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But why did the Soviet Union sign an agreement which stopped an ongoing production line for them, which interrupted the momentum of their production for a period in which they knew we couldn't do it? They did it because they, too, have come to realize that the gains you can make in this sort of an arms race just cannot be translated into political advantage. What can you do with these weapons unless you can get an overwhelming superiority that no opponent will permit? Therefore, the significance is not that we signed an unfavorable agreement, because we don't want to go into the details now. I think the opposite could be shown.

The interesting question is why did these hard-headed Soviet leaders, through an enormously painful process in which the President was up with them two nights, and I, on his instructions, was up with them another two nights, and where we knew they had a Politburo meeting every morning -- they had four Politburo meetings on that issue last week. On Thursday morning at 4:00 o'clock, when we broke up, we thought there would be no SALT agreement because we wanted to put certain restrictions on with respect to the modernization of the G-class submarines, and forcing them to trade in their H-class submarines. At 4:00 o'clock on Friday morning we had broken up the meeting and said, "If you don't do these two things, we can't have it," and at 11:30 a.m. they asked for a meeting. They had just come from a Politburo meeting, and said, "We have decided to accept those two propositions. Let us draft it."

Then they said, which was rather significant for them, "Look, we have been planning to sign this SALT agreement all along. Why should we admit to ourselves that we couldn't meet our schedule? Now that we have come this long way and have had these long discussions, why don't we break our backs and get it all done today so we can symbolically show to the world that we could do this?"

For them, I think this process was as painful for different reasons, because they are looking beyond 1978, from now to 1978.

It is not easy for us, although all we are doing is to ratify what every reader of every posture statement of the Secretary of Defense has been reading unchallengingly for the last three or four years.

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But they know that in 1978 it is up to us what we
will have then, after the freeze ends. It is not up to them.
It is not affected in any way by this offensive agreement.

So we did something which I think is unique in the
annals of Soviet-American diplomacy, and any diplomacy: that
we sat down and drafted joint instructions to both of our
delegations, certainly the first time that the instructions
on the Soviet side and American side in Helsinki were abso-
lutely identical, in order to make sure there wouldn't be any
hang-up because of misinterpretations.

Then they kept us informed about the meetings going
on within the Soviet Embassy, to get the thing wrapped up.
We got the thing wrapped up on Friday.

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Then the next significant event was the signing of the declaration of principles, but there is another thing in connection with the trade issue. I have been reading stories in the press about how we tried to get a trade agreement in return for Vietnam. That just is not true. We never attempted that. These are serious people. You can't do it by whatever increases of trade may develop as a result of these various agreements.

What we attempted was to put the whole commercial relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union on a comprehensive basis, and ask ourselves, where do we want to be at the end of a five or ten year period, and not take off individual pieces. So we always recognized before we could even think of credit, we would have to get a settlement of the Lend-Lease issue. In extending credit, we did not want to wind up in a position where they by controlling the rate of repayment would get the upper hand on us in negotiations five or ten years down the road. So we had always expected that the wrapup of this negotiation would come in the summer in the Commercial Commission. We tried to settle the sum of the Lend-Lease issue in a direct conversation between the President and Kosygin, but then there was a hangup on interest rates, rate of repayment and so forth. While we probably could have settled it there, we wanted to relate it to all of the other issues, and therefore we deferred it and we are not that eager for the Land-Lease settlement in itself. We want to get a comprehensive conclusion.

Now, all of this wound up with a declaration of principles. How did this declaration of principles develop? First, obviously some preparatory work on all of these issues had been done before we came to Moscow. Our original idea was to incorporate into the communique some general principles just as we had done with the People's Republic of China. On the occasion that I was in Moscow, Brezhnev proposed that maybe we should break out these principles and make them a separate document. The President's reaction was, "Let us see how we are doing in all other fields, because we won't sign declarations of principles unless they mean something. There has to be an objective basis."

This was kept in abeyance until the President met with the Soviet leaders, and until the progress during the week of negotiations went on.

