can, through Soviet logistic support and Soviet military
equipment, determine the structure of government in continents
thousands of miles away, we are not dealing with a local situation but
with a threat to the global equilibrium. It is at one and the same time a
threat to every government in an area where all governments have
uncertain support, and a demonstration of American impotence. We
were not enabled in 1975, because of our domestic divisions, to act
on this conviction because our Congress prohibited any support for
the anti-communist forces in Angola. I believe that the road to
Afghanistan started in Angola. Since then, we have seen gradually
developing a pincer movement, one of which by proxy Soviet forces
came up through Africa, specifically Aethiopia, and then into the
Arab Peninsula in Yemen, where there are now nearly 10 000
foreign troops and police forces. And the other came through Afgha-
nistan where the first communist coup occurred 18 months ago and
has now been completed with the occupation by the Red Army.

Parallel to this has been the support of groups of terrorist organi-
zations, and the signature of friendship treaties which as in the case of
Vietnam, made it possible to eradicate another independent country,
however loathsome its government. Vietnam occupied Cambodia
not because its government was repugnant to human values but
because it was independent of Hanoi's control. All of this has culmi-
nated in a situation in which serious doubts developed in many
threatened areas about American understanding of the international
situation and maybe ambiguity in the Soviet mind about our willing-
ness or ability to resist adventurism and expansion.

It is for this reason that I welcome the attitude that is taken now by
our Administration. It is because I believe that the American national
interest cannot possibly be determined on a partisan basis. I have

43

HENRY A. KISSINGER

stated that repeatedly in the United States and say so here that within
the United States everybody, every serious person has an obligation
to attempt to create a non-partisan support for the main lines of our
current policy.

It is why I believe that our European allies, whatever question they
may have about how we got there, whatever doubts they may feel
about how long we will stick with this policy, have an interest in
making this policy irreversible and having it succeed. And when I
read that maybe the United States is over-reacting I would like to ask
you: What would our friends think if the United States had not reac-
ted and if we had accepted a hundred thousand Soviet troops in
Afghanistan as we more or less accepted the Soviet brigade in Cuba?
That would be a reason for concern!

This does not mean that I believe that the declaration of a new
doctrine or a single speech define American policy or exhaust our
problems. On the contrary, the most important obligation of our
leadership now is to convey to our people that we are in for a long
period of difficulties. A strategy requires years to implement. There is
no terminal point. We must not pretend that there is a magic solution
to a crisis that took many years to crystallize. My concern is to avoid
that a year or two down the road we will again face the domestic
debate under which we suffered during the war in Indochina. And it
is not a trivial matter. Because if the United States failed in yet other
commitments, I think our position in the world might be under-
mined beyond repair.

Therefore, I would like to put to you a number of questions that I
believe must be answered. I do not say that I have the answer to them
and it doesn't really matter at this point what my answer is. It is
important what we tell ourselves as a government, what we tell other
nations and what we tell the Soviets, and that we mean it, and above
all that we stick with it. I would like to apply it in three areas: with
respect to the Gulf, with respect to Pakistan, with respect to China,
and then I would like to make some observations about European-
American relations, and finally about where all this leads with the
Soviet Union.

44

With respect to the Gulf: We have now said repeatedly, and I welcome it, that we will resist any further expansion into the Gulf area. What we now must do is to define just what we mean by the Gulf area. We have to define what exactly is the threat that we are resisting. Is it Soviet military attack only, is it Soviet proxy attack, is it terrorist attack, is it internal upheaval? And whatever answers we give, we must make sure that we know how to respond. It is imperative to bring our capabilities into line with our commitment, and for this reason we must now rapidly make up the military imbalance that has grown up because for a period of 18 years the Soviet Union increased its military budget by 5 per cent a year while ours remained more or less constant, and even that is somewhat deceptive because the Soviet Union applies 30 per cent of its budget to personnel costs, and we apply about 60 per cent of our budget to personnel costs. I read all the debates and have participated in them myself about what percentage increase is adequate. And as any of you who have dealt with governmental budgets will know, it is impossible to answer these questions in percentage terms because it depends on which baseline you calculate from, what inflation rate you consider and what items you list in the military budget. And this is why so many of the NATO increases magically never seem to yield increases in military forces.

