DRAFT

Dr. Kissinger's Speech -- Group on Strategy and Arms Control

March 12, 1986

Strategic Context of the Arms Control Talks

I've been trying to extract from Joe Jordan and Brent
what I might talk about here that you haven't gone over 50
orevious times and they haven't really come up with any great
profound ideas and with all respect I think it shows in part
the difficulty all of us have, the difficulty certainly I have,
to come up with contributions, with new ideas in the field of
arms control. So I would like to do three things--some
reflection on the international political framework within which
the negotiations are going on. Secondly, some reflections
without necesarily having a better alternative on where we stand
in the arms control negotiations. And third, maybe some
reflections on why the thing has grown a little sterile.

First, the political framework--the international political
framework. If one looks at the history of US-Soviet relations in
the post-war period, one finds I'm sure, the following
phenomenon. The resolute insistence by the US that US-Soviet
relations are a semi-theological problem of conversion. And the
resolute insistence by the Soviets that there has to be some
complete content to a negotiation usually expressed in snifting
using negotiation as a means of tilting the balance of power
somewhat to their direction.

If you read the literature on containment, or almost any
other post-war period, you will find that every new Soviet leader

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has been greeted, including Stalin, with the argument that he
himself is reasonable but that we had to protect him against this
hostile environment. In the literature of containment, for
example, you will look in vain for any description of what we
would... it is essentially a procedural analysis of how
negotiations are to start. They are to start from a position of
strength and what happens when that position of strength is
achieved? And the Soviets appear at the conference table found
no expression whatever—not anybody had an agenda of what we were
going to put before the Soviets when they appeared.

And this leads to the question of how we could ever
concieve that we were ever not in a position of strength when we
had the atomic monoploy and the Soviets had just lost 20 million
people. And frankly, you find it even in the statements of
Reagan. When Reagan says the major contribution of the Summit
was to begin removing stress, and as the stress is removed, great
progress will be made, I think it is a very American approach to
the problem of negotiation. The one President who would never
believe that, what ever he said, was Richard Nixon, because
frankly he didn't expect all that much good from Americans, so
why should he say that Russia was to be trusted. But that has
been the basic problem in our negotiations, and therefore without
going into the history of US-Soviet relations, there is one
almost unaviodable tendency. That is, once you have an American
negotiator, he becomes a spokesman for his negotiation, and you
tend to forget what it is you're trying to accomplish in a geo-
political historic sense because many people reject the

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proposition that we have geo-political purposes in this world.
There's always that lingering belief that the US will prevail
through the purity of its motives and the eloquence of its
position.

With this as the background, let's take the current
situation. For a year there was a lot of discussion over whether
Gorbachev was a new man. I take it as axiomatic that it isn't
possible to become the General Secretary of the Politburo with a
different mentality than the people who elected you, and when
your sponsors have, in Andropov and Seztlov, the two hardest
cases in the Politburo, can of course assume Gorbachev, in which
case, two actors are in charge of the two leading countries. But
it's not probable that Gorbachev fooled them. They must have
seen some residue of some great ...and if you look at the recent
Party Congress, if you read the speech that Gorbachev made, what
it says to me is what he wants to do is to modernize the
Communist Party and to base his systems in the USSR on the
Communist Party. He doesn't accept the proposition that this
system isn't working. He wants to make the system more
effective, more efficient, more modern, more responsive. I
happen to believe that that can't be done and that therefore they
will face a major crisis down the road as they fall more and more
behind. But that seems to me the strategic choice he has made.

Nevertheless, I also believe that having made that decision,
he wants a period of respite. He does not simultaneously desire
major crises with the US if he can avoid them. And therefore I
believe if there's a chance for negotiation, we are in an
unusually good position to conduct them at this moment because I

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cannot think of a period, unless it was immediately after the
death of Stalin, when the pressures and incentives on the Soviet
system were more favorable, at least looking at it abstractly, to
a negotiation. And this has nothing to do with the benevolence
of Gorbachov. And in fact the argument is stronger if you do not
postulate the benevolence of Gorbachov, if you say that the
dynamics of the system make that highly desirable.

On the other hand, he has the problem that since he clearly
intends to purge the Party, he does not want any additional
enemies within the system if he can avoid it. And therefore he
would like relaxation of tension. In my analysis, if at all
possible, by essentiafly psychiatric means. By meetings, by
tranquilization, by agreements that at a minimum do not change
the balance of forces as he sees it, and indeed if he plays his
cards well, by agreement to tilt the balance of forces at least
potentially in his direction .. Now the balance of forces is sort
of tilting towards the Soviet Union, not because I believe they
have an effective first-strike capability, but because the West
has not been able to disengage itself from its reliance on
nuclear weapons and therefore as long as the defense of the West
depends heavily on strategic nuclear weapons, a Soviet leader
must calculate that sooner or later this strategy will evoke
pacifism and unilateral disarmament in more and more democracies.
And therefore even if he can keep the existing relationship
going, he will be in time, and they can again move with greater
self-assurance. He will be again in a position to get some real
benefits. This is all the more true because in the West, arms

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control has become such a test of good will and good faith that linkage has become a dirty word. And the relationship between political and military solutions is more and more being denied, and has been every time an Administration has attempted to establish some linkage. Endless political argument and serious pressures within the bureaucracy have forced them to disallow it and we are well on the way to doing that in this Administration, we more or less are moving in that direction. The Nixon Administration, I don't remember that the Carter Administrators ever attempted it. Therefore, we find at this moment, the Soviets are increasing military aid to Angola, aid to Nicaragua, certainly encouraging, doing nothing to dissuade tensions in the Middle East as a means of keeping the political options open. And it's in this framework that the arms control negotiations have taken place.

Now in my view, let me talk about two sets of arms --one on IMF. The common characteristic of the Soviet positions on the arms control negotiations as I see it is either to maintain the status quo with respect to their nuclear equation or to tilt it slightly in their favor.

Let me begin with the IMF. The problem with us is, that with the breakdown of bipartisanship and the absence of agreement between the Congress and the Executive on the general strategic direction of American foreign policy, so many arguments are advanced that serve short term purposes that we've become accustomed to our own pronouncements. Therefore, IMF debate has never been out in the right context. Originally, the proposal came from Helmut Schmidt who asked for intermediate range missiles in

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Europe as a counterweight to the SS-20's. It really reflected his profound distress with the Carter Administration, and it was a way of linking the two defenses together--Europe and the US-- but I don't think he had thought through all of the implications. Then we accepted it and in order to put the Soviets on the defensive, we put forward the zero option, which implied that we really preferred not to have medium-range missiles in Europe for a price. Now in my view, as a strategic concept it was a great mistake for this reason: the argument for medium-range missiles in Europe was never as a weapons system aimed at the Soviet Union. If we really wanted to hit the Soviet Union, we could have done it either with more ICBMs in the US or with C-phase intermediate range weapons. The argument for putting land-based missiles in Europe was to create a situation in which the Soviets could not risk a conventional attack without taking out these medium-range missiles and whatever kill probability you gave them for these intermediate-range missiles even if you make it as high as 95%-- if even 10 of them survive and struck the Soviet Union and the USSR did not retaliat, they would have emerged from the war so greatly weakened that they would not have achieved a strategic objective. Therefore they could not accept that level of damage and would have to attack the US strategic forces in the US. That in turn would have triggered a general nuclear war, and frankly the SS-20 to me was a way to make the American nuclear guarantee for Europe plausible for another 10, 15, 20 years. Not for an unlimited period of time, but for some period of time. Therefore it can never be in our interest to remove all

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the intermediate-range missiles from Europe.

--You mean the SS-20 or the Perschings?

Perschings. I don't think there is an equivalence between the SS-20 and the Pershing 2 and cruise missiles because the Soviets don't need to have the SS-20 in Europe to threaten Europe with nuclear weapons. And above all the Soviets do not have the problem of making an attack plausible because unless they attack there is no war. We have the problem of making the nuclear defense of Europe plausible, at least as long as we're not willing to build adequate conventional forces, and may be even then. So I would have thought that we can limit the intermediate range missiles in Europe, but to go to zero, is a serious advantage for the Soviets and cannot be compensated for by any redeployment of Soviet SS-20's or any reduction, in my view. I'm saying this from the political point of view, I'm not making this as a military argument. We can put missiles on many other platforms if that's our objective.

On the other hand, I fear that the way the Soviets have handled the IMF negotiations will restart the IMF debate. If we wind up pulling these forces out, which is not our current proposal, but if we should wind up in some position like zero that we pull them out the Soviets will leave, take the SS-20's out of Europe and leave some deployment in Asia, we will have suffered a double blow. We will have suffered a blow to the Atlantic alliance, we will have suffered a blow to our Chinese and Japanese relationship. And I don't care what, how systems analysis tells us about the implications...I wouldn't bet my last cent that we're not heading in that direction when the gun is at

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our head at a July summit. And if not, I'd be delighted. But at
any rate, this is the real purpose of the Soviet proposal and all
these gimmicks of moving the SS-20's from where they are in Asia
to Central Asia actually make it worse because in central Asia
they can reach--if you draw 2000 miles from Central Asia, they
can reach in both directions. So I can't think the SS-20 problem
is solvable, or the IMF problem is solvable, unless we begin with
the conviction that some have to stay--that we can be quite
flexible about the numbers--if the problem is a surprise attack
on the Soviet Union, there is great flexibility there, but that
we will not permit the link to be broken and that we will not
permit them to have missiles on the EuroAsian land mass and we
have none there. And even if they were to go to the zero option,
I frankly think it is not in our interest. But they won't go to
the zero option--they will offer us a reduction in Asia,
elimination from Europe, and I won't even go into questions of
verifications of how many they have, extra missiles they may have
for each launcher, all of this technical experts can discuss.
That's not my concern.

