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Once we negotiate those things, what leverage do we have
with the Soviets to begin these asymmetrical reductions that
need to take place on conventional forces? I do not see what
leverage, once we get those things out of the way and move in
that direction, what we have left.

Dr. Kissinger: Well, I suppose you could argue that the
Soviets will want to reduce the expenses of maintaining large
conventional forces, and cannot reduce them unilaterally.

But I am worried about the fact that the Soviet Union, in
a period of obvious difficulty, has managed to focus the
negotiations on those weapons on which, for better or worse,
we have relied, and have managed to keep out of the
negotiation those weapons that have represented the greatest
threat to the security of their neighbors. Namely, the
conventional weapons That is not a healthy situation.

The Chairman: Could I interrupt one second on that? I
would like to just venture that perhaps they have not managed
that, we have managed that.

Dr. Kissinger: We have managed it.

The Chairman: I think you give the Soviets too much
credit. We cannot figure out what we want.

Dr. Kissinger: You are quite right.

Senator Quayle: We have managed that, but we have
negotiated things that are in the greatest interest to them
rather than focusing on this conventional imbalance.

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And once we negotiate the things that are of interest to them, I ask again in the leverage that we have with the Soviet Union beyond the economic considerations. Certainly they have to make resource allocations in the Soviet Union.

But past tradition and precedence do not seem to indicate that they have too much reluctance to invest in defense whatever they want to.

Dr. Kissinger: But the point that Senator Levin implied is also important, that we go four-fifths of the way down a road and at that point we raise the considerations we probably should have raise at the beginning of the road.

And that makes it much more difficult with people like Margaret Thatcher and others, who really are basically very well disposed towards us.

Senator Quayle: So therefore it would make sense to put the conventional issue on the front burner?

Dr. Kissinger: I would certainly put it on the front burner. We probably cannot now insist upon having it completed, but I would certainly want to see whether the Soviet Idea of conventional disarmament is so preposterous that we are in a ball game in which they want to maintain their conventional threat at all costs.

Or at any rate, want to maintain their conventional threat.

Senator Quayle: Senator Cohen outlined in some of the

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concerns he came away with from Veracunda, and I would just
like to continue that train of thought.

Not only did Hagar and Barr and Vogel join in in congratulating Chancellor Schmidt, but Strauss had some rather revealing comments about the threat of the Soviet Union that I had not heard before. Some I had read, but had not heard before.

I do not believe, from a political sense, I do not see Chancellor Kohl really getting any stronger down the road. Two years from now, five years from now, most predict that he would have a re-election capability. I think they are being held in 1990.

Given that, and that perhaps they are not going to get politically stronger, given the fact that you have got this momentum going with zero-zero, 50 percent reduction, I mean from a political sense, despite the call for a steady American foreign policy, how are we realistically going to deny that third zero, when the Soviets put it on the table?

You have a situation in Germany now where the politicians are out ahead of the public on this issue. In this particular discussion of modernization. I did not detect it when I was over there in the public that there are a lot of demonstrations, a lot of talk about this.

I detected it with the politicians. And it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the public will certainly

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begin to focus on this, once that gets on the table. But how
do we realistically think in the next decade that we are
going to stop this triple zero?

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And once you have that you basically have the
denuclearization, you have got the concern of whether our
troops will be in harm's way or in safety. I am just sitting
here and walking away, having spent a week over there, not
terribly optimistic.

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And if I look at this thing just from a political sense,
how do we stop this? What do we need to do? How do we
recommit ourselves --

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Dr. Kissinger: In fairness to some of the people you
have mentioned, Kohl, Strauss, Bush, none of them wanted the
double zero, that they did in response to us. That now has
unleashed the triple zero.

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The only hope, if there is a hope, that there are
certainly trends in Germany that may move faster than we can,
than anything we can do. I suspect that there will be more
and more economic lures put out by the East.

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I suspect that some sort of romantic nationalism will
develop where they will say, the two Germanies need not be
unified, but can pursue parallel foreign policies. All of
which will have the objective tendency of easing Germany's
ties to NATO.

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The only hope that we have is that we have a bipartisan

consistent policy here to which we will stick, and in which
we will have to say that we cannot keep forces there without
nuclear protection.

The trouble is that now any policy we adopt becomes very
risky for a leader to identify himself with. I believe that
if Germany starts pursuing a purely national course or
largely course, NATO will change its character completely or
substantially. And Europe will become an area of great
political disquiet.

But I fear the tendencies are there. That was the reason
why I was opposed to INF from the beginning. That was my
major reason. None of the analytical arguments carried much
weight with me one way or the other.

