Via SSM

January 6, 1987

MEMO FOR HAK

FROM: Rosemary

SUBJECT: Your 1985 BBC Radio Interview with Michael Charlton - For Publication

BBC/Michael Charlton is asking for written approval indicating your agreement to let them publish the transcript of your interview in 1985, which will become Chapter 2 of a much longer book of interviews. The relevant pages - on which you are mentioned and quoted - of that chapter are attached (which is all they sent us).

The interview has already aired on British radio. The transcript is all set up in final galleys, ready for printing. It is a mixture of the moderator's comments (probably they edited their own text) and quotes from you, as well as a few others.

They do not mention wanting any edits from you - just final approval to go ahead and print as shown. In fact, there is only one clear change to be made - on page 49 which shows a wrong date and we should change this (I have marked it).

I understand you have agreed to publication. I do not know if you want to insist on making any edits.

Since it has already been aired, I read it through and flagged some things which stood out in my mind that you might want to look at again.

Approve galley as is for publication (with the one date change shown p 49)

Approve as edited by HK

Disapprove; tell them I didn't agree to publication

## Chapter 2

# Deterrence Through Détente

## *The Hand of Henry Kissinger*

WHEN PRESIDENT NIXON took office in 1969, he spoke at once of the unique and fatal implications which nuclear weapons possess for the statesman. 'While I would like', he said, 'to provide the American people with complete protection against nuclear attack, it is not now within our power to do so...' The President added, 'It might look to an opponent like the prelude to an offensive strategy threatening the Soviet deterrent.'

President Nixon was reiterating the essence of Robert McNamara's passionate presentation to the Soviet Premier, Mr Kosygin, at the Glassboro summit two years earlier. To attempt a nuclear defence would merely mean an intensified race in *offensive* weapons to overpower that defence, and, therefore, 'Mutual assured destruction' - assuring the certain threat of retaliation in kind - should be acknowledged as the rational prescription for stable deterrence. It fell to the Nixon Administration to bring about the fascinating and fitful negotiation with the Soviet Union which was to give a cold and ambiguous assent to Robert McNamara's proposition.

The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) became the principal arena for a struggle which was itself a substitute for war. SALT was compared, in the beginning, to the Congress of Vienna in the last century, which secured the forty years of peace that followed the Napoleonic Wars. The similarities were superficially beguiling. What Talleyrand had said of his colleagues and former allies against Napoleon, that they were 'too frightened to fight one another, too stupid to agree', was given a wholly new dimension by the nuclear competition. The Russians were achieving nuclear parity with the United States. The balance of power was being challenged.

In 1968, the year Nixon was elected, the Russian had reasserted their hegemony in Europe by invading Czechoslovakia. In South Vietnam, the Communist forces (armed by the Soviet Union) had launched the 'Tet'

30

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

offensive in more than forty provincial towns. Their ability to do so was seen in America at the time as overthrowing certain basic assumptions about the nature and progress of the war in Vietnam. In consequence, amid a growing domestic tumult, President Johnson decided not to seek re-election. As President Nixon drove down Pennsylvania Avenue from Capitol Hill on his inauguration day, the last image that he can have taken with him into office, as his car turned the corner by the White House, was of some stands of hostile demonstrators against the Vietnam War, waving the Viet Cong flag and chanting the name of Ho Chi Minh, the Communist leader with whose insurgent armies the United States was at war. There was grave public disquiet – and at the gates of the White House itself.

Into this forbidding context stepped Dr Henry Kissinger, with his immense talents and intelligence. For almost ten years he was to be one of the most powerful men in the world. In his own book about the Congress of Vienna, Dr Kissinger had written of those statesmen who achieved final greatness that it was given to them 'not only to maintain the protection of order but to have the strength to contemplate chaos – and there to find the material for fresh creation'. How far did chaos appear to Henry Kissinger himself to be the prospect, as he went to the White House as President Nixon's National Security Adviser and later his Secretary of State?

**HENRY KISSINGER:** It was a very difficult period, because the bipartisan consensus that had characterised US foreign policy for most of the post-war period was collapsing. A kind of opposition was developing in the United States that was unprecedented. The practical proposals that were being made had the consequence of a complete collapse of a military effort in Vietnam that our predecessors had started and which had left us with 550,000 troops in place. (Our studies indicated, for example, that it would take us eighteen months to get them out, even as a simple logistics problem.) This was continued with an attack on every military programme, together with the fact that the people who had created the conditions went into opposition to what were their own policies as soon as they were out of office. So it was an extremely complicated situation, not eased by the fact that President Nixon (who was a man of great accomplishment and great knowledge in foreign policy) did not have the art of gaining popular support the way, for example, President Reagan has.

**CHARLTON:** The 'strength to contemplate chaos', you said, 'there to find the material for fresh creation...' Why was arms control, SALT, the material for fresh creation as you saw it, and to become the principal activity for what you called 'a new structure of peace' with the Soviet Union?

**KISSINGER:** That was not our policy. Our policy was much more complicated than this. Arms control to us (that is, to Nixon and me, and to those who dominated the Nixon Administration) was not an end in itself.

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

31

It was one of the tools, and in fact we did not make even the first preliminary agreement on arms control until May 1971, which was two-plus years after we came into office. Our strategy was to try to bring China into play; to try to isolate North Vietnam; to establish a new relationship with Europe and with the Soviet Union; to move ahead on a broad front. We believed in 'linkage'. We, for example, did not agree to any increase in trade until there had been some preliminary agreement on arms control. So, we never believed that arms control by itself could carry the whole burden of East-West relations. There were, however, significant segments of American public opinion (especially scientific and intellectual opinion) who thought exactly that; and since they were needed to carry any agreement through the Congress against conservative opposition, they tended to have a more vocal role than our theory would have justified.

HENRY KISSINGER HAD AN overarching concept of grand strategy. His enticing of China out of its years of self-imposed isolation and the dialogue he established with the leaders of the Soviet Union have written some of the most important history of the twentieth century. Kissinger declared that the problem of the age was how to 'manage' the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower. That relationship turned fundamentally on the supreme instruments of national power and sovereignty – nuclear weapons.

As the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks began, the Soviet military programme was gaining momentum. (Dean Rusk has already drawn our attention, in the first chapter, to the decisions the Russians had taken in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis). For their part, the Americans had stopped building ICBMs, for the reasons Robert McNamara has given, and were now trying 'not to lose' rather than to win in Vietnam. There was evident concern about the long-term trends in the Soviet strategic advance. Kissinger believed that, as nuclear parity approached, it was the duty of the statesman to dominate what he could not avoid. That was also the intention of President Nixon, as the chief American negotiator with the Russians at the SALT talks, Gerard Smith, recalls.

GERARD SMITH: Neither side is going to let the other get a superior position. I think Nixon was sensible enough to realise that the best we could do would be to register parity, and not let the Soviets get into an overreaching position.

CHARLTON: But on the specific point of superiority, written into the Republican Party platform today as it was in the 1950s with President Eisenhower and Secretary John Foster Dulles - did Nixon yield on that for essentially the same reason Eisenhower himself did, that it could no longer be made a continuing requirement of American policy?

SMITH: I suspect that Eisenhower had a much clearer notion of what was possible than Nixon. You speak of Eisenhower talking about superiority.

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

33

Soviet Union – as he did, symbolically, in the SALT agreement of 1972 – what did President Nixon then feel would deter the Soviet Union from political expansion elsewhere in the world? If the Soviet Union had achieved an equality of power with the United States, was not the corollary of that going to be expanding political opportunities?

Smith: It was Kissinger's thesis that alongside the arms control agreements there would be a network of agreements that it would be in the interest of the Soviet Union to keep. I think Kissinger figured that if the Soviets went around committing aggressions, they could not have these other 'goodies' – and that would deter them.

KISSINGER'S GRAND DESIGN of judicious rewards and punishments as a deterrent, embracing trade and technology and credits as well as arms control, was critical to the nature of his discourse. Arms control by itself could not relieve tensions. If it were not linked to restraint in worldwide competition, Kissinger said. 'It could prove a safety valve for Soviet expansionist designs. Every time there was a Soviet aggressive move, there would be claims that the new tensions were making arms control even more important. And that is why', as Kissinger tells us in his memoirs and has repeated here, 'I believed in "linkage"'.

But he was also convinced that the nuclear weapon had added a new dimension of horror and, therefore, responsibility for national leaders. We come to a point which divided Kissinger from some of his conservative critics in America. To what extent did he consider that possession by both sides of the 'absolute weapon' meant there could no longer be an 'absolute enemy' – an enemy whose ideology, or whose very existence, was a threat to one's own existence or survival?

