The ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY CENTER, established in 1976, conducts a program of research, writing, publications, and conferences to encourage debate on domestic and foreign policy issues among religious, educational, academic, business, political, and other leaders. A non-partisan effort, the Center is supported by contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. The authors alone are responsible for the views expressed in Center publications.

Like original Center studies, the essays selected for the Center's reprint series are written by authors who recognize the validity of fundamental Western values and who attempt to combine moral reasoning with empirical analysis.

This article is reprinted by permission from *The Washington Quarterly*, Summer 1982 (© 1982 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University). Copies of the reprint are available at $1 each from the address below.

Henry A. Kissinger has been a professor at Harvard and was secretary of state under presidents Nixon and Ford.

Ernest W. Lefever, President
ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY CENTER
1666 Connecticut Avenue N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20009
(202) 328-7400

ISBN 0-89633-067-2

Foreword

THIS ESSAY BY FORMER Secretary of State Henry Kissinger combines in a remarkable way strategic analysis, a grasp of political and military realities, and moral reasoning. With wisdom illuminated by experience, Dr. Kissinger addresses all major facets of the nuclear arms debate, including arguments for a no-first-use pledge by NATO, demands for a freeze on nuclear weapons, plans for countering Soviet intermediate-range missiles targeted against Europe, the status and utility of the unratified SALT II Treaty, and current U.S. arms control proposals.

Against the backdrop of political and military developments since 1945, he argues that a no-first-use pledge and a nuclear freeze would both play into the hands of the Soviet Union and would make a conventional or nuclear attack by Moscow more likely, rather than less. “The democracies’ desire for peace,” he says, “must not be allowed to turn into a weapon of blackmail in the hands of the most ruthless,” adding that the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Western Europe is designed to “reduce the possibility of selective Soviet nuclear blackmail against Europe alone, and to link the nuclear defense of Europe indis solubly to the strategic deterrent of the United States.”

If the demands of the “peace move-
ment” became U.S. policy, Kissinger says,
we would “in effect have disarmed our-
selves unilaterally while sitting on the
most destructive stockpile of weapons the
world has seen.” To be effective, he says,

arms control must be an integral “compo-
nent of security policy. Experience shows
that it can ratify or stabilize a military bal-
ance, not serve as a substitute for it. . . .
The premise of arms control must be that
security can be enhanced if the balance is
maintained at lower, agreed, and verifi-
able levels.”

Dr. Kissinger concludes with a critique
of utopians who fail to understand the re-
quirements of statesmanship: “Dem-
agogues have no great difficulty attacking
any step by comparing it with some con-
jectural utopia. . . . It is a disservice to
serious moral concerns to pretend that
there is no practical dimension, just as it
falsifies practical solutions to separate
them from their moral content.”

This perceptive essay augments other
publications of the Ethics and Public Pol-
icy Center that address the nuclear di-
lemma, notably *The Apocalyptic Premise: Nuclear Arms Debated* edited by Ernest
W. Lefever and E. Stephen Hunt (pub-
lished in December 1982), *Why Arms
Control Has Failed* by Edward Luttwak,
and *What It Means to Be Number Two* by
Fred Charles Iklé.

This essay, like all Center publications,
is presented as a service to the interested
public. The selection of the facts and the
views expressed are the responsibility of
the author.

ERNEST W. LEFEVER, President
Ethics and Public Policy Center

December 1982

Henry A. Kissinger

> Moral concern about nuclear weapons touches upon a problem vital to mankind's future. Nuclear issues must be addressed with a concreteness and seriousness that do justice to the dangers.

# Nuclear Weapons and the Peace Movement

That nuclear weapons have added a new dimension to warfare and indeed human existence, that they make obsolete traditional concepts of military victory, that they stake civilized life and perhaps humanity itself, is not a new discovery. Some of us have been warning for over two decades that excessive reliance on nuclear weapons would sooner or later lead to the psychological paralysis of Western defense strategy. Where we differed from much of the current agitation is in our rejection of unilateralism. We drew the conclusion that reducing dependence on nuclear weapons obliged us to seek alternative means of defense, especially a buildup of conventional forces. The democracies' desire for peace must not be allowed to turn into a weapon of blackmail in the hands of the most ruthless.

