Nuclear Weapons and the Peace
Movement

NCE GALLEYS FOR VOL. ____

Spring

Summer

Autumn

Henry A. Kissinger

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

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

THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY

CSIS / 1800 K Street, N.
Washington, D.C.

FOR PUBLICATION WITHOUT PERMISSION.
THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY

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of postwar history: that but for Soviet pressures in the immediately postwar period American troops would have been withdrawn from Europe in the forties, as indeed they were from Korea; that but for the Korean war the U.S. military budget would have shrunk to derisory levels; that it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

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

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

All consideration of the nuclear question must begin with this reality: Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons have been produced by the superpowers; hundreds by medium-sized countries; and dozens by recent and possibly new entrants into the nuclear club. No scheme of disarmament could account for all these weapons. Nations would insist on residual forces to protect themselves against cheating, or against the fact that the factories that produced the weapons would remain, or, should by some improbable chance these too be destroyed, against the knowledge in the minds of men from which these factories and weapons sprang in the first place. Mankind cannot unlearn the secret of the atom. In other words, we are doomed to some kind of deterrence, equilibrium, or balance at some level and in some form.

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

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Our current dilemmas are the result of the decision of all our postwar leaders to base security on technology—to compensate for an assumed Soviet superiority in manpower and conventional weapons by reliance on our nuclear arsenal. Stalin’s aggressiveness was real enough. But from the perspective of a generation, it is possible to argue that the West was too ready to attribute a military edge to an adversary only recently devastated by war and 20 million casualties; that the NATO nations underestimated the significance of their own industrial potential and forgot—conveniently—that in fact NATO’s manpower is greater than that of the East. All these reflections are now academic. For the immediate future, the West is locked into the decisions of a generation; whether conclusions we draw from the current realities and the concerns they generate, for at least a transitional period it will be nuclear weapons which inhibit aggression in Europe. The evasions of three decades cannot be remedied by proclamations but by hard and dedicated effort.

The principal evasion was the refusal to face the fact that strategic nuclear weapons could continue to counterbalance local Soviet advantages only if the U.S. strategic arsenal was clearly superior to that of the Soviet Union—superiority being defined as the ability to destroy the opposing nuclear capability at acceptable cost. That condition began to disappear in the sixties. Technology tended toward equality, and to levels beyond which additional increments of destructive-ness lose all relationship to the objectives likely to be in dispute. Under current conditions superiority, to be meaningful, would require an edge so large that no opponent would tolerate it and calculations so esoteric that few leaders will understand them or stake survival on them. Arms-control theory and practice, with their formal emphasis on equality, only accelerated and legitimized this trend.

western governments and societies preferred to ignore the consequences of their own decisions. Logically, once the Soviet Union acquired the capacity to threaten the United States with direct nuclear retaliation, the American pledge to launch an all-out nuclear war on behalf of Europe was bound increasingly to lose its credibility and public acceptance, if not its sense—and so would the alliance's defense strategy. For the strategy now rested on the threat to initiate mutual suicide. But governments continued the existing strategy, seeking to compensate by emphatic reiterations of all-out nuclear defense for the implausibility of their professions.

I made these points in a speech in Brussels in the fall of 1979 and was roundly criticized for allegedly undermining the credibility of NATO strategy. Unfortunately, what I said was true and has now come to pass. For more than two decades it was obvious that U.S.-Soviet nuclear parity would lead us—sooner or later—to this point. And for more than two decades, the West has hid its head in the sand and ignored the inevitable.

There was an occasional flirtation with a doctrine of limited nuclear war to restore some relationship between policy and military power. In my early writings on the subject in the 1950s, I, too, was briefly tempted by that theory. The effort never got very far. Part of the reason was that from the European perspective, the distinction between limited and general nuclear war was not as clearcut as on the American side of the Atlantic; a relatively few nuclear weapons could produce catastrophe and chaos difficult to distinguish from what only total war could do to America. Another cause was the polarization within the community of civilian experts between those who wanted to make nuclear weapons "conventional" and those who feared that governments could be kept from initiating a nuclear holocaust only by guaranteeing that nuclear war would be as gruesome as possible. Ironically, those circles usually advocating humane and progressive domestic policies generally insisted that nuclear strategy be aimed primarily at the mass extermination of civilians.

