FOR BAG 26

lc: Donna

1

April 3, 1996

FOR HAK:

RE: Press on Vladivostok

What I believe you recall is the press reaction covered
in a massive paper by Poli (the Yale intern) who incorporated
everything PWR, Bill and I did of public materials.

Her paper - "The Domestic Environment and Detente: August-
December 1974" is in Bag 26, if it is still there. It
is quite comprehensive. Also, we had a spare copy in
New York which Donna at your request put in soft binders
for the Mexico trip (and which is probably back at RH).

But you need not look. Attached are the excerpts I promised
last night:

--Index to her paper so you can see everything that is
included

--Excerpts from tab 4 "Liberals on Detente" -- the portion
covering press on Vladivostok

--Excerpts from Hyland's *Mortal Rivals* - pp 75-109 0
194-201

Rose

Added - some extra editorial material at the very back.

All of the above faxed to HK in Kent in two parts on April 3.
This book is duplicate of excerpts - for HK and Donna. HK has
Poli's massive book on Detente Public (bag 26)

Détente

The détente debate during the period of August-December 1974 revolved around two main issues: the first was the issue of US-USSR arms control; and the second, Soviet emigration policy as it related to the trade reform bill. Criticism of the Administration's policy of détente abounded from individuals and organizations on both the Left and the Right sides of the political spectrum.

"Arms control turned out to be technically too ponderous to carry the weight of the philosophical controversy over the nature of American foreign policy. Gradually, the debate shifted to an issue more congenial to traditional American idealism, and one which had a greater resonance with the public at large--the proposition that human rights should rank among the principal goals of American foreign policy.

The human rights debate started out as an appeal for wielding American influence to improve the treatment of Soviet citizens but graduated into a strategy for forcing a Soviet domestic upheaval. As with arms control, the issue did not concern the objective, which was not in dispute, but the degree to which ideological confrontation should be the top priority of American foreign policy." (Tab 12, p. 752)

"Even under the best of circumstances, Kissinger would have had trouble selling détente on Capitol Hill during the Ford years. . . . Opponents of détente, then, included those conservatives who believed that Nixon had adopted a Yalta-like mentality, having given away too much to the Soviets and the Chinese and having received too little in return. But the opponents cut across both party and ideological lines: it included labor--traditionally anticommunist and virulently opposed to the free trade with the Soviets that Nixon and Kissinger had proposed--and a potpourri of liberal leaders who felt that the United States should deal only with nations that had committed themselves to supporting the basic human rights of their citizens." (Tab 13, pp. 120-21)

See Tab 1 & 2 for brief chronological summaries and excerpts of events which occurred during August-December 1974.

1

# I. LIBERAL CRITICISMS—

Rosemary's work, "Liberals on Détente," is a comprehensive piece which outlines the major themes of liberals attacking the détente policy. The arguments are as follows:
(See Tabs 3 & 4 for detailed outlines)

* Détente has not advanced human rights in the USSR.

* Détente has not produced real progress on arms control; or the US has not done enough on arms control; or the US should revise its approach.

* Ambiguities in the meaning of 'détente'.

* The US is not doing enough to facilitate moderate Soviet policies under détente.

* Emphasis on avoidance of nuclear war and importance of arms control as central issue of détente.

* Détente has, in fact, meant more gains for the Soviets.

* Détente failed to prevent Soviet machinations in the Middle East.

* White House itself divided on meaning of détente.

* Détente is too global.

* Détente isn't global enough -- needs new impetus looking "beyond" détente.

## Vladivostok and Détente:

* Arms control agreements at Vladivostok didn't go far enough; ceilings will in fact mean arms build-up.

* Arms control agreements at Vladivostok give Russians the advantage.

* Summit did not deal with the Middle East under détente.

* Vladivostok accords were good; the US should go beyond with unilateral restraint.

In addition, Rosemary's work outlines excerpts of key critical quotes from the following individuals and organizations in chronological order. (See Tab 4 for detailed outline and quotes)

* Senator Case

* Senator Fulbright

* Senator Symington

* Senator Edward Kennedy

* Senator Muskie

* Arthur Schlesinger

* George Kennan

* James Reston

* Dean Rusk

* George Rajthens

* Washington Post editorial

* Senator Frank Church

* Senator Percy

* Senator Pell

* Senator Walter Mondale

* Former Senator McCarthy

* Tom Braden

* Marshall Shulman

* William Bundy

* Herbert Scoville (ACA)

* Walt Slocombe

* New York Times editorial

2

## II. CONSERVATIVE CRITICISMS--

The most outspoken critic of détente was Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the Democratic Senator from Washington who was, "after all, what many considered the ideal American combination -- liberal in domestic policies but conservative in foreign affairs." (Tab 11, p.99) His criticisms were all-encompassing, attacking the Administration on the issue of trade with the USSR, as well as US-USSR arms control measures. "Left to the passage of time, the essentially theoretical debate over détente might have been overtaken by events. But the intellectual leader of the critics, the formidable Senator Henry Jackson, was far from ready to leave détente to the test of time, and mobilized support to stop it in its tracks. . . . He combined erudition with a masterly grasp of how to manipulate the various branches of the government, bringing the Congress together with sympathetic elements in the Executive Branch." (Tab 12, p. 747)

* *Jackson on Soviet Emigration Policy:*

In October 1972, Jackson proposed an amendment to the trade reform bill. Democratic Representative Charles A. Vanik of Ohio followed suit on the House side. The Jackson-Vanik Amendment, Section 402 of the Trade Reform Act, "undertook to bar the extension of most-favored-nation (MFN) tariff treatment of US government credits to any Communist country that restricted freedom of emigration. (Tab 1, p. 378)

See also: Tab 13, pp. 122-23

In *Diplomacy*, Dr. Kissinger remarks, "It was a tactically brilliant stroke." (Tab 12, p. 753)

"To Jackson and his supporters, the issue of Jewish emigration was a surrogate for the ideological confrontation with communism. Not surprisingly, they treated every Soviet concession as proof that their pressure tactics were working. . . . The Jackson forces also legislated restrictions on loans to the Soviet Union by the Export/Import Bank (the Stevenson Amendment) so that, on commercial matters, the Soviet Union ended up in a worse position after détente than before the relaxation of East-West tensions." (Tab 12, p. 754)

In correspondence between Senator Jackson and Secretary Kissinger, dated October 18, 1974, (Tab 1, pp. 382-385) Jackson outlined his understandings of the US-USSR agreement on the Soviet emigration policy. His five points were:

1. The Soviet Government will not use "punitive actions, intimidation or reprisals" against an emigrant or his/her family to prevent the emigrant from leaving the USSR.

2. The requirement whereby adult applicants must receive permission from their parents or other relatives to emigrate is no longer valid.

3. Special regulations on emigration will govern individuals who have handled "genuinely sensitive classified information;" however, "we would expect such persons to become eligible for emigration within three years of the date on which they last were exposed to sensitive and classified information."

4. The number of applicants will promptly increase and continue rising. "We would consider a benchmark--a minimum standard of initial compliance--to be the issuance of visas at the rate of 60,000 per annum; and we understand the President proposes to use the same benchmark . . . "

5. In order to monitor compliance, communication will be permitted.

3

Jackson was equally indignant that an obsolete American weapon, the Tomahawk, had been
bargained away. ... An angry Jackson reinvoked images of Yalta, charging Ford with weakening
America's defense by daring to consider the junking of any of its weapons systems." (Tab 13, pp.
125-26)

See also Tab 13, pp. 124-26

See also Tab 16, p. 39

For Articles (Tab 14, p.33; p. 43)

*   **Also on Arms Control and Vladivostok/SALT II:**

Former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird was also an opponent of détente. "Clearly, we must shed any lingering illusions we may have that détente means the Russians have abandoned their determination to undermine Western democracy and impose their system on the world. We must communicate to the Russians that the only alternative to mutual arms reduction is an American rearmament that would doom them to permanent military inferiority. We must show them that we will no longer tolerate the use of détente as a Russian one-way street." (Tab 13, p.121)

In the book, *Ambush at Vladivostok* (Tab 14), Schlafly and Ward espouse the argument that the terms agreed to at Vladivostok benefited the Soviets and "fatally disadvantaged the US." (p.83) They also contend that President Ford was deceived by the Soviet leaders (p.26) and Secretary Kissinger (p.65). They portray Ford as the inexperienced President who did not understand the subject matter addressed at Vladivostok, while Secretary Kissinger had "6 years experience losing SALT negotiations." (p. 29)

After the Vladivostok talks, "a Moscow journalist who is highly esteemed as a source by some of the American press party's most distinguished ornaments said he had it straight from the conference center that the arms discussion had ended in hopeless impasse."

It didn't, of course. . . . Kissinger said the joint statement 'marks the breakthrough with the SALT negotiations that we have sought to achieve in recent years and produces a very strong possibility of agreement, to be signed in 1975.' His exuberant manner more than his words led some reporters to elide 'strong possibility' and jump to 'agreement.' I didn't and don't." (Tab 16, Osborne, p. 35)

Also Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, See Tab 13, pp.121, 124-25

5

### III. THE ADMINISTRATION'S VIEW/SUPPORTERS OF THE ADMINISTRATION--

Secretary Kissinger's Major Statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 19, 1974 (Tab 6)

> Secretary Kissinger's definition of détente: "It is the search for a more constructive relationship with the Soviet Union. . . . It is a continuing process, not a final condition, that has been or can be realized at any one specific point in time." (Tab 6, p.2)

> Fundamental principles which guide this policy [of détente] (Tab 6, pp. 2-3)

> **American Goals (Tab 6, pp. 4-5)**

> "The effort to achieve a more constructive relationship with the Soviet Union is not made in the name of any one administration, or one party, or for any one period of time. It expresses the continuing desire of the vast majority of the American people for the easing of international tensions, and their expectation that any responsible government will strive for peace. No aspect of our policies, domestic or foreign, enjoys more consistent bipartisan support. No aspect is more in the interest of mankind." (Tab 6, p. 4)

Articles on the Statement (Tab 14, pp. 19-21; 29)

Excerpts from an article published in *Newsweek*, December 30, 1974: 29-32. Thoughts of the Secretary of State: Interview with Dr. Kissinger by representatives of *Newsweek*, December 18, 1974. (Tab 1, pp. 579-588)

**On Soviet Emigration Policy:**

Excerpts from Secretary Kissinger's Statement on Soviet Emigration Policy before the Senate Committee on Finance, December 3, 1974 (Tab 1, pp. 379-382 and pp. 565-68)

Tab 1, pp. 382-384 --American Expectations Regarding Soviet Emigration Policy: Secretary Kissinger's letter to Senator Jackson, October 18, 1974)

After the passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment on December 20, James Reston commented in a New York Times article: "In the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, the Congress is reasserting itself in many positive ways, but it still has not found the line between effective and destructive intervention. It can and should influence the objectives and instruments of foreign policy, but when it intervenes in negotiations, it invariably gets into trouble." (Tab 15, p. 225)

**On Arms Control and Vladivostok/SALT II:**

Tab 1, pp. 508-9 --Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms: Joint US-Soviet statement released in Vladivostok November 24, 1974

6

["Tab 1, pp. 509-12 --Excerpt of a news conference statement by Secretary Kissinger, Vladivostok, 11/24/76--Interpretation of the Agreement on Limiting Strategic Offensive Arms", "Tab 1, pp. 512-13 --News conference statement by President Ford, Washington, 12/2/74", "Tab 1 pp. 514-17 --News conference statement by Secretary Kissinger, Washington, 12/7/74", "Tab 2, pp. 173-79", "Tab 2, p. 176--Text of US-Soviet Nuclear Arms Agreement", "Tab 14, p. 12--Baltimore Sun", "Tab 14, p. 41--New York Times, 12/5/74", "In his book, *White House Watch*, John Osborne provided an account of the events and agreement reached at Vladivostok. "[The agreement] is a case that deserves to be presented without the intrusion of hostile expertise . . ." In Secretary Kissinger and President Ford's defense, Osborne criticized the media's inability to accurately and fairly report the facts of the press conferences on Vladivostok. "[M]ass and open press conferences and briefings, infested as they are nowadays with reporters who mistake them for public crucifixions, are seldom occasions for the quiet and considered presentation of complex arguments." (Tab 16, p. 36)", "Osborne also outlines the opposing arguments (anti-Vladivostok vs. the Administration) in his report. (Tab 16, p. 39-40)", "7"]

THE DOMESTIC ENVIRONMENT AND DÉTENTE:
AUGUST - DECEMBER 1974

(Bag #26)

Table of Contents:

Tab

<table><tbody><tr><td>American Foreign Relations 1974: A Documentary Record (Council on Foreign Relations)</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Kissinger & Détente, (A Facts on File Publication)</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>"Liberals on Détente" - Summer/Fall 1974: Part I (by Rosemary Niehuss)</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>"Liberals on Détente" - Part II (by Rosemary Niehuss) Excerpts attached</td><td>4</td></tr><tr><td>Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings on Détente (Aug-Oct 1974)</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>Secretary Kissinger's Statement on US-Soviet Relations (SFRC Hearings, 9/19/74)</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>Senator Edward Kennedy's Speech Before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council</td><td>7</td></tr><tr><td>"Beyond Détente," by Senator Kennedy</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><td>"Beyond Détente: Toward International Economic Security," by Walter Mondale</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>"International Security Today," by William P. Bundy</td><td>10</td></tr><tr><td>Mortal Rivals (by William Hyland) - 2 chapters attached</td><td>11</td></tr><tr><td>Diplomacy (by Henry A. Kissinger)</td><td>12</td></tr><tr><td>The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford (by John Robert Greene)</td><td>13</td></tr><tr><td>Ambush at Vladivostok (by Phyllis Schlafly and Chester Ward)</td><td>14</td></tr><tr><td>A Time To Heal (by Gerald Ford)</td><td>15</td></tr><tr><td>White House Watch: The Ford Years (by John Osborne)</td><td>16</td></tr><tr><td>Newspaper and Periodical articles (arranged in chronological order)</td><td>17</td></tr></tbody></table>

October 30, 1985

MEMO FOR HAK

FROM: Robeary

SUBJECT: Liberals on Detente - Part II

I found the Bill Bundy piece (tab 1) attacking detente as basically too global and too 'universalist'. It is at Tab 1.

I also went more thoroughly through the SFRC hearings held Aug-October 1974 and Bill's clippings on detente.

Attached are

--A short summary of themes I identified picking detente apart

--The summary is keyed to the back-up immediately attached - excerpts of the key quotes from leading critics, in chronological order.

--The full Bundy piece at Tab 1.

I did not include any articles except Bundy in full, but if you see something you want just have Chris let me know.

Note: If you are planning to write something, you may want to let me see so that I can double-check any quotes you are using from my package.

Any further guidance or requirements??