In too many North Atlantic Treaty Organi-

zation (NATO) countries, protests and mass demonstrations against nuclear weapons tend inevitably toward a unilateral psychological, and even physical, disarmament with respect to the very weapons upon which Western security has in fact depended. The impression is created that it is the alliance's possession of nuclear arms-weapons that it did not use when it had an atomic monopoly and overwhelming superiority-that threatens the peace and which must be resisted. Little attention is paid to a whole series of aggressive or intransigent Soviet actions, from the dispatch of Cuban troops to Africa through the occupation of Afghanistan to the repression of freedom in Poland, which not only threatened the global equilibrium but are the proximate cause of the breakdown of strategic arms control negotiations in the 1970s.

Even less attention is paid to some basic

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facts of postwar history: that but for Soviet pressures in the immediate postwar period American troops would have been withdrawn from Europe in the forties, as indeed they were from Korea; that but for the Korean war the U.S. military budget would have shrunk to derisory levels; that it was the threat to the freedom of Berlin in the late fifties which accelerated the American military buildup; that the Soviet strategic arsenal has grown and been modernized relentlessly since the Cuban missile crisis 20 years ago; that for a variety of reasons the United States stopped its numerical buildup in the late sixties and slowed its modernization for the better part of the seventies; and that *all* wars in the postwar period have occurred where there were *no* American forces and *no* nuclear weapons, while Europe under American nuclear protection has enjoyed the longest period of peace in its history.

For all these reasons, the clamor for peace in much of the West is in most respects addressed to the wrong governments. Unmatched as it is by comparable agitation in the East, it poses the danger that a psychological imbalance, indeed a form of unilateral disarmament, will compound the regional military imbalances, which have already produced such a sense of insecurity in almost all countries around the periphery of the Soviet Union.

And yet the moral concern about nuclear weapons touches upon an issue crucial to our future: Mankind's new-found ability to exterminate itself makes new modes of thinking imperative. But they do not require a flight from concreteness; hysteria is a poor guide to policy. Moral concern must be coupled with a willingness to think through the central issues with a seriousness and in a detail that do justice to dangers as complex as they are enormous.

All consideration of the nuclear question must begin with this reality: Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons have been produced by the superpowers; hundreds by medium-sized countries; and dozens by recent and possibly new entrants into the nuclear club. No scheme of disarmament could ac-

count for all these weapons. Nations would insist on residual forces to protect themselves against cheating, or against the fact that the factories that produced the weapons would remain, or, should by some improbable chance these too be destroyed, against the knowledge in the minds of men from which these factories and weapons sprang in the first place. Mankind cannot unlearn the secret of the atom. In other words, we are doomed to some kind of deterrence, equilibrium, or balance at some level and in some form.

For the immediate future—even assuming foreseeable reductions—that level will be quite high; the real issue before us will be the nature of deterrence, and its components. That problem is neither new nor the exclusive discovery of newly concerned groups in all our countries. Technology would have imposed a reconsideration of existing strategy in any event; the destructiveness of weapons was bound sooner or later to break the cocoon in which we suppressed the consciousness of our Promethean power. But the public outcry has had the healthy result of forcing governments into considerations that they should in fact have initiated; into coming to grips with the awesomeness of the choices into which they have slid because of their reluctance to face, and tell their publics, the implications of their own design.

Our current dilemmas are the result of the decision of all our postwar leaders to base security on technology—to compensate for an assumed Soviet superiority in manpower and conventional weapons by reliance on our nuclear arsenal. Stalin’s aggressiveness was real enough. But from the perspective of a generation, it is possible to argue that the West was too ready to attribute a military edge to an adversary only recently devastated by war and 20 million casualties; that the NATO nations underestimated the significance of their own industrial potential and forgot—conveniently—that in fact NATO’s manpower is greater than that of the East. All these reflections are now academic. For the immediate future, the West is locked into the decisions of a generation; whatever conclu-

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sions we draw from the current realities and
the concerns they generate, for at least a
transitional period it will be nuclear weapons
that inhibit aggression in Europe. The evas-
sions of three decades cannot be remedied by
proclamations but by hard and dedicated ef-
fort.