HENRY KISSINGER: I have always believed that Communism is morally repugnant, and I think if you go through my writings you will never find any deviation from that point of view. I have also believed that nuclear weapons impose the necessity of co-existence. I do not base that co-existence on any moral acceptance of the Soviet system, but on the practical necessities that nuclear weapons create. That has been my position from the very beginning. I wrote a book in 1956 called *Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy* which was perhaps premature, but in which I said that, sooner or later (I thought it would come sooner than it did), strategic nuclear weapons would tend towards a kind of parity which would make absolute war impossible; and I called for alternatives. I've never changed that position. I believe that is still true now. Sometimes I have changed my view as to what the alternatives could be, depending on the technology of the moment, and I don't claim infallibility with respect to technological alternatives.

In this debate I was in a lonely position. I was a hawk on defense and a dove on SALT, earning opponents on both sides. I was opposed to the "assured destruction" theory of emphasizing civilian casualties in a nuclear war, and I was convinced we had to strengthen conventional forces. But I also saw an important role for SALT in a well-defined national security policy. I did not believe that arms control could by itself alleviate tensions. Indeed, if not linked to some restraint of the geopolitical competition, strategic arms control might become a safety valve for Soviet expansionist designs – a vehicle for Soviet peace of-fensives to mask or compensate for some new act of aggression. Every time there was a Soviet aggressive move, there would be appeals that the new tensions now made arms control talks even more important. This is why I favored linkage.

But I partsed company with some conservative critics in my conviction

you, p. 1010

34

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

**KISSINGER:** I've never believed that – I've believed exactly the opposite. I've believed that as nuclear parity was achieved, threats *other* than nuclear war would gain greater force, and that it was the obligation of the West to create obstacles to these other threats.

**CHARLTON:** Stability at the level of the nuclear balance created instability at other levels?

**KISSINGER:** Exactly.

**CHARLTON:** How, in your view, did the ratio of nuclear strength influence or dictate the outcome of crisis?

**KISSINGER:** I have always believed, contrary to many scientists, that you're better off with superiority than with parity. I have also thought that absolute superiority was going to become next to impossible to attain; either because it was no longer achievable technically, or because the calculations would be too complex for anybody to have any confidence in them. Nevertheless, this is one extreme. At the other extreme, however, I believed (and I still believe) that a strategy based on mass extermination of populations would lead to the gradual demoralisation of the West, and to the growth of the unilateral disarmament movement and pacifism. I do not think one can (or should) convince democratic publics that their extermination is the key element in their security, either the threat of *their* extermination or of *mutual* extermination. So my view was that we would be better off with superiority than with parity. Even if superiority was not attainable, we were better off with a capacity for discriminating targeting than with a capacity for indiscriminate destruction.

**CHARLTON:** You are reported as having said that parity with the Russians stopped you, in your time – over the Soviet attempt, in 1970, to establish a submarine base at Cienfuegos in Cuba – from adopting the same tactics as President Kennedy had during the Cuban crisis in 1962.

**KISSINGER:** I never said that. Absolutely not. We used more or less the same tactics and we achieved more or less the same result: that is, we achieved the dismantlement of what we thought was a Soviet nuclear submarine base, and which I believe *was* a Soviet nuclear submarine base.

**CHARLTON:** With the implicit nuclear threat in order to achieve that?

**KISSINGER:** We didn't need implicit nuclear threats any more than Kennedy did, because Cuba is so close to our shores. We blockaded the harbour of Cienfuegos. He blockaded the whole island – so he more or less used the same tactic.

**CHARLTON:** Does, therefore, the behaviour of states in the last analysis conform to the traditional pattern – once nuclear parity has been established?

**KISSINGER:** No – but I think whoever has a local advantage has a decided and very important advantage, precisely because the side that can extricate itself *only* by initiating the use of nuclear weapons is at a very great disadvantage.

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

35

AT THE HEART OF Henry Kissinger's discourse was his stated belief that, as the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity, '... threats other than nuclear war would gain greater force', and that 'it was the obligation of the West to create obstacles to those other threats.' Kissinger laid subsequent failures of the détente policy to create those obstacles, as a deterrent to the extension of Communist power and Soviet influence in his own time, squarely at the door of 'the Watergate scandal'. The crippling of Presidential authority meant the loss of the capacity both to offer incentives for responsible behaviour and to apply inhibiting penalties for aggressive action.

But there was also, perhaps, an underlying, unspoken reason. In Henry Kissinger's search for a stable world order were echoes of what Lord Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary and soul of the coalition against Napoleon, had told the House of Commons about the Congress of Vienna: 'The Congress was not assembled for the discussion of moral principles, but for great practical purposes - to establish effectual provisions for the general security.' Kissinger was trying to wean American foreign policy away from both its traditional oscillations and its historical preoccupation with moral principles. Henry Kissinger's manipulations of the balance of power might have been familiar in the statesman's world of the Congress of Vienna, a context he was trying to recreate; but they were alien to much of the American body politic, to whom foreign policy is obliged to be, above all, a public policy subject to public scrutiny.

**HENRY KISSINGER:** Our style of foreign policy would have been easily understood in Britain, but was not easy to understand in the United States. We believed in a national-interest-based foreign policy. You did not have to explain in Great Britain through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the problem of throwing Britain's weight to whoever seemed the weaker of the continental countries, and Britain made no moral claim for that. For the United States this was a rather novel approach.

At the precise moment that we had achieved apparent success, both at isolating Vietnam and in relations with China and the Soviet Union, there occurred 'Watergate', a totally unpredictable event which collapsed executive authority, so that for fifteen to eighteen months the locus of executive respect by the public was the State Department - which was unheard of. That then put us into a much more defensive posture, so by 1975, we had a coalition of conservatives and liberals against the policy that Nixon and later Ford were carrying out, with me as Secretary of State. You had liberals who felt that if Nixon was for peace, confrontation could not be all bad, and conservatives who believed that any deal with the Soviets was wicked.

**CHARLTON:** On the point of the moralistic aspects of the American political tradition, you've written of the time when you came to office that,

36

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

for the United States, conflict is unnatural. It was seen as caused by evil men or motives. Thus the Soviet Union as a tyranny fulfilled the traditional image of irreconcilable conflict as between good and evil.

**KISSINGER:** You have two extremes in America. Since conflict is considered unnatural, one of two things happens: either the opponent is considered inherently evil, or it is believed that the opponent has undergone a conversion and is, therefore, ready for a final settlement – without being able to express what the content of the final settlement is.

**CHARLTON:** But if Americans saw relations between states as either peaceful or warlike, in black and white terms, why did you think, if that *was* the American political tradition, that it had become incompatible with the American national interest and a sound foreign policy?

**KISSINGER:** Because, at the end of the day, the relation among states has to be able to be expressed in some concrete conditions. If you cannot express it in concrete conditions, you are doomed to oscillate between extremes of conciliation and extremes of intransigence, overdo each of them as you go through each phase, and then be disappointed with each phase. The attempt that President Nixon and I made, inconclusively, was to see whether we could express conditions of peace or stability in some specific manner, and this more or less runs counter to the American tradition. Go back to American post-war history; take the policy of containment. You will find Dean Acheson, Dulles, Truman and Eisenhower always saying that when we have positions of strength, the negotiating position will improve. What we were going to *do* with the negotiating position – what we were going to *ask* of the Russians if they came to the conference table – I defy anybody to find one statement.

**DR KISSINGER'S CREATIVE AND COHERENT** substitute for this long-standing omission was his policy of entangling the Soviet Union in a web of involvements on arms agreements, trade and credits, to be linked to restraint by the Russians in the exercise of Lenin's ambition for the Soviet state as a power fulfilling a millennial mission. However, among Kissinger's more compelling domestic critics were those who felt there should be more to these involvements than the principle of agreement on a set of rules, and that what was missing from his concept was an ethic of a peaceful order. Otherwise why resist the revolutionary power?

Liberals who felt that détente condoned the suppression of human rights and conservatives who baulked at notions of equality or parity with the Soviet Union combined under the leadership of a powerful Senator, Henry ('Scoop') Jackson. This formidable opposition in the Congress consistently attacked both the arithmetic and the concept of the SALT talks and all but wrecked the policy. One of the Americans who sat with Kissinger across the table from the Russian leaders during the SALT negotiations, as a member of the National Security Council, was Hal Sonnenfeldt.

38

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

dangers of the appearance of inequality, and the expected Soviet ability to translate that advantage into political gains. The argument is endless whether the Soviets in Angola, and in Ethiopia, and later in Afghanistan were exploiting the appearance of strategic advantage.

CHARLTON: Whereas Henry Kissinger, and you, for example, took the view that those numerical advantages were illusory...

SONNENFELDT: We took the view that we could live with numerical disadvantages, especially as regards launchers, for a period of time. But, of course, one of the great disappointments of SALT I was that the clear assumption that there would *then* be substantial cutbacks in offensive forces (on which, incidentally, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Agreement was also based) was an assumption never borne out by subsequent events.

### THE EMERGENCE OF THIS particular Soviet advantage in heavy land-based missiles, and the question of whether it stimulated the possibility of political transfers, had returned the American debate to an earlier apprehension, recalling President Kennedy's words in 1960. Reflecting upon the likely consequences of the sudden advent of Sputnik, the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile, he said:

> Soviet missile power will be the shield from behind which they will slowly but surely advance through 'Sputnik' diplomacy, limited wars and the vicious blackmail of our allies. The periphery of the free world will be nibbled away...