4

# Summary of themes of liberals attacking detente

Detente has not advanced human rights in the USSR

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. - p. 1

Tom Braden - p. 1

Sen. Case - p. 11-12

Detente hasn't produced real progress on arms control; or
the US hasn't done enough on arms control; or the US should
revise its approach

George Kennan - p. 2

Sen. Frank Church - p. 3-4

Marshall Shulman - p. 5

Dean Rusk - p. 9-10

Sen. Fulbright - p. 10

Sen. Percy (re Diego Garcia) - p. 12

Sen. Symington - p. 13

Sen. Pell (Diego Garcia) p. 13

Sen. Kennedy (article) - p. 15-16

Ambiguities in the meaning of 'detente'

George Kennan - p. 2

Frank Church - p. 3-4

Marshall Shulman - p. 4

Dean Rusk - p. 9

Sen. Kennedy - p. 15-16

The US isn't doing enough to facilitate moderate Soviet policies under detente

Frank Church p. 3-4

Marshall Shulman p. 5

Sen. Kennedy - p. 15

Emphasis on avoidance of nuclear war and importance of arms control as central issue of detente:

George Kennan - p. 2

Marshall Shulman - p. 4-6

Former Sen. McCarthy - p. 8

Dean Rusk - p. 9-10

Sen. Kennedy - p. 15-16 (but puts it in broader context)

Washington Post editorial - p. 20

cont'd

5

Detente has in fact meant more gains for the Soviets

Sen. Case - p 11

Detente failed to prevent Soviet machinations in the
Middle East

Sen. Case - 11

James Reston - p 19

Sen. Mondale - p. 17

White House itself divided on meaning of detente

Sen. Muskie - p. 13

** Detente is too global

William P. Bundy - summary p 17-18

full article Tab I

Detente isn't global enough - needs new impetus looking
'beyond' detente

Sen. Kennedy - p 15-16

Sen. Mondale - p. 16-17

Vladivostok and Detente (beginning late November)

Arms control agreements at Vladivostok didn't go far enough;
ceilings will in fact means arms buildup

Herbert Scoville (ACA) - p 20

New York Times editorial - p. 20

Washington Post editorial - p. 22

Arms Control Association statement - p 23

Washington Post editorial - p 25

George Rajthens - p 26

Sen. Mondale - p 22

Summit did not deal with the Middle East under detente

James Reston - p 20

Vladivostok accords good; US should go beyond with unilateral restraint

Walt Slocombe - p 25

Later in fall, focus switches to Vladivostok

James Reston colum in NYT, Nov. 22, 1974

Argues that summit not likely to make much progress.
Reasons: Lack of allied unity in dealing with Mid East oil
problem and Soviet policies there; absence of US-Soviet agree-
ment on Res. 242; and division withing USG itself over meaning
of detente.

"There has been a tendency in Washington to assume that any agreement with the Soviet Union is better than no agreement at all. In support of this, it is noted that by holding up trade agreements and technology arrangements with the Soviet Union, Washington was able to persuade the Soviet Government to release tens of thousands of Soviet Jews who wanted to emigrate to Israel. On humanitarian grounds this was obviously a gain, but the question is whether the US should not have been insisting on a genuine and secure peace in the Middle East as a condition of its trade and technology, which Moscow obviously needs....

"The Soviets cannot be unhappy with the present drift of world events, particularly the political and economic dissaray in Europe. They have established the rule that all Communist or Socialist countries are off limits for the US but that the rest of the world from SEAsia to Cuba is an open hunting ground for them. They do not mind detente with the US so long as they are free to operate at will in the Middle East, patrol the Mediterranean and threaten the flow of oil to Europe, Japan and North America. Their eagerness to see the new American President was undoubtedly to assure themselves that their concept of detene would be carried on by the new Administration." Ford can't do anything "without the cooperation of Europe and Japan", something HAK had been trying to arrange since April 1973, "without much success."

Washington Post editorial - Nov. 26, 1974

Praises "early returns" of Vladivostok summit (before
actual statement on arms control agreement was published)
as providing the base for "a certain anticipatory satisfaction."
Cites positively the reported areas of agreement on arms limi-
tations by say of stressing that arms control is the most important
issue. Concludes by saying:

"We would note only that the control of strategic arms - their characteristics as well as their numbers - is the most urgent and central part of that unfinished experiment in moderated superpower competition known commonly as 'detente'. Much other business must be done - in the Mideast for instance - but SALT is what detente is principally about." (My emphasis added)

Herbert Scoville, Jr. - Secretary of the Arms Control Association
(and critic of HAK's failure to get MIRV ban early on in administration)

Writes column in NYT castigating results of Vladivostok
because "the ceilings established at the summit meeting.... are so high as to make the agreement almost meaningless."
Castigates Ford's Dec 2 press conference statement that
US under agreement would enlarge its strategic forces
to meet ceiling: "The agreement becomes instead the justification for additions that otherwise might never have been approved)

(Out of sequence - this is early December 1974)

James Reston - Column in NYT Nov 27, 1974

Critical that Vladivostok did "not deal with but merely evaded the central issue in the Middle East problem.
Ford and Brezhnev "did not really apply their noble principles to the Middle East." Overall, the results of the summit re the Middle East were "no triumph." On the other hand, the summit did keep "the balance of nuclear power about where it was. It agreed to maintain that balance for the next ten years, which is helpful. But on the immediate crisis of the Middle East, it did not summon up the power of Washington and Moscow to avoid another war."

New York Times editorial - November 29, 1974

Attacks arms control agreements at the summit not as a
'cap on the arms race' as HAK alleged but "on the contrary,
it would authorize both sides to go ahead with their planned
build-ups." Asserts that "The military on each side evidently
were less interested in limiting the other's forces than they
were in gaining a green light for their own programs."

(NYT 11/29/74 cont'd)

Attacks MIRV levels as "astonishingly high" and notes
"The Administration has already acknowledged...that the
agreement will not halt the qualitative arms race now
underway." Concludes: "What the Senate, which ultimately
will have to ratify the new treaty, must now decide is
whether it is prepared to settle for such high ceilings
on strategic offensive arms or whether the American leaders
should be asked to return to the conference table to seek
more meaningful arms control."

From Bill Hyland's research:

On December 4, HK briefed the Foreign Relations Committee on the agreements and expressed his surprise to the press of the criticism. Jackson, however, was on the Backfire problem, and others were beginning to raise question about verifying the MIRV limits (how to distinguish MIRV from non MIRV in the same category in a category which was later resolved by counting all missiles ever tested as a MIRV as MIRVed, whether in fact they still contained a single warhead).

The criticism had finally produced a counter attack, but mainly from liberals such as Frank Church, with some support from Sparkman who was slated to take over the Committee from Fulbright.

But the bizarre situation was created that the Washington Post
in a further editorial criticized the agreement which "in effect
license build-ups to the very high levels or these limits." And the
Post stated that "we look forward to hearing him (Senator Jackson)
make his case" The Post even speculated that Jackson might
be able to muster 34 votes to block any treaty. (December 6).

22

## New York Times article, Dec 5, 1974 by Gwertzman

Reports on HAK profession of "surprise" over the
criticism of summit's arms agreement, after briefing
SFRC on Dec. 4. Gwertzman reports much of the criticism
comes from advocates of arms control and from budget
minded members of Congress, "who have argued that it is
too high and would not stop the arms race." He reported
on Jackson's concern about whether the Backfire would be
included in the 2400 ceiling.

Gwertzman reported that HAK's briefing did win support
from some, notably Sen. Sparkman (scheduled to replace
Fulbright) who told journalists: "I think I can say there
was a spirit of optimism - progress was made."

## Mondale Postion

Around the same time, press reports that then Senator Mondale attacked accord as giving Russians "an enormous advantage" in certain weapons and could escalate the nuclear arms race. Mondale intended to play a "major role" in Senate debate to amend the pact to increase its effect-iveness.

## Washington Post editorial - Dec 6, 1974

Editorial concedes that "even those initially skeptical of the Vladivostok accord have had to concede" its "positive features."

Goes on to say: "This is not to say that many people, ourselves included, do not have some serious reservations about the Ford-Brezhnev handiwork. Chief among them is the undisputed fact that the tentative accord bears the potential for pushing ahead certain aspects of the arms race. The newly proposed ceilings not only set upper limits but in effect license build-ups to the very high levels of these limits. It is the American 'obligation' to reach them, Mr. Ford said. But is it? Why should not those ceilings be regarded as levels to be lowered by further immediate negotiations, rather than as goals which must be met no matter what?"

Describes Jackson's criticism: "He believes - and this is as hard to disprove as to demonstrate - that the Administration could have negotiated a "better" agreement. Mr. Jackson may well ask the Senate to repudiate (it) and to instruct the President to go back to the table with Mr. Brezhnev....The administration cannot fail to ignore the larger chance that Mr. Jackson might have later to collect 34 votes to block a treaty which he thought was unwise....we look forward to hearing him make his case...."

From Bill Hyland's research at this juncture:

Two of the liberal oriented special interest groups gave support, but without much enthusiasm. Following is the Arms Control Association release of Dec 11, 1974.

THE VLADIVOSTOK ACCORDS

Whether the advantages of going ahead with negotiations toward a permanent agreement based on the Vladivostok accords outweigh the disadvantages will depend in the end on how they are used. If the quantitative ceilings set by the agreement only become floors from which to launch a qualitative arms race, and the agreement becomes a hunting license to assure approval of more costly and unneeded arms, it will not be worth the price. If it is used, instead, as a starting point for a real turnabout in the arms race, and provides the basis for eliminating uncertainties about intentions, for reducing spending on arms, and for systematically reducing the levels of military forces on both sides, it can be justifiably characterized as a step worth taking.

The accords as they have been publicly presented have serious shortcomings. They set very high ceilings - 2,400 on each side -- for numbers of strategic delivery vehicles (bombers, ICBMs, and submarine-based missiles) and 1,320 each for missiles carrying MIRVs, but place no limit on the number of MIRVs they can carry. These ceilings will remain frozen for ten years, although negotiations to reduce them, after the ten years have passed, can begin sooner. President Ford has stated that "we have an obligation" to build up to the agreed ceilings and Secretary Schlesinger has observed that the agreements will result in higher expenditures on armaments. Because they place no restrictions on numbers of MIRVs, on missile "throw weight," or on replacement, modernization, or other improvements to the characteristics of weapons within the numerical ceilings imposed, the agreements provide little assurance that the decade ahead will see a stabilization of the arms race and a reduction of the risk of nuclear war. To the rest of the world the Vladivostok accords are, at best, a very small step in the direction both sides formally pledged to move, in the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, "to achieve at the earliest possible date the cessation of the nuclear arms race and to undertake effective measures in the direction of nuclear disarmament."

And yet the agreements do represent steps forward: Both sides did agree to ceilings, albeit high ones. They did agree for the first time on limits of a sort on MIRVs and on bombers and committed themselves to a timetable, albeit a long one, for further negotiations, including possible reductions. Additionally, by providing for a ten year agreement limiting offensive arms, more complete than the 1972 SALT interim agreement, the accords give more permanence to the 1972 ABM treaty, thereby strengthening an important stabilizing element.

F.A.S.

307 Massachusetts Avenue, N.E.
Washington, D.C. 20002 (202) 546-3300

Philip Morrison
Chairman

Herbert Scoville, Jr.
Secretary

*Christian B. Anfinsen
Vice-Chairman

Herbert F. York
Treasurer

Jeremy J. Stor
Director

SCIENTISTS CALL FOR ARMS TREATY ASSURANCES

In effect, the Vladivostok Arms Agreement simply takes note of the fact that the numbers arms race -- the quantitative arms race -- is peaking out in favor of the further competition in modernization -- the qualitative arms race. For example, the United States numerical build-up peaked in 1967 at 2200 missiles and bombers and there has been little or no interest in increasing that number in the last seven years. Under such circumstances, for the United States, an arms treaty limiting forces to 2400 such vehicles obviously would have little significance in limiting our force structure.

On the other hand, the Soviet Union has more recently built up to about 2400 such vehicles and it is true that we have no assurance that it will not build still more after the interim agreement freezing missile numbers at 2358 expires. The Russians have a tradition of holding on to old weapons and of building still more excessively even than the United States. Moreover, there can be little doubt that most U. S. Administrations would mindlessly match Soviet purchases in numbers of weapons despite our present overabundance.

Similarly, the allotted MIRV limits of 1320 do not restrict the United States. They permit the United States to keep MIRV on half of the Minuteman missiles on land and all of the Poseidon submarines at sea and to put MIRV as well on 10 new Trident submarines, should these be built. True, it will prevent the United States from MIRVing

Ruth S. Adams

Rosa E. Frisch

National Council Members (Elected)

John F. Holdren

John W. Storrs

(Paris, France)

* Christian B. Anfinsen

* Kenneth J. Arrow

* Julius Axelrod

* Leona Baumgartner

* Paul Beeson

* A. Bethe

* I. Bloch

* F. Borlaug

* C. Carter

* Owen Chamberlain

* Abram Chayes

* Leon N. Cooper

* Carl F. Cori

* Paul B. Cornely

* André Courand

* Max Delbruck

* John T. Edsall

* Paul R. Ehrlich

* Adrian Fisher

* Jerome D. Frank

* John Kenneth Galbraith

* Richard L. Garwin

* Donald A. Glaser

* H. K. Hartline

* Alfred D. Hershey

* Hudson Hoagland

* Robert W. Holley

* Marc Kae

* Carl Kaysen

* I. Gobind Khorana

* George B. Kistiakowsky

* Arthur Kornberg

* Polykarp Kusch

* Villis E. Lamb, Jr.

* V. W. Leontief

* J. J.mann

* J. J. Enninger

* Robert Merton

* Matthew S. Meselson

* Neal E. Miller

* Hans J. Morgenthau

* Farston Morse

* Robert S. Mulliken

* Franklin A. Neva

* Marshall Nirenberg

* evero Ochoa

* Charles E. Osgood
* fax Palevsky

*inus Pauling

* George Polya

* scar Rice
* David Riesman, Jr.

* Robert Schrieffer

* Christian Schwinger

* Stanley Sheinbaum

*lice Kimball Smith

* Cyril S. Smith

* Robert M. Solow

* William H. Stein

* Albert Szent-Györgyi

* I. S. L. Tatum

* mes Tobin

* H. Townes

* J. W. d

* I. W. Wegman

* Jerome B. Wiesner

* Robert R. Wilson

Walter Slocombe and Andrew Hamilton column in Washington
Post - 12/16/74 (both former NSC staffers)

Argues outlines of new accord are "promising" and shoots down argument that US 'obligated' to build up to ceilings. Goes on to say that "More fundamentally, achieving some bilateral agreement on ceilings, whatever their level, by no means eliminates the need for the United States to practice unilateral restraint - not to be nice to the Soviets, but from an intelligent recognition of our own vital self-interest in their reactions to our programs."

Concludes: "The Vlad. accord seems to be as reasonable and comprehensive an agreement as could be negotiated now. That the agreement could be abused by diverting the arms race into new channels is not so much a criticism of the agreement as of the domestic political and institutional difficulties that stand in the way of a strategic policy based on restraint."

Washington Post editorial - Dec 18, 1974

Focussing on ceilings, says that "for reasons that are still unclear - and which the Congress urgently should probe - Ford at Vladivostok (if not before) "abandoned" earlier efforts of Nixon administration to seek low MIRV ceilings.

Says "A nuclear 'Pearl Harbor' with its unforeseeable consequences would not be initiated lightly by either side, of course. But the existence of this capability on both sides during a future crisis - and the massive advantage it seems to offer for the side that shoots first - raise possibilities almost too horendous to contemplate. Crisis instability - the penultimate danger of the nuclear era, second only to the ultimate horror of an actual nuclear exchange - clearly has been brought closer by the failure at Vladivostok to limit MIRV missiles to low levels."

"It clearly is in the joint Russian and American interest as well to lower the high ceilings of the Vlad. agreement before they are reached rather than to seek to reduce them afterward. A resolution introduced by Senators Kennedy, Mathias and Mondale calls upon the President to seek these improvements in the Vlad. agreement... (this is) vital if the Vlad. agreement is to bring arms control rather than the continued 'mad momentum' of the arms race for another decade."