While I'm at it, let me say a word about the MBFR
negotiations, in which the proposals are going in exactly the
same direction. I don't follow any of these with the detail they
deserve, and one of the problems is in --Lord Palmerston said
about the Slechnex/Goldstein question--that only three people had
ever understood it--well, some British foreign secretary said
only 3 people have ever understood it. One was dead, the second
was in a lunatic asylum, and he was the third and he had

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forgotten. Some of the esoteric discussions on arms control
positions didn't have me in that position. But I read the other
day that we are now with MBFR at a point where we have proposed
6500 withdrawal and they 11,500 or some such number. But to me
that article at least missed the central issue. What numbers are
reduced is not interesting nor of much symbolic significance.
What is interesting is that once you reduce you have put a
ceiling on the forces in Europe and you will have prevented a
build up of conventional forces in Europe and you will have
frozen the conventional situation. And if you freeze the
conventional situation and decouple the nuclear problem, then the
practical consequence of all this is that you have made a number
of agreements that have not taken into account the fundamentally
changed strategic relationship.

Now let me get to the strategic arms negotiations. I have
tried without the benefit with systems analysis and without the
aid of computers, to try to distribute the weapons that each side
has left--either on the American proposal or on the Soviet
proposal in some manner that improves the two dangers that we are
supposed to deal with--the danger of surprise attack and the
danger of mass extermination of civilian populations. I have
been unable to do so and I don't know whether it is...maybe a
computer can do it. I cannot see how if we accept their proposal
or they accept our proposal, how the situation will be
significantly improved. In fact I could make a good case for the
proposition that the incentive for reemission is increased, maybe
not by enough to make any difference, and that some forces like
the submarine forces, ought to at least theoretically become more

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vulnerable because the anti-submarine forces are not limited by agreement. And if we go from 42 submarines to, I think the number that one hears is 16-20 that we would have left under these various schemes, the same number of anti-submarine forces would be chasing after the number of submarines. It would mean theoretically should marginally increase the vulnerability.

Anyway to me, what problem is being solved by what is now being negotiated? Now this sounds extremely critical, and I don't intend it to be because no one has come up with any arms control proposal that would make it the criteria of improving it. Now it's for all of these reasons that I have become more interested in SDI than I was when I heard the original speech. I think some of the claims of the perfect defense are madly exagerated. But I do find it impossible to conceive either a strategic concept or an arms control concept that does not include an defensive component. Now what that defensive component should be, in what relation to offensive forces, I believe that should be a subject of study that I haven't seen. Maybe it's done on a classified basis that I don't see. I am very worried about the trend in our domestic debate on the issue of SDI in which everybody focuses on improving research and the increasing implication is that deployment is something that we will do sometime in the future. I think it will create intellectual and substantive havoc and it may wind up giving us the worst of all worlds, in which only the Savits can benefit from SDI. One, I don't believe that even the military services will want to devote large amounts of money to do something that

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is a research program and has been banned from deployment by
international agreement. I doubt that the Congress will devote
adequate resources for it once that principle has been
established. I believe that once we have an offensive weapons
agreement, if we then come along five years later and say that we
have now completed our research and we want to negotiate
defensive weapons, we will find ourselves trapped in the position
that we will be threatening what will be considered an
achievement because the Soviets may then threaten to abrogate the
offensive agreement. But the much more likely outcome is that we
will gradually reduce our research in defense, the Soviets will
work like hell—if they succeed they will then be able to deploy
and if they don't succeed they have frozen us into this posture
which I deplore. This is the reason why I have supported SDI,
although you don't really know what you are supporting as it is
never clearly stated what we mean by SDI. But I would prefer a
position on SDI, to be deployment is not negotiated, the level of
deployment is negotiable depending on the level of offensive
forces and that we will negotiate together with the level of
defense.

This gets me to my last point. If in the discussion you are
going to ask me, now what exactly is your proposal, what would
you do? I have a preference for the Scowcroft Commission report,
I came to a parallel conclusion at the same time but be that as
it may, of doing away with MIRVs and going to single warhead
missiles in such a world the SDI problem would be much
simplified and could be given a much more restrictive
application. It would also reduce the number of warheads by much

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larger numbers than we are now talking about and it would genuinely reduce the danger of surprise attack. And I think one could attempt then some substantial population defense against what is remaining. But I would like to make a point that really concerns me, and it is this: fundamentally, our arms control theory that now exists is what was developed at Harvard. MIT. Stanford, various think centers, in the late '50's and early '60's and were repeating variations of the same theme--the importance of mutual vulnerability, defense is bad, and I'm sure you can predict what most of the witnesses before your committees are going to say on almost any issue.

Which means that there hasn't been any really great new thinking on the subject and that seems to me due to many factors, but the two at least One--when I was part of this think group none of us professors ever thought we'd get anywhere near power and so the only way you could make a contribution to the future of your country was to think ten years ahead. It was in the days of the Eisenhower Administration, for which we had great contempt quite unjustly, and we didn't even know with whom to get in contact with if we did have a great idea. Intellectuals were not heavily in demand. But it had the great advantage that we had to work through the intellectuals and academics. I think that then Kennedy seduced us intellectuals and then the Vietnam war broke the consensus. And I sense that the intellectual community is now split into two groups--job applicants and the revolutionaries. The first group writes position papers but is in its essence indistinguishable from other position paper writers that are

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around, and others who specialize in proving that the government is run by a bunch of fools and crooks and that any proposal that the human mind can conceive is tricky and weapon that the human mind can conceive is a contribution to the arms race, whose danger is never precisely defined. And in the process, all these issues turn into tests of strength and of exortations of compromise that may wind up with the worst of all worlds, in any rate don't lead us in a direction. I keep hearing SDI stobs us from having an arms control agreement. But I do not hear what the content of that agreement is that will greatly improve the world other than that the Soviets have said that it is negotiable.

The second problem is the collapse of bipartisanship and I think those are two big obstacles to an effective national policy. I have made no great contribution to the thinking of this group which pointed out weaknesses in the latter positions. I'm very worried for this reason. One, I think there is an opportunity. At any rate, in order to know whether there is an opportunity, we ought to make some proposal, some proposal ought to emerge so that we can tell ourselves will in fact improve the military balance for everybody. We will never know unless we can formulate such a proposal. Absent of that, if we talk ourselves into an obsession of the arms race, and make the sort of proposal that is now around on all sides, I do not see that it does anything other than freeze the existing reliance on a weapons system that the democratic system cannot tolerate indefinitely. And therefore shifts the psychological balance against us, even if it doesn't shift the military balance. And so I am sure that

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for the next two or three years it is almost impossible to screw
up East-West relations. For the next two or three years things
will be quiet because the Soviets need quiet. But I do not see
that most of the things that are now going on will greatly
advance matters and then I don't see that they will greatly
worsen them except in the sense that entrenched could create
problems. So this is all I wanted to say.

Rostow--Thank you very much Henry. I think that this time I
would agree with about 96% of what you said, perhaps even 100%.
Brent has the floor first.

Brent--Let me ask you a question about SDI in terms of the major
thrust of your remarks. We have depended for better or worse on
the threat of nuclear weapons to defend our interests. Assuming
a mutual deployment plus strategic defense, it seems to me that
two things become apparent. The first is an increase in our
conventional strength because however weak extended deterrence
is, it becomes even weaker in the face of a Soviet strategic
defense. It seems to me we also have to strengthen our strategic
offensive forces because their character is such that we are far
worse off than the Soviets are in ability to penetrate a
strategic defense.

Is that true?

I think absolutely. We have small weapons, fewer...there is just
no question that they are better able to penetrate a
defense...assuming equal defense capability. So you put that in
the context for at least a half a dozen years, a fairly
restrictive defense budget, with SDI taking an increasing wedge

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out of it and SDI calling forth the requirement both to increase
defense conventional forces and offensive nuclear forces. I
don't see how we'd manage.

Kissinger--Let me make a number of points. First, I think it's a
mistake to postulate a symmetry in the deployment of defense. It
seems to me that we are clearly ahead.

I don't know.

The basic thrust of your remarks seems to me to be to nostalgia
to much of the post-war period, mainly that we can keep the
Soviets from deploying a weapons system that is advantageous to
them by not deploying such a weapon system ourselves. If the
advantage to the Soviets of SDI are as overwhelming as you
describe them, I don't see why they are so insistent that there
be no SDI. I think that will then happen is that the Soviets
will continue working until they are in a position to reap the
benefits that you describe and then interpret the treaty or
invoke its remission clauses and go ahead and deploy it. I don't
think we can avoid your problem by not deploying ourselves. Do
others around the table agree that the technical military
consequences are as Brent describes them?