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

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

Europe exemplifies the current confusion. Too often it has been portrayed as an American attempt to shift the risks of nuclear war to Europe or to use Europe as a forward base for strictly American purposes. This is absurd. To the extent that intermediate-range weapons are needed for American nuclear strategy at all—and this depends on the resolution of our own internal debate over the utility of a counterforce capability—they can be deployed in various modes at sea. How much counterforce we seek depends on how much we wish to insure that we have an option other than the mass extermination of civilian, Abjuring counterforce has a price: The more we emphasize frightfulness in our strategy, the more we diminish its credibility in the circumstances against unexpected catastrophe. The real argument for placing intermediate-range nuclear weapons on the soil of the continent has always been twofold: to reduce the possibility of selective Soviet nuclear blackmail against Europe alone, and to link the nuclear defense of Europe indissolubly to the strategic deterrent of the United States. Given the diminishing credibility of the threat of strategic war initiated from the United States, the argument is plausible that the Soviet Union might be tempted to exploit its preponderance of intermediate-range missiles for blackmail against Europe—reasoning that no American response with strategic weapons could alter the outcome. That danger is clearly diminished by the proposed deployment of intermediate-range weapons which would create the imperative of a certain automaticity in the response.

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

If our European allies are not persuaded by arguments such as these, however, it would be wrong for us to insist on them—especially since, as I have said, we can deploy at sea the intermediate-range weapons we need for a purely American strategy. I believe that our allies should now decide that aspect of the requirements of their defense without further American hectoring. By the same token, our proposals in the INF talks should be made on their merits, independent of considerations of shoring up the domestic support for our deployment in various European countries. Such a course would restore balance to the transatlantic dialogue and, frankly, a sense of proportion to the domestic deliberations of our allies.

## Renouncing the First Use of Nuclear Weapons

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

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

A statement of no first use would leave us psychologically naked in the intermediate period that would surely extend over at least five years, even if our own government and all our NATO allies were prepared to make immediate, serious, and sustained efforts to redress the imbalance in conventional weapons. Of course, if the reaction of our allies were less enthusiastic about conventional rearmament than anticipated by the authors, the psychological and military vulnerability of NATO would be magnified even more. Our leaders have an obligation to reduce their reliance on nuclear weapons; they must not do so, however, at the price of accelerating a trend of pacifism and panic that may invite Soviet nuclear blackmail. Much of the antinuclear agitation is, after all, directed against the West's nonnuclear weapons as well.

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

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

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

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

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

## Strategic Arms Limitation and Reduction

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

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

This is why so much hope has been attached for over a decade to U.S.-Soviet talks on strategic arms control, and why President Reagan has reaffirmed the commitment of all of his predecessors to limiting these weapons of mass destruction, giving special emphasis to reductions. And that is why there have emerged the various freeze proposals now under active discussion in the United States.

President Reagan's commitment to strategic arms talks marks a watershed in the American domestic debate. For nearly a decade, disputes over strategic weapons limitation have torn our domestic consensus, becoming symbolic surrogates for larger controversies over policy towards the Soviet Union. Arms-control negotiations over the years have been buffeted by debates between competing philosophies sometimes only indirectly touching upon the details being negotiated. Advocates have made exorbitant claims and insisted on separating arms control from all other aspects of policy; opponents saw in them a serious weakening of Western will power and concentrated on portraying the inherent balancing of relative advantages as unilateral concessions. President Reagan, by proposing and entering a negotiation over strategic arms reduction, has liberated our domestic debate and permitted a serious public discussion of the real issues of arms control. The delay in starting the talks, legitimately needed for preparation, is a small price to pay for opening up prospects of a successful conclusion that were not available to either of his two immediate predecessors.