Jack Ruina - column in NYT, Dec 21, 1974 (he also criticized HAK early on in Administration for failing to control MIRVs)

Writes that "the political impact of the agreement suffers because the agreement does not call for any significant reductions nor any immediate slowdown in the introduction of new arms. Nevertheless, the agreement represents a necessary and potentially important step in arms-control negotiations and should not yet be dismissed as merely a mask for business-as-usual in the arms race......

26

13

(Ruina contd)

...."Now it is up to the political leaders in both countries to assure that the agreement is not converted into a rationalization for intensifying the arms competition or for postponing further arms control measures....Why can't the Vlad. agreement be followed immediately by further limitations and reductions..."

Boston Globe, 12/24/74: Column by G.B.Kistiakowsky and G.W. Rathens

Argue that "it is highly questionable whether the Vlad. agreements are in any sense an arms control measure. The agreements are such that the detailed negotiations which are to follow and then a treaty based on them might even be a major stimulus to the arms race.....It is very likely that the agreements will be used to rationalize an increase in the size of the planned Trident missile-launching submarine force and to sell the increasingly expensive B-1 bomber program to a Congress that might otherwise reject it."

Does concede some "affirmative claims" for the agreement. However, "the Vlad. agreements should not be approved without very serious qualifications. Beyond that, we see two defensible positions: It may be that the agreements should be approved by Congress but only on the conditions that there be an American commitment for a vigorous effort to negotiate real limitations and reductions on a time scale far shorter than suggested in the communications that have been forthcoming from it thus far.....Alternatively, it should perhaps be recognized that in the present climate we stand to lose more from continuing with SALT than we are likely to gain...."

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The press was almost gleeful in writing off Nixon, the summit and détente with Brezhnev. An "epitaph for détente," *The Washington Post* editorialized. Liberals hated Nixon; even though they had pressured him to conciliate the Soviets in 1969, they were now gloating over his political problems. They were also beginning to realize that Nixon's foreign policy might become a casualty of Watergate.

It is still difficult to recall that period between the end of the summit in Moscow and Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974. It seemed as if Nixon was almost a fugitive, first vacationing in Key Biscayne and then in San Clemente. I spent my time trying to pick up the pieces of the SALT negotiations and participating in what turned out to be a frustrating attempt to save our détente policy.

As concern mounted over what was perceived as Nixon's failure on SALT in Moscow, the assault on détente also continued to grow. Even before the summit, Senator Jackson had taken a few shots against the anticipated SALT agreements, revealing what he claimed was a coverup of "secret" agreements concluded during Nixon's first summit negotiation in Moscow in 1972. The charges were absurd and soon fizzled, but they were indicative of the poisoned atmosphere in Washington.

Another indication of the waning of support for détente was the shift in attitudes toward trade with the Soviet Union. In 1972, *The New York Times*, after the first Nixon-Brezhnev summit, had complained of the lack of progress in economic relations. In September 1974, after the last summit, trade was no longer the key to Soviet-American relations but a technological trap: "The danger of détente as it has been pursued therefore is that the United States may get an eloquently expressed design for interrelationships while the Russians get a new generation of computers."

The spirit of growing skepticism was best expressed by that most astute observer the late Hans Morgenthau, who wrote that détente had become a "disembodied spirit" preventing a detached examination of the "objective factors of interests and power."

In collaboration with Senator J. W. Fulbright, Kissinger agreed that it was necessary to try to establish a broad public platform for détente to rally supporters. The vehicle for this would be a major statement of policy by Kissinger, given before

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Fulbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee. For most of July we worked on drafts of the formal statement that Kissinger would present. Kissinger, of course, was preoccupied with Nixon's plight, and this simply increased his natural irritation at the imperfect drafts produced by his staff.

The date set for Kissinger's testimony (August 8) began to loom ominously. The chances that Richard Nixon would remain in office until then were dwindling. So the testimony was postponed, and some of us questioned whether the entire project should not be abandoned. It hardly seemed the most propitious time to man the ramparts in defense of détente.

Our fears were justified. When the hearing actually took place in September, after Nixon's resignation, Kissinger delivered a comprehensive statement that was almost totally ignored. -Fulbright

Fulbright concluded that détente was dying not of inconsistency but of indifference: "I find there seems to be an indifference to the idea of détente partly because of a feeling that it is futile and I do not know how you overcome that. . . . When the Secretary [Kissinger] advanced it there was widespread interest in it and now as you can see from the committee this morning, there is relatively little."

Fulbright's complaint was underlined when one of the illustrious members of his committee, Jacob Javits, fell asleep.

Watergate inflicted a severe wound to the development of Soviet-American relations. Critical blows to détente were delivered by the desertion of the same liberal constituency that had supported trade, SALT and the general relaxation of tensions. They gradually withdrew their mandate, in part because of disenchantment with the Soviet repression against Jews and intellectuals, in part because of disenchantment with the limited scope and slow pace of strategic arms control, but also in some measure because of their historic resentment of Richard Nixon. The disappearance of Nixon left his principal foreign policy achievements as his only monuments—the opening to China and relaxation with the Soviet Union. The latter was the more vulnerable target. Both liberals and conservatives could temporarily join forces against it: the conservatives attacking SALT and the liberals linking expanded trade with free emigration.

This was the situation inherited by the new president. Now it fell to Gerald Ford to preserve the opening to Moscow—a task that was to prove more and more difficult.

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V

THE ROAD
TO VLADIVOSTOK

On November 23, 1974, Gerald Ford and his entourage flew from Tokyo to an airfield in the maritime provinces of Russia, about an hour's train ride north of the city of Vladivostok. The airfield was clearly a military base, but all the fighter aircraft had been carefully concealed in shelters. Indeed, the entire base resembled a ghost town, covered with deep white snow: almost no one was in sight—except for a small band of officials in their traditional huge fur hats. They turned out to be Leonid Brezhnev and his staff. After the customary greetings, mercifully shortened because of the frigid weather, the Ford party was whisked away by a fleet of shiny black limousines to a nearby railroad station, which was surprisingly modern, even though we were deep in the wilderness. The train was a Russian classic, with its charming interior decor right out of the nineteenth century. A pot-bellied stove at one end of the car was tended by a Russian babushka who could have been provided by central casting. I found myself thinking of scenes from *Doctor Zhivago* as the journey continued along the rail line to Vladivostok, passing occasional isolated wooden cottages that also seemed almost too picture-perfect. I also thought of Potemkin.

Ford and Brezhnev and their immediate staffs rode in the dining car, and a friendly conversation took place, but without any particular substance. It soon became apparent that Brezhnev was comfortable with Ford, who was in many ways more compatible with Brezhnev's personality than Nixon had been. Both were rugged outdoor men of action; they loved sports and good stories, and in other times or other places might have become genuinely friendly. The following year, when they met again at Helsinki, Brezhnev confided to Ford that he was hoping for his reelection—a rather unusual and risky remark for a Soviet leader. During the journey to Vladivostok the two leaders agreed to start their formal negotiations with a general review and then turn to the SALT issues.

The train's destination was the Okeanskaya Sanatorium, a primitive resort for vacationing workers and servicemen from the nearby area. It was rough but serviceable and probably had been picked to keep the visiting Americans as far away as possible from Vladivostok and the Soviet naval base. We were later given a whirlwind tour of Vladivostok. It turned out to be quite a modern city, more impressive than many in European Russia. There were many buildings under construction, a program obviously intended to reassure the population of the permanence of Russian power. Nevertheless, it had an eerie quality—a quaint city that could have been lifted out of Central Europe but set in the vastness of Siberia. And it was easy to understand the need for reassurance, as one looked out the train window and saw a low ridge of hills beyond which was China.

China was already on our minds. Kissinger was scheduled to visit Peking immediately after the Vladivostok meetings. Those few of us who knew of the previous exchanges on Brezhnev's secret project for an anti-Chinese alliance were still wondering how he would play the issue with a new president. In October, when Kissinger had made his first visit to Moscow after Nixon's resignation, Brezhnev had warned that he intended to bring up China with Ford. When he did so—in private after the Vladivostok negotiations were finished—Ford simply listened and asked some questions. Nothing further was said. But Brezhnev was sufficiently satisfied so that after the summit he decided to stop in Ulan Bator, the capital of Outer Mongolia, where he had been.

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to recover territory lost to the Russians in the nineteenth century. In that speech, Brezhnev said that the Chinese were demanding the withdrawal of Soviet forces from "areas of our territory, to which the Chinese leaders decide now to lay claims, which they began to call disputed areas." Brezhnev drew a stern conclusion: "Comrades, it is absolutely clear that this position is totally untenable and we reject it."

It was notable that only a few days after meeting the new president of the United States, Brezhnev should want to stress again that there had been no thaw in Sino-Soviet relations following Nixon's resignation. We also suspected that in choosing Vladivostok for the summit, Brezhnev could not resist rubbing salt into Chinese wounds, since Vladivostok was one of the disputed areas that he mentioned in his speech. And, of course, after the meetings in Vladivostok, Kissinger went directly to Peking; and this was not lost on Brezhnev. Kissinger later admitted that agreeing to Vladivostok, a location in the areas that China claimed as lost territory, was a mistake. On reflection we decided that Brezhnev's speech was meant primarily as a signal of reassurance that despite Watergate and the resignation of Nixon, he was prepared to continue the main line of détente policies. For Brezhnev this was the real meaning of Vladivostok.

The principal issue at Vladivostok was how to move the SALT negotiations forward. Kissinger had already laid the groundwork during his October visit to Moscow. But Ford's problems were not only with Brezhnev. The new president was looking over his shoulder at his political standing at home. There had been an immediate groundswell of support when Ford took office, but this was a temporary reaction to the agonies of Watergate, and relief that, after all, Gerald Ford could restore normalcy. But his decision to pardon Nixon and thus free the former president from any threat of prosecution had badly damaged Ford's position. There was so much speculation that Ford had made a deal on the pardon that he broke precedent and testified before the Congress about his decision. A success in foreign policy would be useful to Ford because foreign affairs was the one area where he compared unfavorably with Nixon. In any case, Ford could not afford a failure abroad. So Vladivostok was a gamble: whatever was agreed to would have to pass muster in a Congress that was edgy and potentially

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hostile. Gerald Ford was particularly sensitive about Congress and knew it better than his advisers did.

He was also under some pressure to prove himself a tough negotiator, one who would see through the traps and snares of détente. The main requirement was that he emerge with an arms control agreement that was "equal," interpreted to mean equality in every category of weapons. This rather simple-minded view of what was at stake badly limited Ford's maneuvering room. In the end he succeeded in reaching an agreement that was, in fact, equal in all respects. But in doing so a greater opportunity was missed, the chance to bargain for limits on those Soviet weapons that concerned us most, even if the trading resulted in an outcome that was not strictly equal.

Ford probably had no choice: it was much too early in his term to start another bitter fight over SALT. His immediate aim had to be to preserve the broader policy of better relations with the USSR until he had sufficient time to examine his longer-term strategic options. This was a reasonable judgment, but, of course, we foresaw neither the fall of Saigon a few months later nor a series of other domestic and foreign policy blows that would, in the end, leave the work of Vladivostok uncompleted.

The obsession with equality in SALT was a psychological reaction to what had been developing for over a decade—the loss of unquestioned American nuclear superiority. Eventual parity with the Soviet Union had become inevitable by the end of the 1960s, but it was such an unsettling shock that many politicians simply refused to accept the prospects. Ironically, the same conservatives who excoriated the Russians for their perfidy and guile seemed to think that somehow Ford could talk them out of their nuclear programs. This was nonsense. But the political timing was wrong for the kind of complicated and nuanced agreement that would have, in fact, served American interests better than the Vladivostok accord.

The demands for simple equality in arms control also ran against the tide that had gradually been developing under Kissinger to treat arms control as part of international geo-political strategy, rather than as an exercise in bargaining over specific weapons. Under Nixon, there was strong feeling in the White House that SALT should be regarded as only the first in a series of agreements that would flow from a more basic

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change in relations. SALT was, therefore, of less interest for
any particular technical achievements than for its strategic
impact on the Soviets. Agreements were supposed to create
vested interests in the process of accommodation, an argument
basically accepted during Nixon's tenure. SALT I had been
overwhelmingly approved. To be sure, there was criticism that
it failed to meet mythical standards dreamed up either by
diehard arms controllers or by the incorrigible right wing. Out
of this first SALT debate had come a vague demand for an
ideal agreement that would provide for strict equality. This
was incorporated into the SALT ratification law passed in the
Senate in 1972. Proposed by Senator Jackson, it directed that
the next SALT agreement be based on equal levels of strategic
arms. This meant that one of two things would have to occur:
the Soviets would have to permit the United States a substantial
increase in categories of weapons, which we could not develop
in any case for several years, or we would have to persuade
the Soviets to reduce their weapons, presumably to earn our
good will.

This approach to arms control was a fatal error. It was an
expression of frustration with the past rather than a valid
prescription for the future. It failed to take into account that
technology was moving so rapidly on both sides that the
problem of equal numbers of various weapons would soon be
meaningless. In a world of multiple warheads, increasing
accuracy for missiles, and mutual vulnerability, defining and
maintaining strategic stability between the two superpowers
was taking on a new meaning. This new complexity was the
cause of Kissinger's outburst on "nuclear superiority" in Mos-
cow. Savants could supply smug answers, but no intellectual
basis was being created for a new American strategy consistent
with the circumstances that were sure to prevail in the late
1970s and early 1980s. This fluidity made arms control all the
more important as part of a new nuclear strategy, but also all
the more frustrating as a political exercise inside the United
States. Kissinger believed that SALT gave us the chance to test
whether Soviet policy was engaged in merely another tactical
turn, or whether there was a new policy in gestation. The
polarization of the American strategic debate made this test
increasingly difficult and, finally, irrelevant.

The American debate over strategic arms control was, of

course, not a quixotic interlude promoted by irascible senators. It reflected a deep-seated distrust of the Soviet Union, a distrust that was fed by the relentless Soviet military buildup in the period following the defeat of Khrushchev in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The Soviet Union, however, owes Khrushchev more than has been admitted there or in this country. It was the much-maligned Khrushchev who created the foundation that Brezhnev was able to use to make the USSR a truly global military superpower, virtually, though not quite, the equal of the United States.

Khrushchev raised some fundamental questions about the
Stalinist thesis of the inevitability of war, about the nature of
a nuclear war and about its utility as an instrument of Soviet
foreign policy. He appreciated, almost instinctively, the far-
reaching political ramifications for the USSR of acquiring long-
range nuclear rockets. He perceived the new opportunities for
coercive diplomacy and psychological warfare. He recognized
that strategic missiles symbolized the opening of a new era of
East-West competition on a global scale. He created the Soviet
strategic rocket forces as a separate branch of his armed forces
and encouraged the development and production of the first
three generations of Soviet ICBMs and of ballistic-missile-
launching submarines.

Khrushchev, however, became obsessed with nuclear weap-
ons as the only means of conducting modern warfare. From
this conclusion he made frequent quantum leaps: denigrating
the role of conventional weapons, brushing aside the Russian
tradition of large standing armies and ridiculing large warships
as obsolete. He tried desperately to translate his perception of
a new nuclear balance into significant Soviet political gains, but
this tight linkage between weapons balances and geopolitics led
him into miscalculation: his imprudent attempt to exploit the
perception of a missile gap, which was in fact nonexistent, led
to ever more desperate moves to force Western concessions,
and, finally, to his fateful Cuban adventure.