I think that an SDI has problems...two I think it is inevitable
with or without the deployment of SDI that what will suffer in
later days ahead will be our conventional capability. SDI
research first, strategic offensive forces almost equal priority
with it, and if the budget is cut then we'll have the greatest
impact on conventional forces. With regard to Brent's comment
that we are less able to handle an SDI tiltage, that's true in
equal SDI, we have low throwweight, they've got large throwweight--

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their throwweight is good to counter hardening and decoy. On the
other hand, I think we are more sophisticated in our penetration
capability, so therefore that tends to offset it somewhat so it's
murky. But I think his basic point is true that if you deploy an
SDI, that will put more pressure on the offensive forces to be
more capable in order to counter that SDI. You will have
problems with linkage because of various reasons. And it will
have a negative impact on conventional forces from a budgetary
standpoint.

We've got the Soviet offensive force posture. Our offensive
strategic forces are not well equipped to penetrate their silos.
Kissinger--Well then we'll certainly see a strategic defense.

Our fear before SDI was of a Soviet breakdown. And one of the
reasons we're not well equipped is what you were saying about
SDI, if you limit deployment, people loose a certain enthusiasm
about research. We limited ABM in the initial treaty, but we
have the right to continue pentretration-age work and we've been
doing very little throughout the years.

Kissinger--Let me say a word about the coupling. The argument
that is made is that if we have SDI that it couples the defense
of Europe from the defense of the US. That is to me an almost
incomprehensible arguement because it seems to say that the more
vulnerable the US is to attack, the more likely it is to resort
to nuclear weapons. Under that theory, when we had an atomic
monoploy Europe was less secure than it is under the present
circumstances. And I do not understand. why, assuming it were
possible to create an SDI capability, we would not be more likely

to use the strategic nuclear weapons than otherwise and so the coupling argument I have great difficulty with. I have no difficulty understanding why the British and French fear for the impact of SDI on their strategic forces. That is a perfectly rational argument.

Ken--Just a few points. Usually the criticism comes that we're trying to do too much in arms control and we should really deal down our ambitions in arms control because of the possibilities of trying to deal with the Soviets and as I take it, your arguments on START are in the strategic realm that we are actually to little, that we are probably trying too much. Let me address both of those and then I'll get to coupling and decoupling. On START, I think that it would be hard to say that if the Soviets were not willing to cut their throwweight in half, stop modernization of their heavy missiles, and do all the other things in the current START position, we would not be better off than we are today. By all calculations, the fractionation rate on both sides must come down, things would be less heavily MIRVed. Now it does not solve all your problems or anything like that. And so you shouldn't oversell it. But I'm saying that the course under the agreement, the stability arguments would be better--yes, you're right, they are not great leais and bounds better but arms control has never brought great leais and bounds better and to have greater leais and bounds better, you would have to have agreements that are far more one-sided than would ever be tolerable in our political system. Because we have to testify all the time and there is criticism you hear all the time is well, what's up with the Soviets? Are you going to break a

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ceai or make a deal?

On IMF, the points you make are very good and sound points...
Let's pause a minute there Ken. I don't understand you. If the
goal, Henry said, and I thinkk said very well, that there's
ambiguity in the public mind as to what content we are seeking in
an arms control agreement. Now the only content I can see for an
arms control agreement is to eliminate the first strike capacity.
Right.

Now we look to eliminate a first strike capacity is just as much
in the Soviet interest as it is in our interest. So what are you
afraid of when you say what's in it for the Soviets?

Because we have no capability today by the usual calculations to
do a disarming first strike against the Soviets and they have one
against us.

I understand that.

Kissinger--Do you think that at the end of this process there
will have been a change? That they will have lost the first
strike capability?

No.

But you just said, if I understood you correctly, that when you
went up to Congress to testify, people would say what's in it for
the Soviets, and I think we both agree that there is as much in
it for the Soviets as there is for us--elimination of a first
strike capability on either side.

I'm saying that they don't have that problem.

So what? If that's the goal--if the goal is to say we want an
arms control agreement which will reduce each side to an equal

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level, parity level, carefully calibrated which will eliminate
the possibility of a first strike and preserve a retaliatory
capacity, what's wrong with that and why won't the American
people and Congress support that?

I would. And the point about the incoherence is right, because
the proposal is to ban mobile missiles on both sides, and people
say well, what's the story here?

Well, it seems to me that that answers Henry's question. But
you're saying that you can't go that far because someone in
Congress will say what's in it for the Soviets.

I'm saying that to present an arms control agreement, that would
solve the problem Secretary Kissinger, by itself, without
military deployments or any other artifice, the arms control
policy would be such a one-sided agreement...

What's one-sided about it?

You're putting more calculations in there that you need. No
body says without any deployments.

Okay.

I mean presumabley, and it's a little hard I know under this
Administration, but ordinarily what you try to do is that the
deployments and the arms control proposals together mesh towards
some goal which is to reduce the first strike capability against
the land-based missiles.

Right. And my big point is--

What's one sided about that?

--that A) arms control will not solve the problem entirely by
itself.

Granted.

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--B) the proposal on the table from the American side would help solve the problem.

How can it help you if you ban the mobile missiles?

It can't do that. You can't figure it out.

It doesn't help you if you ban the mobile missiles.

Yes it would.

Kissinger--It's better vis-a-vis the Soviet proposal than vis-a-vis ours, but since never in history has our opening proposal been our final decision, and since our opening proposal does not really go all that far towards solving our problem, anything that emerges from it is likely to be of much new significance. That's all I'm saying.

Okay, if that's what you're saying. Let me move onto IMF.

That's all I'm saying...in addition to the mobilizing problem which I have mentioned.

Okay we can discuss that later.

I'd like to come back to that.

Yes, I would too. On the IMF, I understand the coupling argument that you make on IMF. But I guess I'm a little mystified because the situation since the early 1960's was the situation that you very much described--trying to deter and Soviet conventional attack. Since the early '60's, the Soviets had 600 to 800 SS-4's and 5's within range of Europe. There was not the poush to have the IMF systems --US systems that could hit Soviet territory--until the SS-20 came along. Now maybe your point is that there should have been a poush during those 19 years but there just wasn't.

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Clear strategic superiority...

Well, we had a number of answers to that. One, we went through
this IMF type debate with the Troubador in the 1950's. Three
years later we pulled those weapons out of Europe in connection
with the Cuban missile crisis. So the atmosphere was not super-
conducive to come back relatively soon with another deployment.
Secondly, people have strenuously forgotten what the Nixon and
Ford Administration were up against in the late 60's and 70's
with the defense program. Now I rarely agree with President
Carter but I must say that I share his impatience with the decade
of neglect because we had to fight, I remember when rapid
deployment transports were for sale, we had to argue ship by
ship. You remember these years. And so if we had come to the
Congress or to NATO during the Vietnam War with a deployment on
medium-range missiles, we would have lost everything. People
ought to remember that the late 60's until the mid-70's, until we
were driven out of Vietnam, what they were like. And what it
meant to put a defense budget together in those years. But the
concept, the problem was always there. I was never comfortable
with the mutual assured destruction doctrine. I was always in
deep anguish with myself--what, if it ever came to it, would I
recommend to the President if he asked me? And so whether we did
or didn't do it, it seems to me that once again we go through a
cycle where we pay a big price, put weapons in, and three years
later pull them out. That is a serious issue and it also tends
to get the Soviets a veto over NATO deployment that I think goes
too far.

Your point is that the deployments are a benefit with or without

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deployment?

Yes.

And you should have done it, or would have done it with or
without deployment?

Yes.

But there was less a case for it earlier because we had strategic
superiority.

But they wouldn't have seconded them without the '70's--that was
the argument in 1976 and '77. That was the whole point of it.
Kissinger--Well, Schmidt went through an emotional and personal
crisis. The Schmidt after-Moget is not the same as the Schmidt
before-Moget issue. Seriously. You must have heard him talk of
those five minutes when he realized that 50 people might die and
that he didn't have the heart for it. It was a sort of spiritual
experience for which I respect him. So he went through, he's
gone through ever since then, ambivalent period. And what his
instincts told him. So whether Schmidt would have done it or not,
I don't know. I think the argument for medium-range missiles
in Europe is to link the defense of Europe. I do not believe
that even that will last, so I look at that as an intermediate
phase. But to move them out so quickly ... I want to make one
last point about Brent's argument that all of this stows
conventional forces. When have we abolished a weapon system and
then really put the money into conventional forces? We've
sometimes built up conventional forces, but I can think of no
instance where the savings from a weapons system were then
cedicated to conventional forces. Am I wrong on that?

82

I don't think so.

Over the long run you'd be taking money from one to the other.

I think one more point while we're on the IMF part of your exposition, Ken, I'd just add two sentences. One is that IMF is not a military but a political problem, as indeed the whole of the nuclear arsenal is a military problem--you're dealing with olatonic shadows and the IMF weapons are really a trivial part militarily of the entire nuclear array because there's really no law of physics that I know about that requires strategic weapons to be fired to their full trajectory. So that whatever you do about IMF doesn't alter the risks anyhow. But it's worth doing that to say that if you can abolish the entire class, and really alter the nuclear equation for political reasons, for minimizing the sense of anxiety. But...

Let me pick up on what you say Gene, on minimizing the sense of anxiety. I never really bought on to these arguments between a political system and a military system. I mean the whole alliance we have there...I find it a very difficult argument. I don't think weapons systems are coupling and decoupling per se. We went through an argument in the early 80's about how the IMF deployments in Europe were decoupling. Why were they decoupling? Because the U.S. could sit back and shoot it out with the Soviets there in Europe and not effect the American homeland. Now we get the argument five years later to remove these systems.