There exists, then, an unprecedented opportunity, for President Reagan's Eureka speech has put forth a new approach based on substantial reductions. This takes account of the concerns of many about the scale of nuclear arsenals. And it deals as well with what is the real heart of the matter, namely crisis stability, or diminishing the danger of the outbreak of nuclear war. For if the reductions are confined to launchers, without concern for the composition and nature of strategic forces, they could increase instability rather than ease it. After all, the overwhelming new problem in the strategic field is the existence of multiple warheads on strategic missiles. Even if the launchers on both sides are exactly equal, the disproportion between the number of attacking warheads and the number of launcher/targets represents a standing temptation to strike first. Reductions of launchers do not automatically change the disproportion. In fact, at some levels reducing the number of delivery vehicles without changing the proportion of warheads to missiles increases the vulnerability of the missiles attacked; a first strike is simplified. The Reagan administration is surely on the right track in striving for a proposal that combines reductions with restrictions on other characteristics of weapons to inhibit, rather than ease, a surprise attack.

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But it is also true that such a process is enormously time consuming, not only in elaborating our own position but in negotiating an agreement with the Soviet Union. It took years of SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) negotiations to agree on numerical limits on launchers; the negotiations now envisaged are infinitely more complex.

A policy is needed to bridge this gap lest careless "quick-fix" solutions dominate the debate. The desire for a dramatic breakthrough has produced various proposals for nuclear freezes. Experience has shown, however, that it is easy to formulate general objectives in arms control negotiations: it is much more difficult to negotiate a meaningful outcome whatever principle is finally adopted. We have, after all, the experience of the two SALT agreements which were both essentially a kind of numerical freeze. Complex negotiations went on for years over what weapons to count; how to relate multiple warheads to individual delivery vehicles; and how to relate either to airborne weapons of mass destruction. Attempting a freeze now would encounter all the old SALT dilemmas—for example, of where to draw the dividing line between "modernized" and "new" systems. Who can forget the Soviets' attempt to define all of their replacement weapons as only "modernized" and hence permitted, while all of ours were said to be "new" and hence proscribed? In short, a freeze requires a baseline; by itself it is no advance over the results of the SALT process which already exists.

In my view, the existing SALT framework may be useful in providing the baselines and the definitions from which to negotiate over the complex reductions that the administration is in the process of developing. At the same time, we must take seriously the concerns expressed in the Senate debate on ratification of SALT II. On that occasion, I supported ratification if three conditions were fulfilled: first, if a major defense buildup were undertaken to restore the military balance; second, if certain amendments were made and if specific ambiguities, particularly in the accompanying three-year Protocol, were cleared up; and third, if the United States made clear the linkage between SALT and Soviet geopolitical conduct. Some senators, led by the then majority leader Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), stressed the importance of maintaining the American right to build heavy ICBMs such as the Soviet

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

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

* Second, lowering the ceilings below the limits established by SALT II to around 2,000-2,100 strategic delivery vehicles. This would symbolize a commitment to reductions.

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

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

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

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

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

## Conclusion

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

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NOTES

1. See Henry A. Kissinger "The Future of Nato", The Washington Quarterly, 2, 4, Autumn 1979, p.12

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

CYJ

# Cutlines for Henry A. Kissinger

## Cutline A, from Galley X1

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

## Cutline B from Galley X12

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

## Cutline C from Galley X17

"We must never forget that the cause of tensions is the political conflict between East and West..."

## Cutline D from Galley X6

"It is reckless in a nuclear world to pretend that any accident must automatically escalate into Armageddon."

## Cutline E from Galley X 3

"The real issue before us will be the nature of deterrence, and its components."

## Cutline F from Galley X3

"The destructiveness of weapons was bound sooner or later to break the cocoon in which we suppressed the consciousness of our Promethean power."

TA588X1

FIRST GALLEYS

MIAMI COPY
MADISON AV ST
BOSTON
COMMITTEE COPY

Received June 15

# Nuclear Weapons and the Peace Movement

NCE GALLEYS FOR VOL. 5 NO. 3

Winter

Spring

Summer

Autumn

1982

Henry A. Kissinger

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

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

THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY

CSIS / 1800 K Street, N.
Washington, D.C. 20006

FOR PUBLICATION WITHOUT PERMISSION
THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY

X 1

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

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Our current dilemmas are the result of the
decision of all our postwar leaders to base
security on technology—to compensate for
an assumed Soviet superiority in manpower
and conventional weapons by reliance on our
nuclear arsenal. Stalin’s aggressiveness was
real enough. But from the perspective of a
generation, it is possible to argue that the
West was too ready to attribute a military
edge to an adversary only recently devastated
by war and 20 million casualties; that the
NATO nations underestimated the signifi-
cance of their own industrial potential and
forgot—conveniently—that in fact NATO’s
manpower is greater than that of the East. All
these reflections are now academic. For the
immediate future, the West is locked into the
decisions of a generation; whether conclu-
sions we draw from the current realities and
the concerns they generate, for at least a
transitional period it will be nuclear weapons
which inhibit aggression in Europe. The eva-
sions of three decades cannot be remedied by
proclamations but by hard and dedicated ef-
fort.

