SECRETARY RUSK: There's an element of philosophical conflict here. When I joined President Kennedy, I did not find anything called the "State" in the drawers of my desk or in my coat closet that I was supposed to be Secretary of. I found men and women who had been set aside, under our laws and Constitution, to act for all of us with respect to certain designated responsibilities. These individuals cannot escape ordinary moral standards by something called "state action" as though raison d'etre were an excuse for doing almost anything. As a practical matter, if you're trying to influence the actions of others, you've got to take into account their basic moral commitments because most people act with respect to those moral commitments.

When I look back over this postwar period, we've been greatly strengthened by what I would call the relatively decent and simple purposes of the American people. In our relations with the rest of the world, despite occasional mistakes and disappointments, we've conducted ourselves, I think, with responsibility, restraint and generosity. I think, that's a very important element of strength for us.

(Applause)

SECRETARY MUSKIE: I think, it's very human for people holding power to tend to try to expand it, and for people holding power to be corrupted by it. That surely applies not only to actions which are visible publicly, but especially to covert actions. Of course, I would agree with the premise that there are occasions when covert actions are justifiable in the national security interest, but one has to watch carefully the expansion of that idea. And that, of course, is why the two intelligence committees of the Congress - the Intelligence Committee of the Senate and of the House - were created.

Henry has made reference to hearings which disclosed many covert actions, which up to that time had never been made public. If one wants examples of such actions - which I think ran counter to what the American people thought were their values - one could find it in those hearings. There were many of them. They made headlines at the time. Many people have forgotten them since. But those hearing, to me, were an illustration of what I said at the outset - to grant this premise is to carry risks that, from time to time, have to be checked.

MR. NEWMAN: That leads us more or less logically into the question of human rights and how far human rights should play a part in American policy. For example, President Reagan has made human rights a very considerable issue in the arms control talks with the Soviet Union. He has said that human rights is at the core of our foreign policy. Is it a good idea for human rights to be given such prominence?

SECRETARY HAIG: I'll answer that by saying that, of course, human rights is a fundamental aspect of our foreign policy. I would not suggest that Reykjavik put human rights high on the agenda. It was hardly discussed. I am suggesting that you must give due attention to that as well as the national interest, and sometimes they clash.

SECRETARY KISSINGER: I would make a different point. Human rights are obviously an important element of American foreign policy, reflecting, as they do, our fundamental values. I do not believe they have anything to do with arms control policy. In other words, if the Soviet Union lets out more immigrants, that is no reason for us to ease our arms control conditions. Arms control has to be related to national security and national strategy. Those conditions should neither be tightened or eased on the basis of the Soviet human rights record.

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An argument could conceivably be made that if the Soviets behave outrageously in oppression, no agreements of any kind should be made with them. That is something I can understand. I cannot understand saying that the terms that might be set for arms control will be influenced by Soviet behavior on human rights.

SECRETARY RUSK: I yield to no one in my interest in human rights, but I'm concerned about how we go about it. There are only about thirty constitutional democracies in the world in which human rights are in good condition. More than a hundred and thirty nations have varying degrees of Dictatorship. If we make human rights a condition for our participation with others in other major problems such as arms control, this could be a self selected road to isolation, as we withdraw into this community of constitutional democracies.

I think, we ought to work at it continuously, sympathetically, even compassionately, behind the scenes, and be a little careful about public confrontations with countries all over the world, and also without any element of sanctimony.

Twenty-five years ago, a Black ambassador coming to Washington to represent his country had great difficulty finding office space or quarters in which his staff could live. He did not know where he could have lunch or dinner in Washington, D. C. except in another embassy. He couldn't go to private clubs. He would drive his family down to a Maryland beach on a Saturday afternoon and be turned away. If he went to another part of the country, the State Department had to send somebody along in advance to make every possible detailed arrangement to see that there were no incidents.

We had one ambassador to the United Nations coming in from south of the border - a person of dark complexion. The plane stopped in Miami for a refueling, and while the other passengers were taken into the terminal to be served lunch, he was put on a folding canvas stool in a corner of the terminal and brought a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Then he got back on the plane and went on to New York. We were supposed to get his vote up there.

I have not yet recovered from what I felt when a Black ambassador sitting with your Secretary of State turned to me and said, "Mr. Secretary, where can I get a haircut?" And I could not tell him except to say, "You can get yours cut where I have mine cut, in that next little room. Anytime you want to come by, there will be a barber here in sixty minutes."

So, we have not earned the right to be sanctimonious. We've got to work with others on these matters diligently and persistently, but let's be a little careful.

(Applause)

SECRETARY MUSKIE: Probably the most visible current illustration of the problem is, of course, South Africa. We moved, I think, as a country, not only through our government, but through the private sector, very carefully over a long period of time in accommodating our view of what the situation in South Africa represents and what it ought to be. We've moved progressively to tougher positions because we've seen little or no evidence of any move on the part of the government of South Africa to move away from apartheid. The recurring question has been, through these years - and I think I can go back in my own recollection at least twenty to twenty-five years in the evolution of our attitude - about what, if anything, we should do to intervene or influence the internal affairs of South Africa? I suspect, as this time has unfolded, that increasingly we see the situation there as a destabilizing element

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in the relationship of African states to each other. That does make it of concern to the
entire world, because a totally destabilized situation there could lead to regional
destabilization and bloodshed. So, there is an international concern about what happens in
South Africa.

I think, over the years, we've done our best to leave it to the South Africans to solve it. But when we become convinced that they are not moving to solve it, then public opinion in this country pushes us to go further.

SECRETARY HAIG: Let me suggest that reasonable men can differ. One of the great problems of the recent controversy over South Africa has been the labeling of those who were opposed to sanctions and opposed to disinvestment as somehow favoring apartheid. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

As wise a woman as Mrs. Thatcher and our own President have had deep reservations about this. I, too, have. Not because I'm favoring apartheid, but because I'm looking for realistic ways. Here is this constant conflict between national interests and morality, but I'm looking for constructive ways through which reform can be achieved. Because, believe me, reform will come, either through bloody revolution or peaceful evolution and rule of law. I've been there, and I've spoken to the Black leaders of the Black majority, from Bougelaise of the Zulus to the leader of Soweto district. These are the responsible leaders of Black Africa who have worked their way into positions of respect in their own community. They've been opposed to sanctions.

MR. NEWMAN: How far should we -- I'm sorry.

SECRETARY HAIG: They've been opposed because they felt that their own people would be the first victims of this finger wagging, holier than thou American attitude. I think, that's wrong. I think it's also well to remember that our multi-nationals - European and American - have been the compelling force of pressure on the Botha government to achieve change. I would challenge the contention that they have not changed.

They have made many changes although not enough - not anywhere near enough. But if the practical consequences of this "feel good" policy here in America are to revolutionize their society - the Black leadership of which will be the first victim - and turn the southern region of Africa over to Soviet mischief, then I don't care what morality we're talking about, we've created more problems than we've solved.

(Applause)

SECRETARY MUSKIE: May I make this point: all of the arguments you've made in support of the position you've stated - at least more clearly then I could, have been made for the last twenty-five years, looking for the -- I think your phrase was - the "realistic" opportunities to change the situation there. I've used those arguments myself. I'm a member of a college board. I can remember that in the initial stages of discussion of that issue I made the arguments you've made. The finance committee of the college on its own, without any advice from the board of trustees, finally, totally divested because it did not want to be.

SECRETARY MUSKIE: I understand, and I'm not elevating the discussion beyond one of presenting all points of view.

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MR. NEWMAN: But how can we decide how far to go? For example, we exchange intelligence information with South Africa. Is this a proper thing for us to do? How do we weigh a country's human rights policies against ours?

SECRETARY HAIG: Let me explain one of the great, great mistakes of recent years. When we started out in 1981, it was a two track policy. The first was to insist relentlessly on change, but quietly, recognizing that while South Africa is not a democracy by our standards although it is governed by a democratic process. When we in the United States start this process of bludgeoning from abroad, we make it more difficult for incumbent leaders of whatever stripe to achieve the reform we are seeking. We ought to learn that in a number of areas around the world.

Secondly, we must understand that a nation that's being asked to make sacrifices for social justice at home cannot afford to be preoccupied by external threats from abroad. We had an obligation to get the Cubans out of Angola. We failed. Had we done so, I really feel that the progress achieved thus far would have been far more dramatic and led by the government being pressured by western standards and values.

SECRETARY MUSKIE: I think with respect to that situation, Al, if the South Africans had done in Libya what we thought we had set in motion -- by "we" I mean the other countries of the special group, which was working on their problem -- and if Libya had been tied to Angola, then I think there was a first step that might have had a salutary effect.

SECRETARY HAIG: Only (inaudible) --

SECRETARY MUSKIE: Once South Africa backed off from the Libyan solution, any prospect in getting the Cubans out of Angola vanished.

SECRETARY HAIG: No, no. You have the horse before the cart.

SECRETARY KISSINGER: Ed, you're the moderator, but it seems to me that we can spend an hour on this easily, and more, discussing the tactics of South Africa. But without getting to the question really which you raised, which is the influence of human rights, of which South Africa is an example. It seems to me that there are a number of questions one has to ask. One, since we cannot do everything simultaneously, as Dean Rusk suggested, what is the national interest of the United States in a particular area of the world? Secondly, what is the objective we are trying to achieve in that part of the world? Three, what price are we willing to pay to achieve that objective?

To take the case of South Africa or any one of these situations, it isn't enough to say -- let's talk about South Africa, the end of apartheid - unless you can define what you mean by the end of apartheid, because there is the aspect that here in this region would have been called segregation, and there is the aspect of political participation in government.

The first has a conceptually relatively easy solution. The second is extremely complicated when you have a White community, a Black community that is itself divided into at least eight major linguistic groups, an Indian community and a colored community. If one is attempting to change the system, one owes it to oneself to define what a democratic solution is in such a context. One has no right just to throw a match into a powder keg and then say, "Okay. You deserved this."

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It seems to me that we have not given an answer to that question when we promote upheavals in countries that we consider non-democratic. One ought to remember that revolutions are started by bringing together all those who oppose the existing system, but the test of a revolution is what you build afterwards. If we're not going to pay the price of stabilizing the upheaval we have ourselves created, then a human rights policy can contribute to chaos rather than to progress. It seems to me those are the criteria, or at least some of the criteria that ought to be applied to these questions.

(Applause)

SECRETARY RUSK: I wonder if I could add a brief postscript to what Henry Kissinger said.

Regardless of the attitudes of the various sides that seem to be pointing toward confrontation, I would like to see a stronger effort being made in the direction of trying to find a solution. So far as I can tell, the Whites will not accept Black rule in South Africa without major violence; the Blacks will not accept White rule without major violence. But, surely that need not be the end of the question. Surely, it is not beyond the reach of constitutional creativity to find an answer with which everyone could live.

I would like to see a group of constitutional experts, drawn from countries with complex ethnic and constitutional situations, like India, Yugoslavia, Nigeria, Switzerland, the United States, Canada and Australia to see what can be done and try to get away from sloganizing - this slogan "one man one vote." There would not have been a United States had we tried to pursue the basis of one man one vote. We still don't have it at the Federal level in the way we select Senators and the Electoral College System for choosing our President. But I would like to see some people working hard on what can be done. After all, in the old League of Nations days they had enormous experience in the protection of minorities in all sorts of countries. I'd like to see somebody working on an answer and not just preparing for confrontation.

(Applause)

SECRETARY MUSKIE: I couldn't agree more with what Dean Rusk has said, but I would like to make the point that what's happening in South Africa is not an upheaval that we created at all. It was created by the forces there. Secondly, this period of restraint that I think goes back at least twenty-five years and our own attitude towards intervening at all in the country of South Africa has included a search to the extent that that search would be accepted by the government of South Africa for a reasonable way to do what we're all talking about.

The Sullivan Principles clearly were advocated by Reverend Sullivan years ago as a way for American multi-national corporations doing business in South Africa. They, by their own policies, within their own organizations and their own plans, through their own employees, began to demonstrate the viability of human rights in their own operations and thus hope to influence the policies of the country. Well, they did not work. Even companies which subscribed to the Sullivan Principles did not all measure up to their own commitment, to the extent that those principles suggested.

Now we are seeing companies pulling out. Bell and Howell, the other day, pulled all of its

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operations in South Africa out. They said in their statement that they had given up on any
prospect for movement on apartheid. I agree with Henry and with Dean Rusk that we have
to have in mind a definition of what kind of progress we would like to see. Of course, we
should. That's the responsible way.

MR. NEWMAN: I would like to raise just one more point about human rights, and when I say, "one more point," you may take that as a cue.

Is it possible to weigh our human rights policy against our strategic interests in a country?
Let's say South Africa, Chile, Korea, Guatemala. You've said more than once today -- it's
been said around the table more than once in certain connections - that there are no hard and
fast rules. Is this another situation in which there are none?

SECRETARY KISSINGER: I don't know how one would really define the question. If the question is, would we rather see South Korea join the communist world or be taken over by North Korea than be associated with a less than democratic government, I would have to say no. I say that foreign policy has to begin with insuring the survival of the United States; because if we don't survive, our values will go down as well.

The art of foreign policy, however, in the vast majority of cases is to prevent such stark
choices from having to be made. If one gets down to such a stark choice, it is often a failure
of one's foreign policy. So, as a general principle, I would say if it gets down to it, I would
have to choose the fundamental strategic interests. I would also hope that one can avoid
getting down to that question.

SECRETARY MUSKIE: That's a particularly difficult situation in South Korea because it's own domestic tranquility affects its ability to protect its survival and security as well as affect our national security interests. It's very difficult to find the ways to apply pressure or influence, whatever benign word you want to use, upon the government of South Korea to move toward the democratization of their political processes which they have promised. But they have been very slow to move in that way. They have argued that the protection of their security interests governs the pace of their movement.

SECRETARY KISSINGER: I'd like to say two things. First, I'm reasonably optimistic that Korea will evolve in a more democratic direction. Secondly, it is important, especially in non-western societies, for us to understand the cultural background and history before we apply American criteria too literally.

(Applause)

SECRETARY KISSINGER: Because the end result of excessive literalness could be an
upheaval at the end of which there is not more democracy but either chaos or a new form of
dictatorship. All I'm saying is one should understand the historical process and deal with it
with great sensitivity.

MR. NEWMAN: I want to turn now to relations with the Soviet Union. There are, I think it's fair to say, two opposing interpretations of the Soviet Union. One is that it is an evil empire, responsible for much of the unrest in the world. The second view is that the Soviet Union is somewhat frightened, somewhat scared, and a somewhat isolated nation, fearful of enemies real and imagined. Which of these is more accurate?

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SECRETARY HAIG: All of the above.

In many respects, Ed, these may be irrelevant questions, irrelevant labels. We have to be guided in our assessment of the Soviet Union by not theology, but objective reality. And that objective reality, of course, would suggest that we have an expansive society, the internal arrangements of which are totally alien to the human rights values that have outraged us so much in South Africa. But somehow we seem to overlook when it comes to Moscow.

(Applause)

SECRETARY HAIG: It is a question always of recognizing that despite these value judgments of the heinous character of the Soviet system and their motives, they're going to be as dominated by self-interest as they are by ideology. The challenge for American statecraft is to create a calculus of self interest in Moscow which would lead them, however briefly, to more moderate conduct abroad, the rejection of bloodshed, terrorism and so called "wars of liberation," and some acceptance of peaceful change through rule of law.

Now, I happen to believe that that's always a direct outcome of the correlation of forces at a given moment in history, and that's why I'm optimistic about our ability to do this.

MR. NEWMAN: You mean, you think, we have superior forces at the moment?

SECRETARY HAIG: When I say, "correlation of forces," I'm not talking about tanks and guns. I'm talking about economics, moral, ideological, political and security assets. Today, the West and Western industrialized societies are moving, I think, far more positively in the correlation of forces if they have the good sense to stay together. The Soviet system is in a state of historic collapse. It won't happen in your lifetime or mine, but this correlation of forces is available to conduct enlightened statecraft.

SECRETARY RUSK: We're all about to be wrestling with things which we ought to forget, but there are some things I cannot forget. Just after V-J Day, the United States demobilized almost completely, almost overnight. By the summer of 1946, the staff of the Joint Chiefs were telling us in the State Department that we did not have one division in our army, nor one group in our air force that could be called ready for combat. The ships of our navy were being put into mothballs almost as fast as we could find berths for them, and those that remained afloat were being manned by skeleton crews. Our defense budget for three fiscal years came down to just a little over eleven billion dollars a year.

Now, Joseph Stalin sat over there in Moscow, looked out across the West, and saw the divisions melting away. He tried to keep the northwest province of Iran, Azerbaijan - the first case before the U. N. Security Council. He demanded two eastern provinces of Turkey, Karzan and Aderhand. He supported the guerillas going after Greece, using bases in places like Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. He brushed aside some of the wartime agreements that would seem to have given the peoples of eastern Europe some say in their political future. He had a hand in the communist coup d'état in Czechoslovakia. He blockaded Berlin. He gave the green light to the North Koreans to go after the South Koreans. And this all in a period when we were disarmed.

Now, to me, those were the events that launched the Cold War. I think we may have contributed to the Cold War in that we may have subjected Mr. Stalin to intolerable

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temptations through our own weakness. So, I think, we have to be careful that we do not put
ourselves in that kind of position again.

But on the other side, during the very serious Berlin crisis of 1961 - 1962 and the Cuban
missile crisis, President Kennedy and his chief associates felt that it was just too late in
history to pursue a policy of total hostility toward that other nuclear superpower. Things
were put in motion which produced the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a civil air agreement, a
consular agreement, a nonproliferation treaty, an important space treaty, improvement in
trade, et cetera.

On one hand, we have to be careful not to tempt thieves, but on the other hand we have to try
to resolve outstanding problems in order that we can live on this earth at the same time and
that requires some doing. It's not easy sometimes for the general public to understand how
these two things work parallel. But I'm relatively optimistic, because we've learned in the
last forty-one years that the fingers on the nuclear trigger are not itchy, just waiting for a
pretext to launch these dreadful weapons.

I think we've learned that the Soviet leaders have no more interest in destroying Mother
Russia than our leaders have in destroying our beloved America. I must confess -- and my
colleagues may disagree with me -- that despite all the doomsday talk going around these
days, I myself cannot put my finger on a single real situation in the real world that is
pointing toward nuclear war. I believe that the Cuban missile crisis was the last occasion
when there was any significant possibility of nuclear war. I hope we can continue to work
at it with these people, difficult as they are, however angry they might make us at times, to
see if we cannot resolve some of these problems without that mortal conflict which simply
must not occur.

(Applause)

SECRETARY KISSINGER: The question as you put it, seems to me to illustrate the way
Americans often look at foreign policy, either identifying it with psychiatry on the one hand
by analyzing the intentions of the Soviet Union, or with a theology on the other hand, by
judging its moral qualities. So periods of confrontation are in the hands of theologians, and
periods of relaxation are in the hands of psychiatrists. Therefore, we oscillate back and
forth. Yes, I will agree that the Soviet Union feels threatened, but the question is not
whether they feel threatened, but what it takes to reassure them. If the only way they can
be reassured is by the impotence of everybody else, then their search of security has the
consequence of making everybody else insecure. The question is: Will they be willing to
live with relative security rather than absolute security, which is what every other nation has
to live with?

Russia under the Tsars and commissars has expanded in every century. Any look at a
historical atlas will show this. Yes, they've been invaded, but at the end of the process
they've expanded. That is a fact one has to deal with.

This problem of freezing oneself into a posture of confrontation is that democracies cannot
sustain this and will not sustain it. Then it doesn't show a way out. The difficulty, we'll
see with what I call "the psychiatric approach," is that it gives us no criteria for progress. I
agree that we are condemned to coexistence by nuclear weapons. We must find a way of
coexisting, but we must also be precise. There is a tendency -- and I've been a part of it;
Dean Rusk mentioned some examples -- where in periods of relaxation you sign cultural

30

agreements, consular agreements, exchanges. But at the end that does not do much more
than improve the atmosphere, and there has to be an end to expansionism. There has to be
precise criteria for arms control. Arms control is now trapped in the position that the
theory was developed thirty years ago, and the technology has advanced enormously since
then, and that many of the concepts that were valid thirty years ago no longer apply. We
haven't developed new ones for many reasons. There is, in my view, a great opportunity in
the fact that the Soviet governmental system is in difficulty and that the Soviet economic
system is a shambles. By any objective analysis, the Soviets need agreements more than we
do. But if we cannot translate this into specific conditions in our own mind, then
opportunity will be missed.

MR. NEWMAN: May I ask you to apply what you've just said to the strategic defense initiative?

SECRETARY KISSINGER: Well, I am a supporter of the concept of strategic defense, maybe not with all of the justifications that have been given by the administration, but as a basic concept and for these reasons. One, I believe nuclear weapons will be a component of strategy for the indefinite future. They cannot be abolished for many practical reasons. Two, I do not see how a democratic leadership can tell its public that its own extermination is the key to its security and will make no effort to protect it. Three, I believe we are in this sense in a precarious situation, that if a nuclear war ever starts and I agree with Dean's analysis that it is highly unlikely and that the calculations are almost engineering calculations - the Strategic Defense Initiative would add an element of considerable uncertainty to the calculations of an aggressor. To be sure, the Strategic Defense Initiative should be negotiated in its magnitude, in the same relationship and in the same way, as offensive weapons. The lower the offensive, the fewer need be the defensive weapons.

The Soviet pressure at the moment to abolish the Strategic Defense Initiative bothers me, because under any agreement they will continue to work on research. The reality in this country is that once we have put it under an extended moratorium, we will slacken our efforts because the country which does not want to devote money to its services, will not want it. I am prepared -- I would be prepared to inhibit deployment in relation to offensive weapons, but not technology.

It makes no sense to begin the process of arms control with weapons that are aimed at weapons, and to preserve the weapons that are aimed at people.

(Applause)

MR. NEWMAN: Why is the Soviet Union so opposed, at any rate in public, to SDI? Is it for economic reasons?

SECRETARY KISSINGER: Because they know that the very groups abroad that today march against SDI will march tomorrow against a contest of deterrents based on undefended civilian populations. It is a way to promote pacifism and unilateral disarmament. Secondly, it adds an element of uncertainty to their calculations. Third, it will deflect resources from their offensive weapons to other weapons. They're always very sensitive to defense by the United States. They were so in '69. But one should ask oneself why that is.

SECRETARY HAIG: Let me add two other considerations. The one, of course, being the currently touted one, is that they fear America's ability and technology. But I would

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suggest through the twenty years lead they have on us in certain of these areas, especially ground laser systems - they are very, very fearful of not only the defensive potential of SDI, but it's offensive potential. They have, probably, firsthand knowledge through applied research.

**SECRETARY KISSINGER:** Once again, one has to keep in mind that the offensive potential is not now banned by any treaty and is not under negotiation. This is the ironical aspect of this negotiation that if we wanted tomorrow morning to place offensive weapons in space, there is no existing international agreement, no any ongoing negotiations, that would ban this.

**SECRETARY RUSK:** I would have to say that I disagree in certain nuances with my friends across the table. I support research on SDI as a hedge against a breakthrough in the state of the art by someone else and because I see no practical way to verify a ban on research. But I'm appalled by the prospect of moving the arms race into outer space. Surely the most economical, quickest, easiest way to get rid of a missile is with a wrench and a screwdriver, and not by spending hundreds of billions of dollars to put these things in outer-space that can shoot down these missiles after they have been launched.

(Applause)

**SECRETARY RUSK:** I would predict myself -- I probably won't be around to collect on it - that a future President and a future Congress will simply not go down that trail. I fault the Russians for not taking a little more of a gamble here - because they too have scientists and technical people, and they know that this is a very hypothetical possibility - with a major chance that it simply won't work out from a scientific and technical point of view. Therefore, they ought to get on with the serious and real problems of putting some limits on the arms race and not let SDI become an obstacle.

If we had just gone ahead with research that was already in progress without making it a major, public issue on top of the table with Mr. Reagan's speech of 1983, then I think we'd have had no problem. But I see very grave problems if we're going to allow this particular issue to get in the way of significant arms reduction discussions.

I myself would hope that the United States, the Soviet Union, and other space launching powers would agree as soon as possible to ban the placing of weapons in outer space. I do not believe that either the Soviet Union or the United States would accept a significant number of space stations in space, hovering above us in stationary orbit with the capability of firing lasers or particle beams or anything of that sort.

It seems to me that moving the arms race into outer space would be politically inflammatory, militarily futile, economically absurd, and aesthetically repulsive.

(Applause)

**SECRETARY KISSINGER:** When President Reagan made his speech on SDI, I actually was not in favor of it because I was imprisoned in the traditional categories. I must say that without his speech we would not now have the negotiations that are going on. I do not see what else we have in our program that the Soviets have raised any particular issue about. Secondly, the deployment of space-based weapons and offensive weapons can be reduced and eliminated to the degree that offensive weapons are also eliminated or reduced.

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It seems to me that everything you have said about space - based weapons is true of city busting weapons (that are now in the armories of the major companies) and the multiplication of warheads put on these missiles. These two problems have to be solved together. Your objection is as valid on Earth as it is in space.

**SECRETARY MUSKIE:** Might I throw in here? This is too important an issue for me to be silent on. I have two or three reservations about SDI. Number one, I share Dean Rusks reservations about whether or not it can be done scientifically, and I'm prepared to go ahead with research. Secondly, the history of the technology of nuclear weapons is that each new development triggers another round at a higher level in the arms race. This is true of the MIRV development, which more than any other single development up to now has created many of the problems that are so difficult to resolve today, and we ought to recognize that. Thirdly, once we are able to put weapons in outer space, the difference between defensive and offensive weapons would disappear, because having achieved that technology, we can apply it to offensive weapons as well as defensive.

But then I'd like to say this: I think this is an issue that can be resolved in undertaking to structure and arms control agreement. I understand the Russian position, I think, and I understand the administration's position. If what we're talking about is defining, in point, the beyond mere laboratory research and testing in outer space, let alone deployment, then there are very logical ways to identify such points. If both parties are interested in doing so. I think that the dialogue ought to go beyond the discussion of this issue in Reykjavik, and undertake to identify such points. I would hope that there is such a point because I think it important that each of the super powers exercise restraint on the other in developing technology. It moves so fast and so rapidly that unless there is a point of restraint applied to both, it can overwhelm us before common and true perception of our national security interests are protected.

**SECRETARY KISSINGER:** Ed, what bothers me in the shifting positions is that if you analyze the Soviet proposals at Reykjavik or at Geneva, they carefully maintain every existing threat. In their version of the fifty percent cut, their threat to our land based missiles is not reduced; the threat to our sea based missiles is increased; the threat to our population is maintained. It is primarily a symbolic gesture. If they were willing to abolish their heavy missiles; if they would agree, mutually, that we do away with multiple warheads and put single warheads on our missiles so that the danger of surprise attack or a first strike is reduced, then the problem of SDI would take on a different connotation. But as long as they keep proposing percentage cuts in categories where they are numerically superior, therefore, a fifty percent cut or any percentage cut is relatively more disadvantageous for us then for him. We are in an area of symbolic agreements and not substantive agreements. What we have to do is to get them to agree to something that we can actually say changes the situation.

Of course, any agreement must be to the mutual benefit. We can't get something that is only to our benefit. But, so far, the Soviet proposals, propositions, have been that we should give up SDI - or, in effect, give up SDI - while every other threat is maintained at a slightly less costly level to themselves. That cannot be the basis of an agreement.

(Applause)

**SECRETARY MUSKIE:** I understand the proposals that were tabled at Reykjavik.

33

There's a range there that makes it possible, if both sides are interested in doing so, to arrive at an agreement. Of course, we wouldn't agree to the kind of hypothetical proposal that you posed.

SECRETARY KISSINGER: I know, but that's the actual proposal. That is --

SECRETARY MUSKIE: I'm not suggesting compromising I'm talking about --

SECRETARY KISSINGER: I understand what you're saying on SDI. You are saying that we can move it out or the testing past of the testing out of the laboratory and come to a definition of testing that we can live with.

SECRETARY MUSKIE: No. I think so, but we need to go beyond that, obviously. I'm not going to give them a blank check on offensive weapons. For example, out of Reykjavik, we could agree on a five year basis -- not that they agreed to this -- to a limitation of sixteen hundred launchers and six thousand weapons. The sublimits would have to be worked out.

SECRETARY KISSINGER: It depends on what we pay for it.

SECRETARY MUSKIE: It depends on what we pay for it. That kind of objective, I think, could be worked out. It hasn't been worked out. One of the things that I am unhappy about with Reykjavik is the implication or suggestion that because these items were put on the table that there was agreement when in fact there wasn't agreement. There's been no agreement at Reykjavik. These things have to be worked out.