Kissinger--Yes, but they're from different people.

Sometimes they're from the same people. We had the argument when you were writing about this business in the 1950's and '60's that the coming Soviet ICBM force would mean that the U.S. was

83

C4J

vulnerable for the first time in a major way and therefore this
was very decoupling, people said, because we would never trace
Chicago for Hamburg. Now with the SDI debate and the prospect
vision of a growing U.S. vulnerability, people are saying "ana"
it's going to be decoupling because the U.S. is going to sit
back--fat, dumb and happy behind a shield and not care about the
defense of Europe.

Kissinger--But you really have to see who makes the arguments
because there is an anti-defense group in Europe who will always
make the decoupling argument and you can't say...in order to
judge the merit of the argument for the Alliance, you have to
analyze who says what.

I notice that more people are saying it everyday--more people
across the spectrum. Kirkpatrick and all kinds of people.
Are saying what Gene?

Pulling out.

You mean pulling out the intermediate missiles?

Pulling out our troops from Europe, from the Philippines, pulling
out, pulling back. And it's the threat of nuclear vulnerability.

I think there are about three different big issues that are
related here. The first has to do with the need to avoid the
diseases in arms control--we don't want to create problems by our
own arms control treatment. And I think Henry is right on the
point with respect to the zero option. It seems to me it was
perhaps a reasonable negotiating ploy, but if you let those
things sit around for too long they can catch up with you. I
recall one time in SALT I when we offered 2 alternatives to the

24

Soviets and they picked the wrong one and we had to go back and say hey you picked the wrong one--we don't like that one.

Kissinger--I think we covered ourselves. We turned down both of them.

That was a very sophisticated move.

We showed them.

They were trying to trick us by agreeing.

But I think that a similar problem exists with the total mobile plan. Now I don't think there would be any problem with a long term agreement to ban the mobile MIRVs. Although I don't really think the problem is mobiles and whether they're MIRVed or not, the problem is keeping them small enough so that you can keep them really mobile. But in any case, we have here 2 situations with respect to the arms control proposal. One on the zero option and the other on the mobile ban which may violate the Hippocratic oath with respect to arms control proposal--first of all we have to stop doing hard. And both may be understandable as initial negotiating ploys whereby with respect to a total mobile ban, we have none the Soviets have two, you end up with one each. Maybe that's fine. Zero option, we don't think they're going to want to go that far, we end up with some low level of deployments for ourselves and in Europe which keeps coupling alive. That sort of thing happens all the time in negotiation. But at some point in time we have to convince ourselves that that's what we're doing and modify the positions and conduct the negotiations in those ways rather than getting caught up in our own rhetoric.

Kissinger--When there is no consensus, it makes it awfully hard.

25

If you want to wind up with some deployment and you keep offering zero deployment, people of goodwill in the country find it awfully hard to know which they should support.

Well I think those two changes are not impossible to make. They don't violate the fundamental tennents of our arms control approaches in either IMF or START. I think if we want to, they are relatively easily handled. I think that in addition to those changes, the second thing that we obviously have to do is improve our conventional forces in Europe along the lines of what you and a number of other people have said. I may be wrong here but I think the pressure over the long run for U.S. troop reductions, particularly as we begin to get into real demographic problems with the all-volunteer force, and the cost of the cash on the barrallhead version of the all-volunteer force keeps going up, here in the Gramm-Rudman era, we're going to have serious problems trying to maintain those troop levels and the only thing to try to do is to replace Americans to some extent with German reserves--to get the German reserves armed--and to let our contribution be more heavily, although not exclusively, in the area of technology and second echelon attack and all that good stuff. I think finally one very important piece in this puzzle, in order to improve our conventional posture in Europe, and also in order to try to pull the Allies together with us, and to some extent pull us together with ourselves on SDI. I think we need to think seriously about reorienting the SDI program--I can't mean scrapping it, replacing it, saying we're not interested in defense or anything else. I'm talking about a course shift here.

CYD

15

not a revolution. I think we ought to focus much more heavily
than people have been willing to so far on anti-tactical
ballistic missile defense as a major component of SDI. There are
a couple of reasons for that. Verner has talked about that
recently and some people have been working on this for some time.
One is that you can do a lot, not all, but a lot of interesting
technical work on a ATBM system which is applicable to many
aspects of SDI. Surely airborne optical systems, hit-kill
interceptors, a lot of this work is not lasers in space, but a lot
of it does overlap. Secondly, if you limit yourself to systems
that are tested against SS-23 range, rather than going all the
way up to SS-20 range, I think you avoid tests against systems
that have the profile of strategic vehicles in flight, which is
the operative phrase. And therefore, because an SS-20 trajectory
is very similar to an SLBM trajectory, you have got problems
testing against 20 range systems. But if you test against 23
range systems, you have a system that you could not only develop
but actually deploy under anybody's interpretation of the ABM
treaty, particularly given the fact that the Soviets have already
tested against reasonable decent range of tactical systems.
Finally, I think you've got something, whatever the merits of
this argument you all were having about whether SDI is decoupling
or is not decoupling, a lot of Europeans think it is and they
tend to resound rather more favorably, I think, towards the
notion that the first echelon of U.S. SDI effort might be
something that is directly and immediately relevant to their own
problems of defence. Particularly when these problems include
protecting them against non-nuclear attack by Soviet SS-23s and

27

CYD

other tactical ballistic missiles which with chemical warheads, runway penetrators, scatterable mines and all the rest of it, I think is a serious problem. The Soviets are executing an end run around NATO's air defense improvements, with their tactical ballistic missiles systems, we need to do something about it. We're not going to be able realistically to do anything about it any other way than by working hard on a ATBM system. Now I think those three elements of adjustments in arms control approach proved conventional forces, which is probably the hardest of those three, oriented more towards technology and less toward man-power, and thirdly ATBM becoming a very major component of SDI. It might begin to kind of get the hard headed in roughly the same direction--some folks are going to stray off. in one direction and some in the other--but I think you at least have a package there that has some potential utility.

Henry, do you want to make any comments?

Well, on the content of SDI, I think a serious discussion would be highly useful. My major point was that I am made very uneasy by the distinction that is being made between research and deployment. Because it gets us into a trap and it creates a false consensus in my view. I would be much happier if our position were that there will be a deployment, its level will be set by negotiation, and then I'd find some of the argument that you made as a first stage, highly plausible. I am not hell-bent on getting everything deployed right away. What I am trying to avoid is to get an agreement that opens up the road to Brent's nightmare, because the Soviets will be working...whether we

28

should ever have made that speech on SDI or not is still ... now that it has been made, now that it's been made, now that we are down that road, you can bet that the Soviets have devoted and will be devoting resources to it. No matter what we do and no matter what we come up with in these negotiations. So I would like to get away from the distinction between research and deployment. Then we should have a serious discussion on what kind of deployment against what dangers at what level, in what priority, all of this is an important discussion which has not yet taken place.

But by saying that, you're acknowledging that your intention is to violate the ABM treaty. You cannot today say that you are for deployment without saying you are per se...

You can if you're talking about deploying an ATBM system.

Oh, I thought you were talking about SDI, not ATBM.

I would have no problem telling the Soviets that we want to deploy a defense in relation to the offense and amend the ABM treaty if that is necessary.

But the ABM treaty, all it requires for new technology is consultation.

You're setting off a fire storm.

The people that are going to create the fire storm are not going to be fooled by theoretical distinctions between research and deployment.

But the issue, Ken, surely, is whether these are new technologies or not, because new technologies, the Soviets certainly didn't want covered in the ABM treaty.

But Les isn't it a fire storm?

29

It is a fire storm.

Kissinger --If I were in office, I might well go in Jim's direction. My nightmare is that the other way we are going to wind up without substantial research while the Soviets will have a free hand in it, the option will be left open, it will wind up in the worst of the conditions that Brent has described, we will keep fooling ourselves. If you want to put down severe limits on the actual deployment, in a treaty in relation to limits on offensive deployments, I'd be happy to sign on.

They are there today. The ABM treaty has severe limits--no deployment.

They prohibit it.

It's a privilege of the Chair to raise a question that nobody else is going to raise. It is clear that we are busily herring off after delightful technical games, comparing what happens in nuclear strikes in various configurations. Henry raised a very serious question--linkage, which he said was a forbidden term, he thought. He and I are probably the only people who care anything about linkage around this table. I came across a remark of Sir James Cables the other day that it is useless to expect either to be able to negotiate or to effectuate an arms control agreement unless it is a prior political understanding. And I think that is absolutely right and I know that Henry thinks that is absolutely right. The question is, is there such a thing as possible?

Kissinger--Let me make clear. I don't want to get more credit than I deserve. I would not make arms control agreements

30

[Y]

conditional on political agreements, but I would think it is imperative that the American public understand that any relaxation of tension requires both arms control and political agreement so that we don't lean back after some arms control agreement while they are pouring a billion dollars worth of arms into Angola. And say, okay, now we have no problems, and we cannot confront them in wherever we want to confront them because we'd be jeopardizing the arms control agreement. In this sense, I would create a linkage.