> The *Argument* gathered force following President Nixon's decline and fall and became a major factor in the change of climate over the following years which led to the election of President Reagan. How Moscow saw the American condition at the time of the SALT negotiations and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972, which were coincidental with the last stages of the American engagement in Vietnam, has naturally arfoused a good deal of scholarly interest and historical speculation. As Henry Kissinger looked back to those perceptions, do they not show that the Russians had come to see an underlying change in the balance of power and a comparative (if transient) American weakness?

### HENRY KISSINGER: Absolutely not! Considering that we had riots in the streets, that we were involved in a war in Vietnam, that the opposition party held both houses of the Congress, I think we achieved an extraordinary flexibility of foreign policy. After all, we drove the Soviets out of the Middle East even *after* Watergate. I don't think the Soviet Union looked on the Nixon Administration as a weak opponent. I think they looked at us as a formidable opponent – we 'opened' to China in the middle of all our travails (which must have been an extremely unsettling time for the Soviet Union) – and what opportunity did they seize during that period? As long as Nixon was even *relatively* unimpaired we made progress in negotiations with the Soviet, lost no international position, and in fact made great gains in the Middle East.

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

39

**CHARLTON:** But wouldn't you agree it is a period seen today as the prelude to a series of global adventures by the Soviet Union?

**KISSINGER:** It was a prelude to a series of global adventures for a whole variety of reasons. First, because with the collapse of our executive authority, starting in 1973, we destroyed a President. We then had a McGovernite Congress. The people who were defeated in 1972, by the most overwhelming majority but one in American history, regained Congress as a result of events that had absolutely nothing to do with the political process. As a result of this, there was the oddest coalition between liberals and conservatives who took away both the carrot and the stick. They prevented us from resisting Soviet aggression in Angola. At the same time they challenged the Soviet Union with the Jackson and the Stevenson amendments, in which they cut off both credits and trade with the Soviet Union – and when the Soviet Union became more aggressive, preventing us from resisting it. Of course it led to the beginning of adventures.

ed/

ed/

Then, in 1977, you had the Carter Administration, which had an absolutely wrong perception of how to deal with the Soviet Union. You remember that when Carter came in, he said he was 'free of the inordinate fear of Communism'. He certainly did nothing, to put it mildly, to arrest the collapse of the Shah of Iran. He permitted the Soviets a major adventure in the Horn of Africa. There was no foreign policy.

That has nothing to do with détente. Our policy was to resist Soviet adventurism wherever it occurred, and as long as we had any authority we managed to do this. It was not détente that produced that situation – at least not as conceived by Nixon and Ford.

**CHARLTON:** But would you not agree that, over Angola, the principal elements of your strategy were pretty severely tested? We find you (in October of 1976) saying that 'the introduction of Cuban expeditionary forces, with Russian support, into an area of no historic Soviet or Russian interest is totally unwarranted', and then you went on to say, 'but we've never considered SALT a favour we granted to the Soviet Union, to be turned on and off according to the ebb and flow of our relations'.

**KISSINGER:** Yes, but let's get a few things straight. In the fall of 1974 the Congress passed the Jackson Amendment, which cut off 'most favoured nation' treatment of the Soviets. It passed a Stevenson amendment which cut off credits. So the Soviet Union, at the end, was worse off than it had been before the détente period started. This happened at the same time, as I've said, that a McGovernite Congress had just been elected that would not support any form of resistance to Communist aggression. Then when the Soviets started stepping up their activities in Angola, and we attempted to resist, the Congress voted against the thirty million dollars we thought we needed to support the anti-Soviet and -Cuban forces (the Savimbi forces, who are still there). At that point the question was, should we cut off SALT... and at a time when we had a Congress that was not going to increase our military expenditures? I think it is absurd to conduct a

OK?

40

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

truculent policy when you're not willing to back it up and I find myself in the ridiculous position that, in this sort of debate, I'm being attacked from the left for being too tough on the Soviets, and by the right for being too soft. We were trying to steer a middle course. Both the left and the right were trying to conduct an essentially moralistic policy - without backing it up with resources.

**THE EARLY HOPES OF President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, that agreement to negotiate strategic arms limitations could be linked to Soviet assistance in America's disengagement from the sunless war in Vietnam, were not sustained. The Russians insisted that SALT was to be looked at on its own merits. With America a house divided and the uncompromising zealotry of the Communists in Hanoi, the détente policy could produce no honourable outcome in Vietnam. President Nixon's guarantee to the South Vietnamese proved not to be the bond of the American nation. Vietnam, in strategic terms, was in the end an American surrender.**

**HENRY KISSINGER:** Certainly Vietnam was a disaster; but when you inherit a disaster, when you inherit 550,000 troops, you just cannot switch it off like a television programme. It would have been easy for Nixon, from a purely selfish point of view, to blame it all on his predecessor. But his judgment was, and I think it was correct, that the United States had no right to sacrifice 35,000 troops and simply liquidate it as if nothing had happened. After all, people forget it took de Gaulle five years to get out of Algeria.

**CHARLTON:** There is the evidence of what Gromyko said to Rab Butler (the British Foreign Secretary) when Butler was trying to enlist Gromyko's help about Vietnam. Gromyko said to him: 'Our American enemies are deeply embedded with men and munitions in Vietnam; we've no desire to interfere.' How much more likely is it that by 1970-71, as negotiations opened on SALT, they *did* see the American position as one of weakness?

**KISSINGER:** First of all, what concessions did we make to the Soviets in SALT? I mean, there is a whole series of myths that are retroactively invented which have absolutely no bearing. Can you name on concrete concession we made to the Soviets that was unwarranted - or that was not going to be imposed on us by the Congress anyway?

**CHARLTON:** I'm interested in how the Soviet Union saw this, and how...

**KISSINGER:** The Soviet Union, until 1971 and until our opening to China, procrastinated in negotiations. We had a number of things going for us, however. We had the opening to China. We had the fact that the Soviet Union was desperate to make an agreement with the West Germans on Berlin and East Germany, which they could not get against our active opposition. (I'm not saying it was necessary to get our *support*, but they could not get it against our active opposition.) Third, they were worried, as they always seem to be worried, by the beginning of our strategic

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

41

defences.¹ And fourth, as soon as we started mining Haiphong the Soviet Union also realised that the military situation was changing. If we made a mistake, I think it was that we did not do in 1969 in Vietnam what we did in 1972—but that would have led to a revolt in our Cabinet and Nixon was not prepared to do that.

**CHARLTON:** There should have been a forward policy, of mining if necessary, earlier ...?

**KISSINGER:** I believe in retrospect that we should have done in 1969 what we did in 1972: that is to say, demand a settlement, or mined the harbours and bombed North Vietnam, but then that wasn't all that easy. A bombing halt had just been signed by the outgoing administration, and by that time public order had broken down in the United States. It's very difficult for a new administration to take upon itself the responsibility for dividing the country. But, despite these difficulties, in retrospect I believe that we should have done that. In fact, I thought so at the time and recommended it. But I recommended it in a way that had no real force, nor have I ever claimed any credit for it.

**CHARLTON:** As you remind your critics, there was no military programme sacrificed by the Nixon-Kissinger Administration, but one still has...

**KISSINGER:** As a matter of fact, SALT, paradoxically, was the only way to preserve our military programmes. Without SALT the Congress would have continued to cut. Take the strategic defence we had at the time: it wasn't called strategic defence, it was called the anti-ballistic missile system, ABM. We started out with twelve defence sites around the country. By the time the ABM agreement was signed, the Congress had already cut it to two; in the next Budget it was going to go down to one; so the thing had become an absurdity. One defence site meant nothing. And the whole thing passed by one vote — the Vice-President's! Every succeeding year it went down. By 1972 it was down to two, by 1973 it would have been down to nothing.

**CHARLTON:** But does not this very process contribute to what it is known Brezhnev said, in Prague, at a Warsaw Pact meeting in 1973? By 1985, he said, 'as a consequence of what we are achieving through détente, we shall have achieved most of our objectives; a decisive shift in the correlation of forces will be such that we'll be able to exert our influence whenever we need to...'

**KISSINGER:** Well, first of all, I don't think he said quite that, but...

**CHARLTON:** That is what he's quoted as...

**KISSINGER:** ... but never mind. Supposing he did say that (you have to remember that each side has the problem of justifying détente to its hardliners), the facts have certainly not borne this out. I would make the case for the proposition that détente has, on the whole, been more disarming for the Soviet Union than it has been for the West. It has brought

¹ i.e. the American anti-ballistic missile system, later abandoned

42

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

it endless troubles in the satellite orbit. It has not improved its relative technological position; quite the contrary, it has declined. If one looks at the growth of other nations in the Far East, it has created the problem of a two-front situation for the Soviet Union; and it led to a massive reduction in their influence in the Middle East. So, in a sense, in détente both sides were betting that they could use history. And even with an impaired Nixon, we made progress; with an unimpaired American administration, I think that situation would have been even stronger.