SECRETARY HAIG: Let me add just a little irony here, because I share precisely the view of Dr. Kissinger as expressed. The irony of this is that SDI has become important because of American reluctance to cope with emerging Soviet threats. You know, for years we've been debating whether or not we, as a nation could afford to deploy ballistic counters to the Soviet's three to one ballistic superiority in ballistic systems. I don't have to tell you about the MX debate and the debate over the mini missile. We've created a vacuum in our own vulnerability that makes this SDI so amazingly significant. And let me suggest, also, that some of the arguments I'm hearing against SDI are the same arguments I heard against deploying MX's in the face of Soviet deployments of SS-19's, 18's, 24's and 25's, while we have sat and neutralized ourselves with internal debate here in America.

I also think, there's another lesson from SDI. The Soviets will never negotiate meaningful reductions until we pose to them the alternative of America having the guts and the unity to match them if we have to.

(Applause)

SECRETARY MUSKIE: May I say we have now posed that in SDI. No one around this table has advocated backing off from SDI. What I've advocated is finding a way to agree on SDI. Henry referred to SDI as though it were a bargaining chip. Well, if it is that, to the extent that it is - then let's use it to work out an agreement on SDI and, at the same time, work out an agreement on offensive weapons.

MR. NEWMAN: Somebody has to have the last word, and I have now decided that it has been had. We're going to take a couple of questions from the audience, and I don't want to keep the people who are going to be asking the questions standing, but there is one subject we

34

ought to get to, and I ask you to be brief on it if there's something you want to say, and that is
Nicaragua. Is the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua a threat to the vital interests of the
United States? Does anybody want to say anything about that? And, as I say, if you can be
brief, please do.

SECRETARY HAIG: I don't think we would really care whether by free choice the people of Nicaragua selected a communist regime. Frankly, we shouldn't put ourselves in the position of saying, "We have the right to determine."

What gives Nicaragua its strategic dimension is the Cuban presence in Nicaragua and the Soviet manipulation of that presence. I would also make the outrageous statement that if it were not for those two elements, the Nicaraguan people would take care of Marxism overnight. They'd throw them out on their ear.

(Applause)

SECRETARY HAIG: And that's why we simply haven't been going about the problem right in that region.

SECRETARY RUSK: My views on that are not typical of many Democrats. I think, the administration has a problem in that it has not presented to the public, or to other governments, a clear, convincing, factual case as to just what it is that the Sandinistas are doing in countries like El Salvador and Costa Rica and Honduras. From such facts would flow many consequences.

Secondly, I think that they suffer from the fact that there is so little solidarity in the hemisphere with respect to these issues. But, I must say that if the facts are as alleged, then I myself would be very serious about Nicaragua. Back in 1964, Castro was caught red-handed landing men and arms on the coast of Venezuela. The foreign ministers of the OAS met at that time and imposed upon Castro all of the sanctions that are available out of the Rios Pact, with the exception of use of armed force. At the time, the OAS said to Castro, "If these activities continue, we do not exclude the use of armed force." So, I would be very serious about it. But I must confess that I am still somewhat puzzled about just what the facts are and what we can do to build up solidarity in the hemisphere where it's a problem for everybody and not just a unilateral problem for the United States.

SECRETARY KISSINGER: I was Chairman of a bipartisan Commission for Central America, a position for which like the briefings on Viet Nam there were not very many applicants at the time. That commission, unanimously, agreed that Nicaragua, with its Cuban and Soviet connection, was a major threat to all surrounding countries and to the stability of the region. I think that Al Haig has pointed out the real alternatives we have. Do we insist on overthrowing the Sandinista government, or should our primary national objective be to separate it or to remove the Cuban and Soviet influence from Central America?

I would think that a Nicaraguan government that had Latin American advisors rather than Cuban advisors; whose army was on the same level as that of other Central American countries rather than a size of ninety thousand; that took its economic help from democratic nations rather than six hundred million dollars from the Soviet Union; that if conditions such as this could be achieved, then what form of government exists in Nicaragua is not a vital interest of the United States, although we would have a preference.

35

However, as long as there are ten thousand Cuban so called, "advisors" there, plus thousands of others from Bulgaria, Libya (whose only common feature is hostility to the United States and who surely wouldn't be in Nicaragua on any other basis) East Germany, and so forth -- as long as they have an army nearly as large as Mexico's, they are a major threat. We have to face that.

MR. NEWMAN: Mr. Muskie, the last word before the questions.

SECRETARY MUSKIE: I don't know what to do with the last word, but the question was whether any vital interest of the United States is involved. I agree with Secretary Haig's answer to that question. No. What troubles me about Nicaragua -- and I'll try to make this two or three sentences -- is that here we are; we have normal diplomatic relations with Nicaragua; recognize their government; they recognize ours. Yet, we are investing another hundred million dollars supporting a rebel faction undertaking to overthrow that government, or at least to change its policies in ways which give them a role in that government. I find that an inconsistent position for us to be in.

I think, Al Haig has put his fingers on what we need to attack, to get at, and that is the Cuban and Russian involvement there, whatever the dimensions of that, (and I really don't know because I don't have access to the intelligence). As Dean Rusk has said, I think, that that's what we ought to focus on. But I am concerned about the over-emphasis, or the almost total emphasis, on a military solution to the problem.

(Applause)

SECRETARY HAIG: Let me just add one observation. What's happened to derail our Central American policies is this: On the one hand, concern about expansionism, and on the other an expression that somehow we claim the right to determine the kinds of regimes that will exist in Central America and we'll take direct action in those countries to overthrow Marxism.

To me, the United States should be an advocate of rule of law, and as an advocate of a rule of law, we have every right to insist that Castro's Cuba and the Soviet Union butt out of the internal affairs of Central American republics. When we start the same, we create these ambiguities and confusions, which are the overtones of your answer.

MR. NEWMAN: Thank you, gentlemen. We'll go now to the audience.

UNKNOWN VOICE: (Inaudible)

MR. NEWMAN: This was not quite the question I had in mind, but okay, you go ahead.

UNKNOWN VOICE: (Inaudible)

SECRETARY RUSK: Beginning with the days of Franklin Roosevelt, the United States transformed the Monroe Doctrine into a multilateral instrument through the charter of the Organization of American States and the Rio Treaty. It becomes especially important for us therefore to have as much hemispheric solidarity as possible in any action taken. Remember, the Organization of American States was infinitely and unanimously in support of the idea that the missiles in Cuba were a threat to the security of the western hemisphere,

36

and demanded that they be removed. So it would be very (inaudible) for us to proceed unilaterally on the basis of the Monroe Doctrine, but it's entirely possible for us to move through the Organization of American States. After all, in January, 1962, the Organization of American States expelled the Castro government from participation in the OAS on the grounds that Marxist/Leninism was simply contrary to the political traditions of the western hemisphere; so I hope we can move in that direction and not leave this matter in effect a unilateral problem for the United States.

MR. NEWMAN: We are going to get questions now from the audience, questions from two distinguished members of the audience, the first of whom is Mayor Andrew Young of Atlanta.

MAYOR YOUNG: Let me thank you very much for some exciting discussion of foreign policy, and let me thank this audience who really has been very, very attentive, and I think you've really been a big hit for all of us today.

(Applause)

MAYOR YOUNG: My question is the choice between aggressive approaches to human rights, which we did, I think, to some extent and with some success starting with Secretary Kissinger in Zimbabwe, later in the Philippines. Are those two situations in any way relevant to the situation we now find in Korea and in South Africa? Would a similar aggressive approach by the Executive Branch, supported by our allies, possibly have the same possible successful result?

SECRETARY RUSK: I'm concerned that we could drive the Afrikaners in South Africa into a logger mentality, circle the wagons and fight it out with the enormous power they have on their side, without moving appreciably toward a decision.

I happened to have a conference with the present foreign minister of South Africa, Mr. Botha, just as he was leaving his post as ambassador in Washington, and I told him I thought that they should put aside their reactions to international opinion on these matters, because that pressed them into developing this logger mentality, and deal with the problem they have at their doorsteps, mainly these millions of Blacks who cannot possibly live under the present circumstances. So, again, I would hope that somehow we could contribute to a solution, but I don't see that at the moment except in terms of violent confrontations, and I have very deep misgivings about the results of that.

MR. NEWMAN: The next questions comes from Governor Gerald L. Baliles of Virginia.

Governor?

GOVERNOR BALILES: Gentlemen, I would add my thanks to that of Mayor Young for your participation this afternoon, but I would add our collective thanks for your years of service for the development of foreign policy choices for this country.

My question is this. According to a recent front page report in the *Washington Post*, a study commissioned by Secretary Shultz found a serious lack of language ability in our foreign service. This coincides with a recent report issued by the Southern Governor's Association. Doesn't this hurt the ability to conduct foreign policy? For example, isn't this partly responsible for our difficulties in dealing with the Iranian situation during the fall of the

37

Shah? And aren't there other examples where the lack of language competence has impaired the ability of this country to deal with foreign emergencies?

SECRETARY KISSINGER: First, with respect to the fall of the Shah, my impression is that what went wrong there was a real conceptual breakdown in this sense. When people said we should have more contact with the opposition, what they really meant was with politicians in Teheran. I was in office for eight years. I never heard - the name of Khoumeini in any intelligence report. I never realized -- nobody ever told me that the mullahs were a political force in Iran. I think this was true of our successors as well, and under whom the revolution actually took place. This was a case where the problem had been totally misunderstood.

Would more Farsi speakers have enabled us to understand it better? Certainly. A better understanding of the history and culture of Iran would surely have helped us. As a general proposition - I don't know the statistics, but if these reports are correct - it certainly complicates the conduct of our foreign policy. As a general rule, we should have many linguists in these countries in our embassies, and not just linguists, but people who understand their culture and their social borders. That is an absolute prerequisite for foreign policy.

(Applause)

SECRETARY RUSK: I think the Governor has raised a very important point. We've been making steady progress in this direction over a period of time. I remember at one point seeing a figure that sixty percent of our foreign service officers spoke the language of the country in which they were assigned, and that included many of the "weird" languages in the world. But I've heard very recently that the foreign language program of the Department of State has been abandoned for budgetary reasons. I personally feel that that would be an unmitigated disaster, and I appreciate the Governor's raising this question with us.

MR. NEWMAN: Gentlemen, Secretary Haig, Secretary Kissinger, Secretary Rusk, Secretary Muskie, thank you all for your participation today.

(Applause)

MR. NEWMAN: And thanks also to the audience here in the Civic Center in Atlanta.

38

ABC NEWS

7 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023

Transcripts: Journal Graphics, Inc., 2 John Street, New York, NY 10038

Press contact: Laura Wessner (212) 887-4995

January 22, 1987

Show #1478

NIGHTLINE

Kissinger interview

TED KOPPEL
In Washington

Anchor

HENRY KISSINGER
Guests:
In New York

Former Secretary of State

RICHARD KAPLAN

Executive Producer

Copyright (C) 1987 by American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.

Transcript produced by Journal Graphics, Inc., New York, NY

TRANSCRIPT CHARGES: One to ten copies: $8.00 each; additional copies, $1.00 each. Be sure to indicate air date and subject or participants. All orders must be prepaid. Annual subscriptions at $225 per year. Indicate starting date and enclose payment.

p.6

1-07 08:01

ABC NEWS NIGHTLINE Show #1478

Air Date: January 22, 1987

Kissinger Interview

**TED KOPPEL (voice-over):** Henry Kissinger has been there. He knows the pitfalls of foreign policy, on dealing with terrorists.

**HENRY KISSINGER, former secretary of state:** The only safe position with hostages is to say you will not negotiate.

**KOPPEL (voice-over):** On protecting the President from embarrassment or worse.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** If you know this is a president who is given to leaps, you owe it to him to tell him where a leap could go wrong.

**KOPPEL (voice-over):** On President Reagan's research.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** What was put before him is amazingly sloppy, superficial—

**KOPPEL (voice-over):** Tonight, some unusually blunt comments from Henry Kissinger on this past year in U.S. foreign policy.

(on-camera) Good evening. I'm Ted Koppel, and this is Nightline.

(voice-over) Kissinger on the bureaucracy:

**Dr. KISSINGER:** —if you don't watch them, the bureaucracy gives you three options: nuclear war, unconditional surrender, and their preference.

**KOPPEL:** And on the unplanned summit at Reykjavik:

**Dr. KISSINGER:** I thought it was a badly dangerous procedure.

**KOPPEL:** Our guest, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

**ANNOUNCER:** This is ABC News Nightline. Reporting from Washington, Ted Koppel.

**KOPPEL:** He became a figure of worldwide importance as the principle foreign policy adviser to Presidents Nixon and Ford. He served in both administrations as secretary of state, but began with President Nixon as head of the National Security Council. Before that, he had served as adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, and many of the world's leaders today studied foreign policy under Professor Henry Kissinger at Harvard. He knows the territory. He also knows that it is a mine field. Dr. Kissinger has stepped on a few of those mines himself, among them Vietnam and Chile. But few people alive are better qualified to assess where, how and why U.S. foreign policy is in trouble. We spoke to Dr. Kissinger yesterday at his office in New York. We began with the subject of hostages, and the wisdom or folly of selling weapons to Iran.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** You have to remember that at any one point, there are tens of thousands of Americans around. So you have to weigh the price you pay for releasing any four or five of them against the added inducement that any number might be taken if the idea gets around that you can pay a price. Secondly, you have to understand what many of these terrorist groups are attempting to do. They are trying to show — especially the Middle Eastern ones — they're trying to show that if the United States cannot protect its own citizens, and if the United States can be made to pay ransom for its own citizens, that then those people in the Middle East who rely on America protection or American support cannot possibly count on it. And, therefore, they are undermining the whole American position in the Middle East.

**DAVID REED, nephew of hostage:** We are extremely concerned as a family for Frank's mental health, for his safety in captivity, and we pray for humane treatment.

**PEGGY SAY, sister of hostage:** What's wrong here? Where did Terry Anderson as a journalist get lost in the shuffle and Nick Daniloff is out in 30 days.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** When you meet the hostage families, of course, it's a very moving and upsetting experience. But if you once establish the principle that a price will be paid for hostages, then you can trigger a whole set of events whose long-term cost will be greater than whatever punishment is involved with the hostages.

**KOPPEL:** Dr. Kissinger, again and again and again, the vice president, within the past 48 hours, has restated the administration's policy: we do not deal for hostages.

**Vice President BUSH:** We do not make concessions to terrorists. We will go the extra mile to free those American hostages.

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S.P.

JUN 23, 1987 10:32 NIGHTLINE

**Dr. KISSINGER:** The two things cannot be reconciled. The only safe position with hostages is to say we will not negotiate, painful as it is. Once you open negotiations, you have indicated that there is a price you're going to pay, and you're haggling about the price. You've given up the principle, and my strong temptation would be to say, "If you have said that you can control release of the hostages, there's no possibility of getting anything from us until the hostages are released. If any harm comes to the hostages, we will take retaliation." Now what— that would have to be studied more carefully than I have studied it.

**KOPPEL:** In terms of public stance, though, no one could have taken a tougher public stance than Ronald Reagan. No one could have backed that tougher public stance with tougher action than what he did against Libya, for example.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** That did a lot of good. It made the Syrians more cautious, it—not much has been heard from the Libyans since then in the field of terrorism. But, that stance was vitiated by the fact that the key actors knew that while we were doing that, we were paying off the Iranians, who are the more formidable opponent. After all, when you use arms dealers from the Middle East to ship arms into Iran, when you do it via Israel, that may be a secret to the American public, but it surely was not a secret to some of the key players in that area. My criticism of this action from a procedure point of view—I can understand how a president, seeing the families and knowing somebody's getting tortured, is overwhelmed with human feelings, but somebody should go to him and say, "Now, Mr. President, if you do this, the following will happen. You do it through Khashoggi, [ADNAN KHASHOGGI Saudi Arabian businessman, arms dealer]"

and he will pick up a telephone and call Fahd within 30 seconds."

**KOPPEL:** The king of Saudi Arabia.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** The king of Saudi Arabia. So the Saudis will know immediately that you're shipping arms, even though your secretary of state has pledged to the Gulf Council, which is the nations of which Saudi Arabia is the key, that not only will we not send any arms, but we don't want anyone else to send any arms. What will the king of Saudi Arabia conclude? One, since he assumes that we know what we're doing, he has to assume— and that this is not trust, a compassionate thing, he must assume that we want the Iranians to win the war. If that is our policy, and since they think the Iranians have the upper hand anyway, then they have to get themselves into a position where they are not the last fighter on the barricades, and they want to preempt this. But, if by chance, they did believe that all we were interested in was hostages, then they could only conclude that if the Americans are so worried about four prisoners, how can we expect them to run the risks of hundreds of casualties, if not more, for our defense, to which they have pledged themselves. So, whatever theory you assume, once we got into this arms shipment to Iran, the consequences among the moderate Arabs had to be serious. And in the documents that I have seen that have been published, I see no reference to that at all.

**KOPPEL:** When we come back, Dr. Kissinger focuses on the National Security Council — what it should be doing and what, over the past couple of years, it has done.

[Commercial break]

**KOPPEL:** The full story, of course, is still not yet known. From what is known, it appears that former national security adviser John Polindexter and one of his aides, Lt. Col. Oliver North, ran certain aspects of foreign policy — arms sales to Iran, profits to the contras — with President Reagan only partially informed.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** What the President desperately needs — any president — is a clear statement of the options. I use to say jokingly that if you don't watch them, the bureaucracy gives you three options: nuclear war, unconditional surrender, and their preference. And what the President needs is to understand the consequences of various courses of action. Any president can make a mistake. But when he makes a mistake, he should have the consolation of knowing that he did it on the basis of choices he considered, and then took the wrong one. What's hard to take, for a government, is that he never even got a chance to consider the things that turned out to be disastrous. Now, in a case like this, to sell arms to Iran when your an-

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JUN 23 '87 10:31 NIGHTLINE

nounced policy is not to sell it — when you, in effect, do something that looks like
ransoming hostages when your announced policy is that you shouldn't, somebody
should have put down the arguments that overwhelm these obvious inconsistencies.
And when your secretary of state and defense disagree, I think the President's
entitled to know why they disagree. What was put before him is amazingly sloppy,
superficial, and out of any proportion to the gravity of what he was being asked to
do. And so I don't know: did he understand that he was overruling them on an issue
of principle, or did he think this is like the numbers in the arms control negotia-
tions, where he has to grab one and go with it? I don't know.

**KOPPEL:** Part of it is a function of what the National Security Council ought to do and what it has been doing. This National Security Council, or at least the one that was in place until a few months ago, became quite literally an operational branch of government. Good? Bad?

**Dr. KISSINGER:** I think potentially disastrous, because— for two reasons: one, the—
I don't oppose using the National Security Council for specific limited operational
missions. Indeed, when I headed it, it was used for specific, limited operational mis-
sions. But its principal overriding function is to make sure that the President
engages in an orderly decision-making process, and that he knows the major consid-
erations that bear on a decision. In any event, many of the staff members of the
National Security Council were chosen for ideological purity rather than for experi-
ence in foreign policy, so they had a temptation to go to more extreme positions,
and there was no countervailing force to check them.

**KOPPEL:** Let me come at it another way. You've got a situation here, for example,
in Nicaragua, where the President's point of view is unambiguous.

**Press. RONALD REAGAN (January 29, 1981):** The only morality they recognize is what will further their cause.

**[February 6, 1985]:** The Sandanista dictatorship of Nicaragua, with full
Cuban Soviet bloc support, not only persecutes its people, the church, and
denies a free press, but arms and provides bases for Communist terrorists at-
tacking neighboring states.

**[June 4, 1986]:** A Communist Nicaragua, aligned with the Soviet Union, is
a permanent threat to us all.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** The President may feel that the world would be better off without the Sandanista government. He may be heavily committed to doing it. But that is not the same as saying, "Disregard a congressional instruction to the contrary, that prevents me from doing what I want to do." Now, I have some sympathy for this problem. The President is deeply convinced that his cause is right. And, I think, on balance, his analysis is better than that of his critics on this issue. Congress prohibits him from doing what he wants to have done. He feels convinced that within six months he can turn the Congress around, that he will then start looking around, and even more, his staff looks around, how he gets through those six months is an understandable emotion, though it does not justify illegal actions. On the other hand, all of his experts tell him that if he gets $100 million out of the Congress, he's doing terrifically well. For any administration, including the ones I have served, there is always the temptation to follow the Leo Durocher principle: use your best pitcher today because tomorrow it may rain. So, if you can get $100 million this year, then maybe something will happen next year.

**KOPPEL (voice-over):** Blocked by Congress from giving what he believed to be essential aid to the contras, President Reagan authorized several end runs around Congress. Representatives of the President became involved in a sort of a privatization of foreign policy, soliciting money from like-minded citizens at home and from sympathetic governments like Brunei, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia abroad.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** I have sympathy for the dilemma of a president in that situation. When you go to Brunei, which is about as far away from the world— in the world from Nicaragua as you can get, then you go to Saudi Arabia and you say there, "We can't handle a problem 400 miles from our border that we think is a threat to our national security. Will you please kick in $X million, and will you put it in a private bank account in Switzerland, so we— and we don't even have a regular machinery

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11:23 87 10:29 NIGHTLINE

for dispersing it," it must raise questions about how you can conduct yourself on those issues that are of greatest consequence to them.

**KOPPEL:** When we come back, Henry Kissinger explains why he believes the summit in Reykjavik between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev was a far greater disaster than the Iran arms deal.

[Commercial break]

**KOPPEL:** It began, you may recall, with the President's advisers insisting, somewhat angrily at times, that Mr. Reagan wasn't going to Reykjavik for a summit with his Soviet counterpart. It was to be nothing more than a preparatory pre-summit meeting. It turned out, of course, to be much more than that, much more substantive and, in Henry Kissinger's view, much more dangerous.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** You know, if you had asked me ahead of time whether it could happen, I would have said— I would have thought it inconceivable. It got off the rails, in my judgment, to begin with, when Gorbachev arrived with a memorandum which had four major proposals in it, the existence of which we didn't even know about.

It was Gorbachev who took the early initiative, pulling from his briefcase a detailed set of proposals to cut both side's strategic arsenals by roughly 50% in five years, and to reduce intermediate range missiles in Europe to zero.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** That's absolutely unheard of, that a— that you present your opposite number at a summit with a negotiating paper which you know and he hasn't seen — puts him at an immediate disadvantage, also runs a huge risk that if they disagree, that then there is no further court of appeals, and if they agree, that they may not know what they agreed on. All the summits that I have ever seen are studied at a preparation in which we told the other side what we were likely to say and asked them to tell us, so that was the first thing. Now, second, is the Soviets were very clever—

**KOPPEL:** Well, what should the President have done at that point—

**Dr. KISSINGER:** In my view—

**KOPPEL:** —when he got that memorandum?

**Dr. KISSINGER:** I think what the President should have said— done is to say to Gorbachev, "Read this, very interesting, has many positive aspects, but I wrote you a letter in June on only one of these four topics that took you three months to answer. So you will understand that this is a complex thing that I cannot answer quickly here. I want to consult my advisers, I want to consult my allies. In a few weeks, few months" — whatever he wanted to say — "Secretary Shultz will be prepared to meet with Shevardnadze, give the answer. As they make progress, you and I should meet again." I think that would have been a very good outcome. President Reagan could have come home and said, "I elicited a major proposal. We've adopted the following procedure." It would have been much less dangerous than to have a group of advisers upstairs, to have President Reagan, who, as no other president, can be an expert on all these issues, and the secretary of state, who also, with all his good qualities, is no expert on these issues, negotiate from a Soviet paper when— the Soviets very cleverly took a lot of proposals that we had made over the years and that had emerged out of the peculiar Washington syndrome of state and defense fighting with each other and then [the] President adopting some number that they could both agree to, figuring that a lot of other things would happen before it ever saw the light of day. They've just dumped it all on us, and so that we were psychologically vulnerable, because, in a sense, they were accepting a lot of things that at some time or other we had put forward.

**KOPPEL:** So who should have done what? I mean, is this a time when the President just has to say—

**Dr. KISSINGER:** Well, I think—

**KOPPEL:** "Hold it, time, we need to—"?

**Dr. KISSINGER:** No, I think probably what should have happened, what I would like to think should have been recommended is— it's very dangerous to put the President— unfair to the President to put him into a position to negotiate from a Soviet paper on the basis of numbers that no president can master, and ask him in

- 5 -

P.2

11. 23 '87 10:28 NIGHTLINE

24 hours to settle the nuclear age, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff went there and have never studied this thing, the secretary of defense hadn't seen these numbers, our allies hadn't seen these numbers. There were two negotiating sessions of three hours each, half of them devoted to interpretation, and I thought it was a madly dangerous procedure that even if they had come to an agreement, I am convinced the impementing negotiations would have broken down by now.

**KOPPEL:** When we come back, we'll talk about President Reagan's competence, and what his strengths and weaknesses require from his top advisers.

[Commercial break]

**KOPPEL:** It's much easier to talk about a leader's advanced age, and whether, figuratively speaking, he's lost a step or two, when it's someone else's leader you're talking about — the late Soviet President Brezhnev, for example, who was visibly out of touch at times during his summit meeting with President Jimmy Carter. For a man about to turn 76, President Reagan has enormous vitality. He could easily pass himself off as being ten years younger, but he is almost 76. And that, as Dr. Kissinger pointed out, requires that his closest advisers take particular care in spelling out options and that they exercise an exceptional sort of bureaucratic courage.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** My impression of President Reagan is that, so far as I can read, he has never been a man to focus on details, as governor or as president. His great strength is a sort of intuitive feel of what might or might not work, and a great courage in making a leap in that direction. Now, any associate of a president has two choices, he can take advantage of the President's psychology — and every president has a particular psychology — or he can try to compensate for it, so that if you know that this is a president who is given to leaps, you owe it to him to tell him where a leap could go wrong. And the way you must work with this is just to make sure — it may cost you your job — but you have to be willing to be a gadfly and say, "Most of the time you've been right on these things, Mr. President, but I just want you to know if you do this, it's — it's a debacle."

**KOPPEL:** Did you see any such heroes in the Carter administration?

**Dr. KISSINGER:** My judgment of President Reagan is that he's — except sometimes in flights of rhetoric — a very careful man, and I do not believe that either at Reykjavik or on Iran people went up to him and said, "You just cannot do this. You're paying a huge price if you do do it, and I think—I don't— and this has to be built into the present system."

**KOPPEL:** Our thanks to Dr. Kissinger for sharing his time and his experience. That's our report for tonight. I'm Ted Koppel in Washington. For all of us here at ABC News, good night.

-6-

EIR**National**

# The Iran-Contra affair: end of the Kissinger system

by Webster G. Tarpley

In order to gain immortality, the great hero of the ancient world Hercules was called upon to perform a series of extraordinary feats for his cousin Eurystheus. For various reasons, the most celebrated of the 12 labors Hercules carried out has been the cleansing of the stables of King Augeas of the Epeans in Elis, where 3,000 oxen had been penned for 30 years, thereby creating a considerable stink: The genius of Hercules, of course, was to clean up that accumulated mess without having to plunge his own hands into the filth. This he accomplished by diverting the river Alpheus, which scoured the Augean stables clean in less than a day. Hercules, in the process, had not so much as soiled his little finger.

The problem today in Washington is of similar proportions. The productive exploitation of the Irangate crisis requires the dismantling and cleaning out of a policy and a policy apparatus that date back to January 1969, when Henry Kissinger began his tenure at the National Security Council. Although the roots of the current crisis reach back to the Truman administration, it is above all a series of institutional arrangements, implemented by Kissinger and then carried forward through the Carter and Reagan years, which must now be demolished as a matter of national survival. No such elegant solution as that devised by Hercules is in sight: The work will be messy.

The Malthusian outlook shared by Kissinger and his alter ego Brzezinski is premised on the pessimistic thesis of inevitable Soviet world domination. The Yalta lines of demarcation, they argue, must be redrawn to reflect U.S. decadence and Soviet military supremacy, consigning Western Europe,

the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean basin, plus much of Asia, to the Soviets.

Brzezinski's version of the New Yalta emphasizes a kind of scorched-earth policy toward the areas to be vacated by the United States, with the pestilence of Shi'ite obscurantist fundamentalism being used to destroy pro-industrial nation-states in the Arab and Islamic worlds. The "China card" buncombe called for China to fill part of the vacuum the United States would leave behind in the Far East.

The insane Kissinger-Brzezinski doctrine includes the corollary of creating a chimerical "Israeli superpower" ranging from the Euphrates to the Congo, with vital interests in Central America and the Far East: truly a global superpower. Israeli influence was to be mediated not so much by diplomacy as by arms sales, with Israeli arms merchants directly controlling more than one-third of all world arms traffic.