The principal evasion was the refusal to
face the fact that strategic nuclear weapons
could continue to counter-balance local
Soviet advantages only if the U.S. strategic
arsenal was clearly superior to that of the
Soviet Union—superiority being defined as
the ability to destroy the opposing nuclear
capability at acceptable cost. That condition
began to disappear in the sixties. Technology
tended toward equality, and to levels beyond
which additional increments of destructive-
ness lose all relationship to the objectives
likely to be in dispute. Under current condi-
tions superiority, to be meaningful, would
require an edge so large that no opponent
would tolerate it and calculations so esoteric
that few leaders will understand them or
stake survival on them. Arms-control theory
and practice, with their formal emphasis on
equality, only accelerated and legitimized
this trend.

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

I made these points in a speech in Brussels
in the fall of 1979* and was roundly criticized
for allegedly undermining the credibility of
NATO strategy. Unfortunately, what I said
was true and has now come to pass. For more
than two decades it was obvious that U.S.-
Soviet nuclear parity would lead us—sooner
or later—to this point. And for more than
two decades, the West has hid its head in the
sand and ignored the inevitable.

There was an occasional flirtation with a
doctrine of limited nuclear war to restore
some relationship between policy and mili-
tary power. In my early writings on the sub-
ject in the 1950s, I, too, was briefly tempted
by that theory. The effort never got very far.
Part of the reason was that from the Euro-
pean perspective, the distinction between
limited and general nuclear war was not as
clearcut as on the American side of the At-
lantic; a relatively few nuclear weapons
could produce catastrophe and chaos difficult
to distinguish from what only total war could
do to America. Another cause was the
polarization within the community of civilian
experts between those who wanted to make
nuclear weapons "conventional" and those
who feared that governments could be kept
from initiating a nuclear holocaust only by
guaranteeing that nuclear war would be as
gruesome as possible. Ironically, those cir-
cles usually advocating humane and progres-
sive domestic policies generally insisted that
nuclear strategy be aimed primarily at the
mass extermination of civilians.

OPTIONAL:

See Henry A. Kissinger, "The Future of NATO."
TWR, vol.2, no.4 (Autumn 1979).

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

4780

End Tape Number 588x2

TA588X3

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

Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
in Europe (INF)

The debate over deployment of American
intermediate-range nuclear missiles in
Europe exemplifies the current confusion.
Too often it has been portrayed as an Ameri-
can attempt to shift the risks of nuclear war
to Europe or to use Europe as a forward base
for strictly American purposes. This is ab-
surd. To the extent that intermediate-range
weapons are needed for American nuclear
strategy at all—and this depends on the re-
olution of our own internal debate over the
utility of a counterforce capability—they can
be deployed in various modes at sea. (How
much counterforce we seek depends on how
much we wish to insure that we have an op-
tion other than the mass extermination of ci-
vilian. Abjuring counterforce has a price:
The more we emphasize frightfulness in our
strategy, the more we diminish its credibility
in the circumstances against unexpected
catastrophe.) The real argument for placing
intermediate-range nuclear weapons on the
soil of the continent has always been
twofold: to reduce the possibility of selective
Soviet nuclear blackmail against Europe
alone, and to link the nuclear defense of
Europe indissolubly to the strategic deterrent
of the United States. Given the diminishing
credibility of the threat of strategic war in-
itiated from the United States, the argument
is plausible that the Soviet Union might be
tempted to exploit its preponderance of in-
termediate-range missiles for blackmail
against Europe—reasoning that no American
response with strategic weapons could alter
the outcome. That danger is clearly di-
minished by the proposed deployment of in-
termediate-range weapons which would
create the imperative of a certain automatic-
ity in the response.

