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<uf76>Q: Here it is 40 years after the bomb. What is it that statesmen, practicing politicians who have actual responsibility for power, must know about the bomb?

A: They of course become very conscious of the consequences of a nuclear war. One of the first things you get briefed on when you are appointed to one of the top spots is the general consequences of a nuclear war.

Q: Does it scare you?

A: It awes you. And it shows you that you have a responsibility that no previous statesmen has faced, in the sense that nobody has ever had the power to destroy mankind. In the past you could always say that the consequences of defeat were worse than the consequences of war. You cannot say that with assurance in the nuclear age.

Q: Can awe become paralysis?

A: It's your duty to prevent paralysis and yet it is also your duty to recognize that nuclear power is not the same as traditional military power. This is the dilemma. If you permit it to go to paralysis, then you're turning

go to paralysis, then you're turning
the world over to the most ruthless, to
the one who can plausibly threaten.

So this is in the back of your mind.
But it has also a contradictory result
that in most concrete crises that arise
you do not believe that they will turn
into general war.

Q: What gives you that hope, that
faith that a crisis won't go nuclear?

A: Well partly because when you're
an American, you know that you have
the ultimate decision over the actions
leading to nuclear war and you know
that your nuclear threshold is very
high, and you assume that that is
equally true on the other side. But it is
a curious phenomenon that in the

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period at least in which I was in office,
I did not believe at any time that we
were close to nuclear war. And I sus=
pect this has been true throughout the
nuclear age, except perhaps the Cuban
missile crisis.

Q: Well now we have an interview
of President Nixon in Time magazine
July 29) where he suggests that on at
least four occasions he ``considered''
using nuclear weapons. He's referring
to the Vietnam war, to the Soviets
threatening to take out China's nu-
clear facilities, to the India-Pakistan

clear facilities, to the India-Pakistan
war and to the Middle East crisis of
1973. "Considered, of course, can
mean many different things, but what
are we talking about here?

A: I read that interview and frankly
I was sufficiently concerned to talk to
some of the other key decision makers
of that period_Secretary of Defense
Melvin Laird, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Adm. Thomas Moorer,
the two security advisers, Gen. Haig
and Gen. Scowcroft_to see whether
their recollection coincided with mine.
And so I can safely say that there was
never a concrete occasion or cirris in
which the use of nuclear weapons was
considered by the government.

One has to look at the problem of
decision making at various levels. One,
a president obviously has to ask him=
self how far he's prepared to go if ab=
solutely the worst were to happen. In
this case if the Soviets attack China or
if the Soviets pressure China as a re=
sult of the India-Pakistan war or in the
Middle East crisis. And I cannot speak
for what president Nixon, in the pri=
vacy of his office or of his living quar-
ters, might have considered he was
prepared to do.

In terms of the operation of the gov-
ernment, none of these crises reached
a point where there was any planning

05:00

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to use nuclear weapons. There was
never any decision--even any contin-
gent decision--to use nuclear weapons
if such a contingency should arise. And
there was never any discussion of how
far we would be prepared to go in
these contingencies.

So we are talking about something
the president must have had in the
back of his mind as to his outer limit,
but not something that in a crisis the
government, either with the key ad-
visers individually or as a group, ever
considered.

Q: In the Middle East war of 1973 there was a so-called nuclear alert on the American side. Is that not an aspect of nuclear diplomacy?

A: Technically it is not 100 percent correct to call it a nuclear alert. What happened was we received a message from Brezhnev inviting joint Amer-ican-Soviet military action in Egypt in effect against the Israelis who had just trapped the 3rd Egyptian army.

Brezhnev added that if we did not agree to joint action, he would under-take unilateral action. We were deter-mined not to undertake a joint action or to permit a unilateral Soviet action.

Those of us who were meeting--and at

Those of us who were meeting--and at
that point President Nixon chose not
to participate--were attempting to
convey to the Soviets that we would
oppose their move into Egypt. And we
wanted to take certain actions that
they would pick up through their intel=
ligence before we sent our reply.

There are five stages of readiness for
our military; forces, most are in de-
fense condition 4. In 1973, the Pacific

theater, because of the legacy of the
Vietnam war, was in defense condition
3. During the Middle East alert, we
wend from defense condition 4 to de-
fense condition 3 for the rest of the
world. Some of the consequences are

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that some people on leave get called
back to their bases and some more
bombers are put on alert and similar
measures.

My guess is the high probability
would have been that had the Soviets
sent troops to Egypt, we would have
responded with the 82nd Airborne
Division in Egypt. Our ally was mili-
tarily stronger than their ally. And our
judgment was that we could get more
conventional forces into the area than
they could.