How could the tiny resources of Israel support such grandiose designs? Only through U.S. subsidy, granted with such a vengeance that Gen. George Brown of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was moved 10 years ago to describe Israel as "a burden."

In such circles as the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), all this was taken to the radical extreme that the United States must have no allies in the world, except for Israel. The NATO alliance, in this view, is a useless relic that must be abandoned. The United States must never cease augmenting its aid to Israel . . . for the vast power of Israel is the only hope for saving the United States from the Soviets.

The ultimate in such lunatic logic was the idea that key

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overcoming the "three obstacles" to full ties defined by the People's Republic of China—removal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, removal of Soviet troops and missiles from the Sino-Soviet border, and removal of Vietnamese troops from Kampuchea—have so far come to naught.

But the Sino-Soviet rapprochement, Gorbachov indicat-
ed, is to be but one piece of an overall "Asian Collective
Security" arrangement, that would involve the U.S.S.R., the
P.R.C., and the United States in a grand design to maintain
top-down imperial control over the smaller nations of this
vast continent. The cover for this operation is the creation of
"nuclear-free zones"—including on the Korean peninsula—
and other "confidence-building measures." Diplomatically,
the Soviets have met with little success, with the exception
of the South Pacific, where the Social Democratic govern-
ments of Australia and New Zealand have done the Soviets'
work for them.

In India, Gorbachov received the equivalent of stern rebukes from the Indian press for the Soviet presence in Afghanistan—an unprecedented occurrence in Indo-Soviet relations. Unimpressed with Gorbachov diplomacy, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi reaffirmed India's commitment to non-alignment, and rejected the offers of a leading role in organizing the "Asian Collective Security Pact." Although the Indian government sees eye to eye with the Soviet Union on its opposition to the Strategic Defense Initiative, Mr. Gandhi made clear, on bilateral issues, there is growing discontent in New Delhi.

The Soviet presence in Afghanistan is creating a serious problem in Pakistan, and hence a serious problem for India. Privately, leading Indian officials will concur that despite their own problems with the government of Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq, particularly over Pakistan's aid to Sikh terrorists in Indian Punjab, the territorial integrity of Pakistan is seen as India's own front line of defense against the encroaching Russian empire. Soviet efforts to force the disintegration of Pakistan, with Soviet-sponsored separatist insurgencies in Baluchistan, Sind, and the Northwest Frontier Province, are not viewed with favor in New Delhi.

In Thailand, as in other Asean countries, the Soviets have attempted to take advantage of the vacuum created by U.S. unreliability. Increased trade has been one form of bait. While the United States has put a brake on agricultural and industrial imports from Thailand, the Soviets have offered to buy Thai rice and other products and also held their first major Soviet trade exhibition in Bangkok this November. Moscow is also attempting to make itself the key arbiter in the Indochina conflict, placing pressure on Vietnam to come to terms with China over the future of Kampuchea.

However, the Thais, as in Malaysia and Indonesia, are
not fooled by Soviet overtures. Support and aid for the dom-
mestic communist parties, it is known, continue to come from
Moscow. More dangerous, under Moscow's direction, the
communist parties in the region are carrying out a "dual

strategy" as put forward by Philippines Communist Party founder Jose Ma Sison, who was released in February from eight years' imprisonment by the Aquino government. In the Philippines, armed struggle is to be carried out in parallel with communist penetration of the existing political structures. In the Philippines, the ceasefire negotiated with the NPA has given the insurgency, which is active in two-thirds of the country's provinces and controls one-fourth of the country, a new-found respectability. The participation in the NPA and allied fronts in the upcoming February referendum for the draft constitution could be a crucial factor in the outcome of the vote.

In Thailand, General Chaovalit warned in November that the communists, who have emerged from jungle-fighting under a government amnesty program, have concentrated on penetrating the political parties. Up to 23 former members of the Communist Party of Thailand are now in Parliament, he warned. The former CPT members concentrate on organizing labor and anti-industrial upsurges. In July, the CPT, in combination with environmentalists with ties to the World Wildlife Fund, organized riots that resulted in the total destruction of a tantalum production plant on the island of Phuket.

The Soviet perspective is a Sino-Soviet condominium
over the Asian continent, with subsidiary control exerted by
partners from the West. Therefore, from Pakistan through
India, through Southeast Asia, and into South Korea, insur-
gent networks enjoy protection and aid from all three sources,
in the battle against the integrity of the targeted country and
government.

The poles of opposition to the scenarios of destruction for the Asian rim countries are:

**India.** Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has invited Peruvian President Alan García to be the guest of honor for Republic Day on Jan. 26, in a reaffirmation of India's role in the fight for the sovereignty and rights of all nations against the International Monetary Fund;

**Thailand.** Faced with a deepening economic crisis, the leaders of Thailand, the only country of Asia that managed to avoid colonialization in the 19th century aside from Japan, are turning to the Kra Canal project as the pathway into full industrialization;

**Japan.** In the last year, Japan's leaders have concentrated on acquiring the financial and economic leverage to force through policies of development as the alternative to deflationary global economic collapse. The underlying policy is straightforward: Japan and the advanced sector countries can only save their own economies by developing and industrializing the economies of the underdeveloped sector, as Japanese support for the construction of the Kra Canal and a second Panama Canal indicates.

It is from these locations that actions on behalf of national
political and economic sovereignty have been taken, by which
the strategic disaster portended by the deterioration of the
Philippines might be averted.

EIR January 2, 1987

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attributes of U.S. sovereignty, including covert operations and intelligence gathering, could only be maintained by Israel. Everything that has become known under the heading of Irangate, and far more that has not, is coherent with this underlying doctrine. When we recall that one of the two dominant factions in Israel, the one associated with Gen. Ariel Sharon, is a strategic ally of the Soviet Union, and a sincere admirer of Ayatollah Khomeini, the extent of the U.S. predicament on the eve of Irangate can be appreciated.

This is the policy that Kissinger institutionalized in the mastodontic Washington bureaucracy, during the interval 1969-77, when he was in power, but also thereafter. It is a truism in Washington that every time a post is vacated in the State Department, the Pentagon, the NSC, and other key branches of the Executive, Kissinger is on the scene with a replacement. As the Reaganite loyalists were burned out in factional warfare, or were enticed by the perspective of fast bucks in the private sector, Kissinger was always there, building his networks of careers dependent on him.

## The 'Kissinger structures'

The most concentrated distillation of this Kissinger system of government came to reside in the Old Executive Office Building, the old State-War-Navy Building in the White House compound, the seat of the NSC. Under Kissinger, the NSC usurped the role lawfully reserved for the cabinet. In Kissinger's notorious series of "end runs" around other agencies, the NSC became the chief executive arm of the government. The NSC became the headquarters for coups d'état, destabilizations, and sundry stabs in the back.

The most typical operative cog in this system is the 208 Committee, an engine of treason quartered in a room of the Old Executive Office Building. Here, for example during the first months of 1986, an interagency task force met to supervise the overthrow of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. The participants were generally of sub-cabinet rank, from deputy secretary to assistant secretary: Abrams and Wolfowitz of the State Department Mossad cell, their superior Armacost, Armitage of the Pentagon, Claire George of CIA, and Poindexter. At the service of this interdepartmental consensus stood the 208 list, a series of assets, covert operations capabilities, and agents of influence across the world, almost all of them really controlled by foreign powers, especially Israel. The 208 Committee had, of course, to pay attention to the wishes of the President, but primarily for purposes of self-protection. The players owe their careers to the Kissinger-Brzezinski establishment.

At the Georgetown CSIS conference back in June, it became clear that the Eastern Liberal Establishment intended to destroy all vestiges of morality and will in President Reagan by subjecting him to a merciless pounding in a series of concurrent crises in economics and strategy, to the point of extorting Reagan's despairing assent to the New Yalta some-

time in the spring of 1987.

So, by the autumn of 1986, the ultimate triumph of this Kissinger system seemed foreordained, as the battered hulk of the Reagan administration lurched from one debacle to the next. The last serious internal revolt against the Kissinger order had taken place back in 1982, when Adm. Bobby Inman of the CIA had taken exception to the late Lord Louis Mountbatten's networks at the British Admiralty leaking U.S. secrets to the Soviets, and protested the arrangements with General Sharon set up by Secretary of State Haig and his sidekick, Michael Ledeen. But Admiral Inman had then departed the CIA.

The Irangate affair has brought a watershed in power relations around Washington. The proponents of an impossible status quo presided over by the familar faces of the Trilateral Commission (Shultz, Don Regan, Kissinger) have been significantly weakened. The faction seeking the all-out Watergate of the President (Jimmy Carter, Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.), and much of the media) is hampered by its own past and present sponsorship of the pro-Khomeini policy that President Reagan foolishly adopted.

This leaves the way clear for decisive victories for a patriotic faction favorable to a strong and successful conclusion of the Reagan presidency, above all through a transformation of administration economic policy—a faction whose necessary program has been provided by Democratic presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche. The leading voice of this outlook within the administration has been Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who proceeds from the advantage of having been the only top official to have condemned the attempted rapprochement with the Khomeiniacs as "absurd" and based on "very bad advice." Weinberger's clout has been much enhanced by the advent of his former deputy Frank Carlucci as the chief of the NSC staff. Others tending in this direction include senior military figures in the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the NATO command, such as Gen. Bernard Rogers. Attorney-General Ed Meese might tend to support this grouping, if he were sufficiently intelligent, and the same can be said of Vice-President George Bush.

The progress of factional warfare in the various agencies of the executive branch can be summed up as follows:

* **The White House:** The most imperative next step for advancing the necessary cleanup is the ousting of Chief of Staff Don Regan. Regan, the Wall Street drug-money laundering technician, must pay the price for the abortive Reykjavik summit, for the loss of the Senate in the November elections, for the policy of doing nothing about AIDS while covering up the spread of the pandemic, and for the economic depression. Don Regan's big lie of an economic recovery has generated more rage against the White House than any other single factor. Don Regan, given his autocratic management style, can be certified as knowing all about the Iran-Contra

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scam. Nancy Reagan senses Don Regan's treachery, and his exclusion from the Reagans' New Year's celebration in Palm Springs, California, is hopefully a harbinger of his early ouster. Accepting Don Regan's resignation would be the biggest favor the President could do himself, and a very promising signal concerning the President's mental state.

* **National Security Council:** A far-reaching, and perhaps total purge of the 180 officials of the NSC staff is now being carried out by a transition team directed by the new NSC chief, Frank Carlucci. Carlucci is a former top official of the CIA who served as Caspar Weinberger's deputy in the first Reagan administration. He has also been a diplomat. Carlucci has been given a bad press by the pro-Kissinger media. The reason is that the invariant of Carlucci's career has been his unremitting opposition to Kissinger and Kissinger's system. Carlucci's deputy will be Gen. Colin Powell, an outspoken opponent of decoupling Western Europe from the United States who presently commands an army corps near Frankfurt, Germany. Powell is one of the highest-ranking black officers in the Army. Carlucci will also be joined by long-time associate Col. Grant Green.

Several key firings have already been announced, including those of acting NSC director Alton Keel and Howard Teicher of the pro-Mossad tendency. The State Department is taking care of its own by giving Keel the post of NATO ambassador in Brussels, where he will replace departing Kissinger clone David Abshire. Also leaving NSC will be Jack Matlock, a theoretician of the crumbling Soviet empire, who wants to replace Kissinger-man Arthur Hartman in the Moscow embassy. The replacement for Matlock is Fritz Ermarth, who made a reputation at the CIA during the Carter years as an opponent of SALT II.

Carlucci's watchword must be thoroughness. Until only yesterday, the NSC was home to the likes of "consultant" Ledeen, who had been brought in by McFarlane. Kissinger-sponsored types like Peter Rodman should be ushered out. The Carlucci NSC must be ready to tip the balance against the State Department in looming battles over SDI, strategic arms, and Soviet aggression.

* **CIA:** By supporting the "moderate mullah" thesis, Director William Casey, the old friend of Leo Cherne, showed once again that he embodies the subordination of U.S. intelligence to foreign powers, especially Israel. Because of his most unfortunate performance before the congressional committees, Casey's ouster has become urgent. His present illness may not allow him to continue in office in any case. Along with Casey must go an entire entrenched CIA faction, associated with names like Colby and Shackley. Replacements can be found along the same Pentagon-CIA institutional interface typified by Carlucci.

* **State Department:** George Shultz's performance at the recent NATO foreign ministers' meeting, where he attempted to wreck everything accomplished by Weinberger one week before, leaves no doubt that the Tartufe of Foggy

Bottom will never be a "team player" and must be jettisoned. Shultz should not be spared because of considerations of institutional perception. Augean labors of the type that must be carried out at the State Department are sometimes distasteful, but they must be faced.

* **Department of Justice:** As EIR has stressed, this is the heart of the Irangate cover-up, stretching back over many years. Stephen Trott's order to suspend an FBI probe of Southern Air Transport on national security grounds involving sensitive hostage negotiations in the Middle East shows that he knew of the Contra-Iran connection long before it was announced by Meese on Nov. 25. William Weld stopped the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland Faith Whittlesey, as the Public Integrity division of the department had recommended. Now, the Swiss press says that Whittlesey helped Oliver North set up his Swiss bank accounts. Both Trott and Weld are presuring New York U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani to let former Israeli General Bar-Am, a close friend of Ariel Sharon, off the hook. Weld's business ties to the Boston *Real Paper* link him to Emma Rothschild, and thus perhaps to the assassination of Olof Palme and certainly to KGB disinformation campaigns on that affair. Trott, Weld, and Oliver Revell should be the first target for the investigation to be conducted by independent counsel Walsh, and by the new Senate and House Select Committees.

Nothing of enduring value can come out of Irangate without one further ingredient: the informed will of Ronald Reagan. Up to now, the President has displayed a streak of Irish stubbornness, refusing to admit that his whole Iran policy is a Carteresque monstrosity, and refusing to repudiate his pragmatic deals and rotten compromises. If he should persist in defending Regan and Shultz, or cling to the fetish of the "magic of the marketplace," there is an abyss yawning for him not too far down the road that will make Watergate seem quite mild.

Reality will intrude on the President in the form of Soviet Marshal Ogarkov's resolve to be ready to unleash World War III, if necessary, between January and June 1989. The Soviets are preparing to break out of the ABM treaty with a nationwide anti-missile defense: They have the radars, and soon will have lasers. The SS-24s and SS-25s are rolling off the assembly lines. To survive, the United States will need to accelerate both SDI and Weinberger's MX deployment targets. That will in turn require a clean break with Gramm-Rudman and Don Regan's deficit-reduction guidelines, and a national defense emergency mobilization of the kind LaRouche has proposed. A great interagency and congressional battle on this whole policy question will dominate the first weeks and months of 1987, shaping the State of the Union address, the budget, and the whole direction of the country and the alliance. Beyond that, the next two years must be a transition away from the failed policies of the last two decades, and toward a LaRouche presidency.

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Kissinger Watch

by M.T. Upharsin

## Not another China card!

Henry Kissinger and his friends would do well to remember what the Chinese themselves undoubtedly have not forgotten, that the 19th-century "China traders" did that country great evil. Some of the punishments inflicted by outraged Chinese upon traders and missionaries who actively promoted the "free trade" policies that brought the opium plague to China were hideous—but then, so was the opium trade.

China has been fighting internally for almost 150 years about how to open to the West. The conflict has taken a heavy toll. One big reason for the problem is that the Chinese have consistently been met with some of the nastiest creatures the West has produced during that time. The fact that Henry Kissinger appears to be plumping himself up to get in on the China circuit once again, will do China no good.

Kissinger began his current round on the China trade circuit by addressing the 20th anniversary celebration of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations in New York Nov. 18. He proclaimed that the prosperity, territorial integrity, and independence of China is as important to the United States as the territorial integrity and independence of any nation in Europe. Of course, Kissinger and his "New Yalta" crowd are very willing to sacrifice the integrity and independence of Europe to the Soviet Empire-builders.

Kissinger spoke for 30 minutes to about 400 former U.S. government officials and dignitaries, at this gala at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City,

the *China Daily* reported Nov. 22. The committee is the latter-day organization of the Boston families that grew rich shipping opium to China, the "Old Families," as a Canadian public-relations executive in Peking called them, which controlled all relations with China up to—and through—the Cultural Revolution. Its membership includes Robert McNamara, Armand Hammer, Cyrus Vance, Adlai Stevenson, and Paul Warnke, a who's who of Soviet appeasers.

Two other leaders of this group are David Rockefeller, Jr., a past business partner in Asia ventures with William Weld, crime-linked head of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Justice Department; and Harvard China expert Jerome Cohen, a sidekick of Weld and adviser on China affairs to Kissinger. Cohen, who spent 1978-81 in China, loves to convey the legendary—and always disastrous—"China market." He was a key speaker at a Dec. 1-2 conference in Paris, on "Reassessing the China Market," at which he described his special talent for writing watertight business contracts, protected against any new Chinese laws that might make things difficult for the foreign investor.

Some in the national committee crew would love to be on the inside of a new global Chinese-Soviet deal. Also in early December, soon after Henry's speech, committee bigshot Armand Hammer was in China, and then flew to the Soviet Union for meetings with the Soviet leadership. A source usually reliable on such matters, told *Kissinger Watch* that Hammer was trying to be "the mediator of a global Chinese-Soviet deal," in which he would make a financial killing in bilateral coal, and other, deals.

"Our relationship with China has always been more complex than our relationship with, say, Europe," Kissinger said at the Waldorf.

He praised the economic reform program led by Deng Xiaoping. "The Chinese people will again, as they always have, set an example," for other countries, especially developing countries, "of how the aspirations for development and the aspirations for social justice can be combined," he said.

In China itself, the terrible disaster of the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong, is now officially known as the "decade of chaos."

## Directly to the people

Early in this year, some of the 200 million Chinese television viewers will see Kissinger presenting his economic expertise. Kissinger proclaimed that the Chinese economic model is an unprecedented experiment, in his interview with Doris Wan Cheng, producer of the "Global View" TV series, from his office in Manhattan Nov. 27. "The Global View" is a Sino-U.S. cooperative television series introducing to Chinese audiences "the development strategy and management experience of advanced American Enterprises," the *China Daily* reported Nov. 29.

A new Sino-U.S. friendship organization will soon be established, Kissinger said at the graduation of the 33 Chinese students from an MBA program at New York State University in Buffalo, as the *China Daily* reported Dec. 20. But by Kissinger's own confession, this looks to be another one of those "Has-Been" organizations that plague world affairs. The committee, for which Cyrus Vance helped draft the proposal, will include former U.S. Presidents and secretaries of state, Kissinger said. Considering what's available in those categories, once again, it seems the Chinese are getting a bum deal.

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retary Weinberger and Secretary of State Shultz are opposed to this plan, Attorney General Meese and CIA Director Casey are for it. The CIA is frequently mentioned as the lead agency in transferring the arms. The conclusions to be drawn on Casey are clear enough.

The entire memo is a tissue of lies, since the moderate anti-Soviet mullahs never existed, and the Israeli and U.S. shipments of war materiel to Iran had started under the Carter administration. Poindexter was simply repeating Mossad lies to the President. These lies served the Ariel Sharon policy of supporting the Khomeini regime for reasons of geopolitics, hostility to Arab states, and out of a deep ideological affinity for what Khomeini and his associates represent. The Mossad resold the President that policy.

In addition to dictating such suicidal policies to the White House, the Mossad is also engaged in direct espionage against this country. This has been demonstrated in the case of Jonathan Jay Pollard and his wife, who have been convicted of spying for Israel, specifically for Dirty Rafi Eytan of the Sharon faction of the Mossad, and who are now awaiting sentencing. U.S. prosecutors, led by Joseph E. DiGenova, have forwarded sentencing memoranda for both Pollards to the federal bench, urging the judge to throw the book at both defendants. The sentencing memoranda stress that the Pollards provided Israel with thousands of classified U.S. documents, more than 800 of them top secret, with many documents running into hundreds of pages. Of these, the Israeli government has returned copies of a mere 163.

Pollard, who worked at the Navy's Anti-Terrorist Alert Center, was told by the Mossad to concentrate on obtaining material on U.S. weapons systems as well as cable traffic regarding U.S. ships, aircraft stations, tactics, and training operations, plus analysis of Soviet missile systems. Pollard's controllers were adamant that they had no interest whatsoever in classified U.S. intelligence on terrorism. The sentencing memoranda point out that the Soviet intelligence sold by the sybaritic Pollards to the Mossad could "reveal much about the way the United States collects information, including information from human sources whose identity could be inferred by a reasonably competent intelligence analyst." It goes without saying that some secrets Pollard stole were traded by Sharon to his Soviet partners, compromising U.S. security and wiping out U.S. intelligence networks in the Soviet bloc.

Sources close to the ongoing investigation suggest that the government will seek to revoke immunity and indict the Pollards' Israeli co-conspirators, including covert operations specialist Eytan, Israeli Air Force Gen. Aviem Sella (who led the Israeli strike on the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, and who was promoted for his role in the Pollard affair), Joseph Yagur of the Israeli consulate in New York, and Irit Erb, a secretary at the Israeli embassy in Washington. Pollard has shown no contrition for his spying for "the Brothers," Rafi, Avi, Yossi, and Uzi. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer of the

*Jerusalem Post* of last Nov. 21, he says, "I feel the same way one of Israel's pilots would feel if after he was shot down, nobody made an effort to get him out."

## Hashemi revelations at center-stage

On Jan. 6, Edward Spannaus, the Law Editor of *EIR*, appeared at a press conference in this magazine's Washington offices to announce his delivery to Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh of a memorandum detailing the Department of Justice-FBI role in the cover-up of Iran arms shipments over many years, especially in regard to the case of the late Cyrus Hashemi. On that same day, some of the "major media" offered belated confirmation of what the *EIR* had revealed years before about Hashemi. In the New York case of Israeli General Bar-Am on charges of running guns to Iran, lawyers for co-defendant Samuel Evans are reportedly prepared to argue that Lloyd Cutler, the legal counsel of the Carter White House, and Assistant Secretary of State Harold Saunders authorized secret U.S. arms shipments to Iran during the 1979-81 hostage crisis, and that these shipments were mediated by Hashemi. In court papers, the Evans defense describes a July 1985 meeting to discuss arms smuggling to Iran attended by the then Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, Saudi magnate Adnan Kashoggi, and Cyrus Hashemi.

As for Special Prosecutor Walsh, he spent the week of Jan. 5 recruiting a staff, several of whom come from the office of U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani in New York, and setting up his Washington and New York offices. Walsh met with Stephen Trott and William Weld, both of them deeply incriminated in the Department of Justice Irangate cover-up, to take over virtually all of the ongoing investigations on the affair. "At the moment, I have them all," said Walsh after the meeting. Walsh overruled resistance by Justice as he assumed control of a Miami probe into drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan Contras. One witness had seen bags of cocaine loaded on board a plane owned by Ted Shackley's Southern Air Transport on a Colombian airstrip, and the plane turned out to be the same one shot down in Nicaragua on Oct. 5 with Eugene Hasenfus among the crew. Walsh also took over the internal Justice examination of Stephen Trott's stalling of an FBI inquiry into Southern Air Transport. Trott is described by Justice Department insiders as being "in deep trouble." Weld is awaiting with some trepidation the testimony of U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland Faith Whittlesley, a pal of North for whom Weld covered.

The House and Senate set up their select Irangate committees the week of Jan. 5, with instructions to report by the end of October at the latest. Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Ha.), the chairman of the Senate panel, says he wants to arrange testimony by the heads of foreign governments, including Israel. The Pentagon is souring on Israel's Lavi jet, which had been touted as a trapping of "superpower" status, and in which the United States had sunk a cool billion. The day of reckoning for the Mossad's U.S. caper is approaching.

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The Washington Post
Sunday, December 21, 1986

Henry Kissinger

# Not Its Power, But Its Weakness

The foreign policy mistakes that surround the sale of arms to Iran have been widely blamed on the excessive power of the National Security Council staff.

My view, perhaps unorthodox, is that the exact opposite is true. The root cause of the United States' foreign policy difficulties is not the strength but the weakness of the national security adviser's staff. It has singularly failed to perform what should be its principal task: to develop realistic options for the consideration of the president and his principal advisers. To be sure, the NSC staff has engaged in occasional acts of operational bravado. But these acts have proved so damaging precisely because of the absence of a system for setting realistic objectives and establishing a relationship between ends and means.

This becomes clear when one considers that the sale of arms to Iran was not an isolated event. In the long term, the events surrounding the Reykjavik summit may prove to have been more damaging than Iran. At Reykjavik—as on Iran—the president lacked a reasoned statement of options and consequences. The failure at Reykjavik was not the predominance of the NSC staff but the administration's inability to develop a strategy that related diplomacy, military policy and arms control policy to a coherent national purpose.

The Tower Commission, recently established to look into the proper role for the NSC staff, should therefore interpret its charter to include 'the gamut of national security policy decision-making.

In Greek mythology the gods sometimes punished man by fulfilling his wishes too completely. In its sixth year the Reagan administration is paying the price for the seeming effortlessness and excessive self-confidence by which its considerable successes have been achieved. President Reagan's extraordinary instinct, his vast popularity and the temporary Soviet weakness caused by a succession of aged leaders made unnecessary the shakedown of procedures and personnel that a crisis usually imposes early in a presidential term. As a result, exorbitant reliance has been placed by his subordinates on President Reagan's persuasive skills. They have acted on the apparent belief that the major challenge to American statesmanship is the public presentation of its decisions and not their quality.

Counting on the safety net of the president's hold on the American public, his advisers felt secure in pursuing their clashing preferences with a single-mindedness unusual even by the not exactly gentle standards of Washington. "Nothing ever gets settled in this town," said Secretary of State George Shultz to the House Foreign Relations Committee. "It is a seething debating society in which the debate never stops, nobody ever gives up, including me." Policy thereby becomes fragmented into a series of ad hoc decisions driven by immediate problems or negotiating deadlines. Spurious compromises emerge, permitting each department or agency either to pursue its own preference or withdraw into sullen dissociation until the next occasion for battle. The State Department's relentless skill in edging toward negotiating positions never fully made explicit confronts the Defense Department's uncanny proclivity to block progress by means of unacceptable

proposals. But the result has been confusion and incoherence more often than a long-range strategy. Nor was the NSC staff sufficiently subtle to distill a realistic strategy from the president's idealistic aspiration to abolish nuclear weapons or his compassionate desire to pay for the release of hostages. In fact, it seems that on Iran the NSC staff mistook a presidential objective for a directive; rather than helping establish priorities, the NSC staff became one of the players.

In the end, the only player who turned out to have no safety net was Ronald Reagan. I can think of no recent president so abandoned by his associates in his hour of crisis. He was alone on the parapet.

Moreover, whatever the failings of the NSC staff, departmental abdication bears a share of the blame. In 1985, the State and Defense departments and the CIA clearly knew that weapons were being shipped to Iran.

> "Exorbitant reliance has been placed by his subordinates on President Reagan's persuasive skills."

It is difficult to believe that they could not have learned that something similar was going on in 1986 had they chosen to inform themselves. After all, hundreds of tons of equipment can hardly be moved from depots across the oceans without somebody's becoming aware of it. In such circumstances, the president is entitled to assume that Cabinet members who do not resign will cooperate in the implementation of his policy and defend his decisions when necessary.

In the case of Iran, not only decision-making but implementation seems to have broken down. What, for example, happened to the 40 Committee representing all concerned agencies, which in previous administrations supervised clandestine operations?

The objective of improving relations with Iran is surely valid given Iran's geopolitical importance. But the timing is open to question. What analysis or intelligence buttressed the belief in the existence of a moderate faction in Tehran? Why was it thought that supplying arms would help the moderate faction when their use was bound to serve radical ends? Why was a senior American sent to Tehran without an assurance of whom he would meet or of an agenda for discussion? How can one contribute to ending a war on an equitable basis by supplying arms to the side that has the upper hand and whose victory would undermine all moderate forces in the Moslem world? Who could possibly believe that the sale of hundreds of tons of equipment could be kept secret, especially as it involved at least three arms dealers of different nationalities? And did anyone—proponents or opponents of the scheme— describe to the president the damage that would result to U.S. credibility worldwide and especially in the Persian/Arabian Gulf, as well as the impact on oil prices, from

continued

the inevitable disclosure that the United States had acted
in flat contradiction of its own passionately declared
antiterrorism policy?