IN THE DYING LIGHT of the commitment in Vietnam, the American will to match limited war with limited war as a deterrent to the expansion of Communist power was, at best, uncertain. Senator Jackson pressed his attack on the consequent dangers of any perceived weakness in the central nuclear balance of power. The arithmetic of the SALT agreement had left the Russians with more offensive missiles than the Americans. But that had been the price of agreement. With or without SALT, the Russians would have had more because they were building more. What began as an arcane argument of Senator Jackson's about the theoretical possibility of a Soviet first strike against the American land-based missile force, the Minutemen, became a generalised charge that the loose constraints negotiated in SALT had presented the Russians with a claim to strategic superiority and to the political cards that go with it. An influential aide to Senator Jackson at this time, and an even more influential one today in the Reagan Administration where he is Assistant Secretary of Defence, is Richard Perle.

**RICHARD PERLE:** I can recall Senator Jackson sending to Henry Kissinger a memorandum in October 1970, suggesting - on the basis of intelligence that was obviously available to the Administration as well as to the Congress - that under the terms of the agreement that seemed to be emerging as the SALT I Interim Agreement the Soviets could, within the confines of that agreement (generously interpreted), double or even treble the effective capability of their land-based missile force. And that is precisely what happened.

**CHARLTON:** What governed your assessment of Soviet power?

**PERLE:** We had enjoyed a long period in which our own strategic forces were not seriously vulnerable to attack. We enjoyed that at great expense, by the development of submarine-launched ballistic missiles and the placing of land-based ballistic missiles in hardened concrete silos to shelter them from the effects of nearby nuclear blast. The inaccuracy of Soviet weapons that might be directed against those forces - all meant that a Soviet attack would fail. It would fail to destroy a significant fraction of the American retaliatory capability. For that reason there was a high degree of stability in the relationship.

What troubled us in the early 1970s was the prospect that the growth of Soviet forces would, in due course, lead to a situation where much of our

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

43

retaliatory capability would be at risk. At the time it seemed to us that the Soviets were determined to acquire a capability to hold our retaliatory forces at risk – although this was not a proposition agreed to by the Administration. We saw the emergence of the threat which has since developed. Soviet doctrine, the structure of Soviet forces, the level of investment the Russians were then making and have continued to make since, all suggested to us that they wish to achieve a kind of military predominance which they believed (and continue to believe) translates ultimately into political power.

SENATOR HENRY JACKSON'S CRITIQUE was conditioned by a more visceral divination of the Soviet Union's intentions and capabilities, and the Senator's aide, Richard Perle, is thought to have exercised considerable persuasion over it. In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger accepted that Jackson had carefully studied Soviet tactics and strategy, and was convinced that they were out to undermine the free world. But while Kissinger agreed that this was a true enough reading of their intentions, he rejected the implication that all agreements were futile. Jackson objected, wrote Kissinger, 'to any agreement which afforded benefits to the Soviet Union, while he took it for granted that they would sign no agreement that did not promise them some gain...'

HENRY KISSINGER: I actually considered Jackson a good friend, and I agreed with many of his analyses of Soviet intentions. The difference between Jackson and me was that he wanted all-out confrontation, under the influence of one of his associates, Richard Perle. He wanted all-out confrontation with the Soviets, and he liked a policy of constant 'needing' of the Soviet Union. I believed that – in the face of the Vietnam War and out other pressures, and then in the face of Watergate – to court a confrontation with the Soviet Union would lead to a series of humiliations. That was one disagreement.

Secondly, I was not as pessimistic as Jackson about the evolution of the two systems. I believed that, on the whole, if we could keep the Soviet Union from expanding, we were capable of conducting a more flexible policy than the Soviet Union – as we proved in the Middle East. I did not think at all that the Soviet Union was bound to prevail in a political context. Quite the opposite.

Finally, I did not believe that the Soviet Union was gaining an advantage. It depended on whether we were willing to make the defence expenditures that were permitted under the agreement, and that was a

The Decline of Détente: A Turning Point

985

that could be sustained over an historical period [Jackson objected to almost any agreement that afforded some benefits to the Soviet Union. We took it for granted that the Soviets would sign no agreement from which they did not promise themselves some gain] our test was whether we were, on balance, better off with an accord than without. We did not accept the counsel of despair that we were bound to be outmaneuvered; our experience in the Middle East and elsewhere had convinced us of the opposite.

44

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

for it. 'Jackson', wrote Kissinger, 'was an absolutist who saw issues in
black and white. We were gradualists seeking a policy that could be
sustained over a long period.'

RICHARD PERLE; I think that is so much abstract obscurantism. Jackson
believed that the only agreements worth having were agreements that
diminished the magnitude of the threat we faced. Agreements that
permitted the threat faced by the United States and its allies were not worth
having. That is precisely the sort of agreement that was achieved in 1972.
Since the opening rounds of the discussions that led to the agreement in
1972, the Soviets have added more than 8000 strategic warheads to their
inventory. The threat has increased enormously. It was the *quality* of the
agreement and not the fact of the agreement to which we took exception.

CHARLTON: Henry Kissinger maintains that he did not believe the Soviet Union was gaining an advantage. It depended, he said 'on whether we were willing to make the defence expenditures permitted under the agreement, and that was a matter of American decisions, not Soviet acquiescence.'

PERLE: It's fair to ask what was the point of arms control that set the stage for a requirement that we make massive additional investments in precisely the strategic arms that were the subject of the negotiation, while permitting the Soviets also to make massive investment in additional strategic forces. That was the point about the failure of the Interim Agreement. It permitted very sizeable growth on both sides. In my view it didn't restrain the Soviet Union at all, in any significant way.

CHARLTON: But when you and Jackson drafted the ratification of SALT I (and the Jackson Amendment), Kissinger appears to have taken the view that your attack was fundamental. It caught him unawares. 'They sought to destroy our policy', he has said, 'not to ameliorate it.'

PERLE: No, the reality was that the Interim Agreement was going to pass the Senate. There was no doubt in our minds about that. So we sought instead to condition, or attempt to condition, future agreements. The Jackson Amendment says simply that future agreements must be on the basis of equality - because the 1972 agreement clearly was not.

CHARLTON: Do you take the view that equality can be established as a fact? Because if it can't, isn't that tantamount to saying that no agreement is possible?

PERLE: I think equality can be established as a fact, but I think it is very difficult to freeze equality. The strategic forces of both sides are in a constant state of flux and evolution. And as vulnerabilities are discovered, they need to be fixed; as imbalances develop they need to be corrected. The role of arms control in accomplishing that is a much more difficult proposition.

Looking back on 1972, I think Henry Kissinger would have a hard time arguing that that agreement facilitated our maintenance of an effective balance. Indeed, in discussions I've had with him, he lays great stress not

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

45

on the military benefits of the 1972 agreement but on the political necessity as he saw it at the time. With the emotions of Vietnam affecting the American Congress and public as profoundly as they then did affect us, he wanted to buy a bit of time in which we might regroup, in order more effectively to compete with the Soviet Union.

THE INFERENCE THAT HENRY KISSINGER'S détente policy embodied a melancholy pessimism about the American will to sustain a policy of containment became central to the political debate which led, in the end, to the Reagan Presidency. The critics of SALT questioned the assumption that the Soviet Union could be contained other than by American power. As Kissinger said, it was part of a larger controversy over whether arms control enhanced or weakened the security of the West.

Kissinger himself rejected the notion which appeared in the anti-ballistic missile debate (as it had in the debate over the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s), that unilateral restraint by the United States would induce the Russians to follow suit. There was, he said, overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Early in the Nixon Administration, in the new uncertainties created by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and following the domestic upheavals over the course of the Vietnam War which caused President Johnson to step aside, the Americans had taken the decision to go ahead and be the first to deploy the multiple-warhead missile, MIRV. The decision was criticised at the time and – almost more than any other since – has been held responsible for making a huge increase in the nuclear arsenals of both sides inevitable. Research and development of MIRV was begun in the previous administration, as Robert McNamara reminded us earlier, 'solely as a means of countering the Soviet deployment of an anti-ballistic missile defence'.

HENRY KISSINGER: Secretary McNamara did not want to build an anti-ballistic missile defence. He therefore developed the idea of a MIRV, arguing that with MIRV we could saturate any Soviet defence and that therefore there would be no strategic inequality if the Soviets had a defensive system and we did not. By the time the Nixon Administration came into office in 1969, more than ten tests of MIRVs had already been conducted. It is generally thought that weapons are operational at a maximum of twenty tests, but certainly, by the time you have undertaken ten tests you have gone down the road toward proving the weapon. Then, for a while, the Soviets were reluctant to enter negotiations.