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What do these principles mean? I talked to some of you after having come back from the People's Republic of China, and I then pointed out that we are dealing here really with different societies from the ones we are used to. We are pragmatic societies. They are almost theological societies. They believe in ideology, philosophy, and general principles, and therefore we pointed out to you then that the declaration of principles in the Chinese communique may have been by far the most important part of it, even though to us it just seemed to be a set of general principles.

I would like to point out to you that if you look at Chinese conduct since that meeting, it has been importantly influenced, and the restraint they have shown on a number of issues, some of which you can imagine have been not uninfluenced by these general declarations of restraint. I do not know whether Senators Mansfield and Scott have the sense that to them the Shanghai communiques are not just abstract phrases. The same is true in the Soviet Union. Here you have the Soviet citizens who are used to reading between the lines, reading in every Soviet newspaper, on every Soviet radio, that their government is now committed to peaceful coexistence with the United States. That I have said before. It is the restraint in their relations with other countries that they will not try to take advantage of local situations, that they will try to avoid military confrontations, and they don't claim special rights for themselves in any part of the world, which incidentally was happily received in Poland, because they correctly understand it as a renunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine.

Now, again, there is no question that the Soviet leaders can next week break every one of these principles if they think it is in their interest to break them. But the publicity they have given it, the enormous amount of attention they have given to it, the amount of time they spent with the President on it, indicates that they too recognize for some of the reasons we have indicated to you that at least they ought to put themselves in a position for a new departure in international relations.

Now, none of this entitles us to let down our guard. None of it entitles us to give up our allies and take action unilaterally. All it indicates is that there is an extraordinary opportunity, if you look at Soviet

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behavior over the last six weeks, the enormous restraint they have shown in certain situations. It must have been extraordinarily painful, and the easy thing for them to do was to try to prove their manhood, and if you look at some previous period they would have done it. It indicates that for a variety of reasons it has penetrated that we are in a new era, that the sort of course that the President has had was never less than six or seven hours a day, and which alternates between the very concrete as I pointed out on the SALT discussions, to the very general shape of the world, that this is a relationship that they are not going to give up easily, and an approach to international affairs they are not going to give up easily, if we do not get such enormous temptations that they feel that they can not resist them.

To sum up, and this gets us back to where the President started, we have been brought to the point in international affairs that we have both understood; we are in a position that is unprecedented in history, where in these we have to cooperate for the peace of the world, and where the countries that have the greatest capacities to destroy each other, and whose whole weapons development is directed at each other, have to try to assume the responsibility for not permitting local situations to get out of hand, and where they have the overwhelming responsibility not to do what the leaders in 1914 did -- almost the destruction of western civilization, that they had let matters run to a certain point, and then a crisis developed, and they had no idea how to stop it, because they had never thought of it, and they were so convinced of the tactical issues at the moment that they forgot that nothing they could possibly gain out of the war that started in August of 1914 would justify the disaster that they brought upon themselves, and where no one, if they had known what the world would be like in 1918 would have made the decision they did on August 1, 1914.

The reason the President has been so unemotional, so precise in his dealings with the Soviet leaders, the reason he spent these many hours with them, is when they get cables from us now they know who is behind them. The reason why the Soviet leaders hopefully have taken a similar approach is so that whatever happens, at least let us do it as a matter of action and not slide into a future

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because it was too inconvenient to continue the task.

SENATOR MANSFIELD: The statement has been made that possibly there have been private and secret agreements. Some of us have denied it. I think that the best way to handle it is to lay it on the table.

DR. KISSINGER: This accusation has been made with respect to the SALT agreement. Now, with respect to the SALT agreement there are two kinds of documents. One is the formal document which we have published. The second concerns a series of unilateral interpretive statements that we have made of how we interpret these paragraphs, to some of which the Soviets have agreed, and some of which they simply noted. All of these interpretive statements will be submitted to the Congress when the treaties are submitted. In his last meeting with Brezhnev, the President said to him that we could not ask the Congress to ratify these treaties and to express their approval to the interim agreement unless they knew the whole record of the discussions, and Brezhnev said that was an unusual process. He agreed to it.