I agree. I've answered that question a thousand times in Congressional committess. Now I wouldn't make one conditional on the other, but there is no point in it and there is no expectation of any good from it. And that's been the experience that we've had. Now, this leads me to the second question I wanted to put to your exposition. Which is why it's a good time for us to negotiate with Gorbachov. You said he wants a period of calm and relative relaxation in order to be able to purge his Party without storm and so on, but it seems to me for the reasons that Jim just brought out and reasons that are imlicit in all our conversation, namely budget pressureas and the distinct possibility of further cuts in the arms budget, everything is working against the possibility of negotiation, and I'm not in the least sure that Gorbachov, well that it's a good time for us to negotiate with Gorbachov, and the expectations of anything very good. Now that doesn't mean that we shouldn't negotiate--of course we have to for our own reasons. And we should be very clear about our objectives--certainly, for our own reasons, for many reasons. But that it's a good time to negotiate or that we

31

should have any expectations?

Kissinger--No, Ken let me make my position clear. In terms of
analyzes of the pressures and incentives of the Soviet Union,
this seems to me to be a good time to negotiate with them. This
does not mean that these negotiations are taking place in a
vacuum. Though I do not like the way the increases in the
defense budget has been managed, I would prefer a continuation
of the major tendencies of the first five years of the Reagan
Administration because I think it would improve our bargaining
position. I don't like, it makes me extremely unhappy to see the
MX go on for a 15 year debate and then we wind up with 50
missiles which no longer then have a strategic rationale. I
could make a rationale for 250, which we started out with, or 200
I can stretch it to 100, but at 50 I lose the rationale. So all
of these things I would put on the negative side of the ledger,
and just because the Soviets are in trouble that doesn't mean
that we can do anything and still have the bargaining position.
But I don't see what their trouble is.

Kissinger--Their trouble is that there is only so much time a
leader can give to certain problems. He has to restructure his
body, he has to try to restructure his economy, and I don't think
he would like to concurrently handle major crises with the West.
And it's even conceivable to me that some Soviets looking at the
situation, at least a few people, communists as they may be, may
conclude that 20 more years of this trend, and they're going to
end up like Czarist Russia as a heavily armed, irrelevant state,
still a threat to the peace in many ways, and thirdly, that there

32

could be in the continuation of present trends, the danger of
some explosion at the end of which both them and we would be like
Europe after WW 1 and 2. At least those tendencies could exist
somewhere, I wouldn't build on them, I wouldn't let down our
guard on the basis of them, but these are possibilities.
Conversely, I also believe that sometime in the next ten to
fifteen years, we may face the problem of a Soviet attack on
China. Because if the Chinese economic program should succeed,
they will have to make the decision of whether they want a Japan
on their border with a billion people operating on a different
principle. So I can see a lot of tendencies. All I'm saying is
that, in terms of the immediate pressures on them, if one can
ever negotiate with them, the objective conditions for it are
better than they've been at other times, but it depends very much
on how we conceive negotiations, how complete we can be, and
whether we can keep the pressures up, and that depends on us.

Well, Bob Hunter is next, but I'll just say that I see your
argument but I'm not convinced. In other words, I think we've
got to do the same thing but I think it is terribly important for
us to make our goals clear, to have goals which Congress and the
people will accept as fair and stick with them, because I don't
think we're in a favorable position to get those goals.

Just a couple of points--one on coupling and one on linkage.
Henry, you asked why is SDI an enemy of coupling. I think you
can go back to Ken's point which is that coupling has never been
a military thing, it's a political thing. I think de Gaulle was
right. It's irrational and crazy for the U.S. to commit suicide
on behalf of Europe. The fact is that for 20 years after de

33

[Y]

Gaulle it still worked. Now what happens with SDI, is that unless it is absolutely 100% foolproof, leaving the U.S. toately unvulnerable in which we can rain death upon the Russians, with total impunity, for our European allies and that's many of the same people, this is the irony recently, why is the U.S. psychologically having to retreat behind its own borders and feel the need to defend it. Obviously, at this point, America is not willing to trade x for y, to use the paradox. This is my thinking the problem. In psychological-political terms the effort to retreat behind our own borders with SDI looks to them as if we are not prepared to implement the strategy. Simple as that. Maybe we can go beyond that, we've gone beyond it in a number of ways; even the McNamara doctrine of 1962 looked like decoupling. Five years later everybody said MC-14/3, my God, that comes from heaven. I haven't seen the way of transiting with SDI, especially since we're not going to have it within 5 years. The linkage question--obviously there are 2 kinds of linkage. One is what does circumstance proscribe? If the Soviets misbehave, by invading Afghanistan, you can't get SALT II through Congress. That's contextually. The second is what do we do to try to manipulate the situation. My own sense is that linkage as a doctrine has not succeeded because we haven't chosen instruments that look like we gain more than they do. There is a perception that somehow arms control is good for us. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Or at least the perception that if you are going to pursue arms control, we should do it because it's in our interest, and if it's not in our interest don't pursue it.

34

[Y]

Therefore, if it is in our interest, we shouldn't let it be held
hostage to something else. If it isn't, we shouldn't be touching
it at all. And therefore why let what the Russians are doing
somewhere else in the world effect something which is good for
us? I suspect that if we kept linkage limited to things that
cede to the Soviet Union of something that benefitted them more
than us, then people would say that that was a good way of doing
it. But to use linkage in a way that at least we come out
neutral or we lose, the general perception is why should we do
that to ourselves.

Kissinger--I said before that I would not hold up agreement, but
between holding up agreement and creating a general climate that
relaxation has been achieved and that therefore we need not
contest in other areas in which we are being challenged, this is
were I would assent to ...

I agree with that.

Jim Goodby first, then Joe Jordan then Joe Kruzel, those are the
names on my list.

Well, the Soviets seem to have gotten nowhere with the
invitations to the British and French to join them in
negotiations on their nuclear forces and the idea of a freeze on
British and French nuclear forces hasn't gone anywhere, but I
wonder if we get into serious negotiations down the road, if the
growing size of the British and French forces will present not
just a negotiating problem which we have dealt with very well in
the past, but also a public opinion problem here in the U.S. and
possibly in Europe, and I wonder if you see any alternative to
our historic position that the British and French forces are not

33

CYJ

a part of this and have to be disregarded.

Kissinger--Well, I think if the British and French forces reach significantly more than a thousand warheads, and we go down towards 5000, then I think they have to be taken into account in some fashion. Of course, there is a high probability that the British forces will be modified after the next election. I don't favor this, but unless Thatcher wins a majority, I think they'll give up the Trident and that will take care of the British forces and then the French forces by themselves would not present an issue and if both MIRVed and if they approached 2000-plus warheads, then I think we have to change our position. Especially in the context if we were going anywhere near 5000 for each side. What do you think Brent, from the military point of view?

There would be enough of a proportion that they would have to.

Today the proportion is less than it was 10 years ago. It's about 4% today and it was about 7% ten years ago. So it's less of a threat to the Soviets, it actually declined.

They speak of them with contempt, as no doubt you all know. And not worth it, the sandbox exercise was the phrase used.

Really, I just wanted to ask Henry to explain his criticism of the Administration's position on mobile missiles. I'd like to have that explicated a little bit and get Ken's response.

Kissinger--Well, I didn't really have it in my remarks in principle. One of the problems we face is the breakdown of bipartisanship, and with the kind of debate that is going on in the intellectual community, any administration does not have the

36

CYJ

same latitude that it had in an earlier period of playing
tactical games. And it is extremely important to put before the
public a concept of what we are trying to do, so at least to gain
public support. I think as an intellectual exercise, the
Scowcroft Commission report on the mobile single warhead missile
was a comprehensible and intellectually valid position and has
been accepted. Then to come up with a position against mobile
missiles, even if you want to wind up with one on each side,
makes it very difficult to follow a consistent public support. I
think it would be better if the Administration explained what we
consider to be the desirable...if we then say, gosh, the Soviets
are developing two or three more mobile missiles, and we have
trouble funding one, with that reason we think we might be just
as well off with banning them, that's a tactical issue which I
can live with. It makes it very hard to sell a concept of
stability that the public can adhere to if we go back and forth
between, on paper, incompatible positions. That's my criticism
of the mobile plan. I guess the reasoning was, the Soviets are
going ahead and we are not, so let's take them out of the game.

Well, there are three reasons. I think your point is a very good
one. The jerkiness of it all is very disturbing. The three
points are first, in terms of verification, it is a very
difficult problem and verification is not just a problem on
launchers, but on warheads, throwweight, across the border on
what you're trying to do in strategic equations, especially for a
MIRVed mobile system. The second problem is that the Soviets
have two systems on stream right now, and we have one in
blueprints. They have one deployed --the 25--they have one

37

CJ

coming out pretty soon--the MIRVed 24-- and we're talking about
the future. But I guess the last point, and in some ways the
most accurate, is that as Sec. Kissinger says, this is an
intellectually good solution, and as the Scowcroft Commission
pointed out, the intellectual exercise and the intellectual
justification is there, and the theory is terrific. The question
is not is the theory good or not, but can we as a society do the
theory. We have been through this road now of mobile missiles
since Minuteman II, since Minuteman III, since the MX. Everytime
we go through a new ICBM, we start it off being a mobile missile.
Everytime we go through an ICBM debate, it becomes immobile, and
the reasons that we all have discussed is that we want to give
the Air Force and have everybody just solve two problems for us--
make the missile invulnerable to Soviet attackers, but make the
missile countable to Soviet arms control verifiers. And these
guys work closely together and we've never found a way to make it
countable and invulnerable. And so we get that on too of the
problem that the Air Force actually calls the public interface
problem, how you can deal in the realm of having an ICBM on the
roads. I'm not saying that these aren't soluable problems, and I
think that we may do better with Midgetman, than we have in the
past on going mobile, but our record has been pretty dismal on
this.