So by November 1969 (when negotiations started), probably fifteen tests had been conducted on a schedule established by the previous administration. Most of its members then started opposing – just as they had with the Vietnam War – what they themselves had created. We had no assurance *at all* that the Soviets would agree to a limitation of ballistic

46

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

missile defences. We in fact proposed, and we opened, the MIRV discussion — admittedly with an unacceptable proposal. The proposal was that there should be a stoppage of all testing. The Soviets countered with a proposal that there should be a stoppage of all *deployment*, but that *testing* should be permitted, of course, this was an easy way for them to catch up.
**CHARLTON:** Rather like the SDI issue now?

**KISSINGER:** Right. So that is where it stalemated. Now, should we also have proposed, at that point, that there should be a stop to *both* testing and deployment? Well, this is a tactical issue. Historical experience with the Soviets shows that, if they wanted an agreement limiting MIRVs, we could not have driven them off the table with it. They would have deluged us with it. Our primary problem at that point was to keep enough support for the agreements that we *were* making, and MIRV was the one programme that the Defence Department had that was not being contested in any significant way — or any decisive way — by the Congress.

As soon as we had the SALT I agreement, we made a whole series of proposals on MIRVs to the Soviet Union which would have imposed severe limitations — none of which they accepted. So, should we have made it two years earlier? It's easy to say in the light of all that happened. One always has to consider the option in any one field compared to the totality of issues that were before us.

**CHARLTON:** In December 1974 you said, of MIRV, that it was the same question people faced when the H-bomb was developed. It raises the issue whether it's the United States development which then in turn produces that same development on the other side.

**KISSINGER:** And I think the answer is the same. The Soviets started deploying MIRVs in 1973, which means that they were well along by 1970 and 1971, which is the time we may have had an opportunity. As it turned out, we exploded our H-bomb about nine months before the Soviets. We deployed our MIRVs about eighteen months before the Soviets. It is impossible therefore that they could have developed MIRVs just in that short interval *between* the time we did and they did.

MIRV AND ITS FRATRICIDAL counterpart ABM, the anti-ballistic missile, were respectively offence and defence, sword and shield. Superficially they had transported this classical antithesis into the nuclear era. But given the enormous power of even a single nuclear weapon, the ancient discord of sword and shield were adjudged unconvincing by Robert McNamara. It fell to Henry Kissinger to search for some common understanding of the proposition that, in the nuclear age, the adversary becomes in a sense a partner in the avoidance of nuclear war as a political and moral necessity.

The historic essence of the first SALT agreement, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, was that each side renounced the defence of its society against the nuclear arsenal of the other. As Henry Kissinger has reminded us, the US Congress had cut the budgets for an American

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

47

counterpart to the already deployed Soviet ABM defence system 'to an absurdity'. But in the labyrinth of the SALT accord is Ariadne's threat – which leads us, in the present day, to President Reagan's case for the 'Star Wars' defence.

Two expectations arising from SALT I were not fulfilled. Henry Kissinger had hoped to shape the outcome so as to delay the trend which would give the Soviet Union a first-strike capability against the American land-based missiles by the 1980s, and then to use that delay to negotiate reductions in the numbers of offensive missiles in another and more comprehensive agreement. But the speed and extent to which the Soviet Union built up their offensive forces were underestimated.

HENRY KISSINGER: You have to understand a number of things about the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. First, there are a great many heroes now who were in their foxholes when all this was going on! At the time of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the number of US missile sites, as I've already pointed out, had been reduced to two. So our choice was whether we were going to agree to the Congress unilaterally dismantling the anti-ballistic missile defences, or whether we were going to get something for it from the Soviet Union.

At that time the build-up of Soviet offensive forces was in its infancy. We made a unilateral statement (or we had our delegation make a unilateral statement) to read into the record that the United States considered the continued existence of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to depend on significant cuts in offensive forces. If these offensive forces were not reduced within the time limit of the offensive agreement, then the conditions for abrogation of the treaty would exist.

Rather than this leading to a reduction of offensive forces, the Soviets built up their offensive forces to a remarkable degree. So the balance between offensive and defensive forces was substantially destroyed. As soon as the ABM treaty and SALT I were signed, we initiated negotiations for the limitation of multiple warheads and reductions to very small numbers. That the Soviets consistently refused. So we have a totally new situation today.

DR KISSINGER REMAINS CONVINCED, however, that SALT was made, in his words, 'the whipping boy' for a more fundamental philosophical contest in East-West relations. The extent to which American strategic policy should be informed by a discussion of 'moral principles' rather than assembled for 'great practical purposes' (the distinction Castlereagh made concerning the Congress of Vienna), and the extent to which it was a reflection of domestic impulses and emotions – therefore subjective rather than objective – could not be resolved. That same Soviet Union with which, in President Nixon's Administration, Kissinger established a wide range of contacts, is the one with which President Reagan much later

48

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

would find it difficult to collaborate at all - for essentially the reasons given by Senator Jackson's associate (and now President Reagan's Assistant Secretary for Defence) Richard Perle.

RICHARD PERLE: The kind of business that was done in 1972 was profitable, but profitable for one side only. The Soviets will always be prepared to do business with us if it produces an advantage for the Soviet Union. I haven't the slightest doubt that Mr Gorbachev would cheerfully sign agreements with the United States that accomplish for him what the 1972 agreement accomplished for Brezhnev.

Look at the other agreements of that period. I don't think one can take the arms control agreements in isolation. There was an agreement on grain which led immediately to a massive Soviet raid on the American grain harvest, pushing up the price of grain to American consumers and solving a very serious Soviet problem. There were agreements on science and technology that led to very significant transfers of technology to the Soviet Union, and we now see them showing up in Soviet military systems. There was a general agreement on principles governing the relationship that crowned a thirty-year Soviet effort to induce the West to accept the principles contained in that document - the Soviet policy line of 'peaceful co-existence' and the like. I think, looking back on that period, that the agreements signed were in every case advantageous to the Soviet Union, and I think that's all one needs to know in order to explain their readiness to sign them.

NEITHER HENRY KISSINGER NOR PRESIDENT NIXON had any desire to accommodate their critics. To a large extent they shared the philosophical case against the Soviet state and its ideology. Dr Kissinger thought of Senator Jackson as an ally and regretted that the Senator chose to oppose him. It was, wrote Kissinger in his memoirs, 'a national tragedy that those who shared a similar strategic analysis should conduct a civil war over tactics ...'

But the gap was surely wider than a disagreement over tactics. Both sides wished to 'contain' the Soviet Union. Kissinger thought that, with seductive inducements, the Soviet Union might be escorted from its traditional expansionism to restraint, and that Russia's economic failures and fear over Kissinger's bringing China into play would press the Soviet leaders to co-existence on the West's terms. The other side - Kissinger's conservative opponents - saw nothing but an implacable adversary and an endless vista of contests and confrontations. At that well-remembered press conference in Moscow in 1974, Henry Kissinger asked a question that has often been quoted since: 'What in the name of God is strategic superiority?' The resonance of this has been sustained. How should the historian understand him?

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

49

HENRY KISSINGER: That is absolutely correct. I do not believe that you can rely on a first-strike strategy as the defence against all contingencies. Again, one has to consider this in the context of events. That remark was made in late June, 1974 in Moscow, a month before Nixon was forced out of office. We found ourselves in the position of being harassed on détente at a time when we had absolutely no capacity for confrontation. And I still believe this: I do not think it is possible to achieve the degree of strategic superiority that existed in the 1940s and 1950s, such that we can rely on nuclear superiority to defend Europe and other parts of the world. I remind you that Reagan has never tired of pointing out in the last two or three years that we are not trying to win a war. In what way does that differ from what I said ten years earlier?

CHARLTON: One of your most persistent and formidable critics, Senator Jackson, sought to know why you had not demanded lower limits from the Soviet Union, as he felt you should have. I thought you gave a very interesting answer to that on the way to Peking in 1974, which was taken down verbatim at the time. I'd like to read it to you. You said:

> The only way we could even have talked about lower numbers was to drastically increase defence spending and to hold the increase for a number of years, long enough to convince the Soviets that we were going to drive the race through the ceiling with them...

That sounds very like the Reagan programme today.

KISSINGER: Exactly correct. That is still my view.

DR HENRY KISSINGER'S HAND WAS EVERYWHERE during one of the most creative periods in post-war diplomacy, of which he is one of the great public figures. Why did he think disenchantment with détente set in so early? 'Overall,' Kissinger says, détente was 'ground down between a liberal idealism unrelated to a concept of power and the liturgical anti-Communism of the right'. But, Kissinger has said, although we made our share of mistakes, the fundamental assault on détente was made by the Soviet Union: with the Soviet-Cuban expeditionary forces in Angola and Ethiopia; their appearance in Aden; the Kremlin's encouragement of North Vietnam's takeover of the South; the pressures on Poland; and the invasion of Afghanistan. Détente had not deterred.

Over the next few years and during the long agony for détente of the Carter Presidency, the strategic debate in the United States was powerfully shaped by forces associated with the Committee on the Present Danger. They would return a different answer to Henry Kissinger's question in Moscow that June night in 1974: 'What in the name of God is strategic superiority?'

RED ALERT

53

the particular resonance that the Korean War had in the 1950s, in calling for rearmament?