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

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

4810
End Tape Number 588x3

TA588X4

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

3500

End Tape Number 588x4

TA588X5

This is why so much hope has been attached for over a decade to U.S.-Soviet talks on strategic arms control and why President Reagan has reaffirmed the commitment of all of his predecessors to limiting these weapons of mass destruction, giving special emphasis to reductions. And that is why there have emerged the various freeze proposals now under active discussion in the United States.

President Reagan's commitment to strategic arms talks marks a watershed in the American domestic debate. For nearly a decade, disputes over strategic weapons limitation have torn our domestic consensus, becoming symbolic surrogates for larger controversies over policy towards the Soviet Union. Arms-control negotiations over the years have been buffeted by debates between competing philosophies sometimes only indirectly touching upon the details being negotiated. Advocates have made exorbitant claims and insisted on separating arms control from all other aspects of policy; opponents saw in them a serious weakening of Western will power and concentrated on portraying the inherent balancing of relative advantages as unilateral concessions. President Reagan, by proposing and entering a negotiation over strategic arms reduction, will have liberated our domestic debate and permitted a serious public discussion of the real issues of arms control. The delay in starting the talks, legitimately needed for preparation, is a small price to pay for opening up prospects of a successful conclusion that were not available to either of his two immediate predecessors.

4800

End Tape Number 588x5

TA588X6

But it is also true that such a process is enormously time-consuming, not only in elaborating our own position but in negotiating an agreement with the Soviet Union. It took years of SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) negotiations to agree on numerical limits on launchers; the negotiations now envisaged are infinitely more complex.

A policy is needed to bridge this gap lest careless "quick-fix" solutions dominate the debate. The desire for a dramatic breakthrough has produced various proposals for nuclear freezes. Experience has shown, however, that it is easy to formulate general objectives in arms control negotiations; it is much more difficult to negotiate a meaningful outcome whatever principle is finally adopted. We have, after all, the experience of the two SALT agreements which were both essentially a kind of numerical freeze. Complex negotiations went on for years over what weapons to count; how to relate multiple warheads to individual delivery vehicles; and how to relate either to airborne weapons of mass destruction. Attempting a freeze now would encounter all the old SALT dilemmas—for example, of where to draw the dividing line between "modernized" and "new" systems. Who can forget the Soviets' attempt to define all of their replacement weapons as only "modernized" and hence permitted, while all of ours were said to be "new" and hence proscribed? In short, a freeze requires a baseline; by itself it is no advance over the results of the SALT process which already exists.

In my view, the existing SALT framework may be useful in providing the baselines and the definitions from which to negotiate over the complex reductions that the administration is in the process of developing. At the same time, we must take seriously the concerns expressed in the Senate debate on ratification of SALT II. On that occasion, I supported ratification if three conditions were fulfilled: first, if a major defense buildup were undertaken to restore the military balance; second, if certain amendments were made and if specific ambiguities, particularly in the accompanying three-year Protocol, were cleared up; and third, if the United States made clear the linkage between SALT and Soviet geopolitical conduct. Some senators, led by the then majority leader Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), stressed the importance of maintaining the American right to build heavy ICBMs such as the Soviet Union already possessed in large numbers.

4280
end 588X6

TA588X7

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

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

## Conclusion

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

end section 588X7

3880

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

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

Even less attention is paid to some basic facts of postwar history: that but for Soviet pressures in the immediately postwar period American troops would have been withdrawn from Europe in the Forties, as indeed they were from Korea; that but for the Korean war the US military budget would have shrunk to derisory levels; that it was the threat to the freedom of Berlin in the late Fifties which accelerated the American military build-up; that the Soviet strategic arsenal has grown and been modernized relentlessly since the Cuban missile crisis twenty years ago; that for a variety of reasons the United States stopped its numerical build-up in the late Sixties and slowed its modernization for the better part of the Seventies; and that all wars in the

2

All consideration of the nuclear question must begin with this reality: Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons have been produced by the superpowers; hundreds by medium-sized countries; dozens by recent and possibly new entrants into the nuclear club. No scheme of disarmament could account for all these weapons. Nations would insist on residual forces to protect themselves against cheating, or against the fact that the factories that produced the weapons would remain, or, should by some improbable chance these too be destroyed, against the knowledge in the minds of men from which these factories and weapons sprang in the first place. Mankind cannot unlearn the secret of the atom. In other words, we are doomed to some kind of deterrence, equilibrium, or balance at some level and in some form.