Khrushchev's removal was in itself enough to cause massive
confusion. It soon became apparent, however, that military
policy, along with all other major policies, was open for
important revision. Brezhnev restored a balance among Soviet
military components and began a laborious buildup across a
broad front. Brezhnev's policies included not only a buildup

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MORTAL RIVALS

of strategic missiles but also the strengthening of conventional ground forces, including substantial increases along the Chinese frontier in the Far East. The anti-Chinese program alone amounted to roughly 10 to 15 percent in the overall total of Soviet defense spending. In addition, plans were expanded for the Soviet fleet, for reequipping the Soviet army, especially in European Russia and Central Europe, and for creating new tactical air forces. Little wonder that the magnitude of such an effort would consume huge chunks of the Soviet Union's economic resources.

It is misleading, however, to read too much into the strategic buildup. The pace of Soviet ICBM deployments conformed very closely to the pace of the earlier American program. In other words, the Soviet pace was not a rapid one, since it followed more or less the production curve for U.S. ICBMs. Indeed, the similarity between the programs of the two superpowers is so striking as to suggest that the governing factors were narrow technical ones rather than the exalted strategic plans made by the various military and political staffs.

This similarity was obscured because actual Soviet ICBM deployments in the late 1960s greatly exceeded CIA intelligence projections, so that the buildup was treated as a virtual blitzkrieg. The CIA had been unwilling to make higher estimates of Soviet production, which would have been accurate, lest the agency be accused of creating an artificial missile gap, as had happened in the late 1950s.

The truly unique aspect of the Soviet buildup—the element that most worried American planners—was the existence of a huge ICBM (the SS-9 and its replacement, the SS-18). It was this missile that analysts seized on as proof of their worst-case fears, namely, that the USSR was planning a first strike against the U.S. missile silos, which would put the United States in an impossible position. If the United States retaliated with its submarine missiles, the Soviet Union could of course launch all of its remaining ICBMs against American cities. In 1969 this nightmarish scenario had been carefully analyzed in the NSC, where it was assigned marginal plausibility. But it gradually found great favor in the Pentagon and among political conservatives and became a major political factor influencing arms control proposals. When questions were raised about why the Soviet Union would take such a mad risk, they were never

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really answered, or were brushed aside as dovish quibbling.

The fact that the Pentagon's intelligence estimates of Soviet capabilities were wildly wrong did not help. If the CIA erred by estimating too low, the Pentagon more than compensated in the opposite direction. There were almost constant alarms that the Soviets were about to break through to strategic dominance—either with a new ICBM with multiple warheads or with a new ABM system. In retrospect, it is clear that the Soviets were proceeding rather prudently. The total number of Soviet ICBMs reached its peak of about 1,600 in 1971 and declined by 200 as a result of SALT I. It is also interesting that this final total of ICBMs, about 1,400, was not that much greater than the number the United States had planned to deploy in the early 1960s.

In the buildup of Soviet nuclear-missile-carrying submarines that followed, the American lead in technology was too substantial for the Soviets to copy the pace of the American production program. After resisting any limitations on submarine-launched missiles for a time in the first SALT negotiations, the Soviets finally settled for a ceiling (60 submarines) that was considerably higher than the ceiling on the U.S. submarines (44). This concession caused a huge outcry about inequality; but the fact is that the Soviets were not able to reach their prescribed limit until 1981, four years after the SALT I agreement should have expired. By then, the Soviet Union had to retire perfectly good, but older, nuclear submarines to stay under the ceiling. The United States did not have to face this dilemma until late 1985. So the United States suffered little from the infamous inequality of SALT.

But, of course, these complex realities could not have been known to President Ford as he prepared for Vladivostok. For the new president the only reality was that complaints about the Soviet military buildup, about SALT and about détente were growing.

One complaint was that the United States was ignoring the fact that, contrary to American opinion, the Soviets believed they could "fight and win" a nuclear war, and were indeed preparing to do so. The evidence for this serious charge in the mid-1970s was supposedly to be found in the esoteric writings of various Soviet military sources. Some of these articles were published in obscure Soviet journals, others appeared at book

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length and some were still secret; but ingenious American analysts pieced together an alarming story that the Soviets believed they could "win" a nuclear war.

This debate about Soviet doctrine was fruitless, because most of the claims concerning what the Soviets believed dissolved into a mass of ambiguities under any rigorous analysis. To be sure, the Soviets believed that they should prepare for a nuclear war or, for that matter, for any war. Given their experience of the German attack in 1941, preparedness had become almost a religion. But the idea that they held that nuclear war could be fought to some abstract concept of "victory" was much more elusive. Indeed, there seemed some grounds for concluding that their military and civilian leaders disagreed on this point. What I believed was truly worrisome was the assertion of Soviet military doctrine that the first phase of a nuclear war would be "decisive" in determining the outcome. Soviet officials repeatedly made that case, and it was not challenged from Khrushchev through Brezhnev. This could only mean that the Soviets would feel compelled to strike first in any crisis. And it followed that the Soviets would have to launch their own strategic forces on warning of an American attack.

This was truly alarming and dangerous. Arms control ought to address this situation if at all possible. Hence I believed reducing Soviet heavy missiles might reduce Soviet confidence in a first strike. This was a legitimate and worthwhile arms control objective, and the United States ought to pay a price to achieve it. True, the Soviets might still feel compelled by their history to strike first in any crisis, but their ability to do so would be diminished just enough so that they might take pause. This concern was quite different from the incredible Pentagon scenario that assumed the Soviets would launch an unprovoked surprise attack to take advantage of the so-called "window of ICBM vulnerability."

Soviet military doctrine remained a bogeyman and was the cause of unending harassment of the White House. It led to the formation of "Team B" by George Bush in 1976, when he was director of CIA. Team B was supposed to be a group of outside experts who would develop an alternative view to that of Team A, the CIA's own analysts. It was not really Bush's doing, since he understood little of the substance at that early

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point. The idea was proposed by the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and I encouraged him to undertake the experiment, largely because I thought a new director ought to be receptive to new views; Bush's predecessor, William Colby, had turned it down.

The exercise turned out to be a license for an attack on Ford's own administration—a case of self-inflicted damage. Team B's report was written by Harvard Sovietologist Richard Pipes (who later served on the NSC under Reagan). The conclusion was that we had seriously underrated Soviet determination to pursue a strategy of victory in nuclear war. This judgment was especially misleading because at that very moment actual Soviet policy and doctrine were in fact changing, significantly. From 1977 on, Brezhnev began to denounce nuclear war as "suicidal." These new pronouncements also coincided with a turn-down in Soviet defense spending. As this became apparent the Carter administration was able to take a somewhat more sanguine view of Soviet intentions. Finally, in 1985, Gorbachev completed the evolution of Soviet doctrine when he dramatically abandoned the old Soviet position and agreed to Ronald Reagan's claim that a nuclear war "cannot be won and must never be fought."

When Ford went to Vladivostok, however, the debate about Soviet intentions was still open, and he had the practical problem of how to press forward on the arms control negotiations. Eliminating the Soviet heavy ICBM force was still the most desirable objective, but it was already quite obvious that it would be very, very difficult to accomplish. In fact, in October 1974, at the staff level, we could not see what Brezhnev's incentive would be to make the kind of concessions now that had been withheld from Nixon. All that we had in our favor as Ford prepared for Vladivostok was Brezhnev's general commitment to a policy of détente and perhaps some feeling in the Soviet military that they could not achieve true superiority. Thus, in a memorandum to Kissinger we wrote:

> This almost certainly is a time of considerable uncertainty in Moscow. There are probably arguments that now, with the change of Presidents, it is time to revitalize Soviet-American relations. But a Soviet leader could also argue that prudence

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dictates a strategy of procrastination—at least until the outlook for the Ford Administration's survival is clear and the impact of the "crisis of capitalism" is clearer.

As best we can judge from all the evidence the decision, if there is one, is to proceed with the atmospherics of detente but to reserve on the substance. In other words, Brezhnev probably has no urgent incentive to make the concessions now that he withheld at the last summit, or that he can offer later.

Thus, a major and perhaps insurmountable problem is how to create an incentive for the Soviets to move.

That incentive was developed during the Kissinger visit to Moscow in October 1974, and it originated in a fortuitous set of circumstances. In brief, we offered to withdraw from our nuclear submarine base at Rota in Spain, which of course greatly intrigued Brezhnev.

Our offer came about because of the political changes during the last years of the Franco regime, as Prince (later King) Juan Carlos was given more power, and the movement toward democracy in Spain gained ground. The United States had to renegotiate a treaty that permitted our military bases in Spain, and we anticipated that once Franco was out of office, the left wing would mount a major effort against retaining the bases. Washington did not want to confront a new democratic government with an immediate test of its strength over U.S. bases. So we decided to abandon the nuclear submarine base, as a concession; at one stroke this would forestall a future debate over U.S. bases and especially over the presence of nuclear weapons. We could afford to give up Rota because the new Poseidon submarines did not require forward basing. We would retain our air bases, which were important for support in the Middle East. During the summer of 1974 we decided that if we intended to do this for Spain, why not present it to Brezhnev as part of a SALT bargain?

In the aftermath of Watergate we needed some bargaining power. In late August I had done a long analysis that showed the United States would not fall behind the Soviet Union if there was an unbridled "arms race," but that we would also stand to gain if we could reach an agreement around the levels that the Soviets were proposing. In fact, I thought that we might come out slightly ahead if we proceeded with our two

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major programs, the Trident submarine and the B-1 bomber, and also proceeded with a program to put some kind of a new mobile ICBM into active service over the next several years.

The mobile missile idea turned out not to be so simple. There was a plan in the Pentagon to place a mobile ICBM on an aircraft, thus operating an airborne ICBM rather than a land-mobile ICBM. Ten years later this idea for an airborne ICBM would be revived and called, appropriately, Big Bird. It was rudely dismissed by an incredulous Congress. In 1974, however, the Pentagon leaders were so carried away by the idea that they ordered the air force to stage a test, in which part of an old Minuteman ICBM was actually dropped out of the tail of a cargo plane and then ignited, apparently to show that it could be done. This had the immediate and unexpected effect of converting a moderately interesting idea into a major political and strategic issue. The Minuteman test was well publicized, and the Soviets naturally saw this airborne missile as a new threat and went to work to stop it. So a Soviet drive to stop a program that was little more than a Rube Goldberg experiment was to bedevil Ford at Vladivostok. At the time, however, it still seemed a novel strategic option to us, and worth protecting from Russian onslaughts. That too would eventually cost us dearly.

I believed that we would do well to make a deal in which we banned or limited this new air-mobile ICBM in return for Soviet concessions to limit multiple warheads (MIRVs) on their heavy missiles. I thought the airborne ICBM would never be built and trading it would be no sacrifice. The missile that had a promising future, in my view, was the lighter, smaller and less expensive cruise missile. Twenty or more of these cruise missiles could be fitted onto one B-52 bomber, thus turning it into the flying equivalent of a MIRV missile.

As for withdrawing from our submarine base at Rota, I felt we should make it conditional on ending debate over including French and British nuclear weapons in SALT and eliminating the Soviet demand to limit our so-called forward bases in Europe. The Soviets had driven us nearly insane with their incessant demands to include allied nuclear weapons in our negotiations. We could not and did not agree, but finding ways to save Soviet face on the issue became a strain on our ingenuity.

At Kissinger's Moscow meetings in October 1974, he pro-

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posed limiting MIRVs on Soviet heavy missiles. Since Brezhnev had previously hinted that the Soviets might impose some limits on their own, we thought that we were adopting his hint. But he seemed adamantly opposed. Indeed, the first session with Brezhnev was filled with complaints, more or less as we had expected. In particular, he was peevish about the Middle East, where he thought that Kissinger was easing him out of any negotiations. (In fact, this was quite true.) He was convinced we were reneging on the economic bargain to grant the Soviet Union credits and expand trade that he had negotiated with Kissinger in 1972 (also potentially true), and finally he thought we were raising new obstacles in the SALT negotiations (not quite true). Brezhnev also alluded cryptically to the China proposal he had made to Nixon, in a way that suggested to Kissinger that Brezhnev might be making acceptance a pre-condition to any further arms control agreements—which would have meant an end to détente under rather dramatic circumstances.

At that moment in Moscow we thought perhaps the coming Vladivostok summit was collapsing. Kissinger cabled a warning to President Ford that if the stalemate in his talks with Brezhnev was not broken and he returned without any movement on SALT issues, the only possibility of getting the Russians to move on arms control would be for Ford to insist that the Congress dramatically increase the budget for strategic weapons.

But as was so often the case in Moscow, the next morning Brezhnev shifted his ground. Gromyko told Kissinger that the Politburo had decided to proceed along the lines of the U.S. SALT position: a ten-year agreement at equal levels of about 2,400 missiles and bombers for both sides, and some sublevels to be set for MIRVed missiles, with an additional subceiling for Soviet heavy MIRVed ICBMs. They had reached a basic decision, Gromyko said, to obtain an arms control agreement by the time of the next regular summit (then scheduled for the summer of 1975). They were still having trouble with our proposals to limit their heavy ICBMs and with the problem of how to count bombers that were armed with longer-range missiles. This last issue was a ticking time bomb that we scarcely noticed at the time.

A new Soviet proposal was then unveiled; it was close to the

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U.S. position, but with the usual Soviet twists that made them such maddening negotiators. While accepting the concept of "equality," they rigged the numbers so that a real equality would not be reached for some time. In Brezhnev's plan, the United States would, in fact, concede to the Soviets an overall advantage of 200 missiles and bombers. Full equality, therefore, at a ceiling of 2,400 missiles and bombers would be only theoretical, because, in practice, for the years up to 1985, Moscow would have a numerical advantage over the United States. Moreover, Brezhnev refused our idea for a cap of 250 on Soviet heavy missiles armed with MIRVs. The full complement of these Soviet missiles (308) would not be affected. They would be counted only in the overall ceiling of 1,320 missiles with MIRVs for each side. The other problems in the Soviet proposal were that the United States would be limited to no more than 10 new Trident submarines, and our bombers could not be armed with missiles with a range greater than 3,000 kilometers. (The clever scheme of dropping a missile out of a cargo plane had obviously alerted the Soviets, who were now trying to get rid of it.)

Brezhnev's new proposal, however, was within the boundaries of what we might accept, allowing for all the negotiating fat that the Soviets usually included in their proposal. Both sides were agreed on an overall ceiling of 2,400 missiles and bombers; we also agreed on a subceiling of 1,320 missiles armed with MIRVs. Thus the summit at Vladivostok would be not merely a get-acquainted meeting but a real bargaining session that might permit completion of the Geneva negotiations.

There were, of course, obvious problems with the Soviet proposal. The petty discrepancy of 200 missiles/bombers that Brezhnev wanted would be of little strategic significance, but because of the inequality, it would be political dynamite for President Ford. Obviously it could not be accepted, and Brezhnev probably knew this. A second, more difficult problem was that we still had nothing to show for our effort to limit the Soviet heavy ICBM. We concluded that the last word had not been said on this issue, and it might be part of a trade. Finally, the idea of limiting the range of our missiles that might eventually be put on American bombers was also a serious problem. We might have to argue for the right to have an airborne ICBM, if the Pentagon really wanted to have this

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projected missile. Even if this scheme was dropped, there would still be the issue of preserving the option to put the lighter cruise missile on our bombers. This was important to the United States and could not be bargained away. We even gave some thought to linking the two ideas, agreeing to limit the missiles on our bombers, but making our agreement conditional on Soviet limits on their heavy MIRVs. In this case, we could propose that these "new" systems would each be limited to no more than about 250: the Soviets would have 250 MIRVed heavy missiles, and we could arm 250 bombers with airborne missiles. This was not much arms control, but an agreement along these lines would have pointed in the right direction.