**ROSTOW:** Exactly. Calling for rearmament and a strengthening of the policy of solidarity. Trying to repair the damage which had been done to the national foreign policy consensus by Vietnam.

**CHARLTON:** No doubt there were many ingredients in the making of your decision, but what was the final spur to forming the Committee on the Present Danger?

**ROSTOW:** The final spur was the sense that we had very little time; that the hopes that had been invested in SALT I, and in Nixon's policy of détente, were manifestly proving to be false; and that the Soviets were gaining so rapidly in nuclear strength, despite the provisions of SALT I and the prospective provisions of SALT II, that we soon would have no alternative but to surrender. The Soviet policy with regard to nuclear weapons and therefore with regard to arms control agreements was extremely astute and well conceived; but it was a policy not of détente, not of relaxation of tensions, but of nuclear blackmail.

**EUGENE ROSTOW'S PERCEPTIONS** of the Soviet Union were those which had been broadly endorsed by the Americans during the period of the Cold War. It was central to the crusade of the Committee on the Present Danger that events had once more shown the Soviet Union to be incorrigibly militant. The hopes nurtured by the activity called 'détente', and the process of arms control conducted by Henry Kissinger, stood, by these lights, confounded.

The basic concept of parity in the SALT negotiations, as an acceptable strategic relationship with the Soviet Union, was attacked as placing the United States at a disadvantage. While the United States adhered to deterrence and retaliation, parity - plus the Soviet policy of strategic initiative (a belief in a first strike, and weapons assigned with that use in mind) - in fact gave the Russians *superiority*.

This critique was put forward in answer to Henry Kissinger's much-quoted question, uttered in Moscow in June 1974: 'What in the name of God is strategic superiority?' The claim that the SALT talks had acquiesced in an American disadvantage and that Kissinger's approach was fatally flawed is, naturally, in conflict with the views of Henry Kissinger himself, particularly concerning the 'quality' of the SALT I Interim Agreement - the target of what would become the prevailing indictment of détente.

**HENRY KISSINGER:** At the time of the Interim Agreement, the Soviets were building about 240 missiles a year, and we were building none. We considered it a considerable achievement that we were stopping the build-up of Soviet forces. Now, of course, you can say that the Soviets would have stopped anyway. Nobody can ever prove that. We thought the

54

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

maximum we could achieve in 1972 was to get a freeze on the *additional* 'digging of holes' or of silos by the Soviet Union. Our strategy then was that, in the next period, we were going to strive for a *reduction* of these, plus a reduction of warheads. What we could have achieved if there had not been any Watergate, nobody can ever know.

The fact is that as soon as the agreement was signed, suddenly people started saying this sanctified an inequality of numbers – which was total nonsense, *because they did not count the bombers*. They just counted the missiles. They did not count the fact that we had multiple warheads, that they did not. We then achieved – even after Watergate, under President Ford – equality in numbers. Whereupon the debate shifted on to the 'Backfire' bomber, which has since disappeared from the scene. The basic difficulty is that if you have an opposition that is determined to wreck any negotiation on a subject as technologically complicated as SALT, the administration in office is in an almost hopeless position.

**CHARLTON:** In fact, Admiral Moorer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, giving evidence about this, said the SALT I treaty should be seen not in the light of what it had frozen but of what it had *forestalled*. That you had actually forestalled what would by 1977 have been a three-to-two ratio in the Soviet Union's favour.

**KISSINGER:** That's exactly correct.

**CHARLTON:** Nonetheless, we find Paul Nitze saying by the mid-1970s that the Soviets were not following a strategy of deterrence and retaliation: 'They spelled out their belief in a strategy of first strike' and their weapons had been assigned 'with that in mind'. Therefore, in their case, 'Parity plus their policy of "strategic initiative" gives them superiority.'

**KISSINGER:** Well, there are a number of things . . . I think Nitze is a man of considerable knowledge and one of the most experienced people we have in this field. He felt badly treated by Nixon – and by me I suppose – at the time of the Moscow signing, and there was some merit in it . . .

**CHARLTON:** In what respect?

**KISSINGER:** In the sense that the delegation had done ninety-five per cent of the negotiating in Helsinki and Nixon took one hundred per cent of the credit in Moscow. On the other hand, that is not unusual. That is what Presidents tend to do, and in an ultimate sense it is their prerogative. You don't expect laurels to be given to the individual negotiators. (On the other hand, they were not treated well. They were treated rudely and I've pointed that out.)

I do not believe that the Soviets are relying on a first strike. I do believe that the Soviet Union has designed its strategic forces with a more military concept than the United States has. They do have the capacity to prevent a tit-for-tat, because they can respond with more military options than we can. In other words, they can force us into initiating the destruction of civilian targets earlier than they have to. That gives them a

RED ALERT

55

great advantage - not to wipe out our retaliatory forces, though they may be able to do that to our land-based retaliatory force.

**CHARLTON:** What is your response, then, to a SALT critic like Paul Nitze, who said that the basic concept of parity was the flaw for him in the SALT agreements, because parity can't be precisely determined and it puts the United States at a disadvantage because of the differences in military strategy?

**KISSINGER:** First of all, you've never heard Nitze say anything like that when he was in a position of responsibility. You've only heard Nitze say that out of office; you haven't heard him say that in office. And neither in our administration, nor in the administration he is serving now, has he ever taken anything like that position. On the contrary, he has been more on the conciliatory side - conciliatory in the sense of trying to find something in the point of view that could be negotiated.

**CHARLTON:** More inclined to 'walk in the woods'?

**KISSINGER:** Exactly. That's right. And now with the Strategic Defence Initiative he has stated criteria that are in fact unfulfillable, so that operationally he is working more in that direction. But the option of superiority did not exist at the time. There was no programme that we could get through the Congress. There is no programme that we *stopped* in the Nixon Administration.

It is true that we probably underestimated the speed with which the Soviet Union would 'MIRV'. But by the year 1984 that does not make any difference. The strategic gains the Soviets had made were not due to the rapidity of their 'MIRVing', but due to the irresolution of the Carter Administration. Supposing the Soviets had 'MIRVed' more slowly? We would still have lost Iran. We still would have had a Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

**CHARLTON:** Yet there is this division still, isn't there, over these perceptions of power which the central nuclear balance conveys. Between those who say the Nicaraguas and Angolas are assisted into history because the central nuclear balance has altered ... that Khruschev withdrew from Cuba because of that ultimate reality, American strategic superiority, and...

**KISSINGER:** No. Khruschev withdrew from Cuba because we had *local* superiority. On top of it, what made it easier was that we also had strategic superiority. We could easily have handled Angola if the Congress had not cut our forces. Whether we could have handled Iran or not can be debated for ever, but certainly - even if we had had superiority - we would not have threatened to use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union in order to keep Khomeini from coming to power. We surely would not have used nuclear weapons to keep the Sandinistas from coming to power, since we *put* them into power - and that had nothing to do with the strategic balance. That had to do with the understanding of pure political reality.

**CHARLTON:** You've written of the period of the decline of détente and of

56

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

support for arms control which elevated confront

KISSINGER: Yes, but with

CHARLTON: '... and in century'.

KISSINGER: And, I repeat thought that if you blow it going to collapse automa

THE SITUATION WITH WHICH Nitze and his associates had sought to transcend entanglements of détente, the Soviet challenge much the Soviet leadership used

The principal formulation of American strategic policy during the era of containment of Soviet power, which began under President Truman, was a document known as NSC (National Security Council) 68. Then, as now, the military strength of the West was held to be dangerously inadequate. NSC 68 considered the Soviet design of world domination to be indivisible from the Communist system and fatal to the West. The Soviet Union, the inheritor of Russian imperialism, possessed and was possessed by a worldwide revolutionary movement which *required* the dynamic extension of its authority. The author of NSC 68, adopted by President Truman as policy when North Korea (aided by Soviet Russia) invaded South Korea in 1950, was Paul Nitze.

**PAUL NITZE:** If I might say a word about the origin of it. This was at a time when we found out that the Soviets had tested an atomic weapon in 1949. It was also right after Chiang Kai-Shek had been driven from the mainland of China. I'd been much impressed by a book written by a man called Nathan Leites, who talked about the 'standard operating code' of the Kremlin. In it he stressed the fact that when the 'correlation of forces' was unfavourable, Lenin had adopted the doctrine that that was a time when one ought to throw dust into the enemy's eyes, so that one would have time to rebuild and to change the correlation of forces. So these two events, the removal of our monopoly and the consolidation of Communist control over the mainland, would be two radical changes in the correlation of forces which the Soviets were bound to take into account if they were still following the precepts that Lenin had laid down.

**CHARLTON:** As in Lenin's famous remark: 'Probe with bayonets, and if you strike mush, go on - if you meet resistance, retreat.'

**NITZE:** That's correct. Up to that time, US policy and Allied policy generally had been emphasising entirely the economic and the political elements of policy and had paid little attention to the military aspects. Our

56

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

support for arms control that its critics were 'clamouring for a policy which elevated confrontation into an instrument of policy ...'