The principal evasion was the refusal to
face the fact that strategic nuclear weapons
could continue to counterbalance local So-
viet advantages only if the U.S. strategic ar-
senal was clearly superior to that of the So-
viet Union—superiority being defined as the
ability to destroy the opposing nuclear capa-
bility at acceptable cost. That condition
began to disappear in the sixties. Technology
tended toward equality, and to levels beyond
which additional increments of destructive-
ness lose all relationship to the objectives
likely to be in dispute. Under current condi-

suicide. But governments continued the ex-
isting strategy, seeking to compensate by
emphatic reiterations of all-out nuclear de-
fense for the implausibility of their profes-
sions.

I made these points in a speech in Brussels
in the fall of 1979¹ and was roundly criti-
cized for allegedly undermining the credibil-
ity of NATO strategy. Unfortunately, what I
said was true and has now come to pass. For
more than two decades it was obvious that
U.S.-Soviet nuclear weapons programs were
tending toward parity at best and that this
would make resort to general war absurd and
the threat of it incredible. And for more than
two decades, the West has hid its head in the
sand and ignored the inevitable.

There was an occasional flirtation with a
doctrine of limited nuclear war to restore
some relationship between policy and mili-

> "The democracies' desire for peace must not be allowed to turn into a weapon of blackmail in the hands of the most ruthless."

tions superiority, to be meaningful, would
require an edge so large that no opponent
would tolerate it and calculations so esoteric
that few leaders will understand them or
stake survival on them. Arms-control theory
and practice, with their formal emphasis on
equality, only accelerated and legitimized
this trend.

While all these changes were taking place
Western governments and societies preferred
to ignore the consequences of their own deci-
sions. Logically, once the Soviet Union ac-
quired the capacity to threaten the United
States with direct nuclear retaliation, the
American pledge to launch an all-out nuclear
war on behalf of Europe was bound increas-
ingly to lose its credibility and public accep-
tance, if not its sense—and so would the al-
liance's defense strategy. For the strategy
now rested on the threat to initiate mutual

tary power. In my early writings on the sub-
ject in the 1950s, I, too, was tempted by that
theory. The effort never got very far. Part of
the reason was that from the European per-
spective, the distinction between limited and
general nuclear war was not as clearcut as on
the American side of the Atlantic; a rela-
tively few nuclear weapons could produce
catastrophe and chaos difficult to distinguish
from what only total war could do to Amer-
ica. Another cause was the polarization
within the community of civilian experts
between those who wanted to make nuclear
weapons "conventional" and those who
feared that governments could be kept from
initiating a nuclear holocaust only by guar-
anteeing that a nuclear war would be as grue-
some as possible. Ironically, those circles
usually advocating humane and progressive
domestic policies generally *insisted* that nu-

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Kissinger

clear strategy be aimed primarily at the mass extermination of civilians.

I continue to believe that in practice governments will be more careful than in their concepts. Indeed it is reckless in a nuclear world to pretend that any accident must automatically escalate into Armageddon. I hope that if the worst happens, governments will seek limits to the use of nuclear weapons—they will almost surely find them. Still, in all likelihood, the problem of limiting the use of weapons whose power has no operationally definable limit will find no acceptable theoretical formulation in advance; as a practical matter, failure to achieve a consensus over a period of thirty years is a pretty good working definition of the impossibility of developing in the abstract a strategy of limited nuclear war.

Unfortunately, many who opposed theories of limited nuclear war recoiled as well before the conventional military buildup, which could have at least reduced or perhaps avoided altogether the local and regional Soviet superiority that gave rise to the reliance on nuclear weapons in the first place. The legacy we are left with is a precarious combination of a NATO reliance on nuclear defense, trends toward nuclear stalemate, growing nuclear pacifism, and continued deficiencies in conventional forces. If we are reluctant to resort to nuclear weapons, and if we continue to evade the necessity for conventional forces, the Western alliance is left with no defense policy at all, and we are risking the collapse of the military balance in Europe that has made possible 35 years of European security, prosperity, and democracy. We will in effect have disarmed ourselves unilaterally while sitting on the most destructive stockpile of weapons that the world has seen.

## Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces in Europe (INF)

The debate over deployment of American intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe exemplifies the current confusion. Too often it has been portrayed as an American

attempt to shift the risks of nuclear war to Europe or to use Europe as a forward base for strictly American purposes. This is absurd. To the extent that intermediate-range weapons are needed for American nuclear strategy at all—and this depends on the resolution of our own internal debate over the utility of a counterforce capability²—they can be deployed in various modes at sea. The real argument for placing intermediate-range nuclear weapons on the soil of the continent has always been twofold: to reduce the possibility of selective Soviet nuclear blackmail against Europe alone, and to link the nuclear defense of Europe indissolubly to the strategic deterrent of the United States. Given the diminishing credibility of the threat of strategic war initiated from the United States, the argument is plausible that the Soviet Union might be tempted to exploit its preponderance of intermediate-range missiles for blackmail against Europe—reasoning that no American response with strategic weapons could alter the outcome. That danger is clearly diminished by the proposed deployment of intermediate-range weapons which would create the imperative of a certain automaticity in the response.

By the same token, the Soviet Union could not risk attacking Europe with conventional weapons without destroying our intermediate-range missiles also, lest they devastate Soviet command centers in a retaliatory blow. And it could not seek to destroy the missiles in Europe while leaving our strategic arsenal in America unimpaired for a possible strike against Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Far from giving us the possibility of separating the nuclear defense of Europe from that of the United States, intermediate-range missiles in Europe indissolubly link the two. They increase the risk to America, not to Europe; logically the public demonstrations against them should be on the American side of the Atlantic.

If our European allies are not persuaded by arguments such as these, however, it would be wrong for us to insist on them—especially since, as I have said, we can deploy at sea the intermediate-range weapons we need for

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Kissinger

a purely American strategy. I believe that our allies should now decide that aspect of the requirements of their defense without further American hectoring. By the same token, our proposals in the INF talks should be made on their merits, independent of considerations of shoring up the domestic support for our deployment in various European countries. Such a course would restore balance to the transatlantic dialogue and, frankly, a sense of proportion to the domestic deliberations of our allies.

Renouncing the First Use of Nuclear
Weapons

The issue of the intermediate-range missiles is a symptom, not a cause, of the current malaise over strategy. The real issue remains the need to gear our defense policies to the twin realities of strategic parity and mounting public concern over nuclear weapons. Recently, a serious proposal to that end was made by a group of eminent Americans: Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, George Kennan, and Gerard Smith, all of whom have held high office. Among other things, the views of these outstanding public servants should serve as a reminder to our European friends that if frustration reaches a certain point, American policy could shift drastically away from the now dominant trend.

I greatly respect these men, who advanced the thesis that NATO should renounce the first use of nuclear weapons and rely exclusively on conventional weapons for the defense of Europe—and a fortiori of other threatened areas. I share their objective that the West must disenthrall itself of the notion that it can substitute technology for sacrifice and destructiveness for effort. I cannot, however, agree with their declaratory policy, for four principal reasons:

A statement of no first use would leave us psychologically naked for a period that would surely extend over at least five years, even if our own government and all our NATO allies were prepared to make immediate, serious, and sustained efforts to re-

dress the imbalance in conventional weapons. Of course, if the reaction of our allies were less forthcoming about conventional rearmament than anticipated by the authors, the psychological and military vulnerability of NATO would be magnified even more. Our leaders have an obligation to reduce their reliance on nuclear weapons; they must not do so, however, at the price of accelerating a trend of pacifism and panic that may invite Soviet nuclear blackmail. Much of the antinuclear agitation is, after all, directed against the West's nonnuclear weapons as well.

A formal pledge of no first use may well create, in addition, two seemingly contradictory dangers which increase the risk of war. If the Soviets should become convinced that the West fears nuclear war above all else, we may trigger one of the not infrequent reversals of Soviet strategic doctrine, from hints of abjuring first use to the reassertion that a war in Europe could never be limited to conventional weapons. All wars, it would then be argued (as at times it has in the past) will be nuclear—facing the West with the choice of surrender or the kind of war of which our countries will then be incapable as a result of years of renouncing and stigmatizing nuclear weapons.

Nor can we afford to create the impression that we would prefer a conventional defeat in Europe to the first use of nuclear weapons. The history of conventional warfare is filled with examples of battles in which numbers and equipment were roughly equal and yet victory was achieved by such unquantifiable factors as superior tactics, superior strategy, or superior leadership. For centuries wars have started between seemingly evenly matched forces. There is no blinking the fact that deterrence, when only conventional weapons were involved, has frequently broken down. And we probably could then not guarantee that we would live up to our no-first-use declaration. Faced with the collapse of Europe we might well reverse our proclaimed doctrine, thereby bringing about the worst of all possible outcomes: a failure of conventional deterrence and a nuclear war.