What are these interpretive statements so that there is no great mystery about them? The reason we have not published them is because up to now they are not really part of the record, and because they are not part of the signed agreement. What do they concern? For example, I can give you one. There is one provision, Article III of the offensive agreements, which says, "Silo dimensions can not be significantly increased." The President said to Brezhnev, and this is indeed one of the results of that week, "Significantly does not mean a damned thing. For all we know, you are going to increase the size of the silos by 50 per cent, and you are going to tell us it is not significant." So then we spent three harrowing hours arguing, as I told you before, the relationship between silo dimensions, new missiles and the relationship of all of that to the modernization clause in the agreement. We finally came up with this solution:

The United States would say as a unilateral interpretive statement that we interpret "significantly" to mean that the increase can be no more than 10 to 15 per cent, and the Soviet Union would read into the record a statement that they agreed with this definition of "significantly".

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So this is one unilateral interpretive statement. Another unilateral interpretive statement concerns the size of the missiles they could put into the silos. I just want to give you this so you don't have to sense there was anything very secret about it.

The Soviets have an almost psychopathic obsession not to make the specific calculations of their weapons a part of an international agreement. They are willing to have general dimensions and so forth. Therefore, they were prepared to talk about the dimensions of the silo but not about the dimensions of the weapon inside the silo, even though one governs the other. Obviously you can't put an SS-9 into an SS-11 hole. They made a unilateral interpretive statement which they noted, but did not comment on, that if they put a missile that is significantly larger than their largest modern weapon, their largest light ICBM, into a light ICBM hole, we could consider that contrary to the purposes of the treaty. We put them on notice that under those conditions we might invoke the escape clause of the treaty.

Now, in other words, the so-called secret understandings, all of which will be put before the Senate, concern either agreed or unilateral interpretations of a highly technical nature of the published provisions, and all of them to the best of my knowledge, as I remember them now, but I think I am safe in saying that all of them work in our favor by tightening up the agreement and by either having the Soviet agreement to them or by having reported in the record as unilateral statements of putting them on notice of how they would affect our interpretation of the escape clause.

This is the only thing that is part of the SALT agreement that we did not publish on the first day, but all of this is going to be put before the Senate and the House, so that when the Senate votes on the ABM treaty and the Congress votes on the offensive agreement, they will be able to examine every provision of the SALT agreement and it has purely technical significance, because they are not part of the signed protocol, that they were not published last week.

CONGRESSMAN HOSMER: Are these in tens or hundreds?

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DR. KISSINGER: I think it is about ten. They are really of the kind that I describe. The question has been asked is there on site inspection. One of the first things that the President ordered when he came into office was that he formed what we called the verification panel, because we faced this problem; we had the Arms Control Agency saying about an agreement, this or this provision is safe, sometimes the Joint Chiefs saying this risks national security, and no one ever told us why it was safe or why it risks national security, and so we made a systematic study of every conceivable weapons system in terms of national means of inspection, satellites, and so forth, how many weapons they could build that we might not detect, what we could do once we did detect it and how much it would take to effect this strategic balance.

On the basis of that we came to the conclusion that the national means of inspection were really perfectly adequate not to catch the last missile, but to catch well within the limits of tolerance any evasion that they might undertake. In fact, in our earlier proposals, we had some on-site inspection with respect to certain weapons, particularly ABM's. Then when we worked out how that inspection would actually operate, we found that it could be used by the other side to evade by siting certain inspections, because they could hide certain components while the inspectors were going around, and it was physically very tough to do since you have to give them some advance notice before you go in there, even if they have to let you in. It will take a day or two before you can actually work it out to get there. So we came to the conclusion which was unanimously supported by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that national means of inspection were better.