There was one other seemingly minor problem, and that was the strange notion of counting each and every missile on a bomber if the missile had capability over a certain range. This would mean that a single B-1, for example, would have to count as 20 to 25 because each could carry that many shorter-range cruise missiles. This would turn any agreement into a farce. We assumed (not correctly) that the Soviets knew this as well, and that they were playacting. As for limiting our Trident submarines to a total of 10, we also put this down to bargaining, since the Soviets knew our Trident program was planned to go up to well beyond 10 submarines; perhaps as many as 20 were planned.

In short, we saw a possible deal: despite the probability of domestic backlash, we could concede some "inequality," as Brezhnev proposed, if in return we could get some restraint on his heavy ICBMs, perhaps limiting the number equipped with MIRVs to a level well under their full contingent of 308. We could give up the very longest-range missiles on aircraft, while keeping shorter-range ones. There would be no further limits except for those roughly agreed: a 2,400 ceiling on missiles and bombers and, within that, a ceiling of 1,320 MIRVed missiles.

When this rough outline was put before the Joint Chiefs of Staff they were "encouraged" that the Soviets were moving toward equality. In commenting on the details, however, the JCS wanted to allow for a new American ICBM (known then and thereafter as the MX) but they did not foresee it's being necessary until after 1985, though Ford had ordered it for

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1984. (The first ones were in fact available in 1986.) Most important, the joint chiefs were skeptical of the so-called "window of vulnerability," the threat to American missile silos posed by the next generation of Soviet ICBMs. They saw this as a problem for after 1985, if ever. Finally, and surprisingly, the JCS accepted a limit of 10 Trident submarines. The civilians in the Pentagon, however, finally and wisely decided this was not acceptable. The truly strange turn was that the JCS wanted to preserve the option for having a "mobile" ICBM deployed on an aircraft: the air force experiment was still raising its ugly head and becoming serious. Basically, however, there was a green light from the Pentagon. If Ford could get "equality," he would win the right wing in the Congress and would have JCS support for a new SALT agreement.

The real question was whether this was the best possible outcome. Many of us thought we could do still better, but only if the new president was willing to take a considerable amount of political backlash. This was a call that only Gerald Ford could make. That was why he occupied the White House; only the president can weigh the overall balance of domestic and foreign policies and decide how to reconcile competing interests.

All this is what Gerald Ford had in mind that wintry night at the Okeanskaya Sanatorium in Vladivostok.

The first session began around six in the evening; it was scheduled to last an hour or so before adjourning for dinner. It lasted until after midnight and, as it turned out, with no dinner, which is always hard on the lowly staff members. Presidents can always rustle up some food, to say nothing of general secretaries in the USSR, but it is not so easy for the rest of us.

The first part of the meeting was predictable, beginning with obligatory small talk. This time the subject was the Congress of Vienna in 1815, where, Kissinger volunteered, the Austrians had to cut special doors through the walls of the meeting hall so that each of the monarchs, including the czar, could enter simultaneously. Brezhnev commented that at that time Gromyko had been the czar, and Gromyko countered that he had only been an observer. It may not seem very humorous, but it was contrary to the traditional image of the somber Gromyko. One always wondered whether these gibes conveyed a hidden

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meaning or were simply the residue of the grisly style of humor characteristic of Soviet politics under Stalin.

In any case, Brezhnev began with his customary bobbing and weaving, testing the American president—whining about inequalities and hinting that all was lost, charging the American side with hardening its SALT position and making new demands. This took the usual straightening out by Kissinger. It was notable that Brezhnev took instruction from Kissinger almost as a student, while impatiently waving away his own advisers. Ford made his case, insisting that the United States had to have full equality if he was to get the necessary support for the agreement in the United States. After a time, Brezhnev called for a break and suggested reconvening in a smaller group. Obviously he was accustomed to doing business with the smaller circle that Nixon and Kissinger had used. So the rest of us were sent to wait in an anteroom. Kissinger and General Brent Scowcroft, who had become Kissinger's deputy at the NSC, remained, along with Ford's interpreter, Alex Akalovsky, who had translated for President Kennedy at the Vienna summit with Khrushchev in 1961.

In the private talks, Brezhnev continued to test the possibility that the United States would give him a slight numerical edge of 200 within the overall ceiling of 2,400 ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers. In other words, the Soviet forces would be at the full 2,400, and this would mean a very slight Soviet reduction from about 2,500. But the United States would be stopped at 2,200, which was in fact higher than the U.S. forces could reach by 1985 in any case. But the issue was politics, not arithmetic.

Kissinger warned that in the current political situation (meaning the post-Watergate climate), it would be extremely dangerous for the United States to agree to this small differential. Brezhnev then went back to a much earlier variant, which we had introduced in early 1974. In this scheme the Soviets would still have an edge of 200 in the overall ceiling, but the United States would be compensated by having a small edge in the number of MIRVed missiles. Kissinger had pressed for this in the Nixon summit. Now Kissinger replied that while this might be preferable, the times were such that it was no longer possible. Ford argued that any tinkering with the concept of equality would be turned against the agreement itself in the United

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States and inevitably would be turned against détente as well. In this case, the results of such a SALT bargain could lead to the election of a new administration far less committed to détente (meaning Senator Jackson).

Finally, the wily old pro Andrei Gromyko threw out what was really behind all of this stalling. Would the United States be prepared to do something about its forward bases? he asked. This was the invitation to clarify the hints that we would withdraw from the nuclear submarine base at Rota in Spain. Ford responded that he would be willing to give a commitment to such a withdrawal in 1985, a decade hence. And Gromyko, ever the rug merchant, said "by" 1984, not "in" 1985, thus gaining a year in the bargain. This small ploy illustrated a Kissingerism about Soviet bargaining: they would knee you in the groin to pick up a nickel from the sidewalk, even though it cost them a million in good will.

All of this produced an interesting Brezhnev digression about the professional military. In his country, he said, the military could not determine policy. They could determine doctrine, but policy, including military policy, was decided at the political level. "In other words, the military decide what to shoot at, while the political leadership decides whether or not to shoot." This was supposed to be reassuring, but it was disconcerting to think of the Soviet defense minister, Marshal Andrei Grechko, arbitrarily deciding which target to hit, whereas in the United States targeting was the source of endless debates, both in theory and practice. Only the president and a very small circle of advisers could see and approve the nuclear war plan known as the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), and the president definitely had to approve it. In the USSR, apparently, Brezhnev had delegated this responsibility—at least this is what he implied, though he was trying to make a different point, emphasizing civilian control.

Then Brezhnev left the room, and as he exited, began shouting "Kozlov, Kozlov." (Colonel General Mikhail Kozlov was a first deputy chief of the general staff and head of its Main Operations Directorate; he had first appeared as part of the Soviet delegation in the Nixon summit.) They disappeared into one of the small private rooms and they stayed there for some time. Whatever Brezhnev's criticisms of the military, he was not loathe to rely on General Kozlov. It is perhaps

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instructive that after this session with the general, Brezhnev began to wrap up the negotiations. He obviously had sought and received advice from Kozlov.

Brezhnev returned to the meeting with Ford and promptly accepted the U.S. demands for full equality: both sides under a ceiling of 2,400 and both sides limited to no more than 1,320 MIRVs. And he pointedly noted that he would inform his "colleagues" of the information about Rota. With agreement staring them in the face, after two years of frustrating haggling, Kissinger and Ford decided they too wanted a break for one final review.

What followed was a marathon circling around and around the compound in the bitter cold while we debated the Soviet proposition. It is always a bit disconcerting when the Soviets accept your proposal. Naturally, Ford was inclined to button up the agreement then and there. We all agreed that it would be a satisfactory outcome. At that point I volunteered that it was surprising how quickly Brezhnev had agreed, and that perhaps we should probe for more; we might salvage some limit on the number of Soviet heavy ICBMs that could be converted to MIRVed missiles. Kissinger also thought this was worth trying, but others warned that we might be getting into a jungle of new issues, especially if the Soviets countered with the question of our missiles on B-52 and B-1 bombers, as Brezhnev had done in the October meeting with Kissinger. But, finally, we all agreed that if this should happen, we could easily drop it and go back and accept Brezhnev's proposal, which, after all, was our own position.

Ford did try for another concession on limiting the number of Soviet heavy missiles equipped with MIRVs. Brezhnev balked and did in fact bring up our missiles on bombers. He again took the far-out position that each missile on a bomber would count under the 2,400 ceiling. This was obvious nonsense; it would mean that we could have only ten bombers and nothing else. Ford turned it down. Both sides agreed it was getting very late, and the talks adjourned about twelve-thirty.

We trooped back to our barracks only to find—as I had feared—that the Soviet service staff, bewildered by all of the late-night activity, had simply retired. A decent meal could not be scraped together, and the American staff went to bed

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muttering and grumbling. I was thereupon confronted by my second great plumbing crisis in Russia. The first had been in the Kremlin itself, where Helmut Sonnenfeldt and I roomed together during the Nixon summit the previous July. One evening the insides of our toilet tank simply collapsed into a pile of rusted junk, with water running out of control. We appealed to the Soviet guard, who suddenly seemed not to understand any known language, including Russian. And so, falling back on our Yankee ingenuity and the fact that we were both old homeowners, we somehow pieced together a makeshift arrangement that worked for the remainder of the summit, but only under a very gentle touch. We left it to the next guest, a Communist functionary, we hoped.

The Vladivostok plumbing crisis was simpler, though quite startling. As I was washing my hands and face I became aware of a growing pool of water at my feet. Peering under the sink I discovered that the gooseneck that should join the pipe to the drain was not there; indeed, it was lying in the corner. It was a simple task to pound it back in place. But I still wondered what the reasoning was for its being disconnected at all and, in particular, why no one thought to put it back. Could it be an insidious psychological warfare plot by the KGB?

The next morning the Americans convened to decide where to go in the next round. Papers were prepared and talking points for Ford to use were worked out with Kissinger; and by the opening of the next session at ten, it was more or less decided that we would probe gently for a time and, if nothing transpired, take the agreement on the table.

Ford returned to the heavy-missile gambit, but it drew only a typical Russian escalation; namely, a new demand to ban all ballistic missiles on bombers. Ford had to turn down Brezhnev's proposal, whereupon Brezhnev turned down our proposal for a limit for heavy Soviet MIRVed ICBMs. Thus the two sides returned to where they had been at ten the previous evening. Both sides decided to agree, and I was summoned to draft the document of agreement, with Helmut Sonnenfeldt and Georgi Kornienko, then head of the American desk in the Soviet foreign ministry.

We decided to leave out any specific numbers and issue to the press a written "framework" explaining that the two sides

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had agreed on equal levels for their strategic weaponry. This was the real breakthrough: the two sides had agreed on strategic equality.

The final agreement, then, was to work for a treaty that would last through 1985. Both sides would be limited to the same overall aggregate of missiles and bombers (2,400), and both sides would be limited to equal levels of missiles equipped with MIRVs (1,320). Negotiations would begin on reductions in these forces to be made after 1985, and the whole agreement was to be completed by the end of 1975.

While this announcement was being completed, Brezhnev, reducing his group even further, finally raised the anti-Chinese treaty. Ford asked what it really meant, and Brezhnev explained that if either side were to be attacked by a nuclear power, the other would go to its aid. Ford said immediately that this could not apply to an ally (having in mind Britain and France), and Brezhnev essentially agreed. Then Ford raised the key question: what about a country that was not an ally? What would happen if such a country attacked? Would both the United States and the USSR be free to counterattack, and with nuclear weapons? Brezhnev lamely said that he could not be that precise. The conversation petered out, but in a complete shift of subject and mood, Brezhnev ended by reminding Ford that the following May would be the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the World War, and that the USSR was thinking about some celebration that the United States might join. "After all," he said, "we were allies in the last war."

On this note the conference ended, except for some further cleanup work. This included sending a long cablegram to Washington, to Schlesinger and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explaining the outcome so that they would not immediately start to undercut it, as Kissinger feared they might. With this vital cable in hand, I commandeered a Soviet car and we set out for our communications center. After a few minutes I realized that the driver was lost. It seemed that we had reached a major highway and were heading toward Vladivostok. Finally, admitting defeat, the driver stopped and asked directions back to the Okeanskaya Sanatorium. I was getting more and more nervous, though the humor was not totally lost on me. Was this a followup to the plumbing crisis by the dreaded KGB? So, in halting Russian, I told the driver where I thought the

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barracks were, and we finally found them. All of this took much too long, and when I returned, Kissinger gave me a quizzical look. But by then the postconference festivities had begun, with caviar in abundance.

Kornienko and I drew up the communiqué and had it retyped and printed to hand out to the press. Kissinger gave his usual background briefing, which was later to become famous because his former staff aide, Morton Halperin, sued to have the actual text released to the public. Background briefings are supposed to be off the record, but texts are usually printed; around this period there was a small revolt against the practice of keeping such briefings secret and only quoting unnamed sources. The Halperin suit was intended to break through this gentlemen's agreement between the government and the press. The government contested the case and won it years later.

In the final communiqué, which was of course made public, Kornienko and I had once again, as we had in San Clemente, inadvertently omitted an agreed upon paragraph on the Middle East. The American press could not believe it was another mistake and saw all kinds of dark plots and secret agreements behind the omission. The real reason was that Gromyko and Kissinger always waited until the very last minute to resolve their contending texts on the Middle East. The Soviets never failed to propose some outrageous language supporting the PLO or attacking Israel, and we dutifully took it out. These delays caused no end of anguish to the staffs. At one point I suggested to Kornienko that we write our own Middle East paragraph, insert it but not tell anyone. He giggled but declined, which probably explains why he became the first deputy foreign minister of the USSR, and why I retired.

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VI

THE ROAD
TO HELSINKI

The Vladivostok agreement should have been a turning point. Ford and Kissinger had, after all, salvaged a framework for an arms control agreement and preserved a relationship with Brezhnev despite Watergate. Moreover, the framework, while not perfect, met the main criticisms that had been leveled against the first SALT agreements: the charge of inequality in the first agreement would be satisfied by the equal levels that would apply to weapons on both sides; and the charge that there had been an arms race as a result of the first agreements would be countered by new ceilings and subceilings that would even require some reductions. Finally, all the major strategic weapons systems would be included, both long-range missiles and bombers.

Thus, it was something of a shock that the reaction at home turned out to be not only skeptical but hostile. Moreover, the attacks on Vladivostok blended into a more far-reaching assault on the Ford administration. Within sixty days of his return, Ford confronted the repudiation of Nixon's policy of using economic relations with the Soviets as an incentive to achieve agreements on political and strategic issues. Since 1972, the Congress had been holding up Nixon's agreement with the

Soviets that settled the old lend-lease wartime debt and granted trade concessions to the Soviets. By late 1974, Congress was considering the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the trade bill, which linked any American economic concessions with Soviet acceptance of the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union, and this legislation was accompanied by the Stevenson amendment, which would sharply limit the amount of credits to the USSR. In addition, new attacks were launched against America's commitment to attend the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, still under preparation, which was to be the culmination of Brezhnev's dream of a European security conference. The domestic backlash against détente was clearly growing. The fall of Saigon in April 1975—reviving all of the bitterness and humiliation of Vietnam—simply enhanced the sense of frustration and of despair that any American foreign policy could be effective.

The anti-Vladivostok reaction centered on Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson. Having insisted for two years on strict equality in SALT, Jackson abruptly changed his tune after Ford's return. He began to attack the agreement for failing to reduce Soviet forces. Whereas the administration argued that the agreement had put a "cap" on the Soviet buildup, Jackson commented that the cap was put on a mountain top. He pressed the case for a reduction from the 2,400 ceiling agreed at Vladivostok to 1,700—a one-third cut. How the Soviets were to be persuaded to make these reductions three months after Watergate and with the threat of the Jackson-Vanik amendment on Jewish emigration still pending, Jackson and his fellow critics did not bother to explain.