Q: But you would not call this a nu-
clear alert?

clear alert?

A: It was a general alert that also alerted some nuclear forces. The best proof of that is that we did exactly the same thing in 1970 when Syria invaded Jordan and at that point the Soviet Union was not even directly involved. We wanted to generate enough cable traffic, enough alerting of forces to indicate we would do something. But we were far from a decision to go to nuclear war.

Q: In the earlier India-Pakistan crisis it appeared at a certain point that the Soviets were encouraging the Indians to go on, having mastered East Pakistan to take West Pakistan also and to disintegrate Pakistan basically. You write in your memoirs that the United States ``would not stand idly by,'' would render ``significant assistance, the precise nature to be worked out when the circumstances arose.'' And you described this as ``a new and ominous dimension'' the Soviet encouragement of India.

Now this is one of the incidents where President Nixon said he ``considered'' nuclear weapons.

A: We believed we had intelligence information that, after having defeated East Pakistan, the Indians would attack West Pakistan. Now, we had a

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special concern with Pakistan at the
time because Pakistan had opened
China for us and president Nixon was
going to China about two months after
this crisis developed. Moreover, previ-
ous presidents had made certain com-
mitments about the territorial integ-
rity of Pakistan.

Q: A In late November, earlydDe-
cember 1971.

A: But the specific events to which
you referred occurred one Sunday
morning early in December. President
Nixon, General Haig and I were meet-
ing in his office. We received word
about 10 o'clock from the Chinese--I
could be off, but this is generally cor-
rect--that they had an urgent message
to deliver to us at 2. We thought that
the message might be that they would
come to the assistance of Pakistan.

We asked General Haig to receive
the message and we instructed him to
tell the Chinese that, if their decision
was to assist Pakistan, we would not
be indifferent to a Soviet attack on
China. The reaction would have to be
worked out in the circumstances that
arose. In the event, the Chinese de-
cided not to act. The circumstance
about which we had spoken never
arose.

arose.

We never inquired from the chair=
man of the Chiefs of Staff or from the
Defense Secretary or from the Secre-
tary of State what they recommended
we do should those circumstances
arise. And so there was no planning
for nuclear war.

Had there been a Soviet attack on
China, it is highly probable that we
would have given assistance to China.
What assistance would have had to de-
pend on staff planning that never took
place. It's possible that president
Nixon in his own mind was prepared to
use nuclear weapons, but I think it's

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important to understand that, as a
government, there was never any dis-
cussion of the use of nuclear weapons.
Even at that meeting there was no dis-
cussion of the use of nuclear weapons.

Q: Isn't there a sense that it's al=
most impossible, once you start get=
ting into one of these very messy vola-
tile crises, not to let come into your
mind some of these what if questions?
These ultimate nuclear questions? Re=
gardless of whether there's any plan-
ning or any documents or anything
like that?

A: It is of course true when you con=
front the Soviet Union, or when you

front the Soviet Union, or when you
even consider confronting the Soviet
Union, you have to recognize that the
nuclear threat increases. And, in fact,
you cannot act as if you exclude the
nuclear threat or, paradoxically, you
encourage it.

Q: Well, every crisis in which a
great power is involved, is at least im=
plicitly nuclear and couldn't fail to be
so unless a great power unilaterally
disarmed.

A: Absolutely. Diplomacy in the
modern age is conducted against the
backdrop of nuclear weapons. Even
day to day diplomacy. As tension in=
creases as specific circumstances arise
that is, of course, more so. Go back to
your first question. Did one consider
the use of nuclear weapons? It just de=
pends how you define considers. If you
mean in an operational sense the an=
swer is no. If you mean in a general
strategic sense, conscious of an in=
creased danger, the answer is more
ambiguous, but even in that sense we
were never, in my view, close to nu=
clear war.

Q: Is there a sense in which any
geopolitical view of the world, by
which I mean that small things done
here may affect large decisions taken

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later in the mind or in the mind of
one's adversary, is there a sense in
which just a geopolitical view of the
world itself adds to the, heavies up,
the nuclear element in political think-
ing?

A: Well I would argue that if you think of the world geopolitically you are, of course, more conscious of nu- clear war in a crisis, and you must in- clude it in your calculations. On the other hand, including it in your calcula- tions in a precise way is more likely to make you act responsibly than if you approach the issue strictly moralisti- cally or strictly legalistically because then, not being aware of your options, you may suddenly slide into a crisis in which you react convulsively. And to my mind the greatest danger of nu- clear war is a crisis that develops among leaders that have not thought about these issues with precision.