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Finally, a no-first-use declaration would
likely demoralize allies in other regions of
the world or other friendly countries, large
and small, not embraced by formal alliances
and yet as dependent on American strength
as they are vital to Western security.

With all these caveats, the authors of the
no-first-use proposal have rendered an im-
portant service. While I cannot accept their
prescription, they have correctly grasped the
key challenge: As they point out, the West
has no choice but to give greater priority to
its conventional defense. As a practical mat-
ter, it *must* be our policy to reduce reliance
on nuclear war to the greatest extent pos-
sible, by creating other means to resist ag-
gression.

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

Strategic Arms Limitation and
Reduction

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

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

This is why so much hope—perhaps too
much hope—has been attached for over a de-
cade to U.S.-Soviet talks on strategic arms
control. That is why President Reagan has
reaffirmed the commitment of all of his pre-
decessors to limiting these weapons of mass
destruction, giving special emphasis to re-
ductions. And that is why there have
emerged the various freeze proposals now
under active discussion in the United States.

President Reagan's commitment to strate-
gic arms talks marks a watershed in the
American domestic debate. For nearly a de-
cade, disputes over strategic weapons lim-
itation have torn our domestic consensus,
becoming symbolic surrogates for larger
controversies over policy towards the Soviet
Union. Arms-control negotiations over the
years have been buffeted by debates between
competing philosophies sometimes only in-
directly touching upon the details being
negotiated. Advocates have made exorbitant
claims and insisted on separating arms con-
trol from all other aspects of policy; oppo-
nents saw in them a serious weakening of
Western will power and concentrated on
portraying the inherent balancing of relative
advantages as unilateral concessions. Presi-
dent Reagan, by proposing and entering a
negotiation over strategic arms reduction,
has liberated our domestic debate and per-
mitted a serious public discussion of the real
issues of arms control. The delay in starting
the talks, legitimately needed for prepara-

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36

Kissinger

tion, is a small price to pay for opening up
prospects of a successful conclusion that
were not available to either of his two imme-
diate predecessors.

There exists, then, an unprecedented op-
portunity, for President Reagan's Eureka
speech has put forth a new approach based
on substantial reductions. This takes account
of the concerns of many about the scale of
nuclear arsenals. And it deals as well with
what is the real heart of the matter, namely
crisis stability, or diminishing the danger of
the outbreak of nuclear war. For if the re-
ductions are confined to launchers, without
concern for the composition and nature of
strategic forces, they could increase instabil-
ity rather than ease it. After all, the over-
whelming new problem in the strategic field
is the existence of multiple warheads on
strategic missiles. Even if the launchers on

tion Talks) negotiations to agree on numeri-
cal limits on launchers; the negotiations now
envisaged are infinitely more complex.

A policy is needed to bridge this gap lest careless "quick-fix" solutions dominate the debate. The desire for a dramatic breakthrough has produced various proposals for nuclear freezes. Experience has shown, however, that it is easy to formulate general objectives in arms control negotiations; it is much more difficult to negotiate a meaningful outcome whatever principle is finally adopted. We have, after all, the experience of the two SALT agreements which were both essentially a kind of numerical freeze. Complex negotiations went on for years over what weapons to count; how to relate multiple warheads to individual delivery vehicles; and how to relate either to airborne weapons of mass destruction. Attempting a freeze

"If arms control comes to be perceived
primarily as an exercise in moral virtue . . . it
becomes a form of self-paralysis."

both sides are exactly equal, the disproportio-
tion between the number of attacking war-
heads and the number of launcher/targets
represents a standing temptation to strike
first. Reductions of launchers do not auto-
matically change the disproportion. In fact,
at some levels reducing the number of deliv-
ery vehicles without changing the proportion
of warheads to missiles increases the vulner-
ability of the missiles attacked; a first strike
is simplified. The Reagan administration is
surely on the right track in striving for a pro-
posal that combines reductions with restric-
tions on other characteristics of weapons to
inhibit, rather than ease, a surprise attack.