It is clear that the advocates of the Iran arms sale gave
at best incomplete answers to these questions. But did the
opponents present a systematic rebuttal? Did their claim
of not being fully informed reflect a White House decision
to exclude them or a departmental decision to adopt a
posture of protective ignorance. Or both? How could they
be ignorant if they had access to the full range of
intelligence? If intelligence was withheld from Cabinet
members, we face a breakdown of the system. If,
however, the ignorance was self-imposed, the president
faces a collapse of discipline and cohesiveness. The Tower
Commission must get to the bottom of these issues if it is
to contribute to improving national policy.

Nor will the commission be able to contribute to
improving national security decision-making if it does not
examine such cases as the Reykjavik summit. Was any
consideration given to the danger that announcing a
summit in such close proximity to the Daniloff-Zakharov
swap had to appear as an extortion—above all to the
Kremlin? What tempted Mikhail Gorbachev into the
unprecedented and disdainful step of presenting a sweep-

"If the [Cabinet's] ignorance was self-imposed, the president faces a collapse of discipline and cohesiveness."

ing agenda without advance notification and demand that
it be negotiated on the spot? What induced the U.S.
delegation to go along rather than confine itself to asking
questions and setting out a work schedule leading to an
eventual subsequent summit? By what process did the
numbers and concepts discussed at Reykjavik emerge?
Why were the principally affected allies not consulted?

Indeed, Reykjavik, because it culminated years of
effort, worries me even more than Iran, which repre-
sented a limited misjudgment. At Reykjavik, the Soviets
took advantage of the weakness of the American deci-
sion-making process by suddenly agreeing to American
positions put forward over the years primarily to paper
over departmental differences. For example, did the
Defense Department representative acquiesce in the
Reykjavik agenda because of its merit or because he
assumed that the more sweeping the schemes the more
likely they were to be aborted by implementing negotia-
tions over verification?

An unintended result of the decision early in the
Reagan administration to give the dominant role in policy
formulation to the departments has been to exalt the
operational role of the NSC staff at the expense of
long-range national policy. It has produced a succession of
NSC advisers who lacked either strength or the full
confidence of the president (William Clark excepted). It
has tempted the NSC staff into conducting special presi-
dential missions no one else was eager to undertake.

A fundamental need, therefore, is to strengthen the
quality of the NSC staff, to focus its work on defining
priorities and options and give it the authority to raise
issues beyond what the various departments put for-
ward. Department heads, no matter how dedicated,
cannot avoid identifying sound national policy with the
preferences of their bureaucracies. These preferences
are often valid; but under the pressure of events the
urgent generally has priority over the important.

The NSC staff should not as a general rule conduct
day-to-day operations involving other nations. This is
especially the case with activities that go beyond the
establishment of a channel for diplomatic communica-
tion. Clandestine operations, because of their potential
for embarrassment, require a significant White House
role in their design; for the same reason, the NSC staff
should stay far away from their execution.

This issue is often wrongly put in terms of departmen-
tal prerogatives. But any presidential appointee who
insists on his advice as a right has already lost the
bureaucratic battle. The real bond between the president
and his Cabinet members is intangible; it depends on
personal confidence, not on an organization chart. Confi-
dence cannot be commanded, much less extorted by
power plays, and prerogatives will not last if they result
from pressure.

Like all general administrative rules, the exclusion of
the NSC staff from operations should not be pushed too
far. In the end the president must be free to use those
instruments with which he feels most comfortable.
There are some missions in which a presidential emis-
sary can operate more flexibly and with greater author-
ity and discretion than a departmental representative:
sensitive talks with the Soviets have, in my view, long
suffered from the absence of such a mechanism.

In the end there is no substitute for presidential
involvement in decision-making. Limiting his role to
ratifying a consensus of his subordinates is likely to
evoke the most self-centered reactions at the cost of a
sense of long-term direction.

The recent crises in U.S. foreign policy have occurred at
a moment when the U.S. bargaining position remains
strong; with rapid remedial measures an opportunity for
major achievement still lies before the United States.

©1986, Los Angeles Times Syndicate

# Fundamental Agreements
## Do Not Happen Overnight

The Washington Post
Sunday, October 19, 1986

Predictably, the Reykjavik summit has unleashed an intense debate about its wisdom and its outcome. But the most important need is to draw the appropriate lessons for the future. Too many administration spokesmen are extolling the "agreement" they claim was all but consummated, thereby supporting the Soviet fiction that the president's Strategic Defense Initiative was the principal obstacle to a historic breakthrough.

As a veteran of four summits, I get a sinking feeling when I read of fundamental agreements being drafted overnight on subjects never explored in preliminary conversations. Nor do I think the United States and the Soviet Union were anywhere close to a completed agreement, much less a useful one.

My view as to the merit of Reykjavik can be summed up in two propositions: the president, to his eternal credit, was right and courageous in walking away from Mikhail Gorbachev's propositions. The tentative agreements at Reykjavik were not breakthroughs; some of them indeed were traps. The need to think through the American position therefore remains urgent.

At Reykjavik the Reagan administration paid the price for never resolving its deep internal divisions over arms control and East-West relations. And the country paid a price for the relentless domestic pressures by Congress and other groups that led the Soviets to believe they could make an appeal over the head of the president, as Gorbachev had the gall to state publicly.

The administration has partially invited these pressures by trying to paper over fundamental disagreements by slogans. The so-called zero option—the removal of U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range missiles from Europe—is a good example. The relentless Soviet strategic buildup over the past two decades raised the question of whether the United States would commit national suicide by using nuclear weapons based in the United States against threats to Europe. And hundreds of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range missiles aimed at Western Europe placed America's allies under a direct threat. American missiles were deployed in Europe to reassure Europe and to remove ambiguity from Soviet calculations.

President Reagan's first term witnessed an intense debate between those who wanted to negotiate limits to deployment of U.S. missiles in Europe—mostly in the State Department and among the NATO allies—and those who considered the project nonnegotiable—mostly in the Defense Department. To pull the teeth of these controversies the administration put forward the zero option. Ironically, it was first suggested by the Defense Department, which calculated that the Soviets would reject it. In the end a tactical ploy wound up developing a life of its own.

The acceptance of the zero option is a major political event. Removing Soviet intermediate-range missiles from Europe reduces the Soviet nuclear threat to Europe only marginally if at all, because the removal of hundreds of medium-range American missiles would destroy the direct link between the nuclear defense of Europe and of the United States. It would also magnify the psychological disparity between the two sides of the Atlantic and improve the Soviets' ability to subject Europe to nuclear blackmail.

The very offer to remove intermediate-range American missiles from Europe will have a significant domestic impact on both Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany. For years these governments have fought courageously against often violent domestic opposition to the American missile deployment. Before the deployment is even completed they now find the United States declaring it dispensable. The upshot must be a weakening of friends of the United States and a strengthening of the neutralist trend in Europe.

"Deep cuts" is another consensus slogan that unites liberals eager for arms control and conservatives seeking a popular platform for their opposition to arms control. The phrase obfuscates the fundamental dilemma. In the absence of SDI—the key Soviet condition—the 50 percent reduction of each category of strategic nuclear weapons that was discussed at Reykjavik will ease significantly neither the danger of surprise attack nor the danger of civilian extermination. So long as each missile carries up to 10 warheads, one launcher can simultaneously attack several retaliatory missiles. Unless the number of warheads per missile is reduced, the danger of a first strike will remain at almost any negotiated total of launchers.

Moreover, under the Reykjavik proposal the number of missile-launching submarines would have to be cut at least in half. Since antisubmarine forces are not considered strategic, the remaining submarines will become proportionately more vulnerable.

Nor is the safety of the civilian population improved in the slightest. Six thousand unopposed warheads are more than enough to destroy civilized life in the United States and in Western Europe. The best that can be said for the first stage of the Reykjavik scheme on offensive weapons is that it would not worsen the situation.

Even more worrisome is the matter of the next

> "The president, to his eternal
> credit, was right and
> courageous in walking away
> from Mikhail Gorbachev's
> propositions."

stage, which envisages the complete abolition of ballistic missiles at the end of 10 years.

The negotiations defining what weapons are to be destroyed, the rate of destruction and the verification of the process would be so complex that they could easily consume much of the 10 years and might break down at any of the many stages needed.

I do not understand how administration spokesmen can present such a vague statement of objectives as a nearly achieved agreement in this regard. And it is astonishing that it was presented, according to administration spokesmen, without any discussion with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Moreover, as Secretary of State George P. Shultz has stated, the scheme could go into effect only if Britain, France and China followed suit, and this would involve similar negotiations with each of these countries. I do not believe that China and France would go along, since they would be left with no counter to Soviet air attacks.

In any event, is the United States to permit itself to join with the Soviet Union in discussing friendly countries in matters about which they were never consulted? It is clearer now why the Soviets did not accept the 10-year moratorium on deployment offered by the United States, a moratorium that, in my view, would slowly kill SDI.

Administration spokesmen do no service to public understanding by falling in with the Soviet pretense that eliminating nuclear weapons is either realistic or

realizable. No conceivable verification scheme could
account for the tens of thousands of warheads in the
arsenals of both sides. A reserve force would therefore
have to be left to protect against possible violations.
Provision would have to be made against possible
threats from third countries. Before they knew it, the
negotiators would be back at the starting point: to
analyze the lowest level of nuclear weapons consistent
with mutual security.

Finally, an alliance dependent on nuclear weapons
should think twice before agreeing to the principle of
their abolition without at the same time agreeing to a
massive increase in conventional forces to meet the
massive Soviet conventional threat. Yet there is not the
slightest evidence that such a course is even contem-
plated.

As for SDI, I consider the so-called Star Wars
program one of the seminal decisions of the Reagan
presidency. SDI provides at least a partial way out of a
nihilistic strategy based on mutual extermination. At a
minimum, it would complicate the calculations of an
attacker. Those who blame Reagan for letting SDI
abort Reykjavik should remind themselves that it was
SDI that brought the Soviets back to the conference
table and produced whatever concessions have since
been offered.

Faced with predictable opposition, the administration
chose to elaborate a distinction between research,
testing and deployment, deferring the ultimate decision
until the outcome of technical investigations was clear-
er. The tactic separated offensive and defensive negoti-
ations and tempted the Soviets to isolate SDI in
Reykjavik. The same weird coalition that supported the
zero option and "deep cuts" formed also on SDI.
Groups that wanted to kill SDI combined with groups
seeking to sustain it in a compromise that gave the
critics a powerful lever, especially in Congress. SDI
was transformed by critics from a strategic program
into a bargaining chip to be given away for arms
reductions—regardless of whether these reductions
made strategic sense.

America's allies have encouraged these tendencies.

"The tentative agreements at Reykjavik were not breakthroughs; some of them indeed were traps."

They have seen in U.S. nuclear strategy a means to
limit their own defense expenditures; they have urged
arms control to placate essentially implacable domestic
critics. Arms control in Europe is on the verge of
making agreement an end in itself. Thus, no European
government will dare to make explicit its misgivings
about the zero option that was nearly struck at Reykja-
vik.

Perhaps the most interesting question about Reykja-
vik is what induced Gorbachev to exploit American
domestic ambiguities. And why, instead of agreeing to

study the proposal, the U.S. delegation permitted itself to be rushed into using what had been announced as a pre-summit to try to conclude a comprehensive arms control agreement within 36 hours. (After all, Gorbachev had taken three months to study a much less complicated proposal by Reagan.) Reagan courageously resisted the attempt to panic him into a one-sided agreement. Now he faces the problem of putting the pieces together again.

A remarkable opportunity for fundamental negotia-
tion with the Soviets still exists. A new Soviet leader-
ship faces nearly insuperable domestic problems. It
badly needs a respite from international tensions and
seeks to purchase it by retaining all options: for nuclear
blackmail; for a first strike; of a superiority in conven-
tional weapons; of splitting the United States from its
allies. But in the end if the president remains firm,
Gorbachev will adopt more equitable positions. The
Soviets will not easily give up their goal of committing,
the most conservative and most popular president of his
generation to arms control. Waiting for a successor is
too uncertain, too time-consuming and too risky for
them.

When negotiation resumes—probably after the American elections in November and the German elections in January—it must be in a different context. A way must be found to explore U.S.-Soviet relations so that the misunderstandings that led to deadlock at Reykjavik are avoided and a conceptual discussion can take place before numbers are tossed around.

Specifically:

* The president's proposal of eliminating all ballistic missiles is important. But the stages of reaching it must be made precise if it is not to backfire. The first goal of arms control must be to reduce the proportion of warheads to vulnerable launchers. The next step must be to reduce the number of launchers to the lowest possible level.

* The political significance of American missiles in Europe must be recognized. Reductions must not be to a level that decouples the nuclear defense of Europe from that of the United States.

* SDI must be given a strategic rationale. The pretense that we are dealing with a research program must be abandoned. The 10-year moratorium on deployment proposed at Reykjavik by the United States would spell the end of SDI. The administration should make clear that the level of its proposed defense will always be proportional to the offensive threat. The lower the level of offense, the lower can be the level of defense. Soviet concerns that some kinds of SDI can support a first-strike strategy can be taken care of in this context.

* Verification is another slogan in search of a program. It is not a substitute for meaningful agreements. It depends on three factors: the intrinsic importance of an agreement; the margin within which it is estimated violations are possible; the strategic importance of the violations and the degree to which countermeasures have been prepared. For example, the Soviets have built in Krasnoyarsk a radar the size of two football fields 1,000 miles from where it is permitted under the ABM treaty. That fact has been known for years. But other than denouncing the ABM treaty—probably too strong a response—no countermeasure has occurred to anyone.

* America must recognize that in a difficult period it is essential to unite. Gorbachev is clearly counting on the divisions and disagreements in America and in NATO to hand him his goals on a silver platter. It is clearly within the power of free peoples to prove him wrong.

THE ICELAND SUMMIT

# Danger at the Summit

## What the United States should do

BY HENRY KISSINGER

ANNIE LEIBOVITZ—CONTACT

Lessons from history: Guidance from a practiced hand

As he heads toward what is likely to be a series of summits, President Reagan finds himself in an ironic position. For nearly six years his traditional opponents have criticized his alleged truculence toward the Soviet Union. Suddenly he finds himself under attack by former supporters for his handling of the Daniloff affair and his surprise agreement to the Reykjavik summit.

I see no purpose in discussing the Daniloff-Zakharov deal—for deal it was—nor the Reykjavik summit, which will soon have to justify itself by its results. What requires examination is the state of U.S.-Soviet relations in general.

Unlike some of his erstwhile supporters, I agree with the president that the nuclear age imposes upon us the need to negotiate coexistence with the Soviet Union. I, like him, believe that the United States owes it to its people

and its allies to seek to ease tensions and improve the prospect of peace. I believe, finally, that the president's fortitude in strengthening American defenses, his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—Star Wars, as it is called—and his firmness on terrorism have contributed to producing a favorable negotiating situation, one that is made even stronger by Soviet internal strains.

I am, however, deeply worried that we are frittering away this opportunity. Arms control is on the verge of turning into an esoteric numbers game that obscures the reality of the military balance and threatens our ability to make progress on the geopolitical issues that lie at the heart of East-West tensions. Yet while the geopolitical causes of tension are ritualistically on the agenda of foreign ministers and heads of government, no serious proposal to solve any of them is on the table. Even with respect to arms control, the agreements that seem likely to emerge from the upcoming summits would not reduce any significant danger. The principal proposal is to reduce some 11,000 warheads by 30 percent and to have an extended moratorium on strategic defense. That reduction would not affect either side's capacity to launch a surprise attack or destroy the enemy population. Giving up SDI—the practi-

cal consequence of a moratorium—is too high a price for a largely symbolic outcome.

### Reagan's Opportunity

Contrary to conventional wisdom, President Reagan's record and political following are a spur, not an obstacle, to Soviet flexibility. The Soviets must consider it a major coup to commit the most conservative and most popular president of this period to a policy of détente. It would limit if not foreclose a future shift to the right in America; it would guarantee ratification of what has been negotiated. This is why I do not accept the often-heard argument that President Reagan is under pressure lest the Soviets decide to outwait his term in office and deal with his successor. To outwait Reagan would risk a delay of not two but of, more likely, four to six years. For no successor could enter office and simply reverse the Reagan legacy.

These considerations are magnified by strains on the Soviet system. The Soviet economy is a shambles, as is demonstrated by the long litany of corruption, inefficiency and malingering presented at the recent Party

Congress. The governmental process oscillates between a purge at the beginning of a new regime that eliminates the adherents of the departed leader and stagnation at the end when the protégés of the failing incumbent jockey for succession.

Faced with the daunting task of restoring

discipline to the bureaucracy, rejuvenating it and seeking to shake it from its stagnation, Mikhail Gorbachev cannot wish to compound his domestic problems with international tensions. He also needs a calm international environment to obtain access to Western technology and credits. It is not necessary to postulate a fundamental change of heart to see why a prudent Soviet leader would seek a respite from international risk taking.

There is a grave danger that if President Reagan fails to take advantage of the present opportunity to bring about a real change in the causes of tension, internal developments may lead the Soviet Union into a new period of expansionism. If against all odds Gorbachev succeeds in modernizing the existing structure, the Soviet Union will gain in strength without any real constraints on its ability to revert to expansionism.

But if—as is likely—Gorbachev's domestic program fails, the Soviet Union will then face the nightmare that after centuries of suffering at the hands of

czars and commissars, the Russian people will have arrived once again at their starting point: a huge territory with disproportionately large military forces weighing on all surrounding countries. Will the Soviet leadership, under such circumstances, finally decide to abandon its obsession with armaments and devote greater resources to domestic needs? Or will it act as Russia has historically, using its most efficient instrument, the military, to obtain breathing room for itself by pressures on China or the Middle East or even, once again, Berlin? Wise Western statesmanship would do its utmost today to reduce the temptations for the military course tomorrow.

### Gorbachev's Strategy

Gorbachev has pursued a carefully calculated strategy aimed at restricting the debate to areas where he hopes to limit Western options while preserving Soviet geopolitical advantages. It has four principal components:

■ The new man. Gorbachev has been extraordinarily skillful in presenting himself as a new type of Soviet leader. His use of the

38 NEWSWEEK : OCTOBER 13, 1986

THE ICELAND SUMMIT

gave Washington high marks for its handling of the crisis. They have never been as scrupulous as Americans about negotiating in response to blackmail. (Only last week French newspapers detailed a long history of talks with Mideast terrorists by both right-wing and leftist French governments.) More important, the Europeans are particularly eager for arms-control progress, since they worry that they might be the first targets in a nuclear war. Because of similar fears, officials from Eastern Europe also expressed relief that the Daniloff case had been resolved and that talks were moving forward. "We are very happy," said one Bulgarian diplomat in Brussels. "This will do us a lot of good."

Even if the Soviets failed to win on points, they did display some slick diplomatic footwork. Andrei Gromyko would have stuck rigidly to the Soviet position in the Daniloff talks. Shevardnadze proved both pragmatic and imaginative in his 24 hours of negotiations with Shultz, according to administration sources. After the deal was struck, Shevardnadze refused to gloat. "I don't know whether it is useful to argue whether it is or is not a deal," he said. "It is a fair solution." At the United Nations, lower-level Soviet officials were just as magnanimous and accessible to the press. Although clearly for show, the performance was smooth—and it confirmed a

"new style of diplomacy" under Gorbachev, as one Soviet U.N. source put it, that should give pause to Americans used to outshining their Soviet counterparts without effort.

**Cool hand:** But the Soviets weren't the only ones who were deft. U.S. officials did make two initial blunders—the first in a series of miscalculations on both sides—by arresting Zakharov rather than quietly asking the Soviets to send him home, and by failing to anticipate that Moscow would arrest an American journalist in retaliation. But after Daniloff was jailed, they recovered their balance. Although the administration often leaks like a broken-down sprinkler, the proposal for the Reykjavik summit was kept secret for 11 days after Gorbachev first offered it in a letter delivered to Reagan on Sept. 19. Shultz played a particularly cool hand. At one point when he was getting nowhere with Shevardnadze, he invited him to the White House to see Reagan. The president was "crystal clear" in expressing both anger over the Daniloff situation and interest in better U.S.-Soviet relations,

JOHN FICARA—NEWSWEEK

Uneven trade: Zakharov on his way home

Shultz said. Later, Shevardnadze acknowledged that Reagan seemed "worked up"—and after their meeting the Daniloff negotiations accelerated.

Historians will argue for years over the long-range implications of the Daniloff deal. Some U.S. reporters in Moscow were already worried that it looked ominous for them. "It amounts to an open invitation to snatch any one of us when the Soviets need bargaining leverage," complained Steve Goldstein of The Philadelphia Inquirer. "As I see it, Sept. 30 [the date of Zakharov's

release] is the start of open-hunting season on all American journalists in Moscow." But others pointed out that the KGB was to blame for arresting Daniloff in the first place. As CBS bureau chief Wyatt Andrews put it, "Let's not forget who the enemy is: it's not the Reagan administration." In Washington some U.S. officials speculated that in the future Moscow might actually be less willing to use reporters as pawns, after the trouble they stepped into by setting up Daniloff.

As for the charges that Gorbachev will take Reagan for a patsy, the outcome of Reykjavik will give a preliminary indication. But the evidence of their dealings so far argues against that assumption. Gorbachev has made most of the concessions in the arms-control bargaining so far. Reagan also succeeded in turning their first summit in Geneva into a get-acquainted meeting rather than the tough bargaining session on Reagan's Star Wars program that Gorbachev wanted. The one thing the Daniloff resolution does show for certain is that minor skirmishes don't always have to upset the superpower dialogue, as they have done so often in the past. In establishing that, Reagan and Gorbachev may have set a very valuable precedent.

MARK WHITAKER with ROBERT B. CULLEN and KIM WILLENSON in Washington, DAVID NEWELL at the United Nations and bureau reports

Yuri Orlov: The End of an Ordeal

**W**hen Yuri Orlov left the Soviet Union on Sunday, he had no idea where in the West he would settle. But he knew nothing that lay ahead could be worse than the agony he has endured over the past nine years. In 1978 Orlov, a physicist, was sentenced to seven years of hard labor and five years of exile for his work as leader of a group that monitored Moscow's compliance with the human-rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki accords. He was sent to a labor camp in the foothills of the Urals. He was fed subsistence rations. He was often denied visits with his wife, Irina. Once he was locked in the camp's grim internal prison for seven months. Tormenting him, a KGB officer taunted, "You will never get out of the camp."

He finally did in March 1984. When Orlov's prison stretch ended, he was sent to Kobyai, a village of 4,000 in the permafrost region of eastern Siberia. Locals were pressured not to rent to him, so he had to live with 12 construction workers in a small wooden cabin. In April 1985 some strangers stopped him on the street and beat him on the head. Finally he managed to rent a house for about $1,500 a year. It had no toilets, no well and only a stove to warm him against temperatures as cold as 60 degrees below zero. For water in the winter, he cut blocks of ice from a lake and stored them on wooden planks; to make tea, he chipped off pieces of ice and boiled them.

Even in releasing Orlov, Moscow stooped to humiliate him. Soviet Foreign Minister

Permafrost exile: In Kobyai

Eduard Shevardnadze referred to him acidly as "a certain Orlov." Irina was summoned to the exit-visa office in Moscow, where she paid for a plane ticket. But it wasn't until a day before their flight that Orlov was brought to Moscow—and told when he could take wing for freedom.

NEWSWEEK: OCTOBER 13, 1986 37

media has been spectacular; he has avoided the heavy-handed dullness of previous Soviet heads of government. All this has encouraged the perennial Western penchant for seeking salvation in conversion. The argument that Soviet leaders have changed is not new; it has in fact been made about every Soviet leader and by every American president, except Richard Nixon, since the Bolsheviks came to power. President Nixon, dubious about the perfectibility of his compatriots, was even warier about staking American foreign policy on a presumed change of heart of a Soviet leader.

I do not claim to know Gorbachev's personal convictions; perhaps he does not yet know himself whether he wishes to change the system or by how much. But it is well to remember that his entire career was in the Communist Party; he was a protégé of Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB, and Mikhail Suslov, then chief party ideologue. Neither of these men was likely to have been a closet dove. It would be reckless to base policy on the assumption of sweet reasonableness. The test of Gorbachev's intentions should be his actions, not his demeanor, his age or the cut of his suits. The test of U.S. policy is the ability to define precise criteria for progress toward peace, not the personal relationship between the president and the general secretary.

■ **The avoidance of political issues.** Perhaps the principal threat to peace resides in the peculiar combination of Soviet expansionism and the instability of the Soviet system. Moscow has invaded Afghanistan and established bases in Vietnam. Cuban proxy troops are in Angola, Ethiopia and Nicaragua. Soviet arms fuel assault after assault on the established order; Soviet money and intelligence services support too many guerrilla movements and too many terrorist groups.

Yet none of these issues is the subject of a U.S.-Soviet dialogue even approximating in intensity and seriousness those on arms control. Obviously the Soviet Union is not eager to discuss topics that constrain its political conduct. It would serve Soviet purposes to confine the dialogue with the United States as much as possible to arms control. Having achieved a relaxation of tension in this manner, the Soviets could then try to deal with neighboring countries such as China, Japan and Pakistan bilaterally, seeking to separate them from the United States.

American resistance to this Soviet strategy is inhibited by many proponents of arms control who are so protective of their cherished goal that they resist linking it with any other issue—thereby unintentionally falling in with Soviet strategy.

Yet the relationship between political tensions and arms levels—the linkage—is not established by policy but by reality. Arms levels cannot be permanently lowered when there is a constant attack on the international equilibrium. In the end the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan sounded the death knell to the ratification of SALT II. It is naive to believe

that any new arms-control agreement can stand by itself without any political context. Linkage, far from sabotaging arms control, is the only reliable way to sustain it. So long as past Soviet practice does not change, the threat of war exists, for sooner or later the democracies will be bound to resist the relentless Soviet encroachment.

The Chinese have no illusion that tensions can be relaxed without political dialogue. They have put forward no arms-control proposal; instead, they have advanced three conditions for improved relations with Moscow: Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and Mongolia and Soviet assistance in bringing about Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia.

■ **Emphasis on summitry.** Gorbachev has been relentless in his pursuit of summitry. As a participant in four summit conferences, I recognize their utility. But when they become the court of first resort they involve the paradoxical risk of trivializing issues. The impression is created that tensions result from a conflict of personalities rather than underlying causes. The time available at a summit—unless it is very carefully prepared—works against a serious exploration of issues. This helps the Soviet strategy of concentrating on abstract slogans like “peace,” “arms control” and “coexistence”—all designed at least in part to avoid having to change major policies.

Overemphasis on summitry is also not without dangers. Misunderstandings and disagreements between heads of government are a grave matter. Mistakes by heads of government cannot easily be repudiated, and when they disagree the consequences are likely to be serious because there is no other court of appeal. At a summit, atmosphere too easily substitutes for substance, and agreement can become an end in itself.

■ **Making arms control the centerpiece of East-West relations.** Even the Reagan administration has begun to repeat the conventional wisdom that the threat to peace resides primarily in the arms race. But when arms control becomes the sole or even the principal issue, the Soviet Union is able to flood the West with proposals designed to magnify its inhibitions: A complete ban on testing undermines confidence in the reliability of the weapons on which Western strategy will have to be based for at least the immediate future. Banning SDI perpetuates the strategy of mass civilian extermination that produces pacifism and unilateral disarmament. Freezing the conventional-force balance maintains Soviet conventional superiority, which, together with its central geographic location, gives the Soviet Union an advantage in local conflicts.

Moreover, unlinking the arms race from political conditions furthers the Soviet strategy of establishing the moral equivalence of the two sides. Many sincere advocates of peaceful coexistence delude themselves into believing that they must begin by holding both sides equally responsible for interna-

tional tensions. To be sure, the West has made its share of mistakes, but most of these have occurred in response to relentless Soviet pressure. Obscuring this distinction undermines the democracies' willingness to resist expansionism.

The postulate that there is little moral difference between the superpowers has gained increasing currency in some European countries. This makes it more difficult for our allies to sustain adequate defense programs. In order to resist domestic pressures—from left-wing socialists, unilateralists, environmentalists—many European governments are tempted to present their defense program as a means to achieve arms control. They are then at the mercy of Soviet overtures that appear to address arms control while in fact not improving security. Elaborating a coherent defense policy is nearly impossible when weapons are treated primarily as negotiating chips. More important, it makes European leaders captives of their own rhetoric. They are extremely reluctant to oppose arms-control schemes even when they know them to be irrelevant or even dangerous—especially when put forward by the United States. The current American proposal for the reduction of intermediate-range missiles, discussed below, is a case in point.

Gorbachev has pursued all four strands of his policy with great skill. The test of America will be not to fall in—albeit unintentionally—with his design.

## Arms-Control Issues

Since it seems clear that Reagan and Gorbachev will devote most of their time to arms control, it is worth taking a close look at the details and implications of the proposals they will discuss. From what is available to the public, it appears that progress is being made in two arms-control areas: a limitation on intermediate-range missiles in Europe and a strategic-arms agreement combining a reduction of warheads with a moratorium on defensive weapons, specifically the Strategic Defense Initiative.