Now we have a clause in the agreement that interference with satellites and other means of inspection would be considered contrary to the purposes of the agreement, and therefore they are under an obligation not to interfere with our photography. If they did, this would be a cause for abrogating the treaty. But in the categories we are now talking about, we don't require on-site inspections. If we go to MIRV's, then it would be very difficult, but when we are talking about numbers, we have confidence that we can catch violations well within the margins of error of the national means of inspection.

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SENATOR MAGNUSON: Might I ask Dr. Kissinger just one question? How will this affect the continuation of the SALT talks? Will they consider it is done, and there is no need to go on further, in your opinion?

DR. KISSINGER: It hasn't been my opinion, but this interim freeze on offensive weapons should be followed by a permanent agreement on offensive weapons, and by an agreement that first of all addresses itself to weapons systems that are not covered by this agreement, like bombers; and second, the aspects of the qualitative arms race.

Secondly, the Soviets fully understand that certain inequalities that were in their favor, in a temporary freeze, given the situation which we inherited, would not be acceptable in a permanent freeze. There you have to work toward local parity. They understand this, and it depends on what developments we have.

Thirdly, we expect that the second phase of SALT will begin as soon after Senate ratification and Congressional approval as we can. The Soviets have talked about September. This, of course, depends on the actions of the Congress, but we can say there is an agreement to go into the next phase of SALT almost immediately upon the ratification or approval, as the case may be, of these treaties and interim agreements. We will be prepared to go into the next phase of SALT almost immediately. Our preparations are well advanced.

THE PRESIDENT: When we go into the second phase of talks, then you can be sure that some of the other subjects will probably be raised. As you all know, the interim freeze which we are still submitting to the Congress deals with only certain weapons systems. The others, of course, may deal with the whole bag. They may; we don't know.

But in any event, since it will then also involve a treaty, it will have to be on the basis of parity and not on the basis of inequality. The freeze, frankly, refers to a situation as it is; whereas, when you go into the next phase of the talks, it will refer to the situation as it is going to be over the period of time and what we are going to have to live with.

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We will deal with that situation and say, "Now we are going to freeze here," having in mind the fact that the freeze leaves some room for us. As you know, it doesn't cover bombers and it doesn't cover MIRV; whereas, on their side, of course, their submarines will be built at a lesser pace.

**SENATOR TOWER:** Was any progress made in arriving at a comprehensive definition of what constitutes strategic and what constitutes tactical weapons?

**DR. KISSINGER:** One of the problems in this particular freeze arrangement has been that we did not want to include the forward based systems in which this gray area developed, and which really should be counted if you want to assess the relative strategic impact of either side on the other.

If you add the bombers and the forward-based U.S. systems, you have to come to the conclusion that in terms of total launchers, the two sides are approximately equal. Now, we did not include those in the agreement and, therefore, when you read the newspapers, what we froze were the things in which they were building, and we were not.

**THE PRESIDENT:** And not only that, but no capability. Armed Services Committee members know this has been put to the Joint Chiefs. You have to look at the situation not as we would like it to be, but the situation as it is.

Let us suppose that we said, "We don't want to have an offensive freeze because they are going to go ahead and build submarines." Now, the question is, if they go ahead at their present level of submarines with no offensive freeze, what can we do? The Joint Chiefs flatly said, and the Navy said, it would be a mistake for the United States to go ahead on a crash basis building the old submarines. The ones we want to build are the 1979 class.

**DR. KISSINGER:** Even if we had built Chinese copies of the old ones, we couldn't have gotten them before late 1976 or early 1977.

**THE PRESIDENT:** By that time the freeze is about over. Let me say this: In our discussions and our very frank discussions with Brezhnev, he knows this. He has read what we have said, and I told him this.

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I think it is fair to say, Henry, on the subject, he knows perfectly well that as far as our own submarine plans are concerned, we do have ULMS down the line, but at present we have no plans to build Chinese copies, to use Henry's term, at present.

DR. KISSINGER: But to answer Senator Tower's question more precisely, I first gave you a general answer, but there were built into the agreement a number of fire breaks. For example, there is a flat prohibition against transforming light ICBMs into heavy ICBMs.