There is one easy test. The International Institute of Strategic Studies publishes each year a survey of the military forces of the two sides. That survey has shown for every year in the last four or five a growing gap against the West in major military categories. We will have done enough in defense when that gap begins to shrink, and we will not have done enough, no matter what the percentage increase, when that gap remains constant or is continuing to increase. That is the necessity before us, and when I say us, I mean not only the United States but also our allies.

Secondly we have to bring that strength to bear in relevant areas. Abstract American commitments in the light of recent history are not enough. We must have a physical presence in or near the threatened areas that makes it plausible that we will execute what we have said.

45

HENRY A. KISSINGER

Now, of course, the defence of the Gulf area is not a purely military issue. It requires also that we create some concept in the name of what we defend that area, and some cohesiveness among the threatened countries so that they have a sense of participation. And it is for this reason that we must define what changes in governmental programs within these nations are bearable without destroying the governmental structure. There must be some change, but if we undermine the whole system the countries will feel it is not worth being defended. One cannot say that the American record in this has been brilliant, and we need a great deal of understanding, and advice, especially from our European friends.

Let me make a few observations about the Indian subcontinent. There again we face a number of important dangers. There is the danger of hot pursuit into Pakistan. There is the danger of a Soviet attack on Pakistan. And there is the danger of an Indian attack on Pakistan. And now, as we launch ourselves into a program to help Pakistan, it is imperative that before we get deeply committed we understand exactly what danger it is that we are trying to avoid, and what the resources are to deal with each of these dangers. And we'd better spell out what is necessary and know at the beginning of the process what cannot be done rather than learn it through bitter experience. Of course, the prospect of the defence against hot pursuit is easy, or relatively easy. But defence against a Soviet attack is much more complicated. I have expressed the view that it is hard for me to imagine how it can be accomplished without the presence on the ground of some American air power. If that is not possible for whatever reason we better know it early, and tailor our commitments to the existing capabilities. I have no fixed views on the subject, but I do believe that we must get clear about it before we launch ourselves into it.

As for the problem of India, no one who has read my book can have any doubt that the personal affection between the Prime Minister of India and me, when I was in office, had well defined limits. Nevertheless, it is her duty to conduct Indian foreign policy and it is the duty of our leaders to conduct American foreign policy. It cannot

46

be in our interest to bring about Soviet-Indian collusion in the destruction of Pakistan. But it also is not in our interest to see the one country that is an ally of both China and the United States dismembered once again. If India feels threatened by the rearment of Pakistan, we should certainly be prepared to discuss India's concerns provided it can generate meaningful assurances against our fear of a possible collusion with the Soviet Union or a possible unilateral attack on its own part. What these assurances are would remain to be discussed.

In any event, Pakistan now illustrates that there are sheer political necessities that transcend one's views about the particular policies of the government concerned. And we find ourselves now in Pakistan in precisely the situation that critics of previous administrations used to apply to our policy in Iran, namely that there are some countries that are defended not because we give them a report card for their conduct, but because they have become essential to the security of the West.

With respect to China, I would say only two things. The first is that China, having the longest history of self-government of any nation in the world, would not itself to be used as a card somebody else played. What we need with China is a steady, consistent policy that is independent of the fluctuations of our day-to-day relations with the Soviet Union. It will hurt us in Moscow and in Peking if we seek to compensate for disappointments in Moscow by ouvertures to Peking beyond our settled policy. It creates the impression in Peking that we might abandon our fundamental course in return for Soviet concessions. And it may trigger off in Moscow what we should attempt to avoid.