Let me say this one quick word about--these are both good points
I think, Ken--the countability and survivability and how they
might go together. The real problem with survivability of the
mobile system is that it's not driven by warhead numbers on the

38

other side, it's driven by throwweight. Because what you use to
barrage an area is equivalent megatonnage, equivalent megatonnage
goes with throwweight, not with warhead numbers. Polaris A-1 and
Poseidon have about the same throwweight. One has one warhead,
the other has many. They have about the same megatonnage, they
are about as effective in barraging areas. So one is not really
concerned so much with warheads on the other side as much as
throw weight. Now the good news about steering both sides
towards mobiles is that (Bob's shaking his head--I can
demonstrate it to you sometime mathematically if you want). If
you work out the numbers, the equivalent megatonnage of an equal
throwweight systems are virtually equal. It's true across a wide
range of systems and across a wide range of warhead numbers. Now
if what you are trying to do is preserve the survivability of a
land-based mobile system, what you want to try to do is hold down
the throwweight on the other side. One very good way to do that
is to try to push the other guy into a mobile system because it
is much more expensive for him to deploy throw weight in a mobile
fashion than it is for him to deploy it in SS-18's.

And we've succeeded marvelously. We've got two new systems on
the Soviet side for the mobile. Isn't that wonderful?
Well, I would submit to you that one does much better in terms of
preserving the survivability of one's own mobile system. In
steering the other side away from things like SS-18, and one
looses the verifiability. Certainly, verifiability is a problem
but I think it's something that can be ameliorated at least by
anselary agreements to have deployment areas, numbers of
logistics facilities and the like.

35

EYJ

Ken, I always thought the attraction of cruise missiles or the single warhead Midget was that each side would have a lot and that each side would know the other side had a lot. That they were not verifiable, but that knowledge produced uncertainty. And therefore a stalemate as far as their potential use was concerned.

I think that a deployment of hard mobile launchers on military reservations which significantly limits if not totally resolves the public interface problem to which Ken alluded, a deployment of that sort is sufficiently resilient to Soviet throwweight increases, that even rather substantial Soviet cheating on an agreement doesn't significantly enhance our own vulnerability. It's a political problem. It's something you ought to worry about, but the level of uncertainty one can deal with in them of the other side's throwweight and capabilities, if one's own ICBM forces on hard mobile launchers, I think is rather great. In part because you don't care about the uncertainty in terms of warhead numbers or their accuracy because those are irrelevant in terms of their ability to attack your own mobile systems.

But I thought that was...Ken's emphasis on verification and countability in connection with the proposals to abolish mobile missiles, missed that particular point.

I didn't. I said that your problem with verifiability had to do with warheads and throw weight.

Kissinger--May I ask a question really for my own education? Back in '69 and the early 70's we did a rather, maybe naive, study of every weapon system that was relevant to strategic

40

negotiations to determine the verifiability, not in the abstract
but so that you could count every last one of them. And we tried
to determine what violation was needed to effect the strategic
equation, and what our verification capability was --not in
relation to each one weapon--but in the degree it took to
overthrow it. So therefore you would have to balance with mobile
missiles the verifiability against the uncertainty. Is such a
study today technically possible? meaningful? Trying to balance
verifiability against the scale of the violation needed to
threaten the system?

It is. What you're saying is how much cheating would be
militarily significant.

That's right.

And that is a proper question.

And that's the only interesting question, really. It's not can
they hide 5 weapons, but can they hide a number that begins to
threaten strategic stability.

Then you'd have to see how ambitious your whole arms control
proposal is, how much it effects overall force. The more
ambitious, the more each margin of cheating would effect that
overall force. Plus you have on that the question of how soon
you would know about the violation to take remedial action, and
you have an overlay on that of the political effect of the
violation.

Kissinger--And you have the third problem. What would you have to do to react to the violation, and are you willing to do it?

How can you get ready for it?

Another point is the character of the forces, and that is the

41

C.Y.D.

less highly MIRV'd they are, the more it takes to destabilize.

Let me ask you a question on verification. I grant you the problem of verification, especially on mobiles. DOD periodically comes out with precise counts of SS-20 and also the 25.

Two comments Brent. One is that we are very good at counting SS-20 garages. We can count the garages like crazy. It's just the 20's we can't count. So we assume that there is an SS-20 for every garage. And if that ever turns out not to be true, then all our count was not true. Second, the verification implies an arms control regime that is holding down the numbers. The Soviets have no incentive now to do any deceptive kind of basing, to do any kind of hiding, to do anything but put one SS-20 in every garage. In fact they have an incentive to show, if the purpose of the force as Sect. Kissinger says, is to really intimidate Western Europe, they have an incentive to show as big a force as possible. Now in an arms control regime that cuts them to a 100 from 441, then you have to look at a whole different scenario.

But why is counting garages any more risky then counting SS-18 launchers? You don't know how many SS-18's they have, only how many holes they have to put them in.

Because you usually see big equipment going in and going out of the silos, whereas with the 20's, ... I'll tell you the amount of times we have seen the actual SS-20 missile would amaze you.

Very low.

Maybe we're overcounting very badly.

Well, the presumption has been that there's a car in every

42

garage. If there's not a car in every garage, then the count is
off.

Joe Kruzel, your turn.

I want to suggest to Ken Adelman that he dig out that 1969
verification panel study that Lit. Jim Woolsey and others around
this table worked on--it's either a terrifying or comforting
thought that these things don't change very much.

I want to return to this question that Gene raised about
Gorbachov's interest in negotiation and pursue it to raise a
larger question. I agree with Mr. Kissinger that Gorbachov has
great incentives to negotiate, domestically and internationally
he derives great benefits from being seen as a peacemaker—as
being out in front on these sorts of issues. But that's a very
different question as being seen as someone who wants to reach
agreement—as someone who has some incentive to work these
negotiations through to a conclusion. And that's the problem I
have—I can't see any concievable reason for Gorbachov to want to
give up something on strategic offensive forces. The one thing
that makes the Soviet Union a superpower, the one trump card they
have against an American success in SDI, the one relatively
inexpensive component of Soviet military power—what could we
offer that would induce the Soviets to give up this one dimension
of their might? The larger question here is really, is this a
good time to be negotiating arms control? Or is this the worst
time since the founding fathers at Harvard sat around that
seminar table 25 yaers ago and dreamed up this whole adventure?
Is this the worst time to be negotiating these arrangements
bilaterally? We can't decide whether to deploy SDI or what sort

43

of SDI. We can't decide whether to ban mobile missiles or to proliferate them. Is this the right time to be sitting down trying to hammer these things into a formal, solemn, long-term bilateral superpower agreement?

Joe, do we have any choice about it politically, in terms of the nature of the American people and the American political process? Do we have any choice but to take a firm...

Well, I understand the political imperative here, both in this country and in Europe. But if you could set that aside, what's the answer to the question?

Kissinger--The answer to your question is that if we could stick to an arms policy for any length of time, this would be a good time to negotiate in terms of pressures on the Soviet system. You have to accept that if Ronald Reagan is observing SALT II that he refuses to ratify and accuses the Soviets of violating an agreement that he considers fatally flawed...

After the time it would have expired...

You have to assume that there are some domestic pressures in this country that make...

Had we ratified it, we would have been able to leave it now.

Kissinger--So, the way we are now conducting our weapons policies with every weapon system, first we are asking it to be survivable. It's impossible. There is no individual weapon system that by itself is survivable. That ties it up for 3 years. Then we argue whether it is desirable. Then it has to run the gauntlet of people who say the existing weapons are good enough or some super-duper weapon is going to come along. That's

44

another 5 years. By that time you've forgotten why the damn
thing was developed in the first place. And then in the name of
compromise they come up with a number to which it is difficult to
assign any strategic sense, like with the MX, then of course that
is not a good time to negotiate. I was talking strictly in terms
of pressures on the Soviet system. Secondly, I think if we make
negotiability the criteria, we are going to win us constantly
looking for things that the Soviets said they accept and we are
going to be driven by these negotiations. Our only salvation is
to come up with a proposal that we can genuinely believe is
improving the situation. If they then don't accept it, then we
have to be willing to draw the consequences from it. But again,
the lack of a consensus and the desire to have an agreement,
almost for its own sake, keeps driving us in the negotiations
from proposal to proposal. I think if the U.S. showed any
staying power, both in our arms programs and in respect to our
proposals, this would be a good time to negotiate. But I am also
conscious of the fact that during the Vietnam War, I once had to
put a researcher to work to see how long we could get the support
of the New York Times and Washington Post editorial page by
accepting their proposals, because we were driven constantly to
making new proposals. It started out three months and it wound
up with two weeks. And one of the penalties we paid for our
approach is no matter what we put forward after a year of
ceasefire, after less than a year of ceasefire, there would be
pressures to change it. That is a handicap that makes it a bad
time. But there is never a good time under those conditions as
long as the Soviets know that.

43

Senator Warner, we're glad to have you here this evening.