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Senator Quayle: The INF Treaty gives up the ground-based cruise missiles. What is your viewpoint on the potential military application of the conventional cruise missile?

Dr. Kissinger: Well, I was a part of this panel on discriminate deterrence, which believed that the accurate cruise missiles, in whatever basing mode, are one of the methods of the countermeasures to Soviet conventional pressure on Europe. And so I would regret any limitation that made it more difficult to resort to that weapon.

Senator Quayle: Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you, Senator Quayle. Senator Stennis?

Senator Stennis: Dr. Kissinger, It would not take a great deal for this group to again hear your comments, your wisdom, your understanding, your counsel and advice that I saw more of in other critical days and experiences of our government.

I want to publicly thank you for the fine contribution you made then and continue to make now. When I heard that you were in the hallway out here, I made plans to get to see you and to hear you.

And it was not Just a personal matter, but it is an appreciation and a realization of the very strong, fine, and effective counsel and advice that you have given to us. And you have proven to be so active and able and effective, and I

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1 would like to thank you again and commend you highly.

2 Dr. Kissinger: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and I
3 think back with great pride to the privilege I had of working
4 with you in very critical periods, and the patriotism and
5 wisdom that you always exhibited during very difficult
6 times.

7 Senator Stennis: Thank you.

8 The Chairman: Thank you very much, Senator Stennis.
9 Senator Wilson?

10 Senator Wilson: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Dr.
11 Kissinger, it is always good to see you and to listen to
12 you.

13 The Washington Post this morning carries a story that I
14 suppose, if I were to capsule it, would say that you think
15 that whatever faults may exist that more damage would result
16 from a failure to ratify this Treaty than to not do so,
17 because it would undermine the credibility of American
18 foreign policy with our NATO allies.

19 Dr. Kissinger: Yes. I do not think that we can
20 negotiate something over a period of years, submit it with
21 great passion to the NATO council, use a lot of body language
22 to convince the Germans to make decisions that would not have
23 been their first choice, and then say that a third of the
24 Senate plus one has refused to go along with it, and now we
25 are going back to the status quo.

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The end result would be that the Europeans would ask us to take our missiles out anyway. So we would get the worst of all worlds.

Senator Wilson: Let me ask you this then. I listened with great interest to my colleague from Michigan, Senator Levin, as he made an inquiry that I was going to make.

And let me make a different one now. Let me just ask you that if you were, were you a Member of the Senate, asked to vote on ratification of this Treaty, what reservations, if any, would you propose in light of the misgivings that you have, but the decision that you have made that the best interests of the United States requires ratification?

Dr. Kissinger: Well, I have not really studied the legal implications of reservations. Let me say what I would like to see happen, and whatever the Senate could contribute to it.

One, I have already indicated that linkage to conventional disarmament in some manner that permits a reasonable debate of where we are going.

Secondly, I would ask the Administration to put forward some strategic doctrine of where we will be from a security point of view after whatever agreement they are putting before us is made, and not on the basis of, look, they have gotten rid of half of their heavy missiles, because the targets of their heavy missiles have shrunk faster than their

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heavy missiles, under this projected agreement.

Third, some indication of where all of this process is
going to go. These would be minimum conditions of a
conceptual nature that I would put before them. Because, I
must tell you, I am deeply worried about what is going to
happen to 40 years of bipartisan effort in the NATO field.

And I am worried about this obsession with the
personality of a single Soviet leader who has so many other
pressures on him, and who could not have reached the top by
being a choker. I mean, this is not a profession that the
gentle choose.

Senator Wilson: You do not think he is the first Dale
Carnegie graduate within the Kremlin?

Dr. Kissinger: I would not want us to wind up like
Yeltsin.

Senator Wilson: I think that says it. Let me just ask
you this.

In light of what you have indicated and in light of the
recent reports from Moscow that our negotiators and the
Soviet negotiators have been instructed by Secretary Shultz
and his counterpart, Mr. Shevardnadze, to return in a month
with a draft agreement on the order, I gather, of the
Vladivostok agreement, in light of that timetable and your
expressed concern that whatever the legal forum, the
substance of a reservation speak to the necessity for linkage

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between future arms reduction, specifically strategic arms reduction, and conventional reduction.

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How is it possible for us to achieve that within the
timeframe that seems to be unfolding? Now, it is true that
signing the Treaty is one thing and ratifying it is another.
But let us assume that an effort would be made to ratify, and
maybe not. Maybe all they are talking about is a framework
agreement, although I do not find great comfort in that.

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Dr. Kissinger: I would feel a lot happier if the process
were more deliberate, because every agreement ~ creates
 generates pressures in ~ new direction.