**KISSINGER:** Yes, but without being willing to pay the price for it.

**CHARLTON:** '... and in the middle of the worst domestic crisis for a century'.

**KISSINGER:** And, I repeat, without being willing to pay any price. They thought that if you blow the trumpet hard enough the walls of Jericho were going to collapse automatically.

**THE SITUATION WITH WHICH** Kissinger had been confronted was the one which Nitze and his associates campaigned to redress. Whereas Kissinger had sought to transcend the ideological differences in the cooperative entanglements of détente, the Committee on the Present Danger examined the Soviet challenge much more in terms of the ideological concepts which the Soviet leadership used to describe and defend their policies.

Jackson was not a man to welcome debate over firmly held convictions; he proceeded to implement his by erecting a series of legislative hurdles that gradually paralyzed our East-West policy. He was aided by one of the ablest — and most ruthless — staffs that I encountered in Washington. They systematically narrowed whatever scope for discussion existed between the Administration and the Senator by giving the most invidious interpretations to Administration motives; they were masterful in the use of press leaks. The impact of the assault was all the greater because it caught us philosophically and emotionally quite unprepared. Neither Nixon nor I had expected that the end of the war in Vietnam would see the demand for peace at any price replaced by a clamor for a course whose practical consequence was to elevate confrontation into a principle of policy — in the middle of our worst domestic crisis in a century — and with the most hobbled Chief Executive of the postwar period.

Chapter 2

# Deterrence Through Détente

President Nixon was reiterating the essence of Robert McNamara's passionate presentation to the Soviet Premier, Mr Kosygin, at the Glassboro summit two years earlier. To attempt a nuclear defence would merely mean an intensified race in *offensive* weapons to overpower that defence, and, therefore, 'Mutual assured destruction' — assuring the certain threat of retaliation in kind — should be acknowledged as the rational prescription for stable deterrence. It fell to the Nixon Administration to bring about the fascinating and fitful negotiation with the Soviet Union which was to give a cold and ambiguous assent to Robert McNamara's proposition.

30

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

31

It was one of the tools, and in fact we did not make even the first preliminary agreement on arms control until May 1971, which was two-plus years after we came into office. Our strategy was to try to bring China into play; to try to isolate North Vietnam; to establish a new relationship with Europe and with the Soviet Union; to move ahead on a broad front. We believed in 'linkage'. We, for example, did not agree to any increase in trade until there had been some preliminary agreement on arms control. So we never believed that arms control by itself could carry the whole burden of East-West relations. There were, however, significant segments of American public opinion (especially scientific and intellectual opinion) who thought exactly that; and since they were needed to carry any agreement through the Congress against conservative opposition, they tended to have a more vocal role than our theory would have justified.

CHARLTON: But on the specific point of superiority, written into the Republican Party platform today as it was in the 1950s with President Eisenhower and Secretary John Foster Dulles – did Nixon yield on that for essentially the same reason Eisenhower himself did, that it could no longer be made a continuing requirement of American policy?

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

33

SMITH: It was Kissinger's thesis that alongside the arms control agreements there would be a network of agreements that it would be in the interest of the Soviet Union to keep. I think Kissinger figured that if the Soviets went around committing aggressions, they could not have these other 'goodies' – and that would deter them.

KISSINGER'S GRAND DESIGN of judicious rewards and punishments as a deterrent, embracing trade and technology and credits as well as arms control, was critical to the nature of his discourse. Arms control by itself could not relieve tensions. If it were not linked to restraint in worldwide competition, Kissinger said. 'It could prove a safety valve for Soviet expansionist designs. Every time there was a Soviet aggressive move, there would be claims that the new tensions were making arms control even more important. And that is why', as Kissinger tells us in his memoirs and has repeated here, 'I believed in "linkage".'

But he was also convinced that the nuclear weapon had added a new dimension of horror and, therefore, responsibility for national leaders. We come to a point which divided Kissinger from some of his conservative critics in America. To what extent did he consider that possession by both sides of the 'absolute weapon' meant there could no longer be an 'absolute enemy' — an enemy whose ideology, or whose very existence, was a threat to one's own existence or survival?

HENRY KISSINGER: I have always believed that Communism is morally repugnant, and I think if you go through my writings you will never find any deviation from that point of view. I have also believed that nuclear weapons impose the necessity of co-existence. I do not base that co-existence on any moral acceptance of the Soviet system, but on the practical necessities that nuclear weapons create. That has been my position from the very beginning. I wrote a book in 1956 called *Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy* which was perhaps premature, but in which I said that, sooner or later (I thought it would come sooner than it did), strategic nuclear weapons would tend towards a kind of parity which would make absolute war impossible; and I called for alternatives. I've never changed that position. I believe that is still true now. Sometimes I have changed my view as to what the alternatives could be, depending on the technology of the moment, and I don't claim infallibility with respect to technological alternatives – but that's not my function.

CHARLTON: How far did you take the view that nuclear threats were more or less infallible in abolishing aggressive intentions?

34

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

KISSINGER: I've never believed that – I've believed exactly the opposite. I've believed that as nuclear parity was achieved, threats other than nuclear war would gain greater force, and that it was the obligation of the West to create obstacles to these other threats.

CHARLTON: Stability at the level of the nuclear balance created instability at other levels?

KISSINGER: Exactly.

CHARLTON: How, in your view, did the ratio of nuclear strength influence or dictate the outcome of crisis?

KISSINGER: I have always believed, contrary to many scientists, that you're better off with superiority than with parity. I have also thought that absolute superiority was going to become next to impossible to attain; either because it was no longer achievable technically, or because the calculations would be too complex for anybody to have any confidence in them. Nevertheless, this is one extreme. At the other extreme, however, I believed (and I still believe) that a strategy based on mass extermination of populations would lead to the gradual demoralisation of the West, and to the growth of the unilateral disarmament movement and pacifism. I do not think one can (or should) convince democratic publics that their extermination is the key element in their security, either the threat of *their* extermination or of *mutual* extermination. So my view was that we would be better off with superiority than with parity. Even if superiority was not attainable, we were better off with a capacity for discriminating targeting than with a capacity for indiscriminate destruction.

CHARLTON: You are reported as having said that parity with the Russians stopped you, in your time – over the Soviet attempt, in 1970, to establish a submarine base at Cienfuegos in Cuba – from adopting the same tactics as President Kennedy had during the Cuban crisis in 1962.

KISSINGER: I never said that. Absolutely not. We used more or less the same tactics and we achieved more or less the same result: that is, we achieved the dismantlement of what we thought was a Soviet nuclear submarine base, and which I believe *was* a Soviet nuclear submarine base.

CHARLTON: With the implicit nuclear threat in order to achieve that?

KISSINGER: We didn't need implicit nuclear threats any more than Kennedy did, because Cuba is so close to our shores. We blockaded the harbour of Cienfuegos. He blockaded the whole island – so he more or less used the same tactic.

CHARLTON: Does, therefore, the behaviour of states in the last analysis conform to the traditional pattern – once nuclear parity has been established?

KISSINGER: No – but I think whoever has a local advantage has a decided and very important advantage, precisely because the side that can extricate itself *only* by initiating the use of nuclear weapons is at a very great disadvantage.

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE ...

35

But there was also, perhaps, an underlying, unspoken reason. In Henry Kissinger's search for a stable world order were echoes of what Lord Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary and soul of the coalition against Napoleon, had told the House of Commons about the Congress of Vienna: 'The Congress was not assembled for the discussion of moral principles, but for great practical purposes – to establish effectual provisions for the general security.' Kissinger was trying to wean American foreign policy away from both its traditional oscillations and its historical preoccupation with moral principles. Henry Kissinger's manipulations of the balance of power might have been familiar in the statesman's world of the Congress of Vienna, a context he was trying to recreate; but they were alien to much of the American body politic, to whom foreign policy is obliged to be, above all, a *public* policy subject to public scrutiny.

**HENRY KISSINGER:** Our style of foreign policy would have been easily understood in Britain, but was not easy to understand in the United States. We believed in a national-interest-based foreign policy. You did not have to explain in Great Britain through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the problem of throwing Britain's weight to whoever seemed the weaker of the continental countries, and Britain made no *moral* claim for that. For the United States this was a rather novel approach.

At the precise moment that we had achieved apparent success, both at isolating Vietnam and in relations with China and the Soviet Union, there occurred 'Watergate', a totally unpredictable event which collapsed executive authority, so that for fifteen to eighteen months the locus of executive respect by the public was the State Department – which was unheard of. That then put us into a much more defensive posture, so by 1975, we had a coalition of conservatives and liberals against the policy that Nixon and later Ford were carrying out, with me as Secretary of State. You had liberals who felt that if Nixon was for peace, confrontation could not be all bad, and conservatives who believed that any deal with the Soviets was wicked.