■ **Intermediate-Range Missiles.** The Carter administration decided to offer intermediate-range missiles to Europe after the Soviet Union deployed SS-20 mobile missiles carrying three warheads each. The American offer included 108 Pershing II rockets and 464 cruise missiles—in effect pilotless airplanes. The actual deployment began in the Reagan administration. Massive demonstrations occurred in the five countries that agreed to the American deployment—Britain, West Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands. In 1983 the Soviet Union walked out of arms-control negotiations in protest. President Reagan and the allies held firm, and deployment has proceeded at a steady pace. After a year the Soviets returned to the conference table. Now that the missile deployment is well

NEWSWEEK: OCTOBER 13, 1986 39

THE ICELAND SUMMIT

advanced and the Soviet bluff of leaving the
conference table has failed, it is important
that the Soviets not achieve via arms control
what they sought to accomplish by political
warfare.

The proposal apparently being discussed is
to limit the deployment of intermediate-
range missiles in Europe to 100 warheads on
each side. The Soviet Union could retain an
additional 100 intermediate-range warheads
in Asia; the United States could station 100 in
the United States. In assessing this proposal,
one must keep in mind that the issue is politi-
cal more than strategic. European-based U.S.
missiles were designed to link the nuclear
defense of Europe to that of America. From a
purely military point of view there was no
need to answer the Soviet deployment by sta-
tioning missiles on the ground in Europe. The
retaliation to Soviet attack could have been
launched from the sea or from the continental
United States. The problem was the declining
credibility of the American nuclear deterrent
as the Soviet nuclear arsenal grew into the
thousands. Our allies feared that the United
States *might* not respond to an attack on
Europe with U.S. strategic weapons and
would surely not do so if the Soviets confined
the aggression to conventional forces.

Stationing American missiles in Europe, it
was assumed, would make the response more
nearly automatic. The Soviets would not be
able to threaten nuclear blackmail or conven-
tional attack on Europe without considering
the European-based American missiles. If
that force attained a certain critical size, they
would not be able to destroy or capture it
without receiving an extremely damaging
counterblow. Therefore, it was thought, the
Soviets would not attack the European mis-
siles without attacking the U.S. strategic
forces and they would be deterred from that
course by the fear of U.S. nuclear retaliation.

With this as a background, several aspects
of the American proposal raise profound
concerns:

* Stationing 100 missiles with a range of 1,500 miles in America as a counter to Soviet missiles 8,000 miles away is irrelevant, if not ridiculous. These missiles are not likely to survive congressional pressures on the defense budget for any length of time.
* American acceptance of the Soviet deployment in Asia will be unpalatable to Asian nations, especially to Japan and China. And since the missiles are mobile they can be moved to Europe in a crisis in less than two weeks.
* The proposal would leave some 40 Pershing launchers in West Germany and some 60 cruise-missile warheads to be divided among Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain and Italy. Since each cruise-missile launcher carries four warheads, there would only be an average of four launchers per country. The Soviets may believe that they can easily wipe out this deployment in a first strike. More important, this would mean that our allies endured the ordeal of heavy domestic criticism—and Soviet pressure—for the sake of

four missiles each. But since Italy, West Ger-
many and Britain face elections within two
years, no leader is going to oppose this arms-
control scheme. But they will surely remem-
ber and it will affect their readiness to fall in
with new American deployment schemes.

* The reduction of the West's intermediate-range capability will not significantly reduce the Soviet nuclear threat to Europe. The SS-20 has in recent years been overshadowed by large numbers of short- and medium-range weapons that can threaten all of Europe but are outside the proposed agreement. NATO has no equivalent weapons.

■ Strategic Weapons. The nuclear age began with an American monopoly that lasted for five years. This was followed for two more decades by a huge American superiority. During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, for example, President Kennedy held close to 4,000 warheads, Khruschev not much more than 100. But after that crisis the Soviet Union started a massive buildup, especially of its land-based missile forces. It developed heavy missiles of much greater throw weight than the United States, which continued to rely on the so-called Triad of a mix of land-based missiles, submarine-based missiles and bombers. As long as missiles had only a single warhead the greater throw weight of the Soviet missiles did not seem to matter. In fact, the theory of arms control developed in the late '50s when launchers had single warheads and accuracy was poor. That meant that neither side was likely to prevail in a surprise attack if the number of launchers was roughly equal. Since it would take more than one attacking missile to destroy an opposing launcher, a surprise attack would exhaust the aggressor's arsenal while leaving the victim with a reserve force capable of destroying the aggressor's population. Thus emerged the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD) that measured deterrence by the percentage of population and industrial capacity that a retaliatory blow could destroy.

The advent of multiple-warhead missiles and improved accuracy destroyed this equation. Now that there were many more warheads than launchers, a surprise attack became at least theoretically possible. The greater throw weight of Soviet heavy missiles began to matter because they could carry more and heavier warheads than American missiles. Indeed, the throw weight of American missiles was too low for an effective first strike. Since reductions in the number of missiles could not eliminate the disproportion between warheads and launchers, arms control in the traditional sense inevitably lost some of its point. But the theory persisted partly because of the passion of its advocates, partly because no credible theory came along to replace it.

But reality has a way of asserting itself. The
facts are that Soviet heavy missiles with mul-
tiple warheads threaten the American land-
based force. The number of warheads is so
large that the civilian populations can be
destroyed many times over. An agreement

that fails to alter these realities is either
meaningless or dangerous.

The president's U.N. speech put forward a
complex proposal: Intercontinental war-
heads would be reduced from 11,000 to 8,000.
At the same time the United States would
agree to a moratorium on the deployment and
weapons testing of SDI for 7½ years. (Gorba-
chev has demanded that this period be 15
years; a compromise is possible.)

These proposals illustrate how slogans can
take on a life of their own. The desirability of
reductions has been invoked so often that it
has become an article of faith even though
eliminating 3,000 warheads does not reduce
in any measurable way the perils to the civil-
ian population.

Nor would the danger of surprise attack
disappear with a ceiling of 8,000 warheads.
With respect to land-based forces, this is be-
cause the ratio of warheads to launchers will
remain at best static even while numbers are
reduced. And the vulnerability of submarine-
based strategic forces will surely increase.
Under the proposed scheme, the number of
U.S. submarines would be reduced to around
15 from the present ceiling of 42. But antisub-
marine forces are not part of the agreement.
By definition, then, an unimpaired Soviet
defensive force will confront a U.S. strategic
submarine force reduced by two-thirds. And
vulnerability tempts attack. The Soviets
would have the same disadvantage, but they
rely much less on their missile-carrying sub-
marines. In any event mutual vulnerability
cannot possibly be the goal of arms control.

In short, the importance of the proposed
reduction in strategic forces is almost entirely
symbolic. At best it will do no damage; it
cannot be said to enhance strategic stability
in any measurable way; in many respects it
diminishes it.

Strategic Defense Initiative

The proposed reduction of warheads surely does not justify the abandonment of the Strategic Defense Initiative, but that, I fear, is the nearly inevitable result of the proposed moratorium. Whether the de facto abandonment of SDI is a misfortune depends, of course, on one's assessment of its significance. Many of its dedicated opponents argue that it is all a mirage anyway—though they fail to explain why the Soviets are so passionate about thwarting an irrelevant program. It is easy to ridicule the straw man of a leakproof defense implied by some of President Reagan's more exuberant explanations. But there are many important objectives for strategic defense other than a perfect protection of the population: complicating the calculations of an aggressor; a hedge against attacks by third countries; a shield against nuclear blackmail; protection for the retaliatory forces. Above all I cannot believe that a democratic public will indefinitely sustain a defense policy that bases secu-

NEWSWEEK : OCTOBER 13, 1986

rity on the capacity for total civilian devastation and that makes no effort to protect the population.

Anyone even vaguely familiar with President Reagan's strong views on this subject will know that he is rightly proud of his Strategic Defense Initiative. But he appears to believe that a moratorium with an agreed time limit would represent a Soviet approval of eventual deployment. In Reagan's view the United States is therefore giving up little and gaining Soviet acquiescence on the question of SDI. But is this really compatible with experience? President Reagan will have been out of office for more than five years when the moratorium ends—assuming that in the course of the negotiations it is not extended further, as is probable. The United States has never unilaterally ended a moratorium—not even of SALT II, though we had refused to ratify it and though it would have lapsed at the end of 1985 had it been ratified. President Reagan cannot possibly predict the reaction of his successor-once-removed faced with the domestic and Soviet pressures to extend the moratorium. If one of the most popular presidents of this century could not commit himself to deployment, what makes one believe that a successor can do so more than eight years from now?

The opponents of SDI will certainly work to delay deployment by reducing the budgetary expenditures for it. The military services will have little incentive to pursue a program that has no deployment schedule and that already is handicapped by the anomaly of not belonging to any one service that could defend it against public and congressional pressures. The Soviets, obviously having no such inhibitions, are likely to make much more rapid progress on missile defense during a moratorium than we are.

If in the early '90s the strategic forces of both sides comprise 8,000 warheads and no strategic defenses (assuming the Soviets do not cheat), the current negotiations will have perpetuated the strategic relationship that leaves the United States in a precarious position psychologically untenable for democracy. Reliance on nuclear weapons will continue at irrelevantly lower levels. But the willingness to use nuclear weapons must progressively erode as no military purpose can be assigned to them and prospective civilian casualties multiply. At the same time, in a period of relaxation of tensions induced by the projected agreements and the existing budgetary pressures in all democracies, there will be little increase in conventional forces; there has after all been very little in decades. In any event the Soviets have engaged the West in negotiations over conventional forces that perpetuate an existing unfavorable balance. The United States and its allies will increasingly find themselves in a position where they can extricate themselves from crises only by the use of nuclear weapons that they are afraid to use because of their apocalyptic consequences. One can only pray that the day will never come when the democ-

racies look back to this period with bafflement and regret that they let slip the occasion for a more radical approach that might have improved the security situation rather than confirmed it.

## How Did We Get Here?

The West finds itself in this dilemma; advocates of arms control are pushing it toward an essentially suicidal security strategy based on thousands of unopposed nuclear strategic weapons. Arms-control opponents harass the negotiations through bureaucratic infighting. Faced with negotiating deadlines, the president opts for what is attainable. For almost all proposals now extant the best that can be said is that they do not make the situation worse.

This results importantly from the longstanding failure of the machinery for developing national strategy. Negotiating positions emerge from interdepartmental contests that focus on defending entrenched positions rather than defining national goals. Relations between the State and Defense departments, rarely cordial in any administration, are at their nadir. The Pentagon is ingenious in developing proposals the Soviets cannot accept and in advancing unfulfillable criteria of progress. In response (or perhaps in pursuit of underlying proclivities), the State Department focuses on negotiability; in other words, on what the Soviets have said they will accept.

Congressional pressures magnify the inference. Congress, especially the House of Representatives, has long since abandoned its historic oversight role and has moved toward legislating its tactical preferences. The conviction is widespread that arms control is best achieved by gutting administration programs. Congress has cut the MX-missile program, for example, to 45—a number for which no military rationale is possible. The Strategic Defense Initiative is undergoing the same attrition. As a result, the Soviets may decide that they need not negotiate seriously because the Congress will hand them their preferences on a silver platter. And the administration is tempted into excessive concessions to get at least some quid pro quo for what otherwise will be abandoned for domestic reasons.

The result is a stalemate. Every president since Eisenhower has been driven to the realization that if he wanted to maintain public and allied support, indeed even if he wanted to maintain the defense budget, he needed arms-control negotiations. Ronald Reagan, the most conservative president of the postwar period, has not been able to escape this reality. At the same time, bitter controversies involving tests of bureaucratic and congressional strength have prevented ideas from emerging other than an endless replay of the concepts of 30 years ago when warheads were single, launchers fewer and accuracy less.

## What Can Be Done?

Real progress at the forthcoming summits thus depends on the willingness of the two leaders to return to fundamentals. Reading each other byzantine arms-control numbers prepared by technical experts cannot bring about a genuine change in security conditions. As far as strategic weapons are concerned, the threats to stability are heavy missiles and multiple warheads. SDI should not be proscribed but limited in an agreed relationship to offensive systems. Hence the smaller the offensive threat gets, the smaller the defensive forces can be.

The forthcoming summits could thus make a major contribution if the two leaders agree on the following principles:

* Heavy missiles should be banned with reductions beginning immediately and continuing over an agreed period of time.
* Multiple warheads should be banned with reductions beginning immediately and continuing over an agreed period of time. The combination of these measures would drastically reduce warheads (by more than 70 percent). It would also permit strategic defense to be reduced substantially.
* Strategic defenses appropriate to the reduced offensive forces should be phased in over an agreed period of time. The level should be established by concrete negotiations now, not at the end of a moratorium that Soviet and domestic pressures will seek to make permanent.
* The current formula for intermediate-range-missile reductions will mark the beginning of the end of a serious U.S. strategic deployment in Europe—thus achieving a major Soviet goal. The scheme should be reworked to provide for equality on the Eurasian land mass—in other words, to have the American warheads in Europe equal the entire Soviet intermediate-range force. And the ceiling should probably be raised to a level in which the linkage between the nuclear defense of the United States and of Europe is maintained.
* Serious negotiations should start with respect to political issues. Previous attempts to negotiate international restraints have foun- dered in part because they were too general. Clearly neither of the two superpowers can be expected to give up its convictions. They could undertake to limit their actions, specifically the shipment of arms into troubled areas, the encouragement of subversion and other covert activities. A beginning for such restraint could perhaps be made in Africa.
The forthcoming meetings must be tested not by the fact but by the content of agreements; in the end they must make a difference. It will be said—and not without merit—that agreements even of marginal consequence build confidence. But at some point "confidence building" must lead to agreements that change reality rather than atmosphere. And to use a famous phrase of President Reagan's: if not now, when?

NEWSWEEK: OCTOBER 13, 1986 41

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Henry Kissinger

Arms: First Let's Figure Out What We Want

After months of shadowboxing, Washington and Moscow have signaled each other that their interest in improved relations and hence a summit is high. This raises the perennial questions of East-West relations: (1) What are Soviet purposes? (2) What agenda will advance the world toward peace?

No doubt Mikhail Gorbachev seeks a relaxation of tensions. He has set for himself the herculean task of making the existing Soviet system more efficient, and avoidable foreign policy crises are likely to prove an unwanted distraction. But prudence—in addition to ideology—will cause Gorbachev to strive for a relaxation of tensions at the lowest possible bureaucratic cost. Unless there is no other way to achieve his goals, he would be reluctant to challenge the foreign policy premises that have produced two generations of geopolitical pressure. The Soviet leaders will change, if at all, grudgingly, because they are imprisoned by their own domestic constraints. A creative American diplomacy must discourage the easy way out—which would be to simply freeze the existing status quo, especially in the military field. American diplomacy must show the way to a better solution.

The Soviet desire to confine the East-West dialogue to arms control is understandable. Circumscribing the discussion obscures the Soviet global political pressures—in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola, Nicaragua—that have been a major factor in international tensions. And by enshrining a concept of deterrence based exclusively on offensive weapons and rejecting deployments on strategic defense, it contributes to the eventual demoralization of the West.

The unresolved domestic controversy in the United States between advocates of arms control and those who rely on unilateral defense has prevented the elaboration of a long-range strategy and of criteria by which to judge progress. It has exhausted the energies of the American leadership, which is reduced to refereeing arcane disputes between technical experts. It causes defense policy to be shaped by the pressures of the budget and arms control discussions to be dominated by what the Soviets have said they will accept. Thus a high administration official, explaining President Reagan's draft reply to the Soviets' latest arms control proposal, was quoted as saying that Reagan "knows [Gorbachev] needs a quid pro quo to buy time to compete with us on defense." Can this be an American arms control objective? Or is it sophistication run amok?

For three decades Western arms controllers and the scientific groups that back them have opposed every new strategic weapon because they believe that a small number of relatively unsophisticated weapons is enough to deter aggression by threatening massive civilian and industrial damage. For an equal period those relying on unilateral defense have harassed arms control negotiators because they believe that arms control creates the illusion of eased tensions while in fact thwarting the sophisticated weapons needed for a strategy aimed at military rather than civilian targets.

The arms controllers have refused to face the fact that their insistence on basing deterrence on offensive weapons and on atrophying strategic defense will ultimately drive democracies to pacifism. The "defense unilateralists" have refused to face the fact that arms control is now an essential requirement of both domestic and allied politics, that their choice may be between a negotiated arms control agreement or a legislated unilateral one. In the end each group has managed to paralyze the other without being able to achieve its own objectives.

America's allies have on the whole added their pressures on behalf of any scheme labeled arms control to satisfy their presumed public opinion, and on behalf of a nuclear strategy because it is cheaper. But what is the sense of talking extended deterrence—the NATO term of art for a strategy involving a prolonged, if limited, nuclear exchange—when one nuclear accident in the Soviet Union produced near-panic all over Europe?

As a result, arms control policy has been frozen in the categories of a generation ago, when each missile had a single warhead and accuracies were poor. But now a single missile can carry 10 or more warheads and threaten several launchers; improvements in accuracy are dramatic. Thus reductions that do not alter the disproportion of warheads to launchers do not ease the dangers of a first strike; indeed they may well increase the risk by making surprise attacks on land-based missiles more calculable and exposing the missile-carrying submarine fleet to breakthroughs in anti-submarine warfare.

America's unresolved internal debate tempts the Soviets to choose, from among the flood of schemes generated by contending elements of the American bureaucracy, those most compatible with their interests. America is perilously close to negotiating with itself.

The United States has proposed reducing strategic nuclear warheads from the current approximately 12,000 to 6,000. The Soviets have countered by offering a ceiling of 8,000, but they have linked that ceiling to a renunciation of the deployment and development of defensive weapons for a period of 15 to 20 years. A "grand compromise" is now being widely urged that envisages reductions below the Soviet ceiling in return for a moratorium on defensive weapons for, say, 10 years.

The biggest argument on behalf of the "grand compromise" is that its advocates believe the Soviets will accept it. I defy any systems analyst to distribute the 8,000 warheads that would remain if the Soviet proposal were accepted—or the 6,000 in the U.S. version for that matter—in a manner that would reduce the threat either side poses to the other. And the indefinite delay in deploying strategic defense would perpetuate the strategy that is fostering pacifism in the West.

(Continued)
Washington Post July 29, 1986

It will be argued that the "grand compromise" concedes nothing because the moratorium on deploying a strategic defense could be negotiated to coincide with the U.S. estimate of how long it will take to complete the research necessary for deployment. But no moratorium has ever been abandoned first by the United States, no matter what the provocation.

President Reagan was roundly castigated when after five years of restraint he declared that he "was no longer bound by SALT II, which he had refused to ask the Senate to ratify, which the Soviets were violating and which, had it been ratified, would have expired at the end of this year. How then could a formal moratorium on defensive weapons be ended? And, were it ended, would Congress vote the funds necessary to finance the Strategic Defense Initiative program? Indeed I doubt that during a moratorium there would be adequate funds even for research.

We may well be facing a unique opportunity for a new start in East-West relations. But its test will be the content, not the fact, of an agreement. When will we ever bring about a new direction in East-West diplomatic and security relationships if it is not possible to do so now, with a new Soviet leadership facing major problems and far less encumbered by the past than it will be later? Can the West do no better than a numbers game that rearrangements existing categories but does not change them?

The attempt to negotiate a numerical compromise on the present basis this year is likely to prove either irrelevant or dangerous. It also focuses the dialogue between the heads of governments on issues that are most likely to make them prisoners of technical bureaucrats. A much more realistic and useful objective for the summit would be to seek to elaborate principles that can guide negotiators and that might well lead to an agreement by the time the president visits Moscow in late 1987 or in 1988.

Two principles seem to me essential: (1) Deployment of strategic defense cannot be separated from the level of strategic offense. Obviously the lower the level of offense, the lower the level of defense can be. (2) To make a strategic difference, reductions must involve a restructuring of the strategic forces of both sides. One way of achieving this is to

ban multiple warheads, at least on land-based missiles. This would reduce warheads by some 80 percent. It would also be a major obstacle to a first strike because an aggressor would exhaust his arsenal in seeking to destroy the opposing retaliatory force, leaving no reserve for threatening other damage.

To bring about the same kind of new direction in defense and arms control policy that it has already achieved in domestic policy, the Reagan administration needs to strengthen its national security machinery. Earlier administrations may have erred by reserving too much power for the White House; the pendulum has now clearly swung too far in the opposite direction of departmental self-will.

Outside panels have proved successful with respect to space in the Rogers Commission, with respect to Defense Department organization in the Packard Commission. A panel on national strategy should be created. It should be charged not with developing actual negotiating positions but with developing a strategic doctrine by which negotiating positions can be judged. It could begin with seeking to answer the key questions raised by the Strategic Defense Initiative. Against what dangers does the Strategic Defense Initiative seek to protect: The defense of missile bases? Of population centers? And against what level of attack? And how will each proposed deployment be modified by various reduction proposals? For the basic debate over strategic defense concerns not technical feasibility but purpose and doctrine.

Together with establishing the criteria, it might be useful to appoint a presidential representative for East-West negotiations reporting to the president and the secretary of state. In order to cut through departmental rivalries, the representative could be given broad conceptual instructions and empowered to make referendum agreements—that is, provisional agreements subject to subsequent approval. In this manner too the president could raise the issues of long-term purposes for which no forum now exists.

Disputes that are essentially philosophical can obviously not be settled by procedural devices alone. They will help only if the administration decides that to explore the prospects of peace it will first have to define its content.

SUPPLEMENTAL CLIPS: TUESDAY, 29 JULY 1986

LOS ANGELES TIMES

Defining
Defense by
U.S. Purpose

By Henry A. Kissinger

NEW YORK

After months of shadowboxing, Washington and Moscow have signaled each other that their interest in improved relations—and hence a summit—is high. This raises the perennial questions of East-West relations: What are Soviet purposes? What agenda will advance the world toward peace?

No doubt Mikhail S. Gorbachev seeks a
relaxation of tensions. He has the hercule-
an task of making the existing Soviet
system more efficient; avoidable foreign
policy crises are likely to prove an
unwanted distraction. But prudence—in
addition to ideology—will cause Gora-
chev to strive for a relaxation of tensions
at the lowest possible bureaucratic cost.

Soviet leaders will change, if at all,
grudgingly, because they are imprisoned
by domestic constraints. A creative
American diplomacy must discourage
the easy way out—which would be simply to
freeze the existing status quo, especially
in the military field. American diplomacy
must show the way to a better solution.

The unresolved domestic controversy
in the United States between advocates of
arms control and those who rely on
unilateral defense has prevented elabora-
tion of a long-range strategy and of
criteria by which to judge progress. It has
exhausted the energies of the American
leadership, reduced to refereeing arcane
disputes between technical experts. It
causes defense policy to be shaped by the
pressures of the budget and arms-control
discussions to be dominated by what the
Soviets have said they will accept. Thus a
high Administration official, explaining
the President's draft reply to the Soviets'
latest arms-control proposal, was quoted
as saying that Reagan knows Gorbachev
"needs a quid pro quo to buy time to

27 JULY 1986

SECTION V, Pg. 1

compete with us on defense." Can this be
an American objective? Or is it sophistica-
tion run amok?

For three decades Western arms con-
trollers and the scientific groups backing
them have opposed every new strategic
weapon because they believe a small
number of relatively unsophisticated
weapons is enough to deter aggression by
threatening massive civilian and industri-
al damage. For an equal period, those
relying on unilateral defense have ha-
rassed arms-control negotiators because
they consider that arms control creates
the illusion of eased tensions while in fact
thwarting the sophisticated weapons
needed for a strategy aimed at military
rather than civilian targets.

The arms controllers have refused to
face the fact that their insistence on
basing deterrence on offensive weapons
and on atrophying strategic defense will
ultimately drive democracies to pacifism.
The "defense unilateralists" have refused
to face the fact that arms control is now an
essential element of both domestic and
allied politics, that their choice may be
between a negotiated agreement or a
legislated unilateral one. Each group has
managed to paralyze the other without
achieving its own objectives.

As a result, arms-control policy has
been frozen in the categories of a genera-
tion ago, when each missile had a single
warhead and accuracies were poor. But
now a single missile can carry 10 or more
warheads and threaten several launchers;
improvements in accuracy are dramatic.
Thus reductions that do not alter the
disproportion of warheads to launchers do
not ease the dangers of a first strike;
indeed they may well increase the risk by
making surprise attacks on land-based
missiles more calculable.

The unresolved internal U.S. debate
tempts the Soviets to choose among a
flood of schemes from contending ele-
ments of the U.S. bureaucracy. America is
perilously close to negotiating with itself.

The United States has proposed reduc-
ing strategic nuclear warheads from the
current approximately 12,000 to 6,000.
The Soviets have countered by offering a
ceiling of 8,000, but they have linked that
ceiling to a renunciation of the deploy-
ment and development of defensive
weapons for a period of 15 to 20 years. A
"grand compromise" is now being widely
urged that envisages reductions below the
Soviet ceiling in return for a moratorium
on defensive weapons for, say, 10 years.

The biggest argument on behalf of the
"grand compromise" is that its advocates
believe the Soviets will accept it. I defy
any systems analyst to distribute the 8,000
warheads that would remain were the
Soviet proposal accepted—or the 6,000 in
the U.S. version for that matter—in a
manner that would reduce the threat each
side poses to the other.

It will be argued that the "grand
compromise" concedes nothing because
the moratorium on deploying a strategic
defense could be negotiated to coincide
with the U.S. estimate of the time needed
to complete the research necessary for
deployment. But no moratorium has ever
been abandoned first by the United
States, no matter what the provocation.

President Reagan was roundly casti-
gated when after five years of restraint he
declared that he was no longer bound by
SALT II, which he had refused to ask the
Senate to ratify, which the Soviets were
violating and which, had it been ratified,
would have expired at the end of this year.
How then could a formal moratorium on
defensive weapons be ended? And, were it
ended, would Congress finance the Stra-
tegic Defense Initiative program? I doubt
that during a moratorium there would be
adequate funds even for research.

We may well be facing a unique
opportunity for a new start in East-West
relations. But its test will be the content,
not the fact, of an agreement. This is a
time to bring about a new direction in
East-West diplomatic and security rela-
tionships, with a new Soviet leadership
facing major problems and far less en-
cumbered by the past than it will be later.
Can the West do no better than a numbers
game that rearranges existing categories
but does not change them?

The attempt to negotiate a numerical
compromise is likely to prove either
irrelevant or dangerous. It also focuses
the dialogue between the heads of gov-
ernments on issues that are most likely to
make them prisoners of technical bureac-
crats. A much more realistic and useful
objective would be to seek to elaborate
principles that can guide negotiators and
that might well lead to an agreement by
the time the President visits Moscow in
late 1987 or in 1988.

Two principles seem essential. First,
deployment of strategic defense cannot be
separated from the level of strategic
offense. Second, reductions must involve
restructuring strategic forces on both
sides. One way would be to ban multiple
warheads, at least on land-based missiles.
This would reduce warheads by some
80%. It would also be a major obstacle to a
first strike because an aggressor would
exhaust his arsenal in seeking to destroy
the opposing retaliatory force, leaving no
reserve for threatening other damage.

To achieve the same kind of new
direction in arms-control policy that it has
already achieved in domestic policy, the
Reagan Administration needs to
strengthen its national security machin-
ery. Earlier Administrations may have
erred by reserving too much power for

CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

C

# World Cup According to Character

By Henry A. Kissinger

NEW YORK

I have been an avid soccer fan ever since my youth in Fuerth, a soccer-mad city of southern Germany, which for some inexplicable reason won three championships in a three-year period. My father despaired of a son who preferred to stand for two hours (there were very few seats) watching a soccer game rather than sit in comfort at the opera or be protected from the elements in a museum.

Soccer evokes extraordinary passions, especially during the quadrennial World Cup competition ending today in Mexico City. It has been estimated that the Brazilian gross national product suffers a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars for every day Brazil plays, as rabid fans sit before television sets or radios. Statistics in other soccer citadels must be comparable.

Soccer lends itself to a competition of national teams because it requires an extraordinary combination of individual skill, teamwork and strategic sense. Since there are 11 players on each side engaged in continuous action, every game produces tactical necessities to be solved by improvisation on the playing field.

This was true even in my youth when soccer was much less complex and much more oriented to the offense. Then there were five forwards, three midfield players, two fullbacks and a goalie. The offense being numerically superior to the defense, goals were much more frequent then. By the late 1930s, managers sought to overcome this advantage by assigning the center half to shadow the opposing center forward. The creation of three de facto fullbacks constricted the attack which since time immemorial had been built around the center forward.