Q: But each crisis has its own pat-
tern. Lessons from one can be very
misleading. A message of resolve in
one instance can be in another situa-
tion a message of intransigence.

A: First of all, any message of re=
solve or conciliation will always be em=
bedded in the general expectations
about the other side that have been
raised over a long period of time. And

raised over a long period of time. And
will be evaluated in that context. For
example, in 1973, all the messages
that went back and forth between the
Soviet Union and us were in the con-
text of a previous extensive period of
detente, so that the Soviets knew we
were not spoiling for a confrontation.

Now had exactly the same measures
been taken after a prolonged period of
noncommunication or tension, it is
possible that the Soviet reaction would
have been different. In 1973 they
pulled back less than 12 hours after
the alert. Would they do the same

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thing in different circumstances? I
don't know. There is no cookbook rec-
ipe you can apply to every situation.

Q: Would you say of the 1973 that
they pulled back not because of a nu-
clear threat but because the U.S. and
the U.S. ally Israel had plainly demon-
strated a conventional advantage on
the ground?

A: I never thought in 1973 that the
nuclear threat was the principal ele-
ment of the equation. The nuclear
forces were raised to the same level of
alert as the other forces but since they
were closer to it to begin with I'm not
even so sure that the nuclear part was
as noticeable. Nuclear forces being

as noticeable. Nuclear forces being
more ready than other forces by their
nature.

I believe that the decisive element
in 1973 was that the Israelis were
conventionally superior and that our
capacity to reinforce with conventional
forces into Egypt was also superior to
that of the Soviets.

Q: Khrushchev said about the '62
crisis of course that there had been
the smell of burning in the air. You
never felt that was the case while you
were in the government.

A: Absolutely not. Certainly not vis
a vis the Soviet Union. We felt it obvi-
ously with Vietnam.

Q: I think Khrushchev meant a
sense of burning to be the nuclear
sense.

A: Never even close to it.

Q: Not in Vietnam? Not with China?
Not India-Pak? Not Middle East?

A: With respect to China, it was my
view and it was also surely president
Nixon's view, that we did not wish the
Soviets to destroy China. We believed
that destroying China might have the
same impact on the global equilibrium
as destroying Europe. We would truly
have sought to resist a Soviet attack

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on China. But we never carried it to

on China. But we never carried it to
the point of nuclear planning.

Q: Over all, have nuclear weapons
been a help or a hindrance in the con-
duct of world affairs for great powers?

A: If it were not for nuclear weap-
ons it is likely that there would have
been a war between us and the Sovi-
ets. So it is almost certainly true that
nuclear weapons have preserved the
peace. It is also true that if we con-
tinue the strategy that has got us
these 40 years of peace, that some
catastrophe somewhere along the line
is going to happen and that therefore
the big problem of our period is to
build on this long period of peace we
have a structure that is different from
the preceding one.

Q: Aren't you saying something
paradoxical? You say the bomb has
been an element to keep the peace
over 40 years and yet if we go on as
we are we risk a catastrophe. What do
you mean by that?

A: In the first 40 years, first of all
there were 20 years in which we had a
huge nuclear superiority, maybe even
30 years. Secondly, most of the crises
were in areas where the United States
and the Soviet Union controlled most
of the decision making. Finally, the
weapons of the two sides only recently
became very sophisticated. In the next

became very sophisticated. In the next
40 years many new centers of decision
making will emerge, and weapons will
become increasingly complex. There-
fore, the crises may not take such a
neat evolution.

Q: You mean . . . places, other coun-
tries which acquire nuclear weapons.

Is that what you mean?

A: Other countries which acquire
nuclear weapons or other countries
that can involve the nuclear powers
through their alliances or their percep-
tions of the national interest. And if

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that happens then I could conceive
some crisis, somewhere, that slowly
evolves. . . . The danger we face is
more a conflagration on the model of
World War I than of World War II. Nu-
clear weapons make it unlikely that a
superpower will deliberately aim for
world conquest in one throw of the
dice, but this does not exclude a grad-
ual escalation or a creeping expansion-
ism.

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A: They of course become very conscious of the consequences of a nuclear war. One of the first things you get briefed on when you are in one of the top spots is the general consequences and plans for a nuclear war.

Q: Does it scare you?

A: It awes you. And it shows you that you have a responsibility that no previous statesmen has faced, in the sense that nobody has ever had that much power. In the past you could always say that the consequences of defeat were worse than the consequences of war. You cannot say that in the nuclear age.

Q: Can awe become paralysis?