I want to back up first about the Soviets are concerned about the
Senate. The Senate today went on live radio--nothing was
accomplished. Nevertheless in about a week or ten days, we will
begin our strategic programs on the authorizations idea. The
issue of the mobile missile will come up in the context of two
points. First, should we increase the weight limitation to
accommodate Penaids? The second issue which I do not support and
will be hotly debated, since we're at that junction to make a
change, should we go ahead and blow it up to around 70,000 pounds
so it can be a MIRV'd vehicle. RAND put out a very interesting
study on this extremely expensive program for warheads. I think
if we got into that tangle, and I seriously hope that we can kill
it, it could really destroy this program. Nevertheless, the RAND
study is interesting. I know Brent, that you have seen it.
Maybe you could lead off with your thoughts on it, first the
Penaids issue and then secondly...

I think that the key issue about the small missiles is the
flexibility. The more weight you have the more you limit, the
way you can deploy it and the flexibility to respond to Soviet
development. Now if we are pursuing an SDI it only makes sense
to make some allocation for decoys and Penaids. One can still do
that and still have a deployment that if the climate changes or
in case of alert you can get it down the highway and so on and so
forth. If you increase the weight by 2 and a half times, and add
to that the increased vehicle weight that you have to carry, you
have a very different kind of a system. And while it's cheaper,

46

nobody ever argued that the small single warhead missile was the
economical way to go. MX and Minutemen silos are the cheap way
to go. No question.

For a mobile MX.

Or even immobile. This is an expensive way to go.

Theoretically, what you get is stability and flexibility because
you don't get...

But your costs are still, according to the RAND study, talking
about per warhead per 500 buy, about 150 million dollars per
warhead, and per survivable warhead about 75 million dollars per
warhead. This compares to in the Trident program 7 million
dollars. Seven, we're talking 10 times the expense per warhead.

A warhead on the Midgetman--a single warhead survivable--150
million per warhead, regular, 75 million for a survivable
warhead.

The trouble with that is that I can change the numbers by
changing the threat, and that isn't even the right analysis in
the first place.

I'd like to hear from Brent on this point.

It's a big leap.

Some of the people here will know that I've had a long history
saying that the right way to think about this, we're deploying
500 missiles and we'll haggle about it, if you spend more money
you can raise the price to attack. And there is no free lunch.

The more you want to raise the price to attack, the more it
costs. And you have to decide how much you want to raise the
price to attack. It's as simple as that. And this cost
effectiveness per surviving missile is a myth, a flawed concept

47

[Y]

because all of those depend upon the threat. Well, I can
diminish the threat and more survive and then get different
ratios and those are very volatile to some judgement on a threat.
You just don't do the analysis that way. The first Townes panel,
I proposed that as the way of doing analysis and it was not
accepted because it made the MPS look too good. And I'll stick
to that statement until hell freezes over and I have two people
here that will support me until hell freezes over that that is
exactly right. That the order from on high was don't make it
look good--so don't take that kind of analysis.

Okay, I'm not saying, defending the threat analysis of the RAND
study, I'm just following on what John says that the RAND study
presents this.

The only non-volatile way to do those is the price to attack, and
we have to say, make a matter of judgement, that finally the
price is high enough and I think the single RV missile is the way
to go. Somewhat on a pragmatic basis. While we can say that we
will go to 3 RV missiles, it has yet to be demonstrated that 3 RV
missiles have adequate mobility. That there is adequate
deployment area. Even if they are, I know a gentleman whom I
respect, the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and
he would say "look, I made a bargain and if I go to the 3 RV
missile, someplace along the line they will declare that it is
not mobile enough and we'll end up putting it in a single
Minuteman hole and I'm not willing to take that risk" and I can't
blame him.

It will be the fourth U.S. ICBM that started out mobile and ended

46

up stationary and vulnerable.

Four out of four.

Ken, this is not the fault of the public.

I'm not saying that the public is to blame.

We've had this historical propensity of starting with carrier
pigeons and with a few modifications turning them into D-5's.

The more I listen the more I think that a mobile missile ban has
some sense to it.

Could I address that for just a moment? I really raised my hand
a moment ago to address Joe's question, which I think I should
do. I think Joe, Dr. Kissinger gave you an answer and a good
one. I think there's a shorter answer to your question. Why
should the Soviets agree to lower levels of offensive arms? I
think the reason is very simple. You posed it, why should he
give up his greatest instrument of power? Now there are two
things wrong with that question. One, he's not giving it up by
going down to 5000, and two that isn't the only instrument of
power that he has because he has the Red Army. But going to the
first, the reason the Soviets couldn't agree to go from 7500 RV's
to 5000 is that it doesn't make a bit of difference.

Dr. Kissinger pointed out that it doesn't change first strike
stability on the margin, if anything it might make it a little
bit worse, but not bad enough that we should discard this
proposal. It just doesn't matter. And that's why he can do it,
because he has some other things that do matter and that's why he
can do this.

But it matters a great deal if he's worried about an American SDI
against which his ability to proliferate warheads is the only

49

[Y]

thing he's got left.

Well, you have a good point there. But you know it isn't SDI that threatens him, it's the threat of deployment. You have a point there but I can argue against that point in the following way. Now this is somewhat at odds with Dr. Kissinger, and I can say well, SDI as a technology program has reasons of its own other than the President's goal. I think it deters the Soviets from any...I think it has made them more religious about the ABM treaty. I mean, all of a sudden, they start seeing great merit in the ABM treaty and I think that is a plus. And so we can argue the following that it turns out if you want to undertake a transition in the mid-90s to a defensive dominated world, it turns out that you want to constrain the offense and improve survivability. And that's a good idea if we undertake the transition or not. So what is your argument? We could reduce the offense and increase the lateral survivability maybe, it's a good idea if we undertake the transition and it's a good idea today if we don't. The Soviets may not buy that, but at least I have a plausible argument that I think has some coherence to it. So I think that there are arguments that can be made and can be made more eleocuent than have been made, that there is a coherence that you can reduce offensive arms even in the presence of a technology program called SDI.

I think there is a danger there of a defeat as we had with MX. We had strong support in Congress on MX and strong support from Democrats on a basing mode that was reasonably survivable and reasonably verifiable. And when that was brought into question in

52

CJD

1981, we played it strongly to not change it unless we could come up with a mode that Congress thought was reasonable because we sensed that there were many people who wanted to get off the MX train who had been aboard it and you gave them a reason by changing the ground rules. Now changing the ground rules from single warheads, small, the whole philosophy of going to de-MIRVing to a 3-MIRV system, regardless of cost considerations, you give a lot of people the opportunity to jump the train as they did on MX and we went from 200 MX to 40 or 50 in a vulnerable mode when we had a reasonable chance of getting 200 with good support in a reasonable survivable mode.

Gene, let me give you one number with respect to a MIRVed 70,000 pound missile. Rough estimate would be that the hardmobile launcher and missile together would be in the range of 250 to 300,000 pounds. A fully loaded 757 aircraft with fuel and passengers sitting out there on the runway at National is 247,000 pounds. Now the notion of making the 250-300,000 pound system able to wander around dirt roads, particularly if one begins to get concerned about Soviet real-time reconnaissance threats, some time way down the pike out in the desert, so you might want to move this fellow to Fort Campbell, Kentucky...something that size wandering around the dirt roads of Fort Campbell, I think ought to boggle anybody's mind.

Senator Warner and Ken Adelman. I want to tell you that there is no question that I run into more often in circles of reasonably well-informed people about arms control and defense issues, nobody in that public that I have met yet can see any reason whatever for the shift from the recommendation of the Scowcroft

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APR.01 '86 17:32 KISSINGER ASSOCIATES, WASH. DC

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# Group on Strategy and Arms Control
## Summary Minutes

March 12, 1986

**Members:** Kupperman, *Rostow, *Scowcroft, Slocombe, *Aspin, *Bingaman, *Blechman, Brown H., *Brown P., Carnesale, Carter, Chayes, Deutch, Doty, Ferraro, Garn, Gore, Gustafson, Haig, *Hunter, *Jones, *Jordan, *Kemp, *Kent, Kerr, *Kissinger, *Kruzel, *McFarlane, Nye, Rosenbaum, Schlesingr, *Selden, Smith, Sonnenfeldt, Taylor, Ullman, *Warner J., Warner E., *Woolsey

**Other Participants:** *Adelman, Armacost, Ermarth, *Goodby, *Schneiter, Taft

**Observer:** *Ballagh, *Clinard, Einhorn, *Ellis, Freney, *Goldberg, Graves, Hage, *Jones, *Langdon, *McGaffigan, *Pollack, *Roberts, Timbie, *Vesser, Williamson

*Attended meeting

APR 12 86

Dr. Kissinger opened the meeting by offering some reflections on the international political framework in which arms control negotiations are taking place, on the current status of those negotiations, and on why, in his view, those negotiations have become somewhat "sterile."

Beginning with the political framework, Dr. Kissinger noted that the United States tends to lose sight of long-term geopolitical goals by treating our relations with the Soviet Union as a "semi-theological problem of conversion," and relying too heavily on the purity of U.S. motives to persuade the Soviets. He contrasted this to the Soviet approach, which seeks in negotiations to achieve favorable shifts in the balance of power.

As to the Soviet Union, he suggested that although he believes Gorbachev to be essentially the same as his predecessors, the new leader's desire to modernize the Party and purge his enemies will make him particularly desirous of a relaxed international front. While this situation offers a good opportunity for negotiation, Gorbachev is likely to pursue decreased tensions through psychological means such as meetings, tranquilization, and agreements which at a minimum do not change the balance of power. The U.S., for its part, is hindered by its excessive reliance on nuclear weapons which triggers pressure for pacifism and unilateral disarmament and by an aversion to linking arms control negotiations to Soviet behavior in other areas.