In the early 1950s, the Hungarians showed how to overwhelm this defense, turning their center forward into a decoy. He would move to the sidelines or toward midfield, drawing the shadowing defensive player out of position, creating an empty space in front of the goal.

But as in military strategy every offensive maneuver in soccer evokes a compensating defensive move. The answer to the roving center forward was a zone defense; defensive players were required to cover a certain area regardless of which player was attacking. Total soccer was invented soon thereafter; all players had to be able to defend as well as attack and to shift from one mode to the other with extreme rapidity.

The modern style of soccer in fact emphasizes defense—with a few excep-

tions like Brazil, Argentina and France. The basic alignment has become four defensive and four midfield players; the forwards have shrunk to two. Massed defenses can in general be overcome only by rapid thrusts involving very accurate passing. The result is a very tactical game, its complexity becoming a fascinating reflection of national attitudes.

The styles of leading soccer powers like West Germany, Brazil, Italy and England illustrate this point.

West Germany, a finalist today, is, with Italy and Brazil, the most successful team of the modern era. West German soccer entered the postwar era with no particular legacy. Postwar Germany's newly professional soccer being as novel as the frontiers of the state it represents, it could adopt total soccer with a vengeance. The German national team plays the way its general staff prepared for war; games are meticulously planned, each player skilled in both attack and defense. Intricate pass patterns evolve, starting right in front of the German goal. Anything achievable by human foresight, careful preparation and hard work is accounted for.

And there have been great successes. Of the last six prior World Cups, Germany has won two, was second twice, third once and out of the running only in 1978. At the same time, the German national team suffers from the same disability as the famous Schlieffen plan for German strategy in World War I. There is a limit to human foresight; psychological stress on those charged with executing excessively complex maneuvers cannot be calculated in advance. If the German team falls behind, or if its intricate approach yields no results, its game is shadowed by the underlying national premonition that in the end even the most dedicated effort will go unrewarded, by the nightmare that ultimately fate is cruel—a nightmare reinforced by the knowledge that the German media are unmerciful when high expectations go unfulfilled. The impression is unavoidable that an outstanding national soccer team has not brought a

proportionate amount of joy to a people that may not in its heart of hearts believe joy is the ultimate national destiny.

Brazil suffers no such inhibitions. Its national teams are an assertion that virtue without joy is a contradiction in terms. Brazilian teams display a contagious exuberance; Brazilian fans cheer them on to the ecstatic beat of samba bands. Brazil always has the most acrobatic players, the individuals one cannot forget whatever the outcome of the match. But, as in Brazil's political institutions, this individualism is combined with an extraordinary ability to make the practical arrangements required for effective national performance. As a result, Brazil has appeared in more World Cups and won more than any other team. It was eliminated in the quarterfinals of the current competition partly as a result of an egregious seeding placing Italy, the old World Cup holder, France, the European champion, and two potential champions—Brazil and West Germany—in the same half of a sudden-death elimination round, while the other half contained only one team, Argentina—today's other finalist—that has ever been in the final four.

To be sure, the Brazilians, being human, cannot avoid some weaknesses. The players sometimes are so intoxicated by their brilliant maneuvers that they occasionally forget the purpose of the exercise is to score goals. And I have never seen an outstanding Brazilian goalkeeper. Perhaps the task is too lonely; the goalkeeper after all has to stay put while his teammates enjoy themselves tracing clever pass patterns on the turf. Or perhaps the only purely defensive assignment on a team offends the Brazilian self-image.

Yet a Brazilian team on the attack—which is most of the time—looks like a dancing band at carnival. Wave after wave of yellow shirts roll against the opposing goal until the opposition is overwhelmed without being humiliated; it is no disgrace to be defeated by a team whose style no one else can imitate.

(over)

The Los Angeles Times

Sunday, June 29, 1986

William F. Buckley Jr.

An Intuitive
President

When Henry Kissinger went to Washing-
ton last week to address a group of acade-
micians at what he thought was a closed
meeting, he spoke of Ronald Reagan and his
administration in terms he would not have
used addressing a Republican rally. But if
you listened carefully to everything Kiss-
inger said, and weighed it comprehensively,
you would find him much more shocking to
academicians than to Reaganite loyalists.

Just to clear the air, Kissinger said he was
in no way "indebted" to Reagan—in the
sense, let us say, that Kissinger would be
bound to acknowledge being indebted to Rich-
ard Nixon. He went on: moreover, if you
meet Reagan and talk with him briefly, you
wonder how he managed to be elected gover-
nor of California, let alone president of the
United States.

One can hear the academic audience pur-
ring at this point; but it did not anticipate
what was to come.

Kissinger went on to say that, in fact,
Reagan had dominated the politics of Cali-
fornia for eight years, had dominated the
political life of the United States for six
years and, not inconceivably, could go down
as one of the most significant presidents of
the century.

How can this be?

Because, Kissinger explained, the appar-
ent limitations of Reagan totally disguise an
intuitive grasp he has not only for priorities,
but also for technique.

Here, Kissinger later explained, is a man
who managed to change his entire staff
without a ripple of change in policy, so
clearly did he himself dominate policy; a
president who clearly outwitted the Soviet
Union through 1983 and 1984 on the mat-
ter of deploying theater weapons in Europe.
When Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in Gene-
va, it was widely conjectured that he would
"eat" Reagan alive. But Reagan's intuitive
wit, his sense of what to get into, what not
to get into—what academicians might call
his reticulative sense of order—ended him
up dominating the summit. And just as Gor-
bachev now believes that by threatening a
summit cancellation because of Libya he
will embarrass Reagan, quite the contrary is
likely: Gorbachev will lose, and Reagan
gain.

Now what got reported from all the above
over ABC was mostly the business about how
Kissinger wondered that Reagan ever got
elected governor of California, let alone presi-
dent of the United States. Nothing was said
about the subtleties of Kissinger's extempo-
rized remarks, let alone his statement to the
academicians that they suffer as a class be-
cause academicians ted nowadays to be ei-
ther job-seekers or revolutionaries. They are,
accordingly, not attempting to carry the load,
to help public figures to conceptualize prob-
lems with clarity.

As an example, take Nicaragua. Reagan
is here genuinely handicapped by his ren-
dering of the problem. Either the problem is
grave enough to bring U.S. action, or it is
not. If it is, $100 million is a meaningless
antitoxin; if it is not, then we have no busi-
ness helping the contras at all. The aca-
demic class tends to ignore refinements in
stating the question.

One notes from Ronald Reagan Jr.'s amusing and deft piece in Playboy magazine that, alongside the son-reporter, hiding outside the summit room in Geneva was presidential historian Edmund Morris, with the same numerous notepad on which he has written the first part of the best biography ever done on Theodore Roosevelt. It is Kissinger's implicit point that Reagan deserves a biographer of the subtlety of Morris.

But between now and the consolidation of
Reagan's reputation in America's history,
commentators need to be cautious. Last
year, Jack Kemp's press aide John Buckley
(a nephew) bunted a question about Kemp
(Wasn't he too stupid to be president?) by
citing Reagan (They said Reagan was too
stupid to be president). What emerged in
many news stories was merely: Kemp Aide
Says Reagan Too Stupid to Be President.

Ronald Reagan is a very unusual man,
with unusual habits of mind and manner.
Three months ago, a retiring and shy editor
was asked by a friend after a testimonial
dinner whether she had been apprehensive
at the prospect of sitting for 2½ hours next
to the president of the United States.
"Well," she said, "as a matter of fact I was.
But as soon as he sat down, he turned to me
and said, 'Priscilla, do you want to hear
what I said to Gorbachev?'"

You wonder how such people as that can
get elected governor of California. But then
you think about it for a while, and you find
yourself wondering how come, the last time
the voters were consulted on the matter,
that man won only 49 states.

©1986, Universal Press Syndicate

31

WP

P. 23

4/24/86

SUPPLEMENTAL CLIPS: TUESDAY, 4 FEBRUARY 1986

WEAPONS SYSTEMS

ENCOUNTER FEBRUARY 1986

Pg. 12

Michael Charlton

"Star Wars"
or Peace-in-the-Skies

*A Short History of Dreams & Nightmares*

1. *The Mortification of Robert McNamara*

FOR THE first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by "the sun of Los Alamos", the possibility of defence against nuclear bombardment is being taken seriously. If successful it would mean a radical transformation in the competition between the two contending political wills of the Soviet Union and the Western Alliance.

If strategic defence were also to become a Russian achievement, it would place a question mark against the

present forces and philosophy of the smaller nuclear powers (China, France, and Britain), who would have to think all over again. The mercurial Americans are poised for another advance. With that prospect a gap in strategic capabilities—so far unique in history—appears to be opening between the United States and Western Europe, a gap at present bridged by the nuclear deterrents of Britain and France. Is President Reagan's vision that the ballistic missile might be made "impotent" and "obsolete" evidence only of the intellectual pathos of our time—the longing to escape from an intolerable yet permanent military dilemma? It has already become part of the historic dialogue of our day.

In the 1960s the Americans arrived at an opposite conclusion. They took the view that *defence* should be all but abandoned. This American insight and initiative led to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the centre-piece of the first Arms Control Agreements with the Soviet Union. Nuclear realities, it was supposed, had forced potential enemies to reach agreement and imposed upon them a common moderation.

My purpose in these articles is to review the intervening years and follow the evolution of this American debate over grand strategy with those, including a President, who have

shaped and made the crucial decisions; and to ask how it is that—having forsaken defence and accepted the threat of "mutual annihilation" as the basis for stable conflict and rivalry with the Soviet Union—disillusion with arms control took root. Why, now, do the Americans believe the time has come to reconsider the stand they took nearly two decades ago, and to pursue an alternative to "mutual assured destruction"?

Few public men have influenced the way we have thought about nuclear weapons more than the Defence Secretary to Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. What one might call the mortification of Robert McNamara was the act of self-denial and subjection of American appetite which he sponsored in relinquishing the idea of defending populations against the Bomb. McNamara recalls the inner Cabinet meeting which laid the foundation for the declared strategic architecture with which we live today.

**ROBERT MCNAMARA:** In November 1966, Cyrus Vance and I (Cy was then my deputy Secretary of Defence), Walt Rostow (the National Security Adviser), with the five Chiefs of Staff, went to Texas to meet with President Johnson, who was then in Austin.

A major issue was the issue of Anti-Ballistic Missile defence. The Congress at that point had already authorised procurement of an anti-ballistic missile defence. We had refused to spend the funds—even in the face of the fact that the Soviets were deploying an anti-ballistic missile defence around Moscow. When we came to that part of the Budget I remember very well that the five Chiefs unanimously recommended to the President that we include funds for production and deployment of anti-ballistic missile defence.

The President turned to me and asked me what my recommendation was. I said, "Mr President that's absolutely wrong. I strongly recommend against it." I said to him, "Mr President, let's do this: let's recognise that I think it's irrational to react to the Soviet defence with a US defence—it will be ineffective and a waste of money. But let's put the funds in the Budget proposal and state to the Congress that none of this money will be utilised until we have made an effort to join with the Soviets to negotiate an agreement...." He said, "I accept that."

21

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STAR WARS...CONTINUED

That began the contacts with the Soviet Union which ultimately led to the ABM Treaty in 1972 and the Offensive Arms Control Protocol that accompanied it.

—But by that time you had reached a position in your own mind where "mutual assured destruction" was the only conceivable way to live with the advent of the nuclear weapon?

MCNAMARA: That is correct.

—Because you assumed the Soviet Union would subscribe to MAD, this was to be the basis of (1) a stable deterrence, and (2) arms control?

MCNAMARA: I didn't assume the Soviets subscribed to it. The way they were behaving on ballistic missile defence cast some doubt on it. But we believed that, ultimately, through the negotiations we would reach a common agreement on that as the foundation; and that would then make possible offensive arms limitation.

—What I was going to put to you, though, is this: isn't a shared perception of doctrine more or less essential to the pursuit of arms control?

MCNAMARA: Absolutely—and what I assumed was that while they might not at that moment ascribe to that doctrine, the negotiations themselves would lead to acceptance of a common doctrine, on the basis of which one then could build arms agreements.

WHAT ROBERT MCNAMARA leaves us with is one of the "unknowns", unresolved today, and still an issue: whether the acceptance of a common vulnerability could be based, with confidence, on a reasonable common understanding. After all, the opinions of the democrat are deemed by the Marxist-Leninist to be ideological fictions.

The perception that animated the Americans then was their unilateral conclusion that the means-of-defence could compromise stability as much as the means-of-attack. It is an argument deployed now against the "Star Wars"/SDI concept. Dean Rusk was Secretary of State to both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

DEAN RUSK: We did a great deal of work on the anti-ballistic missile problem. We came to the conclusion that if we and the Soviets began to deploy anti-ballistic missiles, the inevitable result would be a dramatic increase in offensive missiles, so that you could penetrate or saturate the ABMs before the main strike was delivered.

Secretary McNamara had gone through that very careful analysis in 1965-66. He seemed to me to be able to demonstrate conclusively that the primary result of ABMs would be to multiply offensive weapons, and therefore they didn't make any sense. It would simply result in a severe escalation of the race in offensive weapons. So that underlying con-

sideration produced the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

AS THE SOVIET nuclear arsenal was growing reciprocally in the 1960s, the view had clearly matured among those who had direct responsibility for these matters in the United States that nuclear blackmail—the use of the nuclear threat with a positive goal in mind—could have no place in the mind of the statesman.

RUSK: Oh yes, I remember almost immediately after President Kennedy took office, he and about six of us sat down in the Cabinet Room. We spent most of the day going through the total effects of nuclear war, both direct and indirect. At the end of it he asked me to come back to the Oval Office with him to talk about something. As we went through the door, he said with a strange little look on his face, "And we call ourselves the human race...." Those who go through that exercise know that at long last the human race has reached the point where it must prevent that general war before it occurs. It's going to take some doing in terms of imagination and restraint and responsibility, and I personally think we need more help from the Russians on that kind of thing than we have had.

DEAN RUSK's disapproval of the withholding by the Russians of such cooperation identifies the source of a persistent distrust. Aren't the two sides arming themselves for different purposes? Can equality ever be conceded or established? The uncertainties which arise are translated into practical consequences. I recall Metternich's famous remark in the last century when he was informed of the death of the Russian Ambassador. "Is this true?" he asked; adding, "What can have been his motive?"

In the 1960s, American policy-makers were absorbing the shock of the Soviet Union being the first to produce an intercontinental ballistic missile—and the exuberant political claims of Khrushchev which accompanied Moscow's success. The American homeland was no longer invulnerable. The Russians had shown that they were capable of surreptitiously gaining an unpredicted strategic advantage. Spumik evoked fearful prospects of Soviet-imposed "Munichs" and "Pearl Harbors."

President Kennedy had campaigned on the issue of "America asleep" and "falling behind." Only later (with satellite reconnaissance) could it be shown that the "Missile Gap"—the fear that the Soviet Union might produce and deploy rockets faster than the United States—was illusory. However, it began an "intelligence" debate which continues to the present day: would the Soviet Union ever be content with parity?

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22

STAR WARS...CONTINUED

ROBERT MCNAMARA: President Kennedy didn't conceive of this gap himself; he was not consciously misstating the situation as he knew it.

The problem then, and to a considerable degree today, is that the West has imperfect knowledge of the Soviet Union; and when you face a situation of imperfect knowledge, it's very important that you do not underestimate the strength of your opponent. You tend to overestimate. That's what the Air Force was doing then, and that led to the allegation of the "Missile Gap." To this day, in my opinion, we're exaggerating the strength of the Soviets for the same reason.

*—Isn't the problem inseparable from the Soviet Union as a closed and secretive society?*

MCNAMARA: Yes, and I would like to stress that I think it's in the Soviet interest to open that up to some degree, at least— to share with us, and to permit us to understand better what their security policies and their security forces are.

*—But would you agree that after the launching of "Sputnik" Khrushchev brandished the nuclear weapon and the Soviet Union's nuclear success? I have here an extract from his 14 June 1960 speech.*

> "The United States, for example, has set itself the target of equalling Soviet rocket production within a period of five years. Do you think the Russians are going to wait? Are we going to play tiddlywinks? Naturally we shall try to make the most of our time-lead and do everything to retain our leading position in this field. There's been a fundamental change in the balance of strength between the Capitalist and Socialist countries—the old positions-of-strength policy is no longer tenable. ..."

*How did the Kennedy Administration intend to react in the face of those pronouncements?*

MCNAMARA: You must recall that, at that time, the Soviets knew their weakness, probably better than we did. The number of strategic warheads possessed by the Soviet Union and the US in 1960, I happen to recall—I was reviewing the figures the other day—the US had 6,300, the Soviets had 200. Now, facing that situation and recognising as he did that there were individuals high in the hierarchy in the Defence Department who believed that we did have, should have, and possibly should use a first-strike capability, I think it was natural that he would tend to exaggerate their strength and boast of what they were going to do to us—recognising that we didn't know exactly what they had, and recognising that they had for a short period of time a technological lead (that is to say in rocket, in missile development). I think that accounts for what clearly was a gross exaggeration of strength.

*—But shouldn't we be clear that that's with the benefit of hindsight, and not what you knew at the time?*

MCNAMARA: Yes, that's exactly the point.

THE SOVIET UNION had neutralised the major Western advantage, and nuclear weapons were serving as agents of mutual paralysis at the strategic level. Kennedy had concluded in 1960, as he said, that:

> "Soviet missile power will be the shield from behind which they will slowly but surely advance, through "Sputnik" diplomacy, limited wars and the vicious blackmail of our allies. The periphery of the free world will be nibbled away."

The inference was that nuclear weapons favoured the aggressor and that the Soviet Union was an aggressive state. In this respect opinion was influenced by the experience of the immediate historical past, as Dean Rusk makes clear.

DEAN RUSK: That continuing build-up is a matter of concern. Let me go back here for a bit. Just after the end of World War II, we in the West demobilised almost completely and almost overnight. By the summer of 1946, we did not have a single division in our Army nor a single group in our Air Force that could be considered ready for combat. The ships of our Navy were being put into moth-balls about as fast as we could find berths for them, and those that remained afloat were being manned by skeleton crews.

Our defence budget for three fiscal years, 1947, 1948 and 1949, came down to little over eleven billion dollars a year, believe it or not. Now Mr Stalin sat over there, and he looked out across the West, and he saw all the divisions melting away. So what did he do? He tried to keep his troops in Azerbaijan, the north-west province of Iran—the first case before the UN Security Council. He demanded the two eastern provinces of Turkey, Kars and Ardahan. He swept aside some of the wartime agreements which might have given the peoples of Eastern Europe more say in their own political future. He supported the guerrillas going after Greece. He had a hand in the Communist coup d'état in Czechoslovakia. He blockaded Berlin. He gave the green light to the North Koreans to go after South Korea.

Now this was at a period when we were disarmed. I personally believed that we in the West exposed Mr Stalin to intolerable temptations through our own weakness. But those adventures of his, just after World War II, were the origins of the Cold War. We were disarmed. Had he pursued for ten years after World War II a policy of genuine "peaceful coexistence", as we in the West would understand it, he would have produced among other things a disarmed and an isolationist America. But he woke us up with all these adventures of his.

THOSE WHO MADE American policy in the 1960s were confronted with a reality beyond the range of all former concepts: the principle of "mutual annihilation" was becoming a material fact. The Defence Secretary, who had "industrialised" the military arts—and in doing so quickly overhauled and then outdistanced the early Soviet supremacy in rockets—had begun his personal odyssey to the meeting he would have some years later with the Soviet Premier, Kosygin. In Glassboro, New Jersey, in 1967, he

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23

STAR WARS...CONTINUED

made a passionate plea to the Russians to forgo the concept of defence against the ballistic missile. In these dramatic years it fell to him to try to reconcile old concepts with new realities.

ROBERT MCNAMARA: I remember being with President Kennedy (in May of 1962) in California. We were visiting Vandenberg Air Base, and the Commander of the Strategic Air Command met us when our plane landed. As we got into his car, he turned to the President, and said, "When we get the 10,000 *Minutemen*, Mr President, I..." At that moment the President said, "What did you say?" "Well", he said, "I didn't say anything—I started to say when we get the 10,000 *Minutemen*, we're going to do. ..."

Well, the President said, "I thought that's what you said." He said, "Bob, we're not going to get 10,000 *Minutemen*, are we?" I said, "No, no, no, Mr President, we're limiting it to 1,000."

Now the reason I mention this is that at that point the Commander of the Strategic Air Command believed we should have 10,000. The Air Force had cut that back and, as I recall, had recommended to me that we procure 3,000. I had cut it back to 1,000. Now I think one could argue that 1,000 was too many. And that's about as far as I thought I could go under the circumstances.

—You've said a good deal in the past about "the cycle of action-and-reaction." In September 1967 you made a speech in San Francisco in which you spoke of your certainty that action-and-reaction fuelled the arms race. I'd like to quote your words:

"There's a kind of mad momentum intrinsic to the development of all nuclear weapons. If a weapon system works, and works well, there's strong pressure from many directions to procure and deploy the weapon out of all proportion to the procurement level required."

What I'd like to ask is: is that not too mechanical an explanation? Doesn't it ignore the ideological conflict and the doctrinal contention which you agree exists between the two powers?

MCNAMARA: Well, I think it's the ideological differences that in effect cause the action-reaction phenomenon in the technology of weapons—given each side's fear of the other. When one side sees the other side moving forward technically, they're driven to a technical response. And therefore I think my statement is entirely consistent with your implication that ideological differences exist.

—The only question is: which would you put first?

MCNAMARA: I wouldn't put either first. They exist together in the world today; the ideological differences persist; each side is fearful of the other; technology advances. If one side introduces a technical advance, the other side is driven to copy it. I think we have a perfect illustration of that today, and I'm not sure either side fully recognises it. President Reagan's so-called "Star Wars" Initiative is bound to lead, in

my opinion, to Soviet responses. There's very little evidence that the US Administration has yet taken account of these responses.

—Responses in kind, or of a different kind?

MCNAMARA: I would say both. "In kind" in the sense that our expansion of research on strategic defences is bound to lead to further Soviet effort in that direction. Moreover, our stated intention to deploy a strategic defence will almost surely lead, unless we backtrack, to an expansion of Soviet offensive forces, in order that they will have continuing confidence in their ability to deter a strike by us....

—And how similar are these arguments to the ones that you had with Kosygin at Glassboro?

MCNAMARA: They are the mirror image of the positions in 1967. The positions have exactly reversed.

ONE LEGACY OF the McNamara years was that America stopped building ballistic missiles in the 1960s, and kept to an overall level which stayed the same until 1980. The Russians' refusal to halt when they reached the same level has fuelled the suspicion that the official ideology

of the Soviet Union imposes and sustains a rather different view of the nuclear weapon.

In the strange universe called into being by weapons which have no function except to stop themselves being used, and which can only discharge that function because there is a chance that they might be, is it the case that the Soviet Union also believes that nuclear arms inaugurated a strategy of deterrence? The former Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, an influential adviser on Soviet policy in the Pentagon and now Director of the National Security Agency, General William Odom.

WILLIAM ODOM: I don't think they accept that at all. The classified studies (most of them are declassified now) don't demonstrate that at all; they demonstrate quite the contrary. I have gone back and looked at some of the evidence. It may be that Khrushchev looked at heavy reliance on strategic nuclear weapons as a way to get around building very large ground forces, particularly paying attention to the modernisation of ground-force weapons.

—Rather like we've done in the West?

ODOM: Yes.

—But experts point out that you can search Soviet military writing and find there no analogue for this Western con-

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cept of deterrence. Do you agree with that?

ODOM: I agree with that completely. I find the best evidence on inferring what the Soviets are most likely to do in the doctrinal literature, even the unclassified open literature which Soviet officers have to study, which becomes the basis for their education and their view about how these weapons will be employed. After a war starts, to try to change everybody's doctrinal view about such employment—that's virtually incomprehensible. Therefore, one or two isolated statements by Khrushchev or Brezhnev strike me as very thin evidence indeed about the Soviet view of nuclear weapons or approach to their use. These textbooks are studied and memorised by them in great detail. When you stack that against the empirical evidence we see in their force-building process, it leads me to the very comfortable conclusion—or maybe uncomfortable but confident conclusion—that they don't share our view of that at all.

*—What is the distinction that they make, then, between Deterrence and War—in the sense that Clausewitz saw war as “the continuation of politics by other means”?*

ODOM: He saw war as an instrument of policy. Clausewitz is much quoted and little read—there are many other things by Clausewitz which you could bring to bear, and I think the Soviets are better students of Clausewitz than we sometimes are in the West. You know, Lenin himself read Clausewitz very carefully, annotated *On War* in some detail; I think he is very close to the Soviet view of war. In fact, a philosophical point that seems to me to bear very heavily on the side of those who argue that the Soviets take a war-fighting approach is that to take the Western deterrence view of “assured destruction” is really to say that we surrender primacy over our choice about matters of war to technical gimmickry. In other words, we determine the outcomes in advance, and just sit back and let somebody else make the choice about whether or not deterrence will fail or not fail.

Though there are so many paradoxes (philosophical, moral, military and others) in deterrence theory, it's amazing that this paradigm has succeeded as long as it has. From time to time I have described it as something like Ptolemy's view of the solar system. When the stars don't behave the way you want them to, you create one more little epicycle to account for this erratic behaviour. I think the Soviets have a Coper-nican view of the solar system.

*—In other words, you are saying that your assessment of it in the Pentagon was that the Soviet Union refuses to adopt this doctrine of “assured destruction” because it thinks—ideologically and empirically—that you cannot, just because nuclear weapons exist, rob war of any strategic meaning. In other words, you've got to keep on thinking, what if deterrence fails (and so on)?*

ODOM: Precisely. I would call deterrence, when it's based on an empty threat (from a Marxist-Leninist point of view), an error of subjectivism. In other words, you don't have the objective material factors to make it come out the way you've

asserted it will come out. Our deterrence theory would strike a Soviet, a serious Marxist-Leninist, as simple-minded subjectivism, or "bourgeois idealism." Whereas an objective war-fighting capability that has the prospects of some campaign success, even at great losses to your society, is an objective capability, not simply a subjective capability.

THE PRIVATE VIEW in the Kremlin of these vital matters remains inaccessible, as both Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk have complained. In such circumstances it was the Duke of Wellington who advised us that the business of war and the business of life was to find out what you don't know from what you do, and to guess what was on the other side of the hill. How, therefore, do we suppose the Soviet Union views the political and military utility of nuclear weapons? A family descendant of the great Duke, who has held high responsibility for the conduct of Alliance nuclear policy: Field-Marshall Lord Carver.

LORD CARVER: I think that the principal political utility is to reinforce their claim to be a world power on the same level as the United States. This is very deeply ingrained in their thinking: politically, they must be seen (partly in order to be seen as the leaders of world Communism) as in every way the equals of the United States.

*—But would you agree that the extent to which the Soviet approach to the problem of nuclear weapons differs from the Alliance or American ones has been the crux of recent debate? What is the evidence that the Russians feel the nuclear weapon has abolished what has historically been an indispensable concept of war—decisive battle? In other words, that they, too, have substituted deterrence for decisive battle.*

CARVER: I don't think that's the case at all. Certainly not the case in the eyes of the Soviet military. I think they initially saw (as, in many ways, we did too) the nuclear weapon, the Atom Bomb as we called it in those days, as an extension of fire-power on the battlefield. We had looked at it in terms of an extension of fire-power *defensively*; they had looked at it as an extension of fire-power *offensively*. Their whole strategic doctrine is based on their absolute determination not (as they see it) to make the mistake that was made in 1941 of remaining on the defensive. The moment they feel or suspect that the other side is about to take military operations against them, they must take the offensive and be capable of winning that offensive in as short a period of time as possible.

Therefore, their whole strategic doctrine (which they regard as being for the purposes of defence) is one of being able to take the *offence*; and for that they have to have what they call "the correct correlation of forces", which means they've got to be superior to the other side.

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—What they call a correlation of forces, a "balance", to them is an imbalance in their favour?

CARVER: That is exactly the case.

—Their publicly articulated position over many years has been "no first use" of nuclear weapons. In what circumstances do you believe the Soviet Union would go first with nuclear weapons?

CARVER: Well, I tackled them on this particular issue, particularly in respect of the SS-20. I said: you made a declaration of "no first use"—but land-based missile systems which are designed to attack the other side's nuclear delivery systems, whether they're mobile or static, are by definition first-use weapons because there's absolutely no point in firing at the other side's nuclear delivery system after it's already fired! So how, I said, do you explain that away?