Secondly, with respect to specific --

THE PRESIDENT: Everyone knows what a light and heavy missile is?

DR. KISSINGER: Our big worry is, as you know, this SS-9, this monster weapon which we feel, if it develops unchanged, is going to threaten our land-based Minuteman force. This agreement puts a freeze on the SS-9; that is to say, they cannot have more than those that are under construction or operation on July 1, which is to say about 319. That is an uncomfortable number, but it is better than 160 or so that they were building a year.

Now, some people say, "Well, they can put a bigger SS-9 type missile into the old SS-9 hole. That is true, but they could have done that even without the agreement and without the agreement they could have put a bigger missile into the old hole and built more missiles. So we have at least cut off the number of launchers."

You have to look at the missiles they have. Another fire break we built is, they have these so-called G-class submarines. Those are diesel submarines that have to surface to fire, but the 22 G-class submarines have about 60 missiles on them that are not very good, with a range of 300 to 700 miles. We have never considered those as strategic.

The first time I ever saw them listed as a strategic weapon was last week when some people suddenly started mentioning them. This was another thing that was a part of the conversation between Brezhnev and the President, in which Brezhnev, who is a rather volcanic type, said, "We are scrapping

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them anyway," and the President said, "If you are scrapping them, what is the problem? Why don't you include them in the agreement?"

The compromise was reached, and that was in our interest, that we do not count the 300 to 700-mile missiles as strategic weapons. The reason we did that was, otherwise we would have had to enter discussions about our forward-based systems in Europe, which would have created a crisis with our NATO allies. But it is part of the agreement; it is part of the protocol of the interim agreement that if they put modern missiles on the G-class submarines, those modern missiles are considered part of the total.

THE PRESIDENT: What counts is the number of modern missiles and not the number of old submarines.

Incidentally, that was another 3-hour thing.

DR. KISSINGER: The answer to your question, Senator Tower, is that we did not make a comprehensive judgment of what is strategic and what is tactical; but we made a practical definition involving every one of the categories of weapons which we were concerned about, and they cannot transform a smaller category into a larger category, or an older category into a newer category without this being counted as part of the total.

CONGRESSMAN MAHON: I would like to say that you did the best possible under the circumstances, and I think this program has a good chance of being really helpful and successful, provided we keep up our guard and don't say, "Well, we will get complacent and unduly reduce our defense power."

As I see it, if we hold the line and keep up our guard, this thing can work out very well for us.

THE PRESIDENT: Let me respond to that by saying this, knowing that in this room there are some who vary as to how much we want to put into defense programs: It isn't participant. There are some Republicans and some Democrats. But from the standpoint of the permanent offensive agreement, it is essential that the United States not give it away unilaterally. That is what we need.

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Now, let me say this: If we can mutually agree, I am all for it. To me, it is foolish to spend this money on these weapons, and I said this to Brezhnev and he agreed totally, and I said, "Let us face it. Each of us has enough weapons already with this freeze, assuming these agreements, to blow each other up and destroy each country a dozen times over." That was the argument for the Statement of Principles. Each of us has enough to kill each other with the freeze, so we must have something more, simply, than a freeze. We have got to have a Statement of Principles and not get involved in that.

So I would say what we need, George, is not in a belligerent way to provoke them to do more, but in a way they, in effect, say they are going ahead and we will watch what they do. We must go ahead with our programs, having in mind the fact that they might not make the second deal, having in mind that they also are much more likely to make it if they realize they are going to stop us from doing more.

Let me say, in terms of their respect for the United States of America, above everything else, have in mind that they respect our economic strength. That is their attitude toward the Japanese. The Japanese do not have one nuclear capability, but they have an enormous economic capability and are capable of becoming an enormous military power. That is the way they look at the United States of America. That is why the Russians don't want to be in a race with us. They know in a race, if we have to do it, they are not going to be able to get an advantage, and neither side can.