It was an absurd situation. We were withdrawing one of the carrots that tempted the Soviets—the prospect of trade and credits—and substituting a threat against their internal order; at the same time we were being urged to discard one of the supposed benefits—restraint on Soviet nuclear forces—by abandoning the SALT negotiations. It was unfortunate that the culprit was Scoop Jackson. Many in the White House admired him. He was, after all, what many considered the ideal American combination—liberal in domestic policies but conservative in foreign affairs. Nixon had wanted him as secretary of defense in 1969. And many in the White House were in close touch

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with him and his staff. This was to prove an embarrassment. It was not unusual to see Richard Perle, one of Jackson's assistants, in the halls of the Old Executive Office Building, visiting one or another member of Kissinger's staff. The confrontation over both SALT and the Jackson-Vanik amendment was conducted on two levels, public and private; on the private level there were prolonged negotiations with the Jackson staff, both Richard Perle and another aide, Dorothy Fosdick. Indeed, the White House staff actually wrote the Jackson SALT amendment on equality in 1972, and Jackson talked it through with Kissinger, while continuing to attack SALT in public.

By late 1974 matters had changed. Jackson was a probable candidate for the presidency in the 1976 campaign. Indeed, many thought of him as the leading candidate. And this must have shaped his tactics and strategy in dealing with the White House. His position on Jewish emigration and SALT became implacable. No matter how hard the White House tried to appease him, he simply escalated his demands. The fact that he had access to inside information in the White House made it maddening, since he would simply pocket every concession, knowing full well that more could be squeezed from an administration that did not want to start its term in a confrontation with the Senate.

Still, the breadth of criticism of Vladivostok was a surprise. We had assumed that at least among the liberal arms control community it would be well received. But even in this quarter the general reaction was critical. The Arms Control Association commented that the agreement had "serious shortcomings." When Jan Lodal, a Kissinger staffer, and I briefed a group of experts, we were treated to an all-out attack. George Rathjens, a liberal who was one of the pioneers in arms control theory and practice, said he would rather have no agreement than Vladivostok because the ceilings were much too high. In later years, when it appeared there would be no agreement, some of the critics of Vladivostok changed their tune dramatically; saving the Vladivostok accord became a battle cry, especially after the Carter administration's debacle in their first try for an agreement calling for deep cuts rather than the "cap" approach of Vladivostok.

All of this criticism could have been weathered, but there were some additional complications arising from the summit.

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A summit is a most inappropriate place to do serious business on such complex issues as arms control. No leader, even with the best will in the world, can master the intricacies. The summit should be reserved for setting general guidelines or indicating a strategy to be filled in later by subordinates. This is what happened at Vladivostok, and in an era of private diplomacy this would have been satisfactory. But not in the 1970s.

It began to leak out in the press that all the details were not fixed in writing. And, in fact, an aide-mémoire filling in the gaps was being negotiated between Kissinger and Dobrynin. The discussions proved to be a problem since the Soviets blithely returned to some of the positions we had already rejected at Vladivostok. Such tactics were not unusual; the Soviets often tried to revive old positions, out of sheer perversity or tenacity, or perhaps even in the hope that we had forgotten. Naturally Kissinger bridled at these Soviet antics and we drafted our own version of the aide-mémoire, which led to a brief standoff. This too began to leak out, and Jackson, who was informed by one of Kissinger's staff, demanded to see the written record. His request had to be rejected, all of which further strained relations with the senator. Finally, a half-baked compromise was worked out with Dobrynin. A new aide-mémoire was drafted by the staff and sent to Kissinger for his meeting with Dobrynin. To play it safe, the staff had drafted two versions, differing only slightly. Rather than choosing, Kissinger and Dobrynin signed both, leaving the staff even more bewildered. It did not matter, for the issues that were to plague the negotiations could not be settled in a few days.

The first issue was whether to include limits on the Soviet medium-range Backfire bomber, defining it as a truly intercontinental weapon. The Pentagon insisted that it was actually an intercontinental bomber because, if it was refueled, it could reach the United States (of course this could apply to any aircraft if refueled often enough). The Soviets scoffed at including this particular bomber, which they strongly insisted was designed only for medium-range operations. But this claim, in turn, only aroused American suspicions.

At one point in this debate, which continued until the end of Ford's term, Kissinger asked the famous American aircraft designer Kelly Johnson what he thought of the Soviet Backfire

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bomber. Johnson said that it was a second-rate aircraft and we should encourage the Soviets to put all of their resources into it. The issue was never definitively resolved; but eventually, in the SALT agreement of 1979, the Soviets agreed to a ceiling on production rates for this bomber.

American insistence raised suspicions of our motives on the Soviet side. No Soviet, civilian or military, could conceive of this weapon as a bomber for attacking the United States, since its primary mission was to strike in Asia or Europe. In one of his encounters with Kissinger after Vladivostok, Brezhnev summoned generals and marshals to prove his point, but the United States experts smugly insisted that they knew more than the Soviet air force about its own bombers—a position calculated to enrage Brezhnev, to say nothing of his generals.

An interesting sidelight occurred a decade later. American F-111 fighter-bombers flew a strike mission from England to Libya, with several refuelings: this would seem to confirm Soviet claims that our forward-based aircraft in Europe were indeed a "strategic" threat, since Libya was much farther from England than was the USSR. It also proved our point that any aircraft could be strategic if refueled often enough. The Libyan missions confirmed that our old fears, in the mid-1970s, about the Backfire were justified; for it too could reach the United States if refueled in flight.

More serious than the Backfire question was the failure to resolve all of the aspects of limiting or banning cruise missiles. This had been touched on only briefly at Vladivostok. For some time the United States had been toying with these intriguing weapons but had not been able to decide whether to move ahead with specific programs; one single version could be adapted for naval, land or air use. Putting some on bombers seemed the most effective deployment; they could be fired at some distance from the target, thus allowing the bomber to use them against defenses; and, of course, they could be used instead of bombs; about twenty such missiles could be carried on a B-52 bomber. This was a more or less agreed program in the administration, and it seemed likely that an agreement could be reached with the Soviets, thus permitting the deployment of air-launched cruise missiles; but the issues that were unresolved were how to deal with sea- and land-based cruise missiles—whether to deploy them on submarines and surface

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ships and perhaps even station them in Europe. The navy was torn. They did not want to dilute the missions of their submarines by adding new weapons to strike land targets. But nonetheless they were reluctant to part with the promising technology involved in cruise missiles, which might be used against other ships.

This indecision became more and more frustrating as the post-Vladivostok negotiations proceeded in 1975. It was eventually solved by a compromise under Carter in his agreement of 1979; in a separate protocol to Carter's SALT II treaty, cruise missiles on submarines were banned for two years; this protocol lapsed in 1981, and cruise missiles have been unrestrained for the past several years.

In 1975, when all of these issues were still open, the U.S. Army had no particular interest in any cruise missiles that would be based on land. It was this very system for the cruise missile, however, that was to prove most controversial; it was this version that would eventually be deployed in Europe in 1983, as a counter to the unrestrained Soviet buildup of its intermediate-range SS-20 ballistic missiles.

Kissinger had rescued the entire arsenal of different cruise missiles from a Pentagon decision to scrap them in 1973, and he was naturally frustrated with the new position of the Pentagon that suddenly insisted on saving the weapons system they had wanted to drop completely two years before. Kissinger had saved the cruise missile as a bargaining chip, but in early 1976, when he suggested playing the sea- and land-based chips, he met fierce resistance.

The effect of both of these unresolved issues—Backfire and cruise missiles—was to further divide Washington over the value of the broad agreement at Vladivostok. It was in danger of being held hostage to the resolution of two second-rate issues. An additional issue, which arose immediately after Vladivostok, concerned the timing of future reductions. The agreement had indicated reductions would come later, after the ten-year period envisioned by the Vladivostok framework. This was attacked by arms control advocates, who wanted earlier reductions, and led to an unlikely coalition: Senators Edward Kennedy and Walter Mondale joined with the Republican Charles "Mac" Mathias of Maryland to introduce a Senate resolution calling for early reductions. When tipped off in

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advance by Mathias, Kissinger and Dobrynin immediately
amended the Vladivostok agreement, to the effect that nego-
tiations on reductions could start before 1985, when the treaty
would officially expire. I was asked to work with Kennedy,
Mondale and Mathias and their staffs to see to it that their
resolution did not become a Christmas tree on which all sorts
of other amendments would be added. Thus the White House
found itself allied to Kennedy and Mondale in opposition to
Jackson—a strange commentary on Washington politics. In the
end the joint resolution proved acceptable, but not until much
agonizing had gone on in the White House over the constant
maneuvering required to keep Kennedy and Mondale at arm's
length, without losing their support for SALT.

All of this was worrisome because it seemed that Ford could
not deliver what he had agreed to at Vladivostok. To the White
House, the reaction against Vladivostok seemed perverse. The
resentment, especially at the staff level, arose largely because
to some degree the White House was isolated, as every White
House is. After Vladivostok the staff was relieved that some
agreement had been reached and that the Soviets had not tried
to exploit Ford's political weakness by demanding major conces-
sions from a new president. Thus we tended to see a great
victory in what was a modest achievement. The new press
secretary, Ron Nessen, told the White House press corps that
Ford had achieved in a few days what Nixon had not achieved
in three years. This was duly reported by the gleeful reporters
from Air Force One, who instantly saw a potential rift with
Kissinger. Kissinger was offended, since Nessen's account made
it seem that he had failed and that Ford had rescued him. But
Kissinger had made the error of going directly from Vladivos-
tok to China while Ford returned to Washington. I rode on
Air Force One and listened with dismay to Nessen's briefing.
Kissinger exploded when he learned of it, but there was little
he could do from China. Leaving the defense of Vladivostok
in the hands of underlings who had none of Kissinger's powers
of elucidation and persuasion, or his authority, was obviously
a major mistake. It may well be that had Kissinger returned
immediately, he could have snuffed out the anti-Vladivostok
revolt.

But another storm, far worse, was brewing over the trade
bill and the amendment sponsored by Senator Jackson and

Representative Charles Vanik. This effort was typical of classical anticommunists, who saw most aspects of relations with the Soviet Union as a means to apply pressures on the Soviet system. Thus Jackson developed a scheme that would tie granting the USSR most-favored-nation treatment to Soviet acceptance of the free emigration of Jews. It reflected his view that the United States had strong cards to play, and that the Ford administration, like the Nixon administration before it, was giving away too much for too little. It may be that in his critique of arms control Jackson had a point open to debate. On the question of Jewish emigration, however, his proposal struck at the heart of Soviet power. No Soviet leader could buckle to Jackson's demands and stay in power. It is difficult to believe that Jackson did not understand this. So one is left with the conclusion that his was simply another effort to break the momentum of détente. And indeed, this was the effect.

Both Nixon and Ford underestimated Jackson. They believed
that somehow, some way, there would be a compromise,
especially since there had been a consensus in the United States
that economic relations were a strong incentive for the Soviets
to moderate their behavior. Thus, the Nixon strategy had been
to promise economic concessions once major issues such as
SALT and Berlin were settled. Consequently, in late 1972, a
bargain was struck: the United States would accord to Soviet
imports the same tariff treatment as was granted to those of
any other nation. The misnomer for this was most-favored-
nation treatment; it had been denied to all Communist countries
after World War II but then gradually restored, first to
Yugoslavia and in 1956 to Poland. The Soviets wanted it mainly
as a sign of equality, since the actual level of trade was quite
low—about $100 million in 1971. The Soviets also wanted
credits to buy American goods, especially grain, and this was
more or less promised to them under Nixon. Brezhnev had
rather expansively speculated that the Soviets might buy $20
billion in consumer goods from the United States. Most-
favored-nation status (MFN) must be granted by Congress, and
in 1972 Congress insisted that before any of these arrangements
would be accepted, the Soviets had to settle their lend-lease
debts left over from the end of the war. The lend-lease problem
was settled in late 1972: in return for MFN, the Soviets agreed
to pay $740 million on their lend-lease debt. (I always thought

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trying to collect the wartime debt was shameful.) After 1972 trade began to increase, even without the formal granting of MFN. The Soviets bought large amounts of grain at low prices, causing a scandal because they proved to be such shrewd traders in the American market. They also began buying industrial equipment, which caused new worries that they might get sophisticated American technology. The net result was that skepticism was growing over the economic dimensions of détente.

This was the situation that Jackson attacked in his amendment, making MFN conditional on free Jewish emigration. The negotiations with Jackson ran for almost two years and were primarily conducted by Helmut Sonnenfeldt for Kissinger. Sonnenfeldt was also sympathetic to Jackson, but he made a determined effort to find a way out of the impasse. Various formulas were tried: some would grant MFN, but only after a waiting period. But all variants came down to one essential point—the Soviets would have to agree to free emigration. They were not necessarily opposed to Jewish emigration, which was already rising dramatically, from almost no emigrants to over 30,000 a year, as a result of the general warming of relations—thus disproving Jackson's basic thesis, that only pressures produced results with the Soviet Union. Indeed, Kissinger had extracted from Gromyko a commitment for emigration at the rate of 45,000 a year, and this had been negotiated in early 1974. Jackson simply pocketed this figure and raised his own demands to 60,000. Even that level was not necessarily out of the question, and Kissinger had warned Gromyko that Jackson's position would be to escalate the figures.

A scheme was finally developed that would solve the problem—at least so it was hoped in late 1974. First, Kissinger (or Ford) would write to Jackson, explaining the president's understanding that the Soviets would end harassment of emigrés and place no "major obstacles" in the way of emigration, or words to that effect. Jackson would accept this assurance but his reply could be couched in whatever terms he wished. Then the White House would acknowledge the guidelines described by Jackson and the deal would be struck. The Soviets were informed of this arrangement, and they agreed. The negotia-

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tions came to a head in October 1974, just before Kissinger left for Moscow to prepare for the Vladivostok summit.

But Jackson outmaneuvered the White House. Following a meeting with Ford that included the senator from New York, Jacob Javits, and standing in front of the White House before the press, Jackson hailed the historic breakthrough, but then promptly went well beyond the agreement with Ford; he said that his "benchmark" was a figure of 60,000 emigrés, and he then speculated that the figures could go even higher. Kissinger and Ford felt tricked and betrayed. Senators Javits and Abraham Ribicoff sought to calm the waters, but the damage had been done, as Kissinger was soon to discover when he went to Moscow shortly after Jackson's remark. Brezhnev and Gromyko were seething. They too thought they had been tricked, and of course could not believe that the powerful Kissinger or the president could not control what a senator would say outside the White House itself. The upshot was that Gromyko gave Kissinger a long letter that accused Washington of distorting the Soviet position, and that decisively rejected Jackson's interpretation. This happened at a breakfast, shortly before the Kissinger party left Moscow.

At that point Kissinger made a mistake. Rather than cabling Gromyko's letter to Washington or otherwise putting it into the policy-making process for discussion, he kept it to himself. He thought that the Soviets could be accommodated after the Vladivostok summit, or that something new could be worked out with both Brezhnev and Jackson. Nothing was ever done, however. Jackson decided to push his amendment and brought the matter to a favorable vote in mid-December—placing the Soviets in the position of having to guarantee emigration rates to the United States in order to receive trading benefits. The indignant Soviets released the text of Gromyko's letter. Everything then collapsed into recriminations. In a letter to Ford Brezhnev repudiated the 1972 MFN and lend-lease agreements and added some mutterings about the bad state of Soviet-American relations. Nevertheless, his letter, dated Christmas Day, was an interesting document. It seemed to cry out for some reassurance from Ford that what was happening in the trade dispute was not a harbinger of an across-the-board deterioration of relations. Brezhnev rather plaintively asked

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for Ford's views on how to improve the situation. My analysis for Kissinger was that a new shift of Soviet policy was not likely, but that the ball was definitely in our court.