② [Y]

This is the dilemma. If you permit it to go to paralysis, then you're turning the world over to the most ruthless, to the one who can plausibly threaten.

A: Well partly because when you're an American, as opposed to a Soviet, you know that you have the ultimate decision over your actions and you know that your nuclear threshold is very high, and you assume that that is equally true on the other side. But it is a curious phenomenon that in the

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period at least in which I was in office, I did not believe at any time that we were close to nuclear war. And I suspect this has been true throughout the nuclear age, except perhaps the Cuban missile crisis.

[Y]

3

threatening to take out China's nuclear facilities, to the India-Pakistan war and to the Middle East crisis of 1973. "Considered," of course, can mean many different things, but what are we talking about here?

A: I read that interview and frankly I was sufficiently concerned to call the other key decision makers of that period_Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Thomas Moorer, Under-secretary of State Joseph Sisco_to see whether their recollection coincided with mine. And so I can safely say that I speak for all of the people who were involved in decision making at the time.

One has to look at the problem of decision making at various levels. One, a president obviously has to ask himself how far he's prepared to go if absolutely the worst were to happen. In this case if the Soviets attack China or if the Soviets pressure China as a result of the India-Pakistan war or in the Middle East crisis. And I cannot speak for what president Nixon, in the pri-vacy of his office or of his living quarters, might have considered he was prepared to do.

In terms of the operation of the government, there was never any plan-

4

LYJ

ning for any of these contingencies.

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any contingent decision--to use nu-
clear weapons if such a contingency
should arise. And there was never any
discussion of how far we would be pre-
pared to go in these contingencies.

So we are talking about something
the president must have had in the
back of his mind as to his outer limit,
but not something that the govern-
ment, either with the key advisers or
as a group, ever considered.

A: Technically it is not 100 percent correct to call it a nuclear alert. What happened was we received a message from Brezhnev inviting joint American-Soviet military action in Egypt in effect against the Israelis who had just trapped the 3rd Egyptian army. We intended to send a reply rejecting joint action and Brezhnev had added that if we did not agree to joint action, he would undertake unilateral action. We were determined not to permit this. Those of us who were meeting--and at

5

that point Nixon was not part of that
group were attempting to convey
top the Soviets that we would oppose
their move into Egypt. And we wanted
to take certain actions that they would
pick up through their intelligence be-
fore we sent our reply. And therefore
we went from defense condition four
to defense condition three. Some of
the consequences of it are that people
on leave get called back to their bases
of conventional units and some more
bombers are put on alert and similar
measures.

My guess is the high probability
would have been that had they put a
force in, we would have put the 82nd
Airborne Division in in Egypt. After
all, we had a conventional superiority.

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Our ally was militarily stronger than
their ally. And our judgment was that
we could get more conventional forces
into the area than they could.

A: So I don't think it's correct to call
it a nuclear alert, it was an alert that
also alerted nuclear forces. But the
forces we wanted them to pick up
were the conventional forces. The

CYS

6

best proof of that is that we did ex-
actly the same thing in 1970 when
Syria invaded Jordan and at that point
the Soviet Union was not even directly
involved. What we wanted to generate
is enough cable traffic that they would
pick up and enough alerting of forces
to indicate we would do something.

Q: In the earlier Indian-Pakistan
crisis it appeared at a certain point
that the Soviets were encouraging the
Indians to go on, having mastered East
Pakistan to take West Pakistan also
and to disintegrate Pakistan basically.
You write in your memoirs that the
United States ``would not stand idly
by,'' would render ``significant assist-
ance, the precise nature to be worked
out when the circumstances arose.''
And you described this as ``a new and
ominous dimension'' the Soviet en-
couragement of India.

Now this is one of the incidents
where President Nixon said he ``con-
sidered'' nuclear weapons.

A: We believed we had intelligence
information that, after having defeated
East Pakistan, the Indians would at-
tack West Pakistan. Now, we had a
special concern with Pakistan at the
time because Pakistan had opened
China for us and president Nixon was

Q: A In late November, early December 1971.

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A: But the specific events to which
you referred occurred one Sunday
morning. President Nixon, General
Haig and I were meeting in his office.
We received a message about ten o=
clock from the Chinese--I could be off,
but this is generally correct--about ten
o'clock from the Chinese that they had
an urgent message to deliver to us at
two. We thought that the message
might be that they would come to the
assistance of Pakistan.

We asked General Haig to receive
the message and we instructed him to
tell the Chinese that after they had
told him their decision, if their deci=
sion was to assist Pakistan that we
would not be indifferent to a Soviet at=
tack on China as a result, the reaction
to be worked out in the circumstances
that arose. In the event, the Chinese
never told us what we expected. The
circumstance about which we had
spoken never arose.