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

3

Our current dilemmas are the result of the decision of all our postwar leaders to base security on technology-- to compensate for an assumed Soviet superiority in manpower and conventional weapons by reliance on our nuclear arsenal. Stalin's aggressiveness was real enough. But from the perspective of a generation, it is possible to argue that the West was too ready to attribute a military edge to an adversary only recently devastated by war and 20 million casualties; that the NATO nations underestimated the significance of their own industrial potential and forgot--conveniently--that in fact NATO's manpower is greater than that of the East. All these reflections are now academic. For the immediate future, the West is locked into the decisions of a generation; whatever conclusions we draw from the current realities and the concerns they generate, for at least a transitional period it will be nuclear weapons which inhibit aggression in Europe. The evasions of three decades cannot be remedied by proclamations but only by hard and dedicated effort.

The principal evasion was the refusal to face the fact that strategic nuclear weapons could continue to counterbalance local Soviet advantages only if the US strategic arsenal was clearly superior to that of the Soviet Union-- superiority being defined as the ability to destroy the opposing nuclear capability at acceptable cost. That condition began to disappear in the Sixties. Technology tended toward equality, and to levels beyond which additional increments of destructiveness lose all relationship to the objectives likely to be in dispute. Under current conditions superiority to be meaningful would require an edge so large that no opponent would tolerate it and calculations so esoteric that few leaders will understand them or stake survival on them. Arms control theory and practice, with their formal emphasis on equality, only accelerated and legitimized this trend.

While all these changes were taking place Western governments and societies preferred to ignore the consequences of their own decisions. Logically, once the Soviet Union acquired the capacity to threaten the United States with direct nuclear retaliation, the American pledge to launch an all-out nuclear war on behalf of Europe was bound increasingly to lose its credibility and public acceptance, if not its sense--and so would the Alliance's defense strategy. For the strategy now rested on the threat to initiate mutual suicide. But governments continued the existing strategy, seeking to compensate by emphatic reiterations of all-out nuclear defense for the implausibility of their professions.

4

I made these points in a speech in Brussels in the fall of 1979; I was roundly criticized for allegedly undermining the credibility of NATO strategy. Unfortunately, what I said was true and has now come to pass. For more than two decades it was obvious that US-Soviet nuclear weapons programs were tending toward parity at best and that this would make resort to general nuclear war absurd and the threat of it incredible. And for more than two decades, the West has hid its head in the sand and ignored the inevitable.

There was an occasional flirtation with a doctrine of limited nuclear war to restore some relationship between policy and military power. In my early writings on the subject in the 1950s, I, too, was tempted by that theory. The effort never got very far. Part of the reason was that from the European perspective, the distinction between limited and general nuclear war was not as clear-cut as on the American side of the Atlantic; a relatively few nuclear weapons could produce catastrophe and chaos difficult to distinguish from what only total war could do to America. Another cause was the polarization within the community of civilian experts between those who wanted to make nuclear weapons "conventional" and those who feared that governments could be kept from initiating a nuclear holocaust only by guaranteeing that nuclear war would be as gruesome as possible. Ironically, those circles usually advocating humane and progressive domestic policies generally insisted that nuclear strategy be aimed primarily at the mass extermination of civilians.

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

5

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

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

The debate over deployment of American intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe exemplifies the current confusion. Too often it has been portrayed as an American attempt to shift the risks of nuclear war to Europe or to use Europe as a forward base for strictly American purposes. This is absurd. To the extent that intermediate-range weapons are needed for American nuclear strategy at all--and this depends on the resolution of our own internal debate over the utility of a counterforce capability--they can be deployed in various modes at sea. The real argument for placing intermediate-range nuclear weapons on the soil of the continent has always been two-fold: to reduce the possibility of selective Soviet nuclear blackmail against Europe alone, and to link the nuclear defense of Europe indissolubly to the strategic deterrent of the United States. Given the diminishing credibility of the threat of strategic war initiated

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

6

from the United States, the argument is plausible that the
Soviet Union might be tempted to exploit its preponderance
of intermediate-range missiles for blackmail against Europe--
reasoning that no American response with strategic weapons
could alter the outcome. That danger is clearly diminished
by the proposed deployment of intermediate-range weapons
which would create the imperative of a certain automaticity
in the response.