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I have great difficulty, but it may be due to ignorance
of what has been negotiated, I have great difficulty
visualizing how verification procedures for five or six
different categories of strategic weapons can be worked out,
that are being reduced by 50 percent to as yet unknown
numbers.

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When we had such enormous difficulty working out
verification procedures for one category of weapon that was
being reduced to zero, and in which the danger of violation
is much less, but that may simply be, that may simply be a
lack of imagination.

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But what worries me is the next step. Just as the double
zero inevitably produced the triple zero pressures, if you
add the non-circumvention clauses to the agreement that

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inevitably will be added, what will happen as a next step is
pressures at both ends.

In Europe, in Germany they will say, If you can reduce
the risk to yourself in the long-range field, why can we not
reduce the risk to ourselves in the short-range field? The
Soviets will begin working on the French and British nuclear
forces in the next phase of these negotiations, and have
already said that no further reductions are possible unless
the British and French are included.

So we will work ourselves into a situation of potential
conflict with all of our partners, if we are not capable of
elaborating limits to where this process will go, and
strategies of how the resulting forces would be used.

And I really believe that this must be included in the
START discussions, and not just military statements that it
is not altering an existing situation.

Senator Wilson: In a climate of triple zero pressure,
how optimistic are you that force modernizations of a kind
that would be required to offset the conventional superiority
of the Warsaw Pact will take place based upon the history of
modernization after arms control agreements?

Dr. Kissinger: I am very uneasy. I am very uneasy with
the fact that in order to sell force modernization, we
apparently have to hook to it very substantial unilateral
reductions of our nuclear stockpile, according to some of the

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proposals that have been made before this Committee.

And I just hope we do not slide with respect to the
short-range weapons into the INF dilemma, that in order to
get a modernization we make a proposal that then comes back
and leads to the complete denuclearization.

How optimistic am I? Well, we have used up our fat in
NATO, and we either are going to face reality or we are going
to have to pay a price. And we are coming close to that
point. We are approaching that point.

The Chairman: Senator Wilson, I believe your time has
expired. We have all gone around the room. Are there any
other questions for Dr. Kissinger?

Senator Shelby: Mr. Chairman, I have one brief
question.

Senator Wilson: Thank you, Dr. Kissinger.

The Chairman: Senator Shelby?

Senator Shelby: Dr. Kissinger, you mentioned the forces
that have been unleashed. You know, we did that.

Dr. Kissinger: No, I think in fairness the Europeans
have been avoiding difficult choices for a long time.

The German domestic situation is complicated by this
century's tragedies in Germany, by the loss of two wars, and
by the basic insecurities of a people in a divided country
that we did not create, that existed.

We have perhaps not been very sensitive to the peculiar

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1 situation in Germany. Everything Senator Cohen said is
2 absolutely correct, but was not unforeseeable. That is, that
3 does not make it right.

4 We were perhaps insensitive and thought systems analysis
5 had the same significance in central Europe as it does at the
6 think tank
7 Senator Shelby: Would It be part of the message that we
8 are bringing, which is different messages, that the Germans
9 could not figure out what we really wanted or what was our
10 policy?

11 Dr. Kissinger: You know, I do not think because we
12 emerged into international politics really only after World
13 War II, the Germans we met were people like Adanauer, who we
14 thought were normal leaders, and we did not understand that
15 the Adanauer tradition was a very unusual tradition in
16 Germany, and took a very major effort to keep together. And
17 so we did not perhaps understand how fragile it was.

18 But then you cannot expect every American leader to have
19 studied the history of every country we are dealing with.

20 Senator Shelby: But it would be nice, would it not?

21 Dr. Kissinger: Well, in this case, it was a pity. But
22 the history of Germany has been so different from the history
23 of the United States that it is understandable that our
24 people did not always understand what they were really
25 talking about.

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When Senator Cohen talks about the Foreign Minister, Gensche, one has to really see that in a context which is quite different in Germany than it is here. It is a small party maneuvering between the other two parties.

And so one has to understand the domestic politic context in which he makes his proposals.

Senator Shelby: Dr. Kissinger, thank you for appearing here with us. I have certainly gotten a lot out of it.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Dr. Kissinger, as usual, you have done a splendid Job, and you have given us a great deal to think about, and a lot of cautionary signals you put up, and also some, I think, instructive suggestions.

And so we are very grateful to you. We are going to continue to have hearings, we have got to look at some of the negotiating record and we have got to have closed hearings on some of the details.

We will be in this process for some matter of weeks, if not months. Not in the Committee, but on the floor. We will be having amendments. And we would like to reserve the right to call you from time to time and impose on you for your views.

Dr. Kissinger: Whenever I can, I would be happy to do it.

The Chairman: We are very grateful. Thank you.