There was a last-ditch effort to compromise. Kissinger suggested to Dobrynin that the Soviets refrain from publicly repudiating their commitments under the 1972 settlement on lend-lease; then MFN would be granted by Ford, as allowed for in the Jackson amendment, and Jewish emigration would rise. But Brezhnev would have none of it. He dismissed the suggestion in a brusque reply to Ford in early January. Kissinger finally decided we might be better off with Brezhnev's rejection. If the Soviets had accepted the compromise, there was bound to be trouble later, since they probably could not live up to Jackson's expectations on Jewish emigration. Then Jackson would launch a new attack. If, on the other hand, the Soviets did comply, then Jackson could show what real "toughness" accomplished. The Soviets, however, were in no mood for any clever gambits. They wrote off the whole mess.

The Soviet denunciation of the 1972 trade agreements proved to be the end of the affair. It was obvious that the atmosphere in the United States had changed since the Nixon summit of 1972 and the economic negotiations that had followed. Then trade was one of several elements in moving the relationship forward. Now it was being held out as a favor that we would grant in return for changes in the Soviet system. And this turn in political opinion came at the very point when American leverage was declining because of Watergate. Jackson had a great deal of support on the question of Jewish emigration, including that of many liberals who had always insisted on pursuing détente. He exalted the achievement of his new law as a vindication of his strategy and waved away the Soviet objections as mere tactics.

But in the end Jackson was dead wrong, and tragically so. Thousands of Soviet Jews were denied exit permits and remained inside the Soviet Union. And the irony was that the United States still sold large amounts of grain to the USSR; and as it turned out, according to American intelligence, much of our advanced technology was stolen. So the Soviets got what they wanted and we got nothing in return. To this day, the Jackson-Vanik amendment remains a sensitive point of controversy. Jewish emigration was a shrewd issue to exploit, but the

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exploitation was too cynical. For his part, Jackson always claimed the problem for the Soviets was the separate Stevenson amendment, which denied them credits. But he had made no move to stop this crippling amendment, which he might have easily done had he sincerely wanted to test the impact of his own amendment. In fact, there was no move to change any of the legislation, even after it became apparent that there would be virtually no further emigration. Thus, another of the pillars of the Kissinger strategy was collapsing because of domestic politics.

Soviet-American relations might have suffered even greater damage had the administration not preserved a bargaining chip, in the form of a commitment to attend the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to be held in Helsinki. The preliminary negotiations for this conference were still open in early 1975, and Brezhnev was determined that it should be completed. Thus Moscow limited its reaction to the Jackson-Vanik amendment (unfortunately concealing for a time the very real damage that had been done).

Suddenly, in January 1975, Brezhnev's health became an issue. It was announced that he could not make a scheduled trip to the Middle East because of illness. This caused a wave of speculation about his political power, about his successors and about the future of Soviet policy. I was worried, not about his personal health, but about his political health. I told Kissinger—I was then in the State Department—that I thought Brezhnev might be in trouble, and I was relieved when he reappeared in early February, apparently healthy. My view then was that political uncertainties in the Soviet Union about American policy were bound to be growing, and that this would make the Soviets more difficult to deal with, and also make it less likely that they would make any concessions to the United States. I was wrong about Brezhnev's political position, but I was right in that the Soviets were having doubts about the United States. This proved to be the case during Kissinger's next meeting with Gromyko, a brief session in February, in connection with preparations for a Middle East conference in Geneva. The Soviets were still stonewalling on SALT and other issues. Obviously they wanted their pound of flesh at Helsinki. Our views were summed up for Kissinger in early March:

to p. 194

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States. This was the theoretical basis for the strategy of the carrot and the stick.

Kissinger also understood that the idea of a balance of power did not resonate well in the country. Americans were by and large legalists and moralists in foreign policy, not balancers of power. After leaving office, when he was freer to speak out, Kissinger said: "The peace we seek must rest on something more tangible than a hope or a fear of holocaust. It must also reflect a military and geopolitical equilibrium. The notion of balance of power has always been unfashionable in America. But it is the precondition of security, and even of progress. If the mere avoidance of conflict becomes our overriding objective, and if our military power is disparaged, the international system will be at the mercy of the most ruthless."

Unofficial Washington would have been well advised to read Kissinger's essay "The White Revolutionary: Reflections on Bismarck," published in *Daedalus* a year before he came to Washington. It was Bismarck, not Metternich, who intrigued him most. What Kissinger admired was that Bismarck managed to change the orientation of German society as well as the international order: "the new order was tailored to a genius who proposed to restrain the contending forces, both domestic and foreign, by manipulating their antagonism." Surely this was Kissinger's approach. He wanted to change American attitudes: to persuade the public to accept America's permanent engagement in world affairs, to end the longing for a neo-isolationism and to temper emotional interventionism. But he understood that Bismarck's system depended overwhelmingly on the Iron Chancellor's genius. How could a policy survive if every generation had to produce another genius. Kissinger's answer was that a new international order had to be institutionalized. This explains a great deal about Kissinger's dealings with the Soviet Union. He sought, whether in written principles, arms control agreements or summit meetings, to build a foundation for a permanent change in relations. He succeeded in laying that foundation. His successors' conduct of Soviet policy still rests on the Kissinger foundation.

But he could not institutionalize Soviet-American relations, nor could his successors. The permanency of his accomplishment is therefore still open to history's judgment. The failure to create stable Soviet-American institutions is one aspect of

the great tragedy of Watergate. It wrecked Kissinger's strategy and threw him back on his own resources to limit the damage.

In sum, events conspired to create a divide between two Kissinger periods. In the first, he had a strong position and was relatively free to try to construct a new policy out of the wreckage of Vietnam. In the second period, his objective had to change: he was forced to try to salvage something of what he had helped to create in the Nixon presidency. Some observers believe that this latter period, under Ford, was a more masterly performance, given the growing odds against him and his policies. In my view history will judge his initial period as the more significant and durable, because it was creative. There are not many such periods in foreign affairs. His last years were defensive and tactically admirable but of less historical importance.

The historical significance of the Kissinger years of American foreign policy is relatively clear: he managed the transition from the period dominated by the cold war and its residue to a new phase in which elements of the cold war were brought into balance with the new elements of détente, not simply with Russia but with other Communist powers. The 1970s brought to a close the era of virulent anticommunism begun in the late 1940s and marked the end of the policy of pure containment.

On his last day in public office, Kissinger was interviewed by *The New York Times* and was asked the inevitable question: what legacy he was leaving. He mentioned in passing the trip to China, Middle East shuttle diplomacy and the SALT agreements, but his first answer is worth quoting, for it gives a flavor of his state of mind on that last, reflective day:

> "Just before I came here I wrote an article in which I said the world is bipolar militarily, multipolar politically and fragmented economically. When you talk of world order you have to take account of each of these realities and also the fact that probably history will record this as one of the philosophical revolutions of history.

> "In the nature of things this task could not have been completed—even without Watergate. This is the basic thing. I think in one way or another the relationship between China, the Soviet Union, the industrial democracies, the United States and the developing world, this five-sided aspect is a permanent feature of the future."

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This, then, was the essence of the Kissinger strategy: to change the "permanent" features of international politics—no minor achievement in a world where such changes almost invariably have been the product of events rather than the design of statesmen. As a student of those historical moments when statesmen did succeed in changing the international structure, he was compelled to make the effort; indeed he relished it. In 1815 Metternich, Castlereagh, Talleyrand and Alexander I created a new European order: it survived thirty years. Bismarck also created a new European system after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and his system also lasted thirty years before it began to disintegrate. Kissinger was often to comment that any system that endures for thirty years must have its merits. It is sixteen years since Nixon's visit to China and Russia.

Of course Kissinger's critics on the right see it quite differently. And they inevitably focus on "détente." The charge is that Kissinger sold an unsuspecting public a phony "generation of peace" with the Soviet Union and then subordinated all aspects of policy, including morality and human rights, to the pursuit of that end. In this charge the description of his methods and tactics almost invariably includes the claim that he sought to buy peace with his economic concessions to the Kremlin, to ensure Soviet adherence through a "web" of bilateral agreements and incentives and to tame Soviet power through arms control agreements and an agreed code of conduct. In all of this he failed, according to his critics.

Thus there has come into being a mythology of détente. Fortunately, as time passes, the worst revisionism will fade, as it does with respect to all historical periods. The first myth is that détente was somehow created in secret. This of course clashes with the opposite charge, that it was oversold to the public. The latter is closer to reality. As the Watergate crisis deepened, there is no doubt that Nixon fell back to his last line of defense: his foreign policy. Détente was indeed oversold, but out of political expediency, not chicanery. It must be remembered that the American public was eager for a relaxation of international tensions; after the disaster of Vietnam, anything that smacked of a purposeful and peaceful foreign policy was eagerly embraced. America needed a respite from failure, and détente provided it. For proof of this one only

need reread the evaluations of foreign policy written in 1972 and 1973.

The second charge is that Nixon and Kissinger naïvely believed that formal agreements would tie down Soviet strength. This was the "Gulliverization" of foreign policy, as one critique cleverly described it at the time. This myth has endured, but it does not reflect the reality of the time. No one of any consequence thought that the various agreements with the Soviet Union—even the arms control agreements—had inherent strength to restrain the USSR. They were intended to be linked in a strategy of both incentives and penalties. The economic component was a significant element of the strategy of détente. Perhaps too great an emphasis was placed on the incentives, but it should not be forgotten that the first summit took place after the mining of Haiphong and the bombing of North Vietnam, and that the last Nixon summit took place after the nuclear alert of October 1973. An eminent student of Communist affairs, the German Sovietologist Richard Lowenthal, has written that "Kissinger was no more inhibited than the Soviets by the fatuous document about refraining from unilateral advantages."

In addressing this general charge that SALT was believed to be sufficient to deter the Soviets from their aggressiveness, Kissinger and Scowcroft, writing jointly in *The Wall Street Journal*, stated in 1984: "Another [fable] is that SALT was intended to restrain Soviet behavior and that it did not stop Angola, Ethiopia or Afghanistan. One can accuse Richard Nixon of many sins, but simple-mindedness is not one of them. No serious member of his administration believed SALT by itself, or even primarily, would restrain Soviet conduct. What we did believe was that a web of incentives and penalties might indeed induce restraint. Watergate prevented this from being tested."

This is my view also, but there is another aspect seldom examined. The real defect of détente, and indeed of Kissinger's conduct of foreign policy, was the weakness of its indigenous roots. After decades of anticommunism and of alarms and crises in our relations with the Soviet Union and China, a major realignment in those relations could not quickly take hold in the public consciousness. This was not a matter of selling détente, though that was part of it, but of gaining enough time

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for the new situation to be understood and absorbed by the American people. Kissinger, a foreign-born national security adviser, was not ideally suited to this task, which, in any case, should be a presidential task. To convince the public of the validity of a policy is preeminently a political effort, which involves considerable sensitivity to the vagaries of popular opinion in the United States. Anyone elected to the presidency has to have some of this talent. Even at the presidential level, however, justifying the policy of détente was a project that required a subtle weaving of intellectual and geopolitical strands into a pattern that would command public support. Before Watergate, Nixon was not very skillful at implanting his policies in a domestic soil; he tended to impose them by fiat. Ford had neither the time nor the talent for it, nor did Carter.

As his own difficulties in office multiplied in late 1975 and early 1976, Kissinger was advised by his subordinates and friends that the country as a whole did not understand his policies, especially détente. Thus, he undertook a number of speaking engagements outside Washington and presented a series of lectures on the fundamental purposes of foreign policy. They were among his best and most thoughtful speeches. The themes were familiar ones, and they provide an interesting contrast with the early defense of détente, which promised more and stressed new initiatives rather than tradition. By the spring of 1976, well into the second phase of Kissinger's policies, his defense was couched both in recognizable Kissingerisms—an “equilibrium of power”—and in mainstream positions—“to contain Soviet power without global war.” In Boston on March 11, 1976, he said: “It is our responsibility to contain Soviet power without global war, to avoid both abdication as well as unnecessary confrontation. This can be done, but it requires a delicate and complex policy. We must strive for equilibrium of power, but we must move beyond it to promote the habits of mutual restraint, coexistence, and, ultimately, cooperation. We must stabilize a new international order in a vastly dangerous environment, but our ultimate goal must be to transform ideological conflict into constructive participation in building a better world. This is what is meant by the process called 'détente'—not the hunger for relaxation of tension, not the striving for agreements at any price, not the mindless search

HAR
definition
of détente

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for friendly atmosphere which some critics use as naive and dangerous caricatures."

By the time of this speech the “complex and delicate” policy Kissinger called for was impossible to pursue, at least until after the presidential elections. This passage nevertheless remains the best capsule summary of détente, and it accurately reflects Kissinger’s basic position, which always included both containment and coexistence.

A third charge, mainly from the left, is that détente was pursued at the expense of moral considerations. In the 1970s, the standard reply was that nothing was more moral than peace. This was clever, but failed to confront the issues. There were two aspects to the criticism. First was the broad, older claim that one could not do any business with Communists; to do so would compromise the moral standing of the United States. By the 1970s, this had less impact than in the early postwar period. The more immediate and operational question concerned the impact of détente on human rights in the Soviet Union: the price for dealing with Moscow should have been an end to repression inside the Soviet Union, or, at a minimum, free emigration.

The critics had a point. Détente was narrowly based, in the sense that it was primarily a political and strategic policy. The human-rights issue struck at the very legitimacy and survival of the Soviet political structure. No one in the Nixon-Ford period believed that the Soviet Union could be bribed by economic concessions or arms control into relief in the area of human rights. The opposite was the working hypothesis that was put into practice: in an atmosphere of détente it might prove possible to gain some internal relaxation, especially with regard to emigration. That was the strategy that worked until challenged in 1975 by the Jackson amendment linking trade and Jewish emigration, which assumed the opposite: that pressures would pay off. It failed.

By far the most serious charge was that Kissinger's détente dangerously weakened the country's defense and jeopardized America's national security. In the early 1970s this charge was usually documented by presenting evidence of the growing Soviet arsenal of missiles; this was inanely attributed to the shortcomings of SALT, as if Kissinger could have charmed the

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Soviets into a permanent state of strategic inferiority. The subsidiary charge is more to the point: namely, that because of the narcotic effect of détente, the United States complacently permitted the buildup of Soviet power and neglected a U.S. countereffort, in the mistaken conviction that Moscow could be tamed by diplomacy. This is the essence of President Reagan's accusation of a "decade of neglect." Again, it is nonsense.

During this so-called decade of neglect the United States increased its capability to attack critical Soviet targets from 1,700 warheads in 1970 to 7,000 in 1978. In the 1970s, the United States deployed 500 newer ICBMs with three MIRV warheads each; it converted its sea-based missile force to nearly 500 new Poseidon missiles, each with 10 to 14 warheads, replacing the older single-warhead Polaris missile. The even longer-range and more capable Trident missiles for submarines were under advanced development when Ford left office. The construction of the first Trident submarine began in 1975. The B-52s were modernized with new avionics and new engines and were equipped with short-range attack missiles; the air-launched cruise missile was developed and tested in this same period. The B-1 was developed, though stopped by Carter. Under the détente of the 1970s the United States improved its strategic position far more than under the period of anti-détente, when no new strategic systems were deployed that were not created by Nixon, Ford or Carter.