But it is also true that such a process is
enormously time-consuming, not only in
elaborating our own position but in negoti-
ating an agreement with the Soviet Union. It
took years of SALT (Strategic Arms Limita-

now would encounter all the old SALT di-
lemmas—for example, of where to draw the
dividing line between “modernized” and
“new” systems. Who can forget the Soviets’
attempt to define all of their replacement
weapons as only “modernized” and hence
permitted, while all of ours were said to be
“new” and hence proscribed? In short, a
freeze requires a baseline; by itself it is no
advance over the results of the SALT process
which already exists.

In my view, the existing SALT framework
may be useful in providing the baselines and
the definitions from which to negotiate over
the complex reductions that the administra-
tion is in the process of developing. At the
same time, we must take seriously the con-
cerns expressed in the Senate debate on rati-
fication of SALT II. On that occasion, I sup-
ported ratification if three conditions were

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Kissinger

fulfilled: first, if a major defense buildup were undertaken to restore the military balance; second, if certain amendments were made and if specific ambiguities, particularly in the accompanying three-year Protocol, were cleared up; and third, if the United States made clear the linkage between SALT and Soviet geopolitical conduct. Some senators, led by the then minority leader Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), stressed the importance of maintaining the American right to build heavy ICBMs such as the Soviet Union already possessed in large numbers.

These are valid concerns, and I believe that we are at a stage where they can be met. The Reagan administration's rearmament effort will in time balance the Soviet buildup; it is urgently needed—but in any case, the administration has voluntarily kept it within SALT II limits. The Protocol has lapsed. We could therefore proceed to an interim agreement using the SALT framework or, as some former opponents of the treaty such as Senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) have indicated, ratify the SALT II treaty. I would lean to that course, although whether the limits are formalized by ratification, congressional resolution or by other bilateral or unilateral means is a secondary issue. In any case I would urge the following additions to the existing SALT framework:

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

* Second, lowering the ceilings below the limits established by SALT II to

around 2,000-2,100 strategic delivery vehicles. This would symbolize a commitment to reductions.

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

Reverting to the framework of SALT II as a point of departure for an interim period may seem to some to reopen partisan wounds. The argument is made that it would freeze existing Soviet advantages in throwweight. But we should remember that those advantages reflect American unilateral weapons decisions, not agreements. They have always been in our power to reverse—for example, by deploying the MX. We have not done so, by our own choice. The administration has repeatedly proclaimed that it will observe the numerical limits agreed in SALT II. I have great difficulty understanding why it is safe to adhere to a nonratified agreement while it is unsafe formally to ratify or to accept what one is already observing. The Soviets may in fact prefer such a posture, all the more so as nonratification gives them at least 250 extra delivery vehicles which they would be obliged to destroy by the terms of the treaty, once ratified.

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

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## Kissinger

pared to pay the price of a further conventional buildup; we must not pretend that there is no price.

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

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

purpose instead of running from them in confusion and division.

## Conclusion

If our problems were simple, they would long since have been solved. The statesman always faces the dilemma that he must approach his goal in stages; he is responsible not only for the best that can happen but also for the worst. Perfection will therefore elude him at each stage; demagogues have no great difficulty attacking any step by comparing it with some conjectural utopia. But democracy cannot survive if debates are driven by such attitudes. It is a disservice to serious moral concerns to pretend that there is no practical dimension, just as it falsifies practical solutions to separate them from their moral content. There is no room for self-righteousness on either side of the Atlantic or within any of our countries. Any real progress, therefore, must begin within ourselves.

TWO

## Notes

1. See Henry A. Kissinger, "The Future of NATO," *The Washington Quarterly*, Autumn 1979, vol. 2, no. 4, p. 12.

2. How much counterforce we seek depends on how much we wish to insure that we have options other than the mass extermination of civilians. Abjuring counterforce has a price: The more we emphasize frightfulness in our strategy, the more we diminish its credibility in the circumstances most likely to arise and the less hedge we have against unexpected catastrophe.