In the event we never inquired from
the chairman of the Chiefs of Staff or
from the Defense Secretary on from

from the Defense Secretary or from
the Secretary of State what they
recommended we do should those cir-
cumstances arise. And so there was no
planning.

Had there been a Soviet attack on
China, it is highly probable that we
would have given some assistance to
China. What assistance would have
had to depend on staff planning that
never took place. It's possible that
president Nixon in his own mind was
prepared to use nuclear weapons, but
I think it's important to understand
that, as a government, there was
never any discussion of the use of nu-
clear weapons. Even at that meeting
there was no discussion of the use of
nuclear weapons.

Q: Isn't there a sense that it's al-
most impossible, once you start get-

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ting into one of these very messy vola-
tile crises, not to let come into your
mind some of these what if questions?
These ultimate nuclear questions? Re-
gardless of whether there's any plan-
ning or any documents or anything
like that?

A: It is of course true when you con-
front the Soviet Union, or when you

even consider confronting the Soviet Union, you have to recognize that the nuclear threat increases. And, in fact, you cannot act as if you exclude the nuclear threat.

Q: Well, every crisis in which a great power is involved, is at least implicitly nuclear and couldn't fail to be so unless a great power unilaterally disarmed.

A: Absolutely. Diplomacy in the modern age is conducted against the backdrop of nuclear weapons. Even day to day diplomacy. As tension increases as specific circumstances arise that is, of course, more so. Go back to your first question. Did one consider the use of nuclear weapons? It just depends how you define considers. If you mean in an operational sense the answer is no. If you mean in a general strategic sense, conscious of an increased danger, I would have to say yes.

Q: Is there a sense in which any geopolitical view of the world, by which I mean that small things done here may affect large decisions taken later in the mind or in the mind of one's adversary, is there a sense in which just a geopolitical view of the world itself adds to the heavies up,

10

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A: Well a message of resolve, first
of all, any message of resolve, intransi-
gence or conciliation, will always be
embedded in the general expectations
about the other side that have been
raised over a long period of time. And

11

will be evaluated in that context. For
example, in 1973, all the messages
that went back and forth between the
Soviet Union and us were in the con-
text of a previous extensive period of
detente, so that the Soviets knew we
were not spoiling for a confrontation.
And if you read the press conference I
held the next day-after the alert, I
went out of my way to make clear that
we were not seeking a confrontation
and that we were not asking the Sovi-
ets to back off from something they
had already done. I was saying don't
do something new.

Now had exactly the same mea-
ures been taken after a prolonged
period of non-communication, and of a
perception of one side seeking to hu-
miliate the other, it is possible that the
Soviet reaction would have been quite
different. In 1973 they pulled back
less than 12 hours after the alert.

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Would they do the same thing in dif-
ferent circumstances? I don't know.
There is no cookbook recipe you can
apply to these situations.

12

A: I never thought in 1973 that the nuclear threat was the principal element of the equation. The nuclear forces were raised to the same level of alert as the other forces but since they were closer to it to begin with I'm not even so sure that the nuclear part was as noticeable. Nuclear forces being more ready than other forces by their nature.

A: Absolutely not. Certainly not vis a vis the Soviet Union. We felt it obviously with Vietnam.

A: Absolutely. Never. Never even close to it.

13

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as destroying Europe. But we never carried it to any point of military planning or military threats.

Q: Overall, have nuclear weapons been a help or a hindrance in the conduct of world affairs for great powers?

A: You know, I think that if it were not for nuclear weapons it is more likely than not that there would have been a war between us and the Soviets, if not during the eight years I was in office then during some other period. So I think it is almost certainly true that nuclear weapons have pre-served the peace. I think it is also true that if we continue the strategy that has got us these 40 years of peace, that some catastrophe somewhere along the line is going to happen and that therefore the big problem of our period is to build on this long period of peace we have a structure that is dif-

14

ferent from the preceding one.

A: What I mean by that is this: in the first 40 years, first of all there were 20 years in which we had a huge nuclear superiority, maybe even 30 years. Secondly, most of the crises were in areas where the United States and the Soviet Union controlled most of the decision making. In the next 40 years many new centers of decision making will emerge. And therefore the crises may not take such a neat evolution.

Q: You mean ... places, other countries which acquire nuclear weapons. Is that what you mean?

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through their alliances or their perceptions of the national interest. And if that happens then I could conceive some crisis, somewhere, that slowly evolves...I think the danger we face is