That is what it really comes down to. So what we need here, we would urge not only support of peace agreements, but let me add one other thing: Let us have no illusions about it. It isn't going to help at all for me, Mel Laird, Jerry Smith or Henry or anybody else to go out and say, "We got the best of them," or "They got the best of us." That isn't going to help anything.

This was a hard-headed, tough negotiation. It is one which has to serve the interest of both sides, and frankly, if either side determines it doesn't like the deal, we can have a pretty good war with the weapons that are not frozen, so what we really come down to is that we have started a process not only for the limitation of arms, but we have started a process in many other fields.

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That is why I don't want to downgrade what we have done in the environment and health and space. Some people say, "We don't want a joint space program." But let me say the more we can get them involved in doing things in a peaceful way, the more we have a chance of getting them involved in doing things involving security. Let us have more of that.

As a matter of fact, there is one other thing, and I don't want to talk too long. I think there has to be more contact at the party level. I would like to see more Republicans and Democrats go over there. I think we have to bring their Communist Party leadership here. We realize they don't have two parties, because the Party runs their country. With our parties, we trade off now and then, but we run the country.

SENATOR SCOTT: They don't have a Minority Leader, do they?

CONGRESSMAN HOSMER: This follows up George's question. Can we be a little more specific about what we do have to carry on in order to have this mutuality?

THE PRESIDENT: Incidentally, Bill Rogers is still in Europe, and we don't have Jerry Smith and we don't have Mel Laird, because I thought all of these questions should be asked when they come before your committees. But I could only say this: that in terms of ULMS, looking at the submarine thing, we would be out of our minds, after hearing the Chiefs, to simply build Chinese copies of what we already have, because it would cost us too much, and I think both of you agree, and all of you, that it doesn't make any sense.

On the other hand, if we don't have a follow-on program, then we are left in a very vulnerable position if we are not going to be able to negotiate this very tough negotiation on the offensive weapons in the future, because if you think this was hard to negotiate, wait until we get to that one.

If we don't have a follow-on program, we have to have something to give in order to get something. It works in the Congress, and when you work out a deal on a piece of legislation, and it works in their national affairs, particularly with these pragmatists, they don't give us a thing because they like us, and they don't give us a thing because Brezhnev and I joke a bit, and we do.

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There was one thing, for example, to give you a
little bit of the color: After we had one of these tortuous
things, and not arguments, but Brezhnev has an interesting
quality. Kosygin has got these cold, blue eyes, and he sits
there and he talks and he seems to be a great poker player.
Brezhnev, I don't know whether he would be or not, because he
gets up and stands up and he paces the floor, and he cracks
the table and all of that sort of thing.

As you know, we went through this for quite a while.
This was one thing significant about the Chinese meeting, and
I say to you, Mike, never once in the course of the conver-
sations with Mao Tse-tung or Chou En-lai, on my part, was
there ever any belligerence. There was toughness, but no
belligerence.

We haven't mentioned Vietnam, and it is best that
we not talk about it this morning. It was discussed at
length. What will happen will happen. But in any event, it
was good it was discussed.

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It was appropriate that we understand those things we disagree on as well as what we agreed on. But in all of the course of those things, and this is what characterized these talks, there was developed on both sides that, first, we know each other so when letters come we will know what the guys are like that write, but there was never any beligerence, not with Brezhnev, and not with Kosygin, and not with Podgorny, when the three were talking to me, which was often the case. That is pretty rough with three coming at you in different ways.

I will come to my little example. Henry, you will probably remember that after we had gone through that tortuous examination about the size of the missile holes and so forth, and they said, "Well, you don't trust us", and so forth and so on, and finally we worked out about the 10 to 15 per cent, and so forth. The meeting broke up and I said, "You know, Mr. General Secretary, you have met at a great disadvantage here because you are a military man." I knew he was a military man, and he said, "So are you." I said, "That is true, but you were a general and I was a lieutenant, and you have me at a great disadvantage."

It had probably an interesting effect on him, because it was quite true.