The second point I want to make is that there is a great deal of discussion about the rearment of China and who should have the privilege of delivering the weapons, and a great tendency to try to shift that honour between various countries. I would suggest that before we address seriously the question of the rearment of China, which is important, we have to ask an even more fundamental question: What is the attitude of the United States and what is the

47

HENRY A. KISSINGER

attitude of the West in case of a Soviet military attack on China – for either limited or for larger objectives? It is not a trivial question, because a demonstration of Soviet ruthlessness towards China would have massive consequences in the world. And as we draw lines around the Soviet territory and announce commitments the absence of a declaration of interests in certain parts becomes extremely noticeable, and much more noticeable than when there was only one major line of commitments. I would put that among the category of issues that have to be discussed.

Now a few words about relations between Europe and the United States. I have said repeatedly, and I say it again, that it is in our common interest that the attempt by the United States now being undertaken to contain Soviet expansionism succeeds. In this sense I do not believe that détente is divisible. Even less do I believe that some European nations can assert that they have a monopoly on conciliation while they give us the monopoly on defence. It must lead to a disaster if the vital interests of Europe and the United States cannot be defined in a comparable manner. There will be a growth of isolationism in America and of a kind of neutralism in Europe. I am not saying that Europe and we must always pursue the same policy in every detail. Even less do I suggest that Europe and the United States cannot disagree on their assessment of the situation at the beginning of the process. But I do say that in this rather great moment we should try to come to a common assessment and to comparable policies. There may well be a division of labour. It may well be decided that the Europeans are peculiarly well suited for political and economic influence in certain parts of the world and that certain military functions are best carried out by us. But it must grow out of a common policy.

It seems to me that after the United States has answered some of the questions I have put forward and others that may occur to itself that the leaders that met in Guadeloupe last year of Western Europe and the United States might well meet again to achieve a common understanding of where we are and where we should be going. In the situation in which we find ourselves we have to move with prudence

48

lest we produce what we attempt to avoid, but also the determination
lest we give the Soviets the impression that we are only playing to the
gallery. And as we discuss a strategy to contain expansionism it is also
imperative that we discuss a program for negotiations when these
become feasible again. In the past, too often the opening of negotia-
tions and the fact of negotiations has satisfied the Western publics.
The greatest danger in relation with the Soviet Union is sentimenta-
lity and unpredictability. We must stop Soviet expansion and we also
have to show them a way out. I believe that every period of crisis that
does not end in a war will inevitably end in a negotiation.

I do not believe we can return to SALT II. There are only three
years left in the agreement in any time frame in which it could be
negotiated. So if we negotiate again and three years are not enough
because the cycle of weapons decisions is much longer than the term
of such an agreement – so what we would have to do is to negotiate
at least a ten years agreement which includes both European and
strategic weapons.

Secondly, we must insist on an international code of conduct of
what is permissible and what is incompatible with peaceful co-
existence. The use of the Red Army to threaten all surrounding terri-
tories, the use of proxy forces, cannot be a regular pattern of interna-
tional relations. Certainly, the Soviet Union has the right to raise its
security concerns, and surely we must look at them. But they cannot
be permitted to define security in terms of the impotence of every-
body else. Security for the Soviet Union cannot mean insecurity for
all other nations. And we'd better not wait for a peace offensive
which is absolutely inevitable before we answer those questions to
ourselves, lest we be driven again by the tactics of negotiations and
the pressures of extremist groups.

These are some of the problems that I see before us: the problem of
being dedicated to peace without being subject to blackmail, the
problem of being committed to defence without making confronta-
tion its own purpose, the problem of confronting the Soviets without
illusion and yet being ready to have serious talks whenever there is a
willingness to talk about genuine co-existence. This is the test of our

49

HENRY A. KISSINGER

leadership in our country, and in the European countries. It cannot
be achieved by rivalry between Europe and the United States. And it
can only be prevented by division within the United States.

But if we do that of which we are capable then we will recognize
that the present period is one of some danger but also of great oppor-
tunity. We have many times the resources of the Soviet Union. We
have the more vital system. We have an alliance of free nations that
are joined together on a voluntary basis. Sometime in the next decade
the Soviet system is bound to find the incompatibility of its structure
with the necessities of human aspirations and indeed the minimum
necessities of the modern economy. So surely, history is on our side,
and if we act with the requisite wisdom and prudence and determina-
tion we may even catch a corner of the mantle of history.

50