Dr. Kissinger then examined the status of current arms control negotiations. Commenting on the INF talks, he suggested that a breakdown of bipartisanship in Congress and of agreement between the Congress and the Executive have prevented the INF debate from focusing on the proper issue. Medium-range missiles

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APR.01 '86 17:33 KISSINGER ASSOCIATES, WASH. DC

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in Europe should be viewed as a deterrent to a Soviet-launched conventional war in Europe. Their ability to deter depends not on their threatening the Soviet Union, which could just as easily be achieved by systems located outside Europe, but on their location in Europe. Under no circumstances, said Dr. Kissinger, should the U.S. consider a zero option, regardless of Soviet offers, and withdraw its entire INF from Europe.

With regard to the MBFR negotiations, Dr. Kissinger warned that, while the proposal force withdrawals are minimal, freezing the conventional situation in Europe while simultaneously decoupling the nuclear problem could mean we have reached agreements which do not account for fundamental changes in the strategic relationship.

Moving to strategic arms negotiations, he expressed concern that current US and Soviet proposals would do little to deal with either the danger of a surprise attack or of mass extermination of civilian populations. He suggested that they might actually increase the incentive for preemption and the vulnerability of some systems, specifically submarine forces.

Dr. Kissinger stated that while claims of a perfect defense are exaggerated, he could not conceive of an arms control or strategic concept without a defensive component. He urged that the SDI debate shift from discussions of research and deployment to considerations of what the defensive component should be and its relation to offensive forces. He suggested that the U.S. negotiate only the level of deployment, and that deployment levels for a defensive component be linked to negotiations on offensive force levels.

-Dr. Kissinger then lent support to proposals, such as those in the Scowcroft Commission report, to do away with MIRV's and replace them with single warhead missiles, thereby simplifying defense problems, reducing the number of warheads by more than we are now proposing, and lessening the danger of surprise attacks.

Finally, Dr. Kissinger discussed what he perceives to be deficiencies in U.S. nuclear theory. He noted that US arms control doctrine has changed little since its original formulation in the late 1950's and early 60's. The breakdown of bipartisanship in the political community and the predominance of "job applicants and revolutionaries" in the intellectual community have hindered the development of significant contemporary contributions. He concluded by noting that stagnation in negotiations will work against the U.S. in the long run because it effectively freezes the existing reliance on a weapons system which democratic society cannot tolerate indefinitely and thus shift the psychological balance against us.

In the general discussion, one discussant disagreed with the contention that the atmosphere is good for negotiation. He felt that current budgetary constraints on the military weaken U.S. leverage. Another participant distinguished between Gorbachev's

APR.01 '86 17:35 KISSINGER ASSOCIATES, WASH. DC

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[LC]

willingness to negotiate and a desire for an actual agreement. He questioned Soviet willingness to reduce their strategic offensive forces, which he perceived to be their one claim to superpower status and their most inexpensive military component. He felt that this, combined with a U.S. lack of direction, makes the atmosphere unconducive to negotiations.

Another participant acknowledged lack of continuity in U.S. arms control policy and added that the U.S. weapons policy process is slow and often produces weapons or quantities of weapons which make no strategic sense. Nevertheless, he felt that if the U.S. can solve its own problems, the Soviet situation is conducive to productive negotiation. A second discussant responded that he felt Soviet concessions are possible, noting that the U.S. wants them to limit, not abandon, their strategic nuclear forces and that they do indeed have a second source of power, the Red Army.

Turning to linkage, a participant questioned whether it is possible to link arms control to other political issues and still continue the arms control process. Another member responded that arms control need not be contingent on Soviet behavior, but at the same time, the U.S. must not accept Soviet misconduct for fear of jeopardizing the arms control process. Another discussant felt that we should be careful to use linkage only in ways which hurt the Soviets more than ourselves.

As for the START talks, one participant contested the suggestion that current proposals offer too little progress. He felt that the political process in the U.S. works against proposals which produce big gains. Because the Soviets alone possess a first strike capability, attempts to deprive them of it (the most reasonable U.S. goal) are viewed by the public and Congress as lopsided and unrealistic. Another discussant responded that a removal of first strike on either side should properly be viewed as stabilizing and mutually advantageous, not lopsided.

Another speaker cautioned that current proposals, originally intended as negotiating ploys, are becoming final positions. Another speaker suggested that this reflects confusion regarding what the U.S. stance should be. A third participant suggested that the appearance of confusion is largely the result of inconsistencies between long-term U.S. declaratory policy and intermediate bargaining ploys. He felt that given a bit more thought, there are ways to present ploys in a manner consistent with other policies without compromising our negotiating strategies.

Moving to a discussion of U.S. intermediate nuclear forces (INF), a member asked why the U.S. had waited so long to deploy IRBM's in Europe if indeed they had good deterrent value. Another participant responded that the U.S. removal of such missiles from Europe in connection with the 1962 Cuban crisis had made quick redeployment politically impossible. During the late

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APR.01 '86 17:58 KISSINGER ASSOCIATES, WASH. DC

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1960s and early 1970s, anti-military sentiment at home had the same effect. The deployment of SS-20's has now made it possible once again, providing a convenient rationale.

Responding to a question on the relationship of British and French nuclear forces to the negotiating process, a participant suggested that it is currently reasonable to consider them separately. He added, however, that should the U.S. and Soviets move toward a 5,000 RV ceiling and British and French forces rise to near the 2,000 RV level, our position would become more difficult.

On the topic of SDI, two participants noted that mutual deployments of strategic defense systems would force modifications in strategic and conventional offensive forces while simultaneously draining the financial resources needed to do so. Another speaker recognized the likelihood of such consequences, but maintained that the U.S. could not, and should not, attempt to prevent Soviet deployment by delaying its own efforts.

Another discussant argued that there would be renewed pressure for U.S. troop withdrawals and recommended that the U.S. reorient its conventional role in Europe to a greater extent toward technological and second echelon contributions in anticipation of those political and budgetary pressures. He also felt that the U.S. should focus its SDI research more heavily on anti-tactical ballistic missile systems (ATBMs). This, he suggested, would offset the current Soviet deployment of tactical missiles as an "end run" around European air defenses, would deflect charges that the U.S. intends to deploy a system which abrogates the ABM Treaty, would involve research applicable to a broader SDI program, and would allay European fears that SDI will "decouple" U.S. and European offense programs.

One member disagreed with the notion that SDI decouples the U.S. from Europe, suggesting instead that its own enhanced invulnerability would increase U.S. willingness to actively defend Europe. He also felt that many, though not all, decoupling arguments are the product of European anti-defense movements and are not terribly credible. Another speaker commented that decoupling is a political rather than military problem, and that SDI appears to Europeans as an attempt by the U.S. to retreat to isolatationism behind a protective curtain.

In further discussion it was noted that SDI deployments might make limitations on warheads harder to achieve. Another discussant responded that if both sides wished to shift to defensive orientations, then constraining offensive systems and enhancing survivability would still make sense even with strategic defense deployments.

In considering the possible contribution of mobile, single warhead missiles, one participant expressed opposition to plans to increase the weight of mobile missiles to allow MIRV'ing, and noted the existence of other proposals to increase their weight to

APR.01 '86 18:00 KISSINGER ASSOCIATES, WASH. DC

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accomodate "Penaids". Another discussant felt that decoys and
Penaids could be handled without seriously crippling mobility,
but warned that MIRV's would change the character of the system
entirely. He acknowledged that the single warhead system is more
expensive, but felt that to raise the cost to the Soviets of an
attack, the cost of the system must rise as well. He rejected
the cost effectiveness per surviving missiles method of
comparison as subject to easy manipulation.

Another member noted that concerns over verifiability
hamper mobile missile proposals, as does a pattern in which
mobile missiles systems invariably emerge from debate as immobile
systems. He attributed this to a problem in making missiles
both invulnerable and countable.

In response, a participant suggested that with mobile
missile systems, survivability is a function of the enemy's
throwweight and equivalent megatonnage, not warhead numbers. One
way to kep an enemy's throwweight down is to push him into a
mobile system as well, requiring smaller missiles. Losses in
verifiability are offset by gains in survivability and the
uncertainty may well serve as an added deterrent. Another
speaker believed that deployment of hard mobile launchers on
military reservations would be resilient enough to absorb a fair
amount of Soviet cheating and would alleviate "public interface"
problems.

A participant suggested that it would be wise to study
vulnerability balanced against the scale of violation needed to
threaten the system. Another discussant noted that such an
undertaking would have to consider the direct relationship
between the ambitiousness of a system and the effects of
cheating, the time needed to detect violations, the political as
well as military effects of violations, possible reactions to
violations, and the inverse relationship between the level of
MIRV'ing and the effects of violations. A third participant
noted that, should sharp limits on Soviet missiles be negotiated,
the Soviets would have an incentive, not currently present, to
hide numbers. Verification would consequently become more
difficult.

Finally, one participant cautioned that wavering over the
issue would give opponents of the mobile, single warhead missile
system a chance to send it the way of the MX and the buffalo, and
another expressed his belief that public opinion is against
MIRV'ing the mobile missile and generally favors the
recommendations of the Presidential Commission on Strategic
Forces (Scowcroft Commission) presented in April 1983.

5