And they said: Ah, but you see, as long as the United States won't make such a declaration, we must assume (and they do in their minds assume) that the United States is planning a first strike against us. And we must, therefore, make provision for the fact that this is the case, and when we come to the conclusion that they are about to carry out that operation, we would strike their systems first. In other words, they would carry out a first strike. Of course it's a mirror image of what the United States themselves think.

—However, President Nixon is on the record as saying this:

> "For years the prevailing United States concept has been that nuclear war could not and would not bring any meaningful form of victory, either military or political. The Soviet concept, however, has been that nuclear war, even though it would mean an immense disaster, cannot and must not be deprived of strategic meaning."

What is the strategic meaning that the Soviet Union would give to it?

CARVER: I think it is this. Certainly the Soviet military, as I see it, take the view that they don't want a nuclear war any more than anybody else. But if a war starts and nuclear weapons are used, there can be no limitation; and there would be no limitation from their point of view in how their nuclear weapons were used. If the worst came to the worst, they are prepared to face all-out nuclear war in the belief that the Soviet system (as well as the geography of the Soviet Union) is one which would survive such an exchange better than the Western system.

IT IS AT THIS LAST and crucial point—envasaging the fighting and winning of a nuclear war—that there is a clear separation between the maintained Soviet view and that which Robert McNamara came to hold and implement as the public nuclear doctrine of the USA and its allies in the 1960s.

Defence Secretary McNamara had been the prophet of

record for two schools of thought—at first providing the American President with the option of first use of nuclear weapons against Soviet military forces (the "Counter-force strategy") and then, as the Soviet arsenal grew, deciding that such "positive" use of nuclear weapons could really only belong to the realms of strategic fiction. He describes how this doctrine concerning the fantastic destructive power of the nuclear weapon evolved in his own mind during the 1960s.

ROBERT MCNAMARA: We were seeking to move away from "massive retaliation", to replace it (a) with conventional response to conventional attack, and (b) to the extent that nuclear weapons were to be used, to use them late and in limited quantity, and against military as opposed to population targets, in order to limit the Soviet nuclear response and thereby limit the damage to NATO.

—There's a doctrinal shift in what is known as "the McNamara years"—away from the idea that the prime target should be Soviet military forces, back to the idea that the populations of both countries are to be "held hostage."

MCNAMARA: A shift to "assured destruction."

—To "assured destruction." Now, was that a unilateral choice made by you?

MCNAMARA: Yes. "Unilateral choice" in this sense. The Soviet forces increased in size. In 1960, I think the number of their strategic warheads was 200, and by 1970 that had risen to 1,800. And during that time the number of their missiles had increased. It became increasingly clear that a second strike against their missiles (in other words, a retaliatory counter-force strike) made no sense. The Soviet missiles were likely to be fired by the time our counter-force got there....

—You'd be firing at empty holes....

MCNAMARA: Firing at empty holes. The counter-force strategy was a function of a very limited Soviet strategic nuclear capability. It was appropriate for 1962. By 1964-66, it was no longer appropriate, as they had multiplied that strategic nuclear capability several-fold.

—As you settled into the Kennedy Administration, could you say (with Clausewitz) that you were "a man of action with all your soul", but that you also wanted to think out, with all your soul, your own activity and your action in general? How did you contemplate this whole question of equality and superiority as between the Soviet Communist Republic and the American Republic?

MCNAMARA: You're quite right, we did want to think it out, and particularly we wanted to think it out because we recognised that, without exaggeration, the very existence of our society and civilisation was at stake. The reality was forced upon us very quickly. You may remember that in August of 1961, a few months after the Kennedy Administration took office, the Soviets began to put pressure on West

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Berlin, clearly with the intention of changing the agreements and in a very real sense taking over the Western position in West Berlin. We then had to consider how to respond; and in the course of a period of time that extended over several weeks, we examined possible responses—including, at the suggestion of some senior commanders, the possible use of nuclear weapons.

Beginning then, and for months in the future, we studied intensively how, if at all, NATO might initiate the use of nuclear weapons with advantage to NATO. I did not find then, and I've never seen since, any indication that anyone in the world knows how to initiate the use of nuclear weapons with advantage to NATO. At that point we came to the conclusion that nuclear warheads are not weapons; they have no military value whatsoever, excepting only to serve as a deterrent to one's opponent's use of such weapons.

—By the mid-1960s the Kennedy Administration (and later Lyndon Johnson) had decided to freeze the USA's ICBM numbers. Why was that?

MCNAMARA: Because we believed in what I'm going to call deterrence, in "assured destruction"; and we felt we could achieve that strategic objective with the number of missiles and warheads that we then had. We did not think of superiority-of-numbers turning unusable into usable military power. We believed then, as I believe today, that these warheads are not weapons; they have no military purpose; they cannot be used in war. They can only be used to deter the other side's initiation of a military strike, a nuclear strike; and if that's the objective, a limited number will accomplish it.

AND so, with a mixture of anguish and resolution, Robert McNamara arrived at the doctrine of "Mutual Assured Destruction". MAD—the mental universe that we inhabit today, with its prospect of a man-made Day of Judgment: the intellectual impasse from

which the Strategic Defence Initiative, or "Star Wars", makes claim to deliver us.

Until then we live in a state of mind which might be compared to that of the primitive church of which Edward Gibbon wrote, in *The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire*, that "the influence of truth was very powerfully strengthened by a belief that the world was coming to an end." This opinion, the historian went on to say, "however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity has not, on the whole, proved agreeable to experience. ..."

MAD, the theory of deterrence, in which official war is replaced by a protracted duel of moral attrition and the threat of retaliation, leaves the answer to a major issue wrapped in ambiguity. What is left of the deterring threat of nuclear

-weapons once we arrive at stability in the form of a guarantee of mutual assured destruction? This was the question President Kennedy raised, and he answered it by undertaking limited war in Viet Nam. That failure of limited war as a deterrent has returned us, in more recent years, to innovations designed to reinforce the paramountcy of nuclear weapons. How did Kennedy mean to avoid (as he put it) the free world being nibbled to death in a nuclear stalemate?

DEAN RUSK: The United States has not chosen to play the role of the world's policeman: we have not accepted any kind of global responsibility in that direction. Since World War II, there have been something over 400 situations of violence somewhere in the world, and the USA has been directly involved in seven or eight of those. We have to keep our eyes on those points of genuine vital interest to the United States, and make it clear that we are prepared to take action to protect those vital interests. But there will be a good many quarrels and changes in different parts of the world which are simply not our business. However, I think these 40 years without the use of nuclear weapons are no sure guarantee for the future. We and the Russians must try to avoid playing the game that Americans call the game of "chicken"—to see how far one or the other can go without crossing that lethal line—because there can always be mistakes and misjudgments.

—But would you agree that, for the Soviet Union, nuclear parity had a political as well as a strategic value, that it offered the possibility of Soviet expansionism—the very thing which you tell us greatly concerned Kennedy, and which was explicit in the "Wars of Liberation speech" that Khrushchev made?

RUSK: This is a point where one has to think of Henry Kissinger's remark, "What in the name of heaven is nuclear superiority?"—because the scale of destructive power is so enormous that minor differences in numbers make no difference from any kind of military point of view. The numbers have to be watched because they could affect perceptions about what these numbers mean. If the Soviet Union ever felt that it had such large numbers that it could engage in adventures in many places without any kind of reaction from the rest of us, then we could have some danger.

—But how important was the nuclear equation in your view? Many took the view that because Berlin could be defended only by going to extremes, therefore it would be lost. Why did some Americans fear this would happen? Was the only way to respond to the Berlin Crisis possibly a nuclear response?

RUSK: There was a graduated response in the contingency plans of NATO with respect to Berlin. My own hunch is that, somewhere along the way, that matter would have been resolved before we got to the nuclear stage—because neither side could possibly want nuclear war, and that includes the Russians.

—But doesn't that argue that the nuclear factor is the ultimate determinant in the manipulation of risk and crisis?

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RUSK: It does impose some limits beyond which one does not go, one must not go. We've learned that in 40 years, and I hope very much that our successors will keep that in mind, in both Moscow and Washington.

-What about Cuba? If one recalls Clausewitz's simple formula, "the effect that a certain step will have on the enemy" is the most relevant of all the factors in the action. What is it possible to add, after all these years, to our knowledge of why Khrushchev and the Politburo challenged Kennedy with nuclear weapons on America's doorstep in Cuba?

RUSK: I don't believe that we ever really knew with precision just why Mr Khrushchev decided to put the missiles in Cuba; or why he thought that he could do so without a very strong American reaction. It may be that he made the judgment that, since President Kennedy had not followed up the Bay of Pigs with American forces, we would not attach much importance to Cuba. It may be that the advantages to him of getting a hundred of these missiles in Cuba would be so great that it would be worth taking a chance if there were only a 20% chance of success. Whatever the reasons, we felt that the missiles in Cuba from a military point of view would make it possible for them to knock out our Strategic Air Command bases with almost no advance warning. From a political point of view, the effects in this Western hemisphere and in NATO would be devastating. And so that produced an extraordinarily dangerous crisis.

-What is the determinant? Is it the central nuclear balance? Why did he do that when America was in the position (perhaps stronger than it is today) to answer from terms of superiority?

RUSK: I can't document this point, but I feel rather strongly that somehow Cuba was connected with Berlin in Khrushchev's mind. That Khrushchev had in mind that he would get these missiles into Cuba very quickly and secretly, and then, much more forcefully, at that point call attention to these missiles in Cuba as a makeweight argument over Berlin. I can't go into all the details of why I have come to that conclusion, but I think the Cuban missiles were related to his pressures on Berlin.

THE EVENTS OF 1962 are still the most dramatic of our nuclear era. Why Khrushchev showed contempt for Kennedy's warning by his dynamic thrust to place nuclear weapons on America's doorstep, why he then gave way, and what impact the central nuclear balance had upon the seminal crises of Cuba and Berlin—there is no unanimous American view.

What has today become the ascendant branch of American strategic thinking would contest Robert McNamara's description of the role played by nuclear weapons in the outcome of crisis and the handling of risk.

ROBERT MCNAMARA: I didn't believe then, and I don't

believe today, that it did affect the outcome of crises. Once one had a sufficient force to deter one's opponents from initiating the use of nuclear weapons, "your" nuclear force or "our" nuclear force had no impact on actions in a political crisis.

-Why did the Berlin crisis of 1948-49 have a peaceful outcome when it was beyond the reach of conventional forces to intervene?

MCNAMARA: It's a very good question, and it was not because we had the superiority I referred to—say, 6,000 strategic warheads in NATO to (perhaps) 2-400 Warsaw Pact warheads. The very fact that in the face of that NATO strategic nuclear superiority the Soviets moved against Berlin is, I think, an illustration of my point.

-What about Cuba, the classic crisis?

MCNAMARA: I would make the same point in the case of Cuba. The Soviets, again in the face of tremendous US strategic nuclear superiority at the time of Cuba—probably on the order of 7,000 warheads to maybe 4-500 Soviet warheads—took a very aggressive move in introducing missiles. They were finally forced out, but it was not through the threat of use of nuclear weapons. We never conceived of initiating the use of nuclear weapons under those circumstances. It was our tremendous conventional power in the region which forced the Soviets to take those missiles out.

-But until the Kremlin archives are opened; that must remain a unilateral assumption on your part, mustn't it?

MCNAMARA: Well, I've had some conversations with Soviets in the intervening years, and they confirm that view.

-How should one interpret what Mr Kuznetsov (the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister) said to John J. McCloy in the USA very shortly after the Cuban crisis: "You will never be able to do this to us again!"

Surely that would suggest that Khrushchev backed down, having taken a hazardous risk, in the face of America's strategic superiority?

MCNAMARA: No, I think one can interpret Kuznetsov's words in different ways. But I think what he meant—and Soviet actions since that time I think would lend support to my interpretation—is that they would never again place themselves in a weak position militarily vis-à-vis the US or NATO.

-But the reality is the implied, perhaps the secret, threat of using nuclear weapons if there's an attempt to tilt the balance. Why did Khrushchev, when that balance was so clearly in favour of the United States, take the risk he did?

MCNAMARA: I don't know. That's a very good question. I have no answer to it. And I have not found a Russian, by the way, who has an answer.

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P
RESIDENT KENNEDY held out against Khrushchev's
violent pressure. That the Soviets, certainly retrospec-
tively, had looked hard at the nuclear equation would
seem to be confirmed.

DEAN RUSK: We had some reason to believe afterwards, that the Soviets thought we had counted missiles at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. In fact we had not. Apparently they thought so: "You got away with it this time! You'll never get away with it again!" If you take into account the lead time required for making decisions and doing all the preparatory work and so forth, much of their further deployment of nuclear weapons in later years undoubtedly came from decisions made shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

CUBA WAS A crucial moment in world history. Compounding the effect of Stalin's actions in Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, it profoundly shocked the Americans.

Kennedy had appeared much stronger in Berlin—where the nuclear guarantees were less equivocal—than he had in Cuba. The reason was perhaps (as Dean Rusk suggested) that because Kennedy had not been prepared to push his abortive Bay of Pigs invasion to its logical conclusion, the resolute gambler in the Kremlin had seen Cuba as Kennedy's (and America's) Achilles heel. Fidel Castro said that the Soviet rockets in Cuba were meant "to strengthen the Socialist Camp as a whole." In other words, they were to provide the Soviet Union with an inexpensive means of altering the balance of power in its favour. Khrushchev's adventure was a challenge to the whole edifice of Deterrence—the premise that rivalry between nuclear powers can, and must, be pursued without confrontation.

Reflection on how close the world had come to the thunderclap in a clear sky concentrated all minds. Undoubtedly it changed Robert McNamara's. In the 1960s, around Moscow, the Russians had been the first to deploy defences against nuclear attack. Doctrinally, such a concept conflicted with McNamara's evangelism for deterrence by the certainty of "mutual assured destruction." The Americans were developing—but had not deployed—a defence against ballistic missiles.

Deterrence insisted upon being able to penetrate any
defence to assure the threat of retaliation. What many believe
to be the single most destabilising development in the his-
tory of the nuclear arms competition—the placing of many
warheads on a single rocket to saturate defences, the
hydra-headed missile MIRV—was being conceived.

ROBERT MCNAMARA: The MIRV development, MIRV research, began roughly in 1966, something of that order; and of course, as you know, the MIRVs weren't deployed until sometime around 1972. It's a very interesting development

because it's an illustration of this action-reaction phenomenon that I think is so important to recognise as stimulating moves by the Soviets and by ourselves. MIRV research was started as an answer by the USA to the Soviet anti-ballistic missile deployment, which they were beginning and which we had evidence of, and which they didn't deny.

We knew that they were proceeding to deploy it around Moscow. What we didn't know was the degree to which they intended to deploy it across the rest of the Soviet Union. It's an illustration of this problem of uncertainty. We had to assume, since we saw them starting, that they would continue. If they did, we of necessity would have to maintain our deterrent—our insurance that we had the capability under all circumstances to absorb a Soviet nuclear strike, survive that with sufficient nuclear weapons to inflict unacceptable damage on them. That was our basis for concluding that we could deter them from ever initiating that strike.

If they're building defence, then we would of necessity have to increase our offensive forces. To do that, we concluded, the best, the most efficient, the most functional way, was to add so-called "multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles" to our launchers—that's what MIRV means. And therefore we began the research to develop those. The MIRV research was initiated solely as a means of countering the Soviet anti-ballistic deployment.

T
HESE WERE, to McNamara, new and irrational uncertainties. Their contribution to that fear of the Apocrypse to which all in the White House at the time of Cuba attest—together with the deepening involvement in Viet Nam, where the Americans had determined to reinforce deterrence by answering limited war with limited war—was hastening McNamara down his chosen path. He decided the time had come to try and reconcile the dialectic of opposing nuclear weapons and wills, and was instrumental in persuading President Lyndon B. Johnson to take an initiative with the Russians—in the hope that they would come to share the American insight into the nature of nuclear deterrence.

The opportunity was taken at the summit meeting at Glassboro in 1967 between President Johnson and the Soviet Premier Kosygin. McNamara made a passionate plea to Kosygin about the nature of the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities and intentions.

ROBERT MCNAMARA: We had great difficulty in determining what they ascribed to. At that point most of the Soviet military writings that we had access to indicated that they believed that any military conflict between East and West would be a nuclear conflict. Quite frankly, their writings made no sense to us; and that was particularly true as the size of their force increased. By 1967, when they were proceeding to deploy their anti-ballistic missile defence, we found it impossible to rationalise their writings and their actions. In 1967 President Johnson met Prime Minister Kosygin in Glassboro, and confronted him with the way we interpreted their actions, particularly as they related to anti-ballistic missile defence.

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Kosygin could no more understand our reactions than we could understand his actions. The two sides had totally different views of the nuclear world they lived in at that time.

—Would you accept a source that you may not willingly wish to agree with? President Nixon says this:

> "In American thinking, strategic nuclear superiority and the attempt to limit damage in the event of nuclear war were replaced by theories of deterrence that emphasize the inevitability of mass civilian destruction, assured destruction. These theories were linked with an arms-control-oriented belief that nuclear weapons beyond the necessary minimum lacked political or military utility. Whereas the Soviet Union did not separate deterrence and defence, and the Soviets orientated their planning towards their ability to fight and survive and win a nuclear war. ..."

ROBERT MCNAMARA: I think that states very clearly my view of both our strategy of 1967 and my view of the Soviet strategy at that time.

—In other words, the Soviet Union's analysis (and why Kosygin does not agree with Johnson at Glassboro) is that the Soviets perceive a political utility in the nuclear weapons which your rational minds do not acknowledge.

MCNAMARA: No, I don't want to put those words in Kosygin's mouth at the time. What I want to say is that I don't believe that Kosygin understood the way we looked at Deterrence.

Johnson, at one point, turned to me and said: "Bob, you explain to Kosygin how we view their ABM deployment."

I said: "Mr Prime Minister, you must understand that we will maintain a deterrent under any circumstances. And we view a deterrent as a nuclear force so strong it can absorb your nuclear attack on it, survive with sufficient power to inflict unacceptable damage on you. And, therefore, if you put a defence in place, we're going to have to expand our nuclear, our offensive forces. You may think, as the Congress apparently does, that a proper response to the Soviet defence is a US defence; but I tell you the proper response is, and it will be our response, to expand our offensive force. ..."

He absolutely erupted. He became red in the face. He pounded the table. He said, "Defence is moral, offence is immoral."

Now I think that's what he believed. This was not show: he believed it.

Perhaps his military commanders also believed that you could use nuclear weapons in war and exchange nuclear shots, and ultimately the side with the largest number would prevail, and quote "win" unquote the war, whatever that meant. I don't know that Kosygin believed that. But he clearly had an erroneous view, in our minds; and, I think, quite a different view then than his counterparts today have of what is reality in the nuclear age and what each side needs to maintain security—and that is Deterrence. He didn't understand it: his view was quite different from ours; his counterparts today would agree 100% with the way we expressed it in 1967.

ALMOST TWENTY YEARS AGO, Robert McNamara urged upon the Russians that nations should not aspire to defend their peoples against the Bomb, but rather make the weapon itself invulnerable—that to attempt defence would mean inevitably only more and more offensive weapons. That is one root criticism of President Reagan's SDI/"Star Wars" proposal today. As we shall see in a subsequent article, the proponents of SDI believe they will be able to justify a different verdict in the years ahead.

But that American initiative to forsake the Anti-Ballistic Missile was the first practical step in seeking Soviet cooperation for the proposition that human survival in the nuclear age would depend largely on two things—the rational intelligence of state leadership, and Arms Control.

There was at first no response. A year later, in 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia—and a new shadow was thrown on the cave wall. Not until a new American government took office could this new diplomacy be revived and later carried into effect. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty became part of the system of rewards and punishments conceived by Dr Henry Kissinger in his attempt to "manage" the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower, and to secure "Deterrence through Détente."

## 2. The Hand of Henry Kissinger

WHEN President Nixon took office in 1969, he spoke at once of the unique and fatal implications which nuclear weapons possess for the statesman. "While I would like", he said, "to provide the American people with complete protection against nuclear attack, it is not now within our power to do so...." The President added this: "It might look to an opponent like the prelude to an offensive strategy threatening the Soviet deterrent."

President Nixon was reiterating the essence of Robert McNamara's passionate presentation to the Soviet Premier, Kosygin, at the Glassboro summit two years earlier. To attempt a nuclear defence would merely mean an intensified arms race in offensive weapons: and, therefore, "mutual assured destruction" should be acknowledged as the rational prescription for stable deterrence. It fell to the Nixon Administration to bring about the fascinating and fitful negotiation with the Soviet Union which was to give a cold and ambiguous assent to McNamara's proposition.

The "Strategic Arms Limitation Talks", SALT, became the principal arena for a form of struggle which itself was a substitute for war. SALT was compared, in the beginning, to the Congress of Vienna in the last century, which secured the

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40 years of peace that followed the Napoleonic wars. The similarities were superficially beguiling. What Talleyrand had said of his colleagues and former allies against Napoleon, "Too frightened to fight one another, too stupid to agree", was given a wholly new dimension by the nuclear competition.

The Russians were achieving nuclear parity with the United States. The balance of power was being challenged. In 1968, the year before Nixon was elected, the Russians had re-asserted their hegemony in Europe by invading Czechoslovakia. In Viet Nam, the Communist forces (armed by the Soviet Union) had launched an offensive in more than 40 provincial towns, which was seen in America at the time as overthrowing certain basic assumptions about the nature and progress of the war. In consequence, amid a growing domestic tumult, President Johnson stood down and did not seek re-election.

Into this forbidding context stepped Dr Henry Kissinger, with his immense talents and intelligence. For almost ten years he was to be one of the most powerful men in the world. In his own book about the Congress of Vienna, Dr Kissinger had written of those statesmen who achieved final greatness: that it was given to them not only to maintain the perfection of order but to have the strength to contemplate chaos—and there to find the material for fresh creation.

How far did chaos appear to Henry Kissinger to be the prospect, as he went to the White House as President Nixon's National Security Adviser and later his Secretary of State?

HENRY KISSINGER: It was a very difficult period, because the 'bipartisan consensus that had characterised US foreign policy for most of the post-War period was collapsing.

A kind of opposition was developing in the United States that was unprecedented. The practical proposals that were being made had the consequence of a complete collapse of a military effort in Viet Nam that our predecessors had started and which had left us with 550,000 troops in place. Our studies indicated, for example, that it would take us 18 months to get them out, even as a simple logistics problem, together with an attack on every military programme. There was also the fact that the people who had created the conditions, as soon as they were out of office, went into opposition to what were their own policies. So it was an extremely complicated situation, not eased by the fact that President Nixon (who was a man of great accomplishment and great knowledge in foreign policy) did not have the art of gaining popular support the way, for example, President Reagan has.

*—The strength to contemplate chaos, you said, and there to find material for fresh creation. ... Why was Arms Control, SALT, the "material for fresh creation" as you saw it, to become the principal activity for what you called "a new structure of peace" with the Soviet Union?*

KISSINGER: That was not our policy: our policy was much more complicated than this. Arms control to us (that is to Nixon and me, and to those who dominated the Nixon Administration) was not an end in itself—it was one of the tools; and in fact we did not make even the first preliminary agreement

on arms control until May 1971, which was two-plus years after we came into office. Our strategy was to try to bring China into play; to try to isolate North Viet Nam; to establish a new relationship with Europe; and with the Soviet Union to move ahead on a broad front. We believed in linkage. We, for example, did not agree to any increase in trade until there had been some preliminary agreement on arms control. So we never believed that arms control by itself could carry the whole burden of East-West relations. There were, however, significant segments of American public opinion (especially scientific and intellectual opinion) who thought exactly that; and since they were needed to carry any agreement through the Congress against conservative opposition, they tended to have a more vocal role than our theory would have justified.

HENRY KISSINGER had an overarching concept of grand strategy. His enticing of China out of its years of self-imposed isolation and the dialogue he established with the Soviet leaders have written some of the most important history of the 20th century. Kissinger declared that the problem of the age was how to manage the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower. That relationship turned fundamentally on the supreme instruments of national power—on nuclear weapons.

As the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks began, the Soviet military programme was gaining momentum, while the Americans had stopped building and were now trying "not to lose" rather than to win in Viet Nam. There was evident concern about the long-term trends. Kissinger felt that, as nuclear parity approached, it was the duty of the statesman to dominate what he could not avoid. That was also the intention of President Nixon, as the chief American negotiator with the Russians at the SALT talks, Gerard Smith, recalls.

GERARD SMITH: I think he felt that the Soviets were moving faster in the strategic field than we were; and that maybe this was the last time (in '69, '70, '71) that we could deal with the Soviets on an equivalent basis. So it didn't come to his mind as sufficiency so much as to stop the Soviets from going ahead pell-mell.

*—To what extent, as President Nixon negotiated with his Soviet opposite numbers (on an ABM Treaty, the first SALT agreement) was he in the French diplomatic formulation "demandeur"?*

SMITH: We never had that sense of being "demandeur" in the actual front lines. I felt that we had substantial qualitative advantages, even though the Soviet numbers were increasing and ours were not. We were on the verge of the MIRV, the multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles; and the Soviets were not and would not be for some years. So the qualitative advantage, we thought (and I think correctly), lay with us.

*—But "demandeur" perhaps in another sense, as the Soviet*

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Union may have seen it, in that SALT I and the American
decision to go ahead with that were a recognition that there
was no way other than by agreement to limit arms that the
Soviet Union could be prevented from achieving numerical
superiority in offensive ballistic missiles.

SMITH: I think that is probably correct for that time. Now, given enough years ahead, it's no trick; we could always, if it was in our interest, build more of the current class of ballistic missile. But I think you're right in saying that in 1969-70, in the absence of arms control, the Soviets were going to have a larger number of launchers for their strategic forces than we were.

KISSINGER'S GRAND DESIGN of "judicious rewards and punishments" as a deterrent, embracing trade and technology and credits as well as arms control, was critical to the nature of his discourse. Arms control by itself could not relieve tensions. If it were not linked to Soviet restraint in world-wide competition (Kissinger said), it could prove a safety-valve for Soviet expansionist designs. Every time there was a Soviet aggressive move there would be claims that the new tensions were making arms control even more important. "And that is why", as Kissinger tells us in his Memoirs, "I believed in "linkage"...."

But he was also convinced that the nuclear weapon had
added a new dimension of horror and, therefore, responsibil-
ity for national leaders.

We come to a point which divided Kissinger from some of
his conservative critics in America. To what extent did he
consider that possession by both sides of the absolute weapon
meant that there could no longer be an absolute enemy—an
enemy whose ideology, or whose very existence, was a threat
to one's own existence or survival?

HENRY KISSINGER: I have always believed that Communism is morally repugnant, and I think if you go through my writings you will never find any deviation from that point of view.

I have also believed that nuclear weapons impose the necessity of coexistence. I do not base that coexistence on any moral acceptance of the Soviet system, but on the practical necessities that nuclear weapons create. That has been my position from the very beginning. I wrote a book in 1956 called *Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy*, which was perhaps premature but in which I said that, sooner or later (I thought it would come sooner than it did), strategic nuclear weapons would tend towards a kind of parity which would make absolute war impossible; and I called for alternatives. I've never changed that position.

*—Did you take the view that nuclear threats were more or less infallible in abolishing aggressive intentions?*

KISSINGER: I've never believed that—I've believed exactly

the opposite. I've believed that as nuclear parity was
achieved, threats other than nuclear war would gain greater
and greater force, and that it was the obligation of the West to
create obstacles to these other threats.

*—That stability at the level of the nuclear balance created instability at other levels?*

KISSINGER: Exactly.

THE subsequent failures of the *détente* policy to create those obstacles as a deterrent to the extension of Communist power and Soviet influence in his own time. Kissinger laid squarely at the door of "the Watergate scandal." The crippling of Presidential authority lost both the capacity to offer incentives for responsible behaviour and any penalties for aggressive actions. But there was also an underlying, unspoken reason.

In Kissinger's search for a stable world order there were
echoes of what Lord Castlereagh had told the House of Com-
mons about the Congress of Vienna:

> "The Congress was not assembled for the discussion of moral principles but for great practical purposes—to establish effectual provisions for the general security."

Kissinger was trying to wean American foreign policy away
from both its traditional oscillations and its excessive pre-
occupation with moral principles. Henry Kissinger's mani-
pulations of the balance of power were familiar in the states-
man's world of the Congress of Vienna which he was trying to
recreate; but they were alien to the American body politic.
Wasn't foreign policy in the United States obliged to be,
above all, a public policy subject to public scrutiny?

HENRY KISSINGER: Our style of foreign policy would have been easily understood in Britain, but was not easy to understand in the United States. We believed in a national-interest-based foreign policy. You did not have to explain in Great Britain through the 18th and 19th centuries the problem of throwing Britain's weight to whomever seemed to be the weaker of the Continental countries, and Britain made no moral claim for that. For the United States this was a rather novel approach.