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

If our European allies are not persuaded by arguments such
as these, however, it would be wrong for us to insist on
them--especially since, as I have said, we can deploy at
sea the intermediate-range weapons we need for a purely
American strategy. I believe that our allies should now
decide that aspect of the requirements of their defense
without further American hectoring. By the same token,
our proposals in the INF talks should be made on their merits,
independent of considerations of shoring up the domestic
support for our deployment in various European countries.
Such a course would restore balance to the transatlantic
dialogue and, frankly, a sense of proportion to the domestic
deliberations of our allies.

The issue of the intermediate-range missiles is a symptom,
not a cause, of the current malaise over strategy. The
real issue remains the need to gear our defense policies
to the twin realities of strategic parity and mounting public
concern over nuclear weapons. Recently a serious proposal

7

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

> A statement of no first use would leave us psycho-logically naked for a period that would surely extend over at least five years, even if our own government and all our NATO allies were prepared to make immediate, serious, and sustained efforts to redress the imbalance in conventional weapons. Of course, if the reaction of our allies were less forthcoming about conventional rearmament than anticipated by the authors, the psychological and military vulnerability of NATO would be magnified even more. Our leaders have an obligation to reduce their reliance on nuclear weapons; they must not do so, however, at the price of accelerating a trend of pacifism and panic that may invite Soviet nuclear black-mail. Much of the anti-nuclear agitation is, after all, directed against the West's non-nuclear weapons as well.

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

8

were roughly equal and yet victory was achieved by such un-
quantifiable factors as superior tactics, superior strategy,
or superior leadership. For centuries wars have started be-
tween seemingly evenly matched forces. There is no blinking
the fact that deterrence, when only conventional weapons were
involved, has frequently broken down. And we probably could
then not guarantee that we would live up to our no-first-use
declaration. Faced with the collapse of Europe we might well
reverse our proclaimed doctrine, thereby bringing about the
worst of all possible outcomes: a failure of conventional
deterrence and a nuclear war.

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

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


It has been NATO policy since at least the Harmel Report
of 1967 that the Atlantic Alliance has two main functions:
to maintain the collective defense, and to seek a more stable
relationship with the East by willingness to resolve political
problems through negotiations. Arms control has had a crucial
role in this effort. Public support for defense and for resis-

9

tance to Soviet challenges can be sustained in the democracies
only by demonstrating that the West is not the cause of confron-
tations. We have seen in recent years that failure to observe
this maxim generates massive pressure groups that then exact
perhaps excessive concessions from governments belatedly
recognizing their impact and suddenly eager to placate them.

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

This is why so much hope--perhaps too much hope--has
been attached for over a decade to US-Soviet talks on strategic
arms control and why President Reagan has reaffirmed the
commitment of all of his predecessors to limiting these
weapons of mass destruction, giving special emphasis to
reductions. And that is why there have emerged the various
freeze proposals now under active discussion in the United
States.

President Reagan's commitment to strategic arms talks marks
a watershed in the American domestic debate. For nearly a
decade, disputes over strategic weapons limitation have torn
our domestic consensus, becoming symbolic surrogates for
larger controversies over policy towards the Soviet Union.
Arms control negotiations over the years have been buffeted
by debates between competing philosophies sometimes only in-
directly touching upon the details being negotiated. Ad-
vocates have made exorbitant claims and insisted on separating
arms control from all other aspects of policy; opponents saw
in them a serious weakening of Western will power and concen-
trated on portraying the inherent balancing of relative ad-
vantages as unilateral concessions. President Reagan, by
proposing and entering a negotiation over strategic arms
reduction, has liberated our domestic debate and permitted
a serious public discussion of the real issues of arms
control. The delay in starting the talks, legitimately
needed for preparation, is a small price to pay for opening
up prospects of a successful conclusion that were not available
to either of his two immediate predecessors.