DR. KISSINGER: There is one which does not prove anything. As the President said, Brezhnev is a pretty volcanic guy, and he makes a point that way. At one point he got up and he started one of his speeches, and he said, "I will sit down. Every time I get up, I make a concession."

SENATOR ELLENDER: I noticed in the agreements that there is some agreement about the ABM, building one around Washington. As you know, that proposal was not looked upon with favor. Now under this agreement our country will be compelled to build one around Washington?

THE PRESIDENT: I think we should, but you are not compelled to do anything.

SENATOR ELLENDER: In order to carry out the agreement?

THE PRESIDENT: No, the agreement simply limits both

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countries, and it compels us to do nothing. I am only
suggesting, however, that as far as the United States is
concerned, looking toward future agreements, that if on the
ABM agreement they do everything up to what they are allowed
to do, and we don't, it certainly is not going to be a very
good way to approach the future. The Washington thing has
some points which the committee ought to look into, some
great advantages.

DR. KISSINGER: As a factual matter, particularly
for the Armed Services Committees, our proposal had been to
complete the two sites on which we were working. That for
a long time was the preferred position of the White House.
But we were confronted with the unanimous advice of the
Chiefs, of the Defense Department, and our whole bureaucracy,
that we should shift the other site to the Washington site
for reasons on which they will testify. They believe that the
strategic benefit of a defense of Washington, as against a
second ICBM site, would be very significant. That is why
we then accepted their recommendation. But as the President
pointed out, we are not compelled by the agreement to do
anything. We are permitted to go up to a certain level.

THE PRESIDENT: Let me say, getting back to the
point I made earlier, that this business of who wins and
who loses, we as politicians all think in terms of winning
and losing, but I think on this kind of negotiation, it is
important for us to recognize that the best posture for both
sides is that we did the best we could considering our
national interest. Now we believe we have the best deal we
could get considering our own national interest. If we could
have gotten more, we could have said that was a victory.

Let me go back, if I can, historically. It has
always been my theory -- I remember an old teacher of
contracts in my first day in law school say that the contract
is only as good as the will of the parties to keep it. The
same is true of treaties. It is true of the enforcing
provisions. But is a treaty, for example, good when it is
one that is so totally unfair or totally unbalanced that it
is an incentive for one side to break it? The Versailles
Treaty is an example.

On this score, I do not claim to the leaders that
the United States of America, that we did as a result of

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our negotiations put something over on Brezhnev and Kosygin and Podgorny. We could not have done it if we tried. But we did bargain every bit of the way. We got the very best deal that we could get, and the choice is not between this deal and something better, but this deal and no deal. That is the way I look at it.

DR. KISSINGER: I think it is well to keep in mind that every concession in Moscow was made by them, and not by us, and this is as close to the agreement that we had in mind, that we had wanted, as it is possible to get. You take the submarine part of it, about which there has been so much discussion, we were the ones who wanted the submarines as part of the deal. They resisted until April, when the President sent a personal communication to Brezhnev, and obviously they resisted because they are building 8 or 9 a year, and as those of you who have access to intelligence information know, they have just built a new plant at their submarine base where they can double the production. So if that program were permitted to run free, they could have as many as 90 modern submarines by the end of 1978.

We had to give them something to stop their program well short of their capacity, and therefore we developed this idea by which they in order to reach their limit have to trade in 240 of their older missiles. This essentially for better or worse was our proposal, which they accepted. I think it is important to keep in mind that this agreement, maybe you can still argue that we came up with the wrong scheme, but it is not that we got to Moscow and they took us. Quite to the contrary, we came to Moscow, to give you some examples, and we had agreed in principle that each side could defend the national command authority, that is, Washington or Moscow, and one ABM field. They had taken the position that this ABM field could be at the discretion of each side. At the discretion of each side, if they had put their ABM field into European Russia, then we would have faced the problem that the radars in the field coupled with the radars of Moscow, and coupled with the fact that 80 per cent of the Soviet population lives in European Russia might have given them territorial defense. We said it had to be east of the Ural Mountains. They did not want to have themselves singled out by saying "east of the Ural Mountains", and secondly they did not want to be that specific. So we proposed, or the President proposed to

Page 41

Brezhnev that we take out the word "Urals", but say the ABM
field can be no closer than 1300 kilometers, and Brezhnev actually
accepted 1500 kilometers. Then when the working crew worked
it out it turned out that 1300 was a better figure for
reasons that are too technical to go into.