It is worth considering the judgments of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a letter to Senator Proxmire, written shortly *after* Kissinger left office: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff do not agree that the Soviet Union has achieved military superiority over the United States. . . . [US strategic forces] are considered sufficient to achieve US objectives today."

Despite the persistence of these myths, there has been some mellowing. One of Kissinger's critics, the writer Norman Podhoretz, even conceded that he did achieve "greatness" as a practitioner of the art of diplomacy. Indeed, as was said of Nixon, Kissinger has been lucky in his successors. His conduct of office seems to grow as his successors compile a less enviable record. Even one of Kissinger's more persistent and incisive critics, a former colleague at Harvard, Stanley Hoffmann, wrote that the questions Kissinger provokes "are not the ones that are asked of trivial figures."

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Once, in San Clemente, when his staff was composing one of Nixon's long annual reports that we called the State of the World report, Kissinger told us to use something from Immanuel Kant's essay on perpetual peace. This set off a wild staff search in San Clemente, and not surprisingly, there was no copy of the essay in that pleasant resort town. So we called Washington urgently to dispatch a copy on the next courier flight. This puzzled the Washington staff no end.

Kant's exposition was a simple one: perpetual peace is achievable but it does not come naturally; it must be constructed. This indeed was the key to Kissinger's foreign policy. Despite Vietnam, despite Watergate, Kissinger left American foreign policy in better shape than he found it. Three days before he left office, Kissinger was assessed by the London *Times*: "It is usually better to have a great man in a great position, and whatever his errors of judgement, or his failures, Dr. Kissinger is one of the great American statesmen of the twentieth century."

Kissinger would probably reply, "What errors?"

Summit at Vladivostok

The HENRY RETURNS on President Ford's first meeting with Leonid Brezhnev are extremely reassuring—the more so because the President's hand at summit bargaining had not previously been tried and little of substantive value had been expected from the Vladivostok session. Until the details of the joint statement on strategic offensive arms are published and debated, no definitive evaluation is possible. However much they add to the atmosphere of "detente," clinks of champagne glasses are no substitute for the facts. But at this point a certain anticipatory satisfaction seems well within bounds.

Quite apart from the recent political crisis and change in the White House, the missile programs of both superpowers—and the anxieties to which those programs give rise—had already put the future of detente under a cloud. The earlier promise of moving on smartly from the 1972 interim (five-year) accord on offensive arms seemed to be yielding to successive new rounds of weapons tests and deployments and to successive new bouts of political tension. The strengthening of Mr. Ford's political opposition in the recent elections and the burgeoning of the West's economic disarray provided other dark omens. And, as we say, Mr. Ford was new at the summit game.

What seems to have happened, however, is that Mr. Ford and Mr. Brezhnev, bargaining broadly with a large number of SALT chips on the table, moved a major step closer to the critical goal of making the 1972 interim agreement permanent. The danger is thereby reduced that expiration of that accord in 1977 will produce an ill-checked explosion in the arms race. Moscow and Washington now hope to complete next year a long-term accord carrying through 1985. To this end, at Vladivostok two kinds of progress appear to have been made, both enshrining the politically crucial requirement of strategic equality.

First, Soviets and Americans agreed for the first time to negotiate an equal number of strategic vehicles of all different sorts — land-and sea-based missiles, plus strategic bombers and, in Henry Kissinger's thus-far unexplained phrase, "certain other categories of weapons." This apparently will involve some reductions by the Soviet Union which came out of SALT I in 1972 with an advantage in numbers of sea- and land-based missiles. The Russians also seem to have dropped their long-standing demand that the United States include in

its "strategic" arsenal (which is to SALT control) those of its Europe-based planes which can carry nuclear bombs to targets inside the Soviet Union; these planes will be dealt with in a European negotiating context. On its part, the United States finally agreed to put its greatly superior strategic-bomber force into its total of strategic vehicles subject to SALT control.

The second kind of progress registered in Vladivostok concerns MIRV, the multi-warhead missile which—by its threat of destroying the opponent's land-based missiles in the ground—has come to be considered the most destabilizing and politically volatile strategic weapon. The United States has deployed thousands of MIRV warheads; the Soviet Union has tested this weapon but has not yet deployed it. It was the American lead in MIRV which let Mr. Nixon accept the relative disadvantage in numbers of launchers and in missile carrying power ("throw-weight") which SALT I conferred on the United States. Now, however, both sides have agreed to seek an equal number of MIRVed vehicles; not all strategic vehicles are MIRVed. The United States could hardly have stopped the Kremlin from MIRVing without this accord but this accord evidently puts an outer limit on the number of launchers the Kremlin can MIRV. The gravest question here—Sen. Henry Jackson's question—is likely to be: does not an agreement for equal numbers of MIRVed vehicles give an advantage over time to the Russians, whose huge extra throw-weight capability would let them pack more and larger MIRV warheads into each vehicle? The further question of how to verify a MIRV limit will also have to be explored.

There will be time and occasion, as well as need, to look at the new SALT prospect with a beady eye. In no area of public policy is the tension between the feasible and the desirable so acute. And in no area of public policy is debate so vulnerable to emotions—hope and fear—which render debate academic. We and others will have more to say on the matter. For the moment, we would note only that the control of strategic arms—their characteristics as well as their numbers—is the most urgent and central part of that unfinished experiment in moderated superpower competition known commonly as "detente." Much other business must be done—in the Mideast, for instance—but SALT is what detente is principally about. In his first summit encounter, President Ford has moved boldly. Whether he has moved wisely is something the whole world strains to see.

35

THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 1977

Vladivostok Arms Pact

The surprise Ford-Brezhnev agreement setting numeri-
cal limits on strategic offensive missiles and bombers
does not "put a cap on the arms race," as Secretary of
State Kissinger claims. On the contrary, it would author-
ize both sides to go ahead with their planned build-ups.
Costs and instabilities are likely to increase.

President Ford asserts that the Vladivostok agreement was the best that could be obtained from the Russians. Secretary Kissinger argues that an even greater Soviet build-up would be probable without the agreement. If these statements are accepted as fact—and both require close Congressional scrutiny—the world may have to make the best of a bad agreement. But there is little reason to cheer about it or to describe it, as did the President's spokesman, as a "triumph" of diplomacy. It is no such thing.

The astonishingly high level set for missiles carrying
MIRV multiple warheads, reportedly about 1,300, is the
chief disappointment in the accord. That is almost four
times the ceiling the Pentagon originally wanted to set
for Soviet deployment of the U.S.S.R.'s big new MIRV-
tipped missiles. Any larger number, the Defense Depart-
ment warned, would give the Soviet Union a "first
strike" capability against American land-based missile
forces. The figure is almost twice as high as Secretary
Kissinger reportedly offered the Russians last spring, and
but 30 per cent higher than the number the Rus-
sians themselves reportedly proposed at that time.

Yet President Ford now asserts that the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff approve the Vladivostok arrangement: If that is true, the reason is clear. The military on each side evidently were less interested in limiting the other's forces than they were in gaining a green light for their own programs.

The country has a right to know, before Congress gives consent to further negotiations to complete these accords, just what the American buildup will entail. It clearly authorizes a further increase of American MIRV-tipped missiles from the less than 800 now deployed to the 1,286 the Pentagon wants.

Americans are unlikely to learn very much about what
went on in that smoke-filled room near Vladivostok,
where Mr. Ford and Mr. Kissinger for the United States
and Mr. Brezhnev and Mr. Gromyko for Russia met alone
for some nine and a half hours with only two inter-
preters—and no advisers—present.

The Administration has already acknowledged, how-
ever, that the agreement will not halt the qualitative
arms race now underway. The United States will be free
to deploy hundreds of B-1 bombers and ten Trident
nuclear missile submarines. The Soviet Union will be
free to deploy 1,300 of the new MIRV missiles it has
been developing. There is no restriction of missile flight-
testing to slow the qualitative arms race. Nor is there
any bar to such other de-stabilizing developments as
land-mobile and airdroid ICBMs, cruise missiles
launched from submarines and certain major improve-
ments in missile accuracy.

Reductions in total numbers of offensive delivery vehicles—a ceiling of 2,400 reportedly is set for the aggregate number of missiles and bombers on each side—are relegated to further negotiations for the post-1985 period. To begin “no later than” five or six years from now, these future negotiations undoubtedly will be simplified by the fact that the Russians now have agreed to equal numbers on both sides for strategic bombers and for MIRV-tipped missiles. Antoher gain lies in Soviet acceptance of the U.S. position that forward-based American aircraft in Europe and Asia are outside the accord.

What the Senate, which ultimately will have to ratify
the new treaty, must now decide is whether it is pre-
pared to settle for such high ceilings on strategic offen-
sive arms or whether the American leaders should be
asked to return to the conference table to seek more
meaningful arms control.

GUNS - (CONT.)

at the 25th party congress, in a
year or 15 months from now,
the success of the "peace pro-
gram," as the detente policy is
called here.

Foreign policy and the country's defense strategy also are key elements in determining the economic development program for the 1976-1980 period for decisions must be made soon on what resources will go for defense expenditures and what for economic development, industrial modernization, production of consumer goods and so forth

The timetable laid out at
Vladivostok also takes into
consideration the American
presidential election and the
impact here of the attacks
upon detente that this will
bring.

Even if the agreement is
concluded in June, it will not
go into effect until

1977. While this extended war
line was undoubtedly set to
allow the deployment of new
Soviet and American weapons
it also relaxes pressure on the
Ford administration to pre-
fer ratification, allowing the
President in fact to choos-
whether to push in the new
Congress or the one elected
two years from now.

This in turn means that the Kremlin will not have to worry about the agreement being rejected before the Soviet party congress—rejection or even a highly critical debate would undoubtedly cause many of Mr. Brezhnev’s supporters to desert him on the issue of detente.

39

The Vladivostok Accord

THE DETAILS of the tentative accord on strategic arms negotiated in Vladivostok are becoming known, and the developing debate on it suggests at once that it is generally a worthy agreement, that it is being well received in Congress, and that it still needs closer attention. The agreement would limit strategic launchers (missiles and bombers) to 2,400 on each side, limit multi-warhead (MIRV) missiles to 1,300 each, run for 10 years, and require further negotiations on follow-on limitations and possible reductions. The United States and the Soviet Union hope to wrap it up by the time Mr. Brezhnev comes to Washington next spring.

Even those initially skeptical of the Vladivostok accord have had to concede these positive features of it. It confirms in the two crucial categories of total launchers and MIRVed launchers the principle of equality, thus greatly reducing either side's fear that the other can somehow gain strategic advantage. It establishes limits where there had been none, thus precluding an opened arms race. It ensures that earlier SALT agreements will become all but permanent, thus foreclosing a major source of Soviet-American anxiety. It further ensures, according to President Ford last Monday, that strategic arms budgets will not go up except as a consequence of inflation. It symbolizes and advances the Soviet and American commitment to detente—a result which can feed back into other aspects of policy. This is not to say that many people, ourselves included, do not have some serious reservations about the Ford-Brezhnev handiwork. Chief among them is the undisputed fact that the tentative accord bears the potential for pushing ahead certain aspects of the arms race. The newly proposed ceilings not only set upper limits but in effect license build-ups to the very high levels of these limits. It is the American "obligation" to reach them, Mr. Ford said. But is it? Why should not those ceilings be regarded as levels to be lowered by further immediate negotiations, rather than as goals which must be met no matter what?

We can understand why Mr. Ford might wish to impress the Russians with a demonstration of confidence that he has the political capacity to get the new weapons from Congress if he has to. But that should not lock him in. Suppose, say, 15 senators conditioned their support for a Vladivostok-type treaty on an administration pledge to go right back into negotiations. The peculiar quality of SALT diplomacy at this stage is that its implementation will be spread over 10 years and will be sub-

ject, via the annual budgetary process, to regular congressional review. This enables—indeed, it enforces— the participation of Congress in SALT diplomacy in a profound way.

There is another problem. The new guidelines to SALT negotiators authorize Soviet MIRVing to match our own. The "throw-weight" of the biggest Soviet launchers will let them pack a lot more MIRV warheads than do American launchers. This could lead the United States to fear a Soviet first strike against American land-based missiles. This poses its own dilemma for American policy. President Ford said last Monday that if the Pentagon and the Congress perceived Soviet throw-weight as a threat, they could match it. That, of course, would only give Moscow more of the same first-strike jitters felt in Washington; it would make the destabilization mutual. There are alternatives: Either the United States could shift a larger part of the American nuclear force to sea or make land-based missiles less vulnerable. Or Washington could move toward a determination that, given the invulnerability of other launchers and the implausibility of a general nuclear war, a Soviet advantage in throw-weight simply could not be converted into either a strategic or a political edge. We trust there will be further debate on this score.

On yet another score, Sen. Henry M. Jackson (D-Wash.) guarantees further debate. He is not so much concerned that an agreement on the lines of Vladivostok would be unsafe as that it would permit excessively high levels of total launchers and MIRVed launchers and would cost excessive billions. He believes—and this is as hard to disprove as to demonstrate—that the administration could have negotiated a "better" agreement. Mr. Jackson may well ask the Senate to repudiate the Vladivostok accord and to instruct the President to go back to the table with Mr. Brezhnev. Whether he can muster a majority for this purpose, which would amount to a major humiliation to Mr. Ford, seems doubtful. But the administration cannot fail to ignore the larger chance Mr. Jackson might have later to collect 34 votes to block a treaty which he thought was unwise. Meanwhile, we note that Sen. Jackson is a serious student of strategy as well as politics, and we look forward to hearing him make his case. The cause of strategic arms control deserves the best—which is to say the most thoughtful and responsible—presentation of all points of view.

NEW YORK TIMES 6 DECEMBER 1974

## The Archbishop Returns

The scheduled return to Cyprus tomorrow of President Makarios, nearly five months after his ouster in a coup ordered by Greece's disintegrating military dictatorship, is unquestionably a symbol of both moral justice and constitutional order. But even some of his supporters fear that the Archbishop's homecoming at this time will diminish prospects for fruitful negotiations looking toward a peaceful political, economic and social reconstruction of the island republic.

Turkey says flatly that the Archbishop's return will mean suspension even of the negotiations between acting President Glafkos Clerides and his Turkish Cypriote counterpart, Rauf Denktash, that have made some progress on the colossal humanitarian problems arising from Turkey's military blitz last August. With winter rapidly approaching, any hiatus in these talks could be indescribably tragic for many among the 200,000 Cypriotes driven from their homes by the summer violence.

Although the Archbishop undoubtedly retains the backing of the vast majority of Greek Cypriotes, some among them — the well-armed "Eoka B" guerrillas,

organized by the late General Grivas, and others who supported the July coup — remain his implacable foes. Thus *there are* fears that his return may provoke resumption of fighting between pro- and anti-Makarios Greek Cypriotes, giving the Turks an excuse for new military action, supposedly to protect Turkish Cypriotes.

If Turkey launched yet another military intervention, it would surely bring war with Greece in addition to destroying all hope for restoring peace and viability to Cyprus. It is incumbent on Archbishop Makarios to exhibit toward both his Greek Cypriote enemies and the Turkish community a spirit of conciliation and compromise that has never before characterized his conduct of office. And Turkey's allies must urge restraint on Ankara with far greater force than they displayed last summer.

It would improve chances for a Cyprus settlement enormously if Turkey could move out of its political and constitutional crisis and return a strong Government with a working majority in Parliament. In the existing climate, only such a Government in Ankara can make the necessary concessions, even as only the kind of strong Government Greece now has under Premier Caramani can negotiate realistically and win acceptance at home for a far from ideal solution.