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Summer 1982

Ethics and Public Policy Reprints

1. Nuclear Energy Politics: Moralism vs. Ethics
by Margaret N. Maxey

2. The World Council of Churches and Radical Chic
by Richard Neuhaus

3. Western Guilt and Third World Poverty
by P. T. Bauer

4. The United States in Opposition:
Anti-Americanism in the United Nations
by Daniel Patrick Moynihan

5. Patterns of Black Excellence
by Thomas Sowell

6. Why Arms Control Has Failed
by Edward N. Lüttwak

7. Environmentalism and the Leisure Class
by William Tucker

8. A Search for Sanity in Antitrust
by Walter Guzzardi, Jr.

9. Ethics and the New Class
by Peter L. Berger

10. Will Lawyering Strangle Capitalism?
by Laurence H. Silberman

11. Is Capital Punishment Just?
by Ernest van den Haag

12. The Case for Doing Business in South Africa
by Herman Nickel

13. Regulation and the New Class
by Paul H. Weaver

14. Trendier Than Thou:
The Episcopal Church and the Secular World
by Paul Seabury

15. The Press and American Politics
by William Fulbright, Raymond Price, and Irving Kristol

16. Is the New Morality Destroying America?
by Clare Boothe Luce

17. Politicizing Christianity: Focus on South Africa
by Edward Norman

18. Alienation and U.S. Foreign Policy
by Paul Craig Roberts

19. The Cost of America's Retreat
by Ben J. Wattenberg

20. The Soul of Man Under Socialism
by Vladimir Bukovsky

21. What It Means to Be Number Two
by Fred Charles Iklé, with a response by two Soviet officials

22. Dictatorships and Double Standards:
A Critique of U.S. Policy
by Jeane Kirkpatrick

23. Taiwan: Pawn or Pivot?
by Parris H. Chang, Gerald McBeath, and Ralph N. Clough

24. Crusade Against the Corporation:
Church Militants on the March
by Herman Nickel

25. America the Enemy:
Profile of a Revolutionary Think Tank
by Daniel Z. Newman

26. Washington vs. the Public Schools
by J. Myron Atkin

Examines the increasing penetration of elementary and secondary education by the federal government to achieve social goals or to advance the interests of politically powerful minorities.

27. Washington vs. the Universities
by Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The senator asserts that the government has the power "to shut down any university" in America by withholding funds if it fails to comply with regulations tied to federal grants from Washington.

28. Christian Schools, Racial Quotas, and the IRS
by Peter Skerry

The author concludes that the recent Christian-school movement is a reaction to "creeping humanism" and moral relativism in the public schools, not to racial problems.

29. Solzhenitsyn and American Democracy
by George F. Will and Michael Novak

Two respected political commentators admire Solzhenitsyn's insistence that an enduring society must have deep spiritual roots but find he expects too much from democracy.

30. Religious Freedom and the Supreme Court
by Dallin H. Oaks

A law professor says that in applying the First Amendment the Supreme Court tends to define religion broadly in relation to the "free exercise" provision and narrowly in relation to "non-establishment."

31. Sanctifying Revolution:
Mainline Churchmen Turn Radical

by Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac

In pursuing justice and "liberation," mainline church leaders have increasingly supported revolutionary, sometimes even violent, means.

32. Education, Character, and American Schools
by Gerald Grant

Students must once again be taught to respect a common code of behavior even if it is a "provisional morality" that they may later revise.

33. The New Defenders of Capitalism
by Norman Podhoretz

The traditional hostility of intellectuals toward market enterprise shows signs of reversal; many now argue that capitalism is the most productive system and increases a society's freedom of choice.

34. Moral Implications of Energy
by William G. Pollard, Frederick S. Carney, and Thomas J. Reese, S.J.
A nuclear physicist (and Episcopal priest), a professor of Christian ethics, and an editor of America reflect on the moral and theological implications of nuclear energy.

35. How to Lose a War: The Press and Viet Nam
by Robert Elegant

A veteran Asia correspondent says the Viet Nam war was lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of Western liberals whose views dominated the prestige press in the United States.

36. Why Latin America Is Poor
by Michael Novak

Latin American poverty is caused not by North American wealth or multinational corporations but by domestic social and cultural forces rooted in the political and economic institutions and world view of the Spanish conquerors.

37. On the Brink: The Myth of German Anti-Americanism
by Uwe Siemon-Netto

The German left wing's "long march" through the courts, schools, churches, media, and other institutions has had considerable success, but the great majority of the German people do not support the radical demand for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

38. The Media Elite and American Values
by S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman

From interviews with 240 journalists and broadcasters the authors conclude that the views of the media elite on major social, economic, and political questions are substantially to the left of those of middle America.

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