At any rate, the President then proposed that 1300
kilometer distance. Now, that guarantees that it cannot
be used as a base for a territorial defense, and I simply want
to stress that I cannot think of a single concession that was
made there that did not come from their side, and they did not
have to have a Politburo meeting on that subject because it was
an easy decision. Converting G-class missiles into modern
missiles, and counting them, when they have never been listed
as strategic weapons, and they did quote those things to us,
getting that was a concession from their side.

So I have to say that this agreement is pretty
close to, given the circumstances we found, -- it comes as
close to the best that it was possible to get.

THE PRESIDENT: Incidentally, don't get from my own
discussion here that I feel we came back defensive about this;
that we came back feeling that this is something where we might
have been better off not to have made the deal, and so on and
so forth. My own feeling is that, looking at this prag-
matically from the interest of the United States, it was
important to try to make an initial move in the field of arms
control.

We had to make some move. This is the best move that
we could make. It is as far as we could go. It is as far as
they could go. If we can get the Congress to scrutinize this
and approve it promptly, we can go to the next step.

I can assure you, whether it is me or someone else,
they will have to go through the same tortuous process at the
highest level of negotiation. I think it is going to come
from something that doesn't have to do with trust, but reasons
that have to do with necessity on both sides.

Page 42

There is more sentiment on our side, but on their
side it is cold turkey, in terms, as I said earlier, that we
either have arms control or an arms race that nobody can win,
and it increases the risks of war rather than reducing it.

So what we are asking you to join us in, basically,
is a great venture. It is a field that we have trod over
before. Nations have made deals, 5-5-3 deals, and it has
not been a record that many of us have found satisfactory.
But in the nuclear age, there is no alternative for respon-
sible leaders of countries, whatever their philosophies, than
to sit down and work out and start on the long road of con-
trolling the arms race and the nuclear strategic field, and
eventually move on a mutual basis toward that end.

To be able to negotiate the kind of agreements that
are in the interest of the United States, it is important
that we have a negotiating position. They will want to
negotiate from the strongest possible position, and they
aren't going to stop anything unless they have a mutual
agreement on our side. Our view should be exactly the same.
We should continue our own program so that we will have a
good negotiating position, but we will be forthcoming in
negotiating a mutual deal with them.

If we do this, it means that in many other areas,
two great powers, of course, will have a possibility of pro-
gress. It is really this that we present at this point.

I would say finally, too, we have been very careful
to write these agreements so they would not cause concern
to our allies. We have been very careful so that we didn't
line up with the Soviet Union against any smaller countries
or, for that matter, against the People's Republic of China.
It has to be played that way on our part. On their part, of
course, they had some similar problems.

What we really come down to now is the fact that
Congress, on the ABM and the whole Congress on offensive
weapons, will have the opportunity to ask all of the ques-
tions, and you examine them. But as you examine them, I
would only suggest this:

[LC]

Page 43

As you examine them, put yourself in the position
that they were in and we were in, and what would you do?
Would you do this, or nothing? The choice is not this or
something better for the United States or for that matter
for them, because we wouldn't have given any more.

The choice is this or nothing, and nothing would
mean, I repeat, a race where we would go and they would go
and in the end, who knows what would have happened? It is
that which we have attempted to avert, and it is that situa-
tion, we believe, we have turned around, and if we can learn
to live together on these issues and work together and
negotiate on these and all of the others, we may change
the world for a while. That is speaking a little too
optimistically. I wouldn't say that publicly, but that is
what I really feel.

END

(AT 12:10 P.M. EDT)