10

There exists, then, an unprecedented opportunity, for President Reagan's Eureka speech has put forth a new approach based on substantial reductions. This takes account of the concerns of many about the scale of nuclear arsenals. And it deals as well with what is the real heart of the matter, namely crisis stability, or diminishing the danger of the outbreak of nuclear war. For if the reductions are confined to launchers, without concern for the composition and nature of strategic forces, they could increase instability rather than ease it. After all, the overwhelming new problem in the strategic field is the existence of multiple warheads on strategic missiles. Even if the launchers on both sides are exactly equal, the disproportion between the number of attacking warheads and the number of launcher/targets represents a standing temptation to strike first. Reductions of launchers do not automatically change the disproportion. In fact, at some levels reducing the number of delivery vehicles without changing the proportion of warheads to missiles increases the vulnerability of the missiles attacked; a first strike is simplified. The Reagan Administration is surely on the right track in striving for a proposal that combines reductions with restrictions on other characteristics of weapons to inhibit, rather than ease, a surprise attack.

But it is also true that such a process is enormously time-consuming, not only in elaborating our own position but in negotiating an agreement with the Soviet Union. It took years of SALT negotiations to agree on numerical limits on launchers; the negotiations now envisaged are infinitely more complex.

A policy is needed to bridge this gap lest careless "quick-fix" solutions dominate the debate. The desire for a dramatic breakthrough has produced various proposals for nuclear freezes. Experience has shown, however, that it is easy to formulate general objectives in arms control negotiations; it is much more difficult to negotiate a meaningful outcome whatever principle is finally adopted. We have, after all, the experience of the two SALT agreements which were both essentially a kind of numerical freeze. Complex negotiations went on for years over what weapons to count; how to relate multiple warheads to individual delivery vehicles; and how to relate either to airborne weapons of mass destruction. Attempting a freeze now would encounter all the old SALT dilemmas--for example, of where to draw the dividing line between "modernized" and "new" systems. Who can forget the Soviets' attempt to define all of their replacement weapons as only "modernized" and hence permitted, while all of ours were said to be "new" and hence proscribed? In short, a freeze requires a baseline; by itself it is no advance over the results of the SALT process which already exists.

11

In my view, the existing SALT framework may be useful
in providing the baselines and the definitions from which
to negotiate over the complex reductions that the Administration
is in the process of developing. At the same time, we must
take seriously the concerns expressed in the Senate debate
on ratification of SALT II. On that occasion, I supported
ratification if three conditions were fulfilled: first,
if a major defense build-up were undertaken to restore the
military balance; second, if certain amendments were made
and if specific ambiguities, particularly in the accompanying
three-year Protocol, were cleared up; and third, if the
United States made clear the linkage between SALT and Soviet
geopolitical conduct. Some Senators, led by the then majority
leader Senator Howard Baker, stressed the importance of
maintaining the American right to build heavy ICBMs such
as the Soviet Union already possessed in large numbers.

These are valid concerns, and I believe that we are
at a stage where they can be met. The Reagan Administration's
rearmament effort will in time balance the Soviet build-
up; it is urgently needed--but in any case, the Administration
has voluntarily kept it within SALT II limits. The Protocol
has lapsed. We could therefore proceed to an interim agreement
using the SALT framework or, as some former opponents of
the treaty such as Senator Sam Nunn have indicated, ratify
the SALT II treaty. I would lean to that course, with the
following additions to the existing SALT framework:

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

--Second, lowering the ceilings below the limits established
by SALT II to around 2000-2100 strategic delivery vehicles.
This would symbolize a commitment to reductions.

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

12

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

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

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

WASHINGTON QUARTERLY

(SALT II section of your speech)

EJD

11

These are valid concerns, and I believe that we are at a stage where they can be met. The Reagan Administration's rearmament effort will in time balance the Soviet build-up; it is urgently needed--but in any case, the Administration has voluntarily kept it within SALT II limits. The Protocol has lapsed. We could therefore proceed to an interim agreement using the SALT framework or, as some former opponents of the treaty such as Senator Sam Nunn have indicated, ratify the SALT II treaty. I would lean to that course, with the following additions to the existing SALT framework:

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

12

WASHINGTON QUARTERLY

CYS

11

12

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