At the precise moment that we had achieved apparent
success, both at isolating Viet Nam and in relations with both
China and the Soviet Union, there occurred "Watergate".
a totally unpredictable event which collapsed executive
authority. So that for fifteen to eighteen months the locus of
executive respect by the public was the State Depart-
ment—which was unheard of: and that, then, put us into a
much more defensive posture. And so by 1975 we had a

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coalition of conservatives and liberals against the policy
that Nixon and later Ford were carrying out with me as
Secretary of State. You had liberals who felt that if Nixon was
for peace, confrontation couldn't be all bad, and conserva-
tives who believed that any deal with the Soviets was wicked.

—On the point of the moralistic aspects of the American political tradition, you’ve written of the time when you came to office that conflict in the United States is unnatural. It was seen as caused by evil men or motives; and thus the Soviet Union as a tyranny fulfilled the traditional image of irreconcilable conflict as between good and evil.

KISSINGER: You have extremes in America—one has people who think that since conflict is considered unnatural, one of two things happens: either the opponent is considered inherently evil; or it is believed that the opponent has undergone a conversion and is therefore ready for a final settlement—without being able to express what the content of the final settlement is.

—But if Americans saw relations between states as either "peaceful" or "warlike", in black-and-white terms, why did you think if that was the American political tradition that it had become incompatible with the American national interest and a sound foreign policy?

KISSINGER: Because at the end of the day the relation among states has to be able to be expressed in some concrete conditions.

If you cannot express it in concrete conditions you are
doomed to oscillate between extremes of conciliation and
extremes of intransigence, and overdo each of them as you
go through each phase, and then be disappointed with each
phase. The attempt that President Nixon and I made, incon-
clusively, was to see whether we could express conditions
of peace or stability in some specific manner; and this more
or less runs counter to the American tradition. Go back to
American post-War history, take the policy of Containment:
you will find Dean Acheson, Dulles, Truman, Eisenhower
always saying that when we have positions of strength the
negotiating position will improve. What we were going to do
with the negotiating position—what we were going to ask of
the Russians if they came to the conference table—I defy
anybody to find one statement on.

THE CREATIVE and coherent substitute for this omission was Dr Kissinger's policy of entangling the Soviet Union in a web of involvements on arms agreements, trade and credits, to be linked to the restraint of the Soviet Union's ambition as a power fulfilling a millennial mission. However, Kissinger's domestic critics felt that there should be more to these involvements than the principle of agreement on a set of "rules", and that what was missing from his concept was an ethic of a peaceful order. Otherwise why resist the revolutionary power?

Liberals who felt that *détente* condoned the suppression of

human rights and conservatives who baulked at the notions of
equality or parity with the Soviet Union combined under the
leadership of a powerful Senator, Henry ("Scoop") Jackson.
This formidable opposition in the Congress consistently
attacked both the arithmetic and the concept of the SALT
talks, and all but wrecked the policy.

One of the Americans who sat across the table from the
Russians during the SALT negotiations with Kissinger as a
member of the National Security Council was Hal Son-
nenfeldt.

HAL SONNENFELDT: The parity notions that existed in the administration at least fifteen years ago, in the early 70s, did not mean that the Soviets would be left risk-free to pursue their various objectives and purposes. Now that particular presumption, that underlying premise of *détente* (and indeed of the whole *détente* régime), was not borne out in the event, partly because the Americans were so divided that we had problems defining what our interests were, what our commitments were.

—Then SALT I was approved by the Senate only after Senator Jackson's amendment to the Treaty was passed. It asked the President to seek a future treaty that would not limit the United States to levels of these missiles which were inferior to limits for the Soviet Union. Now, what underlay that objection was a perception of power and the exercise of power—the political exercise of power through these weapons—which clearly was not resolved in the USA.

SONNENFELDT: Well, we had no consensus in the country, and there were a lot of people (including Senator Jackson, and many in the Republican Party as well) who believed that the ABM Agreement might have been unwise. They saw more promise in the possibilities of defence and saw us, the Americans, giving up in an area where technologically we might well have had an advantage over the Soviets. Secondly, people were unhappy about the seeming disparities that were incorporated in the SALT I offensive agreement, which gave the Soviets substantially larger numbers of submarines for Sea-launch Ballistic Missiles. It also gave them, or legiti-mised, their very substantial advantage in land-based ICBMs, and that produced the "Jackson Amendment" to which you refer, calling for equality in future agreements—without, however, defining precisely how that equality would be constituted.

But I think the dominant argument really had to do with the political appearance. There is one issue, however, a military issue (at least to a very considerable degree) which has really bedevilled the whole process of negotiating strategic arms limitations with the Soviets. Because of their large land-based forces and our relatively small land-based forces, the Soviet capacity to threaten the totality of our land-based force was seen on the horizon in 1972 and became essentially a fact by, let us say, 1980. Whereas a comparable American capability to threaten a large portion or the entirety of the Soviet land-based missile force has still not been achieved to this day.

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WHETHER THE APPEARANCE of that particular Soviet missile advantage translates itself into political gains is an argument that is with us still (and it became a major factor in the election of President Reagan). How Moscow saw the American condition, at the time of the SALT negotiations and the last stages of the war in Viet Nam, has naturally aroused a good deal of scholarly interest and historical speculation.

If one looks back to those perceptions, do they not show
that the Russians had come to see an underlying change in the
balance of power and a comparative, if transient, American
weakness?

HENRY KISSINGER: Absolutely not! Considering that we had riots in the streets, that we were involved in a war in Viet Nam, that the opposition party held both houses of the Congress, I think we achieved an extraordinary flexibility of foreign policy. After all, we drove the Soviets out of the Middle East even after Watergate. I don't think the Soviet Union looked at the Nixon Administration as a weak opponent. I think they looked at us as a formidable opponent—we "opened to China" in the middle of all of our travails (which must have been extremely unsettling for a time to the Soviet Union) and what opportunity did they seize during that period? As long as Nixon was even relatively unimpaired we made progress in negotiations with the Soviets, lost no international position, and in fact made great gains in the Middle East.

—But wouldn't you agree it's a period seen today as the pre-
lude to a series of global adventures by the Soviet Union?

KISSINGER: It was a prelude to a series of global adventures for a whole variety of reasons. First, because with the collapse of our executive authority, starting in 1973, we destroyed a President. We then had a McGovernite Congress. The people who were defeated in 1972, by the most overwhelming majority but one in American history, regained Congress as a result of events that had absolutely nothing to do with the political process. As a result of this, there was the oddest coalition between liberals and conservatives who took away both the carrot and the stick. They prevented us from resisting Soviet agression in Angola. At the same time they challenged the Soviet Union with the Jackson and Stevenson amendments, in which they cut off both credits and trade with the Soviet Union—and then when the Soviet Union became more aggressive prevented us from resisting it. Of course it led to the beginning of adventures.

Then, in 1977, we had the Carter Administration which had an absolutely wrong perception of how to deal with the Soviet Union. You remember that when Carter came in, he said he was free of "the inordinate fear of Communism." He certainly did nothing to arrest the collapse (to put it mildly) of the Shah of Iran. He permitted the Soviets a major adventure in the Horn of Africa. That has nothing to do with détente. Our policy was to resist Soviet adventurism wherever it occurred; and as long as we had any authority, we managed to do this.

THE EARLY HOPES OF Kissinger and Nixon that agreement to negotiate strategic arms limitations could be linked to Soviet assistance in the American disengagement from Viet Nam proved illusory.

The Russians insisted that SALT was to be looked at on its own merits. That, and the uncompromising zealotry of the Communists in Hanoi, meant that the *détente* policy could produce no honourable outcome in Viet Nam. President Nixon's guarantees to the South Vietnamese proved not to be the bond of the American nation. Viet Nam, in strategic terms, was in the end an American surrender.

HENRY KISSINGER: Certainly Viet Nam was a disaster; but when you inherit a disaster, when you inherit 550,000 troops, you cannot just switch it off like a television programme. After all, people forget it took de Gaulle five years to get out of Algeria.

—There is the evidence of what Gromyko said to Rab Butler (the British Foreign Secretary) when Butler was trying to enlist Gromyko to help about Viet Nam. Gromyko said to him: "Our American enemies are deeply embedded with men and munitions in Viet Nam; we've no desire to interfere." How much more likely was it that by 1970-71, as negotiations opened on SALT, they did see the American position as one of weakness?

KISSINGER: First of all, what concessions did we make to the Soviets in SALT? I mean, there is a whole series of myths that are retroactively invented which have absolutely no bearing. Can you name one concrete concession we made to the Soviets that was unwarranted, or that was not going to be imposed on us by the Congress anyway?

—I'm interested in how the Soviet Union saw this, and how...

KISSINGER: The Soviet Union until 1971 procrastinated in the negotiations. We had a number of things going for us, however. We had the opening to China. We had the fact that the Soviet Union was desperate to make an agreement with the West Germans on Berlin and on East Germany, which they could not get against our active opposition. (I'm not saying it was necessary to get our support, but they could not get it against our active opposition.) Third, they were worried, as they always seem to be worried, by the beginning of our strategic defences. And, fourth, as soon as we started mining Haiphong the Soviet Union also realised that the military situation was changing. If we made a mistake, I think it was that we did not do in 1969 in Viet Nam what we did in 1972—but that would have led to a revolt in our Cabinet, and Nixon wasn't prepared to do that.

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—There should have been a forward policy, mining if necessary. ...

KISSINGER: I believe in retrospect that we should have done in 1969 what we did in '72: that is to say, demand a settlement or mine the harbours and bomb North Viet Nam. But then that wasn't all that easy. A bombing halt had just been signed by the outgoing administration, and by that time public order had broken down in the United States and it's very difficult for a new administration to take upon itself the responsibility for dividing the country.

—As you remind your critics, there was no military programme sacrificed by the Nixon-Kissinger Administration, but one still has. ...

KISSINGER: As a matter of fact it was, paradoxically, the only way to preserve our military programmes. Without SALT the Congress would have continued to cut. Take the strategic defence which we had at the time; it wasn't called "strategic defence", it was the anti-ballistic missile system. We started out with twelve defence sites around the country. By the time the agreement was signed, the Congress had already reduced it to two; in the next Budget it was going to go down to one; so the thing had become an absurdity.

—But does not this very process contribute to what it is known that Brezhnev said (in Prague at a Warsaw Pact meeting in 1973)? By 1985, he said;—

"as a consequence of what we are achieving through détente, we shall have achieved most of our objectives, a decisive shift in the correlation of forces will be such that we'll be able to exert our influence whenever we need to. ..."

KISSINGER: Well, first of all I don't think he said quite that, but. ...

—That is what he's quoted as. ...

KISSINGER: But never mind. Supposing he did say that, you have to remember that each side has the problem of justifying détente to its hard-liners. The facts have certainly not borne this out.

I would make a case for the proposition that détente has, on the whole, been more disarming for the Soviet Union than it has been for the West. It has brought it endless troubles in the satellite orbit. It has not improved its relative technological position; quite the contrary, it has declined. If one looks at the growth of other nations in the Far East, it has created the problem of a two-front situation for the Soviet Union; and it led to the massive reduction of their influence in the Middle East. So, in a sense, in détente both sides were betting that they could use history. And even with an impaired Nixon, we made progress; with an unimpaired American administration, I think that situation would have been even stronger.

IN THE AFTERMATH of Viet Nam, the American will to match limited war with limited war as a deterrent to the expansion of Communist power was, at best, uncertain. Senator Jackson pressed his attack on the consequent dangers of any perceived weakness in the central nuclear balance of power. The arithmetic of the SALT agreement had left the Russians with more offensive missiles than the Americans. But that had been the price of agreement. With or without SALT, the Russians would have had more because they were building more. What began as an arcane argument of Senator Jackson's about the theoretical possibility of a Soviet first strike against American land-based missiles became a generalised charge that the loose constraints negotiated in SALT had presented the Russians with a claim to strategic superiority and to the political cards that go with it.

An influential aide to Senator Jackson at this time, and an even more influential one today in the Reagan Administration where he is Assistant Secretary of Defence—Richard Perle.

RICHARD PERLE: I can recall Senator Jackson sending to Henry Kissinger a memorandum in October 1970, suggesting—on the basis of intelligence that was obviously available to the Administration as well as to the Congress—that under the terms of the agreement that seemed to be emerging as the "SALT I Interim Agreement" the Soviets could within the confines of that agreement, generously interpreted, double or even treble the effective capability of their land-based missile force. And that is precisely what happened.

SENATOR HENRY JACKSON'S CRITIQUE, which was governed by a more visceral assessment of the Soviet Union's intentions and capabilities, was largely drafted by Richard Perle.

Writing in his Memoirs, Henry Kissinger agreed that Jackson had carefully studied Soviet tactics and strategy, and was convinced that they were out to undermine the free world. But while Kissinger agreed that this was a true enough reading of their intentions, he rejected the implication that all agreements were futile. "Jackson objected", said Kissinger, "to any agreement which afforded benefits to the Soviet Union, while we took it for granted that they would sign no agreement that did not promise them some gain. ..."

HENRY KISSINGER: I actually considered Jackson a good friend, and I agreed with many of his analyses of Soviet intentions. The difference between Jackson and me was that he wanted all-out confrontation under the influence of one of his associates, Richard Perle. He wanted all-out confrontation with the Soviets, and he liked a policy of a constant needling of the Soviet Union. I believe that in the face of the Viet Nam

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war and our other pressures, and then in the face of Water-gate, to court a confrontation with the Soviet Union would lead to a series of humiliations. That was one disagreement.

Secondly, I was not as pessimistic as Jackson about the evolution of the two systems. I believed that, on the whole, if we could keep the Soviet Union from expanding we were capable of conducting a more flexible policy than the Soviet Union—as we proved in fact in the Middle East. I did not think at all that the Soviet Union was bound to prevail in a political contest. Quite the opposite.

And, finally, I did not believe that the Soviet Union was gaining an advantage. It depended on whether we were willing to make the defence expenditures that were permitted under the Agreement; and that was a matter of American decisions, not of Soviet acquiescence.

THAT was precisely the point where Senator Jackson concentrated his attack on the nature of the Arms Control process. SALT became both an orphan and a victim when divorced from Kissinger's wider context for it.

RICHARD PERLE: It's fair to ask what was the point of arms control that set the stage for a requirement that we make massive additional investments in precisely the strategic arms that were the subject of the negotiation, while permitting the Soviets also to make massive investment in additional strategic forces. That was the point about the failure of the Interim Agreement. It permitted very sizeable growth on both sides. In my view it didn't restrain the Soviet Union at all, in any significant way.

—But when you and Jackson drafted the ratification of SALT I (and that amendment), Kissinger appears to have taken the view that your attack was fundamental. It caught him unawares: "They sought to destroy our policy", he said, "not to ameliorate it."

PERLE: No, the reality was that that Interim Agreement was going to pass the Senate. There was no doubt in our minds about that. So we sought instead to condition, or attempt to condition, future agreements. The Jackson Amendment says

simply that future agreements must be on the basis of equality—because the 1972 agreement clearly was not.

—Do you take the view that equality can be established as a fact? Because if it can't, isn't that tantamount to saying that no agreement is possible?

PERLE: I think equality can be established as a fact; but I think it is very difficult to freeze equality. The strategic forces of both sides are in a constant state of flux and evolution. And as vulnerabilities are discovered, they need to be fixed; as imbalances develop, they need to be corrected.

The role of arms control in accomplishing that is a much more difficult proposition. Looking back on 1972, I think Henry Kissinger would have a hard time arguing that that agreement facilitated our maintenance of an effective balance. Indeed, in discussions I've had with him, he lays great stress not on the military benefits of the 1972 agreement but on the political necessity as he saw it at the time. With the emotions of Viet Nam affecting the American Congress and public as profoundly as the war then did affect us, he wanted to buy a bit of time in which we might regroup in order more effectively to compete with the Soviet Union.

THE INFERENCE THAT Henry Kissinger's détente policy embodied a melancholy pessimism about the American will to sustain the policy of Containment became central to the political debate which led, in the end, to the Reagan presidency.

The critics of SALT questioned the assumption that the Soviet Union could be contained other than by American power. As Kissinger said, it was part of a larger controversy over whether arms control enhanced or weakened the security of the West. Kissinger himself rejected the notion which appeared in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Defence debate (as it had with the Hydrogen Bomb in the 1950s): that unilateral restraint by the United States would induce the Russians to follow suit. There was, he said, overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Early in the Nixon Administration, in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Americans had been the first to deploy the multiple warhead missile MIRV; and it was heavily criticised at the time as making another cycle in the arms race inevitable.

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MIRV, as Robert McNamara reminded us earlier, was begun "solely as a means of countering the Soviet deployment of an anti-ballistic missile defence."

HENRY KISSINGER: Secretary McNamara did not want to build an anti-ballistic missile defence. He therefore developed the idea of a MIRV, arguing that with MIRV we could saturate any Soviet defence, and that therefore there would be no strategic inequality. We had no assurance at all that the Soviets would agree to a limitation of ballistic missile defences. Historical experience with the Soviets shows that if they wanted an agreement limiting MIRVs we couldn't have driven them off the conference table with it. They would have deluged us with it. Our primary problem at that point was to keep enough support for the agreements we were making; and MIRV was the one programme that the Defence Department had that was not being contested in any significant or decisive way in the Congress.

THE HISTORIC essence of the first SALT agreement, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, was that each side renounced the defence of its society against the nuclear arsenal of the other. As Henry Kissinger has reminded us, the Congress had cut the budgets for a defence

system to an absurdity. But in the labyrinth of the SALT accord is Ariadne's thread—which leads us, in the present day, to President Reagan's case for the "Star Wars" defence.

Two expectations arising from SALT I were not fulfilled. Henry Kissinger had hoped to shape the outcome so as to delay the trend which would give the Soviet Union a first-strike capability against the American land-based missiles by the 1980s, and then to use that delay to negotiate reductions in the numbers of offensive missiles in another and more comprehensive agreement. But the speed and extent to which the Soviet Union built up their offensive forces were underestimated.

KISSINGER: At the time of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the number of missile sites, as I pointed out, had been reduced to two. So our choice was whether we were going to agree to the Congress unilaterally dismantling the anti-ballistic missile defences, or whether we were going to get something for it from the Soviet Union. At that time the build-up of Soviet offensive forces was in its infancy. We made a unilateral statement (or we had our delegation make a unilateral statement) to read into the record that the United States considered the continued existence of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to depend on significant cuts in offensive forces. If these offensive forces were not reduced within the time limit of the offensive agreement, then the conditions for abrogation of the Treaty would exist. Rather than leading to a reduction of offensive forces, the Soviets built

up their offensive forces in a remarkable degree. So the balance between offensive and defensive forces was substantially destroyed.

As soon as the ABM Treaty and SALT I were signed, we initiated negotiations for the limitation of multiple warheads, and reduction to very small numbers. That the Soviets consistently refused. So we have a totally new situation today.

DR KISSINGER REMAINS CONVINCED, however, that SALT was made, in his words, "the whipping-boy" for a more fundamental philosophical contest on East-West relations.

The same Soviet Union with which Kissinger established a wide range of contacts was the one with which President Reagan much later would find it difficult to collaborate at all—for essentially the reasons given by Senator Jackson's associate, Richard Perle.

RICHARD PERLE: I don't think one can take the Arms Control agreements in isolation.

There was an agreement on grain which led immediately to a massive Soviet raid on the American grain harvest, pushing up the price of grain to American consumers and solving a very serious Soviet problem.

There were agreements on science and technology that led to very significant transfers of technology to the Soviet Union, and we now see them showing up in Soviet military systems.

There was a general agreement on principles governing the relationship that crowned a 30-year Soviet effort to induce the West to accept the principles contained in that document—the Soviet policy line of "Peaceful Coexistence" and the like. I think, looking back on that period, the agreements signed were in every case advantageous to the Soviet Union: and I think that's all one needs to know in order to explain their readiness to sign them.

NEITHER HENRY KISSINGER nor President Nixon had any desire to accommodate their critics. They shared to a large extent the philosophical case against the Soviet state and its ideology. Dr Kissinger thought of Senator Jackson as an ally, and regretted that the Senator chose to oppose him. It was, said Kissinger in his Memoirs, "a national tragedy that those who shared a similar strategic analysis should conduct a civil war over tactics...."

But the gap was really much wider than a disagreement over tactics. Both sides wished to "contain" the Soviet Union. Kissinger thought that, with seductive inducements, the Soviet Union might be escorted from its traditional expansionism to restraint: and that Russia's economic failures and fear over Kissinger's bringing China into play would press the Soviet leaders to coexistence on the West's terms. The other side—his conservative opponents—saw nothing but an implacable hostility and an endless vista of confrontations.

At a much-remarked press conference in Moscow in 1974.

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Henry Kissinger had said, "What in the name of God is strategic superiority?" How should the historian understand him?

HENRY KISSINGER: That is absolutely correct. I do not believe that you can rely on a first-strike strategy as the defence against all contingencies. Again one has to consider this in the context of events. That remark was made in late June 1974 in Moscow, a month before Nixon was forced out of office. We found ourselves in the position of being harassed on détente at a time when we had absolutely no capacity for confrontation.

And I still believe this: I do not think it is possible to achieve the degree of strategic superiority that existed in the 1940s and '50s, such that we can rely on nuclear superiority to defend Europe and other areas of the world. I remind you that Reagan has never tired of pointing out in the last two or three years that we are not trying to win a war. In what way does that differ from what I said ten years earlier?

—One of your most persistent and formidable critics, Senator Jackson, demanded to know why you hadn't sought lower limits from the Soviet Union, as he felt you should have. I thought you gave a very interesting answer to that on the way to Peking in 1974. You said this:

"The only way we could have even talked about lower numbers was to drastically increase defence spending and to hold the increase for a number of years, long enough to convince the Soviets that we were going to drive the race through the ceiling with them."

That sounds very like the Reagan programme today.

KISSINGER: Exactly correct. That is still my view.

THAT WAS ONE of the most creative periods in post-War diplomacy. and Kissinger is one of that diplomatic history's great public figures. Yet why did disenchantment with détente set in so early? Overall détente. Kissinger says, was "ground down between a liberal idealism unrelated to a concept of power and the liturgical anti-communism of the Right."

But although we made our share of mistakes, Kissinger has said, the fundamental assault on détente was made by the Soviet Union: with the Soviet Cuban expeditionary forces in Angola and Ethiopia; their appearance in Aden; the Kremlin's encouragement of North Viet Nam's takeover of the South; the pressures on Poland; and the invasion of Afghanistan.

Détente had not deterred.

Over the next few years and the long agony for détente of the Carter Presidency, the strategic debate was powerfully shaped by forces associated with the Committee on the Present Danger—they would return quite a different answer to Henry Kissinger's question, "What in the name of God is strategic superiority?"

A second article in this series by Michael Charlton will be published in next month's ESCOLTER.

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O 100956Z JAN 86

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TO SECSTATE WASHDC IMMEDIATE 6953

UNCLASS BANGKOK 01484

E.O. 12356: N/A

TAGS: MOPS, OVIP, TH, VM

SUBJECT: KISSINGER REMARKS ON INDOCHINA

REF: STATE 8245

1. THE FOLLOWING IS THE TEXT OF AN ARTICLE CARRIED ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE BANGKOK POST NOVEMBER 23 CONCERNING THE VISI' OF FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE HENRY KISSINGER TO KHMER CAMPS ON THE THAI-CAMBODIAN BORDER AND REMARKS MADE BY KISSINGER ON OTHER TOPICS INCLUDING 'HE POW/MIA ISSUE.

2. BEGIN TEXT. DR. HENRY KISSINGER YESTERDAY CRI'ICIZED MOVES IN CONGRESS TO GIVE 'HE KHMER RESISTANCE AID OF $5 MILLION AS A WEAK AND SYMBOLIC GESTURE.

SPEAKING AT THE END OF HIS TWO-DAY VISIT TO THAILAND, THE FORMER US SECRETARY OF STATE SAID HE FAVORED US SUPPORT FOR THE KAMPUCHEAN RESISTANCE IF THAT SUPPORT MATCHED THE TASK THE KHMERS FACED.

"THE AMOUNT OF MILITARY AID BEING SUGGESTED IS SO TRIVIAL," HE SAID, " THAT THE POLITICAL FURY IT WOULD CAUSE IS NOT WORTH THE EFFORT."

REFERRING TO THE PLANNED $5 MILLION AID, DR. KISSINGER SAID THE COUNTRY "DOESN'T GAIN ANY GREAT CREDIT IN THE WORLD WITH LOSING IN MODERATION.

"SYMBOLICALLY, IT SEEMS VERY STRANGE TO ME FOR THE UNITED STATES TO SUPPORT A CAUSE BUT TO SAY WE WILL GIVE ECONOMIC AID AND LET OTHERS DO THE DIRTY WORK."

"AS LONG AS WE'RE PREPARED TO SUPPORT THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS WE SHOULD ALSO BE PREPARED TO GIVE THEM WEAPONS. BUT IF WE'RE PREPARED TO GIVE THEM WEAPONS THEN IT SHOULD BE ON A LARGER SCALE THAN WHAT CONGRESS HAS VOTED," SAID DR. KISSINGER.

EXPRESSING DISTASTE FOR WHAT HE CALLED THE VIETNAMESE PRACTICE OF "SELLING BODIES WHENEVER THEY WANT TO EASE RELATIONS" WITH THE US, DR. KISSINGER SAID IMPROVED RELATIONS BETWEEN WASHINGTON AND HANOI DEPENDED ON A CHANGE IN THE "OBJECTIVE CONDITIONS".

OVER THE YEARS, HE SAID, "EVERY PROPOSAL THAT COULD BE CONCEIVED HAS BEEN MADE" BY THE UNITED STATES.

VIETNAM HAD DONE LITTLE MORE THAN OFFER THE TRANSFER OF US SERVICEMEN'S BODIES AS WEDGES FOR NEW DISCUSSIONS--A TACTIC HE TERMED "PERSONALLY SOMEWHAT OFFENSIVE".

IF THE VIETNAMESE "DISASSOCIATE FROM SOVIET BASES AND NEGOTIATE IN GOOD FAITH ABOUT KAMPUCHEA, THERE IS NO REASON WHY THE US COULDN'T LIVE WITH POSITIVE RELATIONS WITH VIETNAM."

"I HAVE NO DOUBT THAT IF VIETNAM WITHDRAWS FROM KAMPUCHEA, WESTERN ECONOMIC ASSISTANCE COULD BE FOUND.

TO OFFER THEM MONEY TO STOP DOING WHAT THEY HAD NO RIGHT TO DO IN THE FIRST PLACE ONLY ENCOURAGES THEIR BELIEF THAT IF THEY HOLD ON LONG ENOUGH THEY'LL GET BETTER AND BETTER OFFERS."

DR. KISSINGER SAID HE DID NOT BELIEVE CHINA HAD EXPANSIONIST INTENTIONS. HE ALSO SAID THAT HIS TEN-DAY VISIT TO CHINA BEFORE COMING TO THAILAND CONFIRMED HIS BELIEF THAT CHINA HAD A "DEEP INTEREST IN THE TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY OF THAILAND AND WOULD LOOK WITH DISFAVOR ON INCURSIONS BY VIETNAM".

COMMENTING ON THE GENEVA SUMMIT, DR. KISSINGER SAID THAT THOUGH THE DISCUSSIONS BETWEEN THE LEADERS WERE POSITIVE, IT WAS IMPORTANT TO GUARD AGAINST THE IMPRESSION THAT THE TENSIONS BETWEEN THE TWO COUNTRIES WERE CAUSED BY THE QUARRELS OF TWO LEADERS AND CAN THEREFORE BE REMEDIED BY BETTER PERSONAL RELATIONS AMONG THOSE LEADERS."

DR. KISSINGER SAID HIS POSITIVE ASSESSMENT OF THE SUMMIT WAS GIVEN PAUSE BY HIS VISIT TO THE KHMER CAMPS YESTERDAY. SEEING THE REFUGEES MADE HIM REFLECT THAT "AS MUCH AS WE CAN BE HAPPY AT THE OUTCOME OF THE SUMMIT, WE SHOULD REMEMBER THAT THERE IS A GREAT DEAL OF SUFFERING LEFT IN THE WORLD CAUSED BY SOVIET ARMS AND SOVIET ENCOURAGEMENT."

DR. KISSINGER WAS IN THAILAND AS A PRIVATE CITIZEN AND AS THE GUEST OF THE FOREIGN MINISTRY. HE LEAVES THIS MORNING TO RETURN TO NEW YORK. END OF TEXT. BROWN

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