[LC]

36

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

38

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

The Argument gathered force following President Nixon's decline and fall and became a major factor in the change of climate over the following years which led to the election of President Reagan. How Moscow saw the American condition at the time of the SALT negotiations and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972, which were coincidental with the last stages of the American engagement in Vietnam, has naturally aroused a good deal of scholarly interest and historical speculation. As Henry Kissinger looked back to those perceptions, do they not show that the Russians had come to see an underlying change in the balance of power and a comparative (if transient) American weakness?

HENRY KISSINGER: Absolutely not! Considering that we had riots in the streets, that we were involved in a war in Vietnam, that the opposition party held both houses of the Congress, I think we achieved an extraordinary flexibility of foreign policy. After all, we drove the Soviets out of the Middle East even *after* Watergate. I don't think the Soviet Union looked on the Nixon Administration as a weak opponent. I think they looked at us as a formidable opponent – we 'opened' to China in the middle of all our travails (which must have been an extremely unsettling time for the Soviet Union) – and what opportunity did they seize during that period? As long as Nixon was even relatively unimpaired we made progress in negotiations with the Soviet, lost no international position, and in fact made great gains in the Middle East.

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

39

CHARLTON: But wouldn't you agree it is a period seen today as the prelude to a series of global adventures by the Soviet Union?

KISSINGER: It was a prelude to a series of global adventures for a whole variety of reasons. First, because with the collapse of our executive authority, starting in 1973, we destroying a President. We then had a McGovernite Congress. The people who were defeated in 1972, by the most overwhelming majority but one in American history, regained Congress as a result of events that had absolutely nothing to do with the political process. As a result of this, there was the oddest coalition between liberals and conservatives who took away both the carrot and the stick. They prevented us from resisting Soviet aggression in Angola. At the same time they challenged the Soviet Union with the Jackson and the Stevenson amendments, in which they cut off both credits and trade with the Soviet Union - and when the Soviet Union became more aggressive, preventing us from resisting it. Of course it led to the beginning of adventures.

CHARLTON: But would you not agree that, over Angola, the principal elements of your strategy were pretty severely tested? We find you (in October of 1976) saying that 'the introduction of Cuban expeditionary forces, with Russian support, into an area of no historic Soviet or Russian interest is totally unwarranted', and then you went on to say, 'but we've never considered SALT a favour we granted to the Soviet Union, to be turned on and off according to the ebb and flow of our relations'.

KISSINGER: Yes, but let's get a few things straight. In the fall of 1974 the Congress passed the Jackson Amendment, which cut off 'most favoured nation' treatment of the Soviets. It passed a Stevenson amendment which cut off credits. So the Soviet Union, at the end, was worse off than it had been before the détente period started. This happened at the same time, as I've said, that a McGovernite Congress had just been elected that would not support any form of resistance to Communist aggression. Then when the Soviets started stepping up their activities in Angola, and we attempted to resist, the Congress voted against the thirty million dollars we thought we needed to support the anti-Soviet and -Cuban forces (the Savimbi forces, who are still there). At that point the question was, should we cut off SALT... and at a time when we had a Congress that was not going to increase our military expenditures? I think it is absurd to conduct a

40

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

truculent policy when you're not willing to back it up and I find myself in the ridiculous position that, in this sort of debate, I'm being attacked from the left for being too tough on the Soviets, and by the right for being too soft. We were trying to steer a middle course. Both the left and the right were trying to conduct an essentially moralistic policy – without backing it up with resources.

**THE EARLY HOPES OF** President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, that agreement to negotiate strategic arms limitations could be linked to Soviet assistance in America's disengagement from the sunless war in Vietnam, were not sustained. The Russians insisted that SALT was to be looked at on its own merits. With America a house divided and the uncompromising zealotry of the Communists in Hanoi, the détente policy could produce no honourable outcome in Vietnam. President Nixon's guarantee to the South Vietnamese proved not to be the bond of the American nation. Vietnam, in strategic terms, was in the end an American surrender.

**KISSINGER:** First of all, what concessions did we make to the Soviets in SALT? I mean, there is a whole series of myths that are retroactively invented which have absolutely no bearing. Can you name on concrete concession we made to the Soviets that was unwarranted—or that was not going to be imposed on us by the Congress anyway?

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

41

defences.¹ And fourth, as soon as we started mining Haiphong the Soviet Union also realised that the military situation was changing. If we made a mistake, I think it was that we did not do in 1969 in Vietnam what we did in 1972-but that would have led to a revolt in our Cabinet and Nixon was not prepared to do that.

CHARLTON: There should have been a forward policy, of mining if necessary, earlier . . . ?

KISSINGER: I believe in retrospect that we should have done in 1969 what we did in 1972: that is to say, demand a settlement, or mined the harbours and bombed North Vietnam, but then that wasn't all that easy. A bombing halt had just been signed by the outgoing administration, and by that time public order had broken down in the United States. It's very difficult for a new administration to take upon itself the responsibility for dividing the country. But, despite these difficulties, in retrospect I believe that we should have done that. In fact, I thought so at the time and recommended it. But I recommended it in a way that had no real force, nor have I ever claimed any credit for it.

CHARLTON: As you remind your critics, there was no military programme sacrificed by the Nixon-Kissinger Administration, but one still has . . .

KISSINGER: As a matter of fact, SALT, paradoxically, was the only way to preserve our military programmes. Without SALT the Congress would have continued to cut. Take the strategic defence we had at the time: it wasn't called strategic defence, it was called the anti-ballistic missile system, ABM. We started out with twelve defence sites around the country. By the time the ABM agreement was signed, the Congress had already cut it to two; in the next Budget it was going to go down to one; so the thing had become an absurdity. One defence site meant nothing. And the whole thing passed by *one* vote - the Vice-President's! Every succeeding year it went down. By 1972 it was down to two, by 1973 it would have been down to nothing.

CHARLTON: But does not this very process contribute to what it is known Brezhnev said, in Prague, at a Warsaw Pact meeting in 1973? By 1985, he said, 'as a consequence of what we are achieving through détente, we shall have achieved most of our objectives; a decisive shift in the correlation of forces will be such that we'll be able to exert our influence whenever we need to ...'

KISSINGER: Well, first of all, I don't think he said quite that, but . . .

CHARLTON: That is what he's quoted as . . .

KISSINGER: . . . but never mind. Supposing he did say that (you have to remember that each side has the problem of justifying détente to its hardliners), the facts have certainly not borne this out. I would make the case for the proposition that détente has, on the whole, been more disarming for the Soviet Union than it has been for the West. It has brought

42

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

**PERLE:** We had enjoyed a long period in which our own strategic forces were not seriously vulnerable to attack. We enjoyed that at great expense, by the development of submarine-launched ballistic missiles and the placing of land-based ballistic missiles in hardened concrete silos to shelter them from the effects of nearby nuclear blast. The inaccuracy of Soviet weapons that might be directed against those forces - all meant that a Soviet attack would fail. It would fail to destroy a significant fraction of the American retaliatory capability. For that reason there was a high degree of *stability* in the relationship.

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

43

SENATOR HENRY JACKSON'S CRITIQUE was conditioned by a more visceral divination of the Soviet Union's intentions and capabilities, and the Senator's aide, Richard Perle, is thought to have exercised considerable persuasion over it. In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger accepted that Jackson had carefully studied Soviet tactics and strategy, and was convinced that they were out to undermine the free world. But while Kissinger agreed that this was a true enough reading of their intentions, he rejected the implication that all agreements were futile. 'Jackson objected', wrote Kissinger, 'to any agreement which afforded benefits to the Soviet Union, while he took it for granted that they would sign no agreement that did not promise them some gain ...'

HENRY KISSINGER: I actually considered Jackson a good friend, and I agreed with many of his analyses of Soviet intentions. The difference between Jackson and me was that he wanted all-out confrontation, under the influence of one of his associates, Richard Perle. He wanted all-out confrontation with the Soviets, and he liked a policy of constant 'needling' of the Soviet Union. I believed that – in the face of the Vietnam War and out other pressures, and then in the face of Watergate – to court a confrontation with the Soviet Union would lead to a series of humiliations. That was one disagreement.

Finally, I did not believe that the Soviet Union was gaining an advantage. It depended on whether we were willing to make the defence expenditures that were permitted under the agreement, and that was a matter of American decisions, not Soviet acquiescence.

THAT WAS PRECISELY THE POINT where Senator Jackson concentrated his attack on the nature of the arms control process. SALT became both an orphan and a victim when divorced from Henry Kissinger's wider context.

44

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

**RICHARD PERLE:** I think that is so much abstract obscurantism. Jackson believed that the only agreements worth having were agreements that diminished the magnitude of the threat we faced. Agreements that *permitted* the threat faced by the United States and its allies were not worth having. That is precisely the sort of agreement that was achieved in 1972. Since the opening rounds of the discussions that led to the agreement in 1972, the Soviets have added more than 8000 strategic warheads to their inventory. The threat has increased enormously. It was the *quality* of the agreement and not the fact of the agreement to which we took exception.

**CHARLTON:** Henry Kissinger maintains that he did not believe the Soviet Union *was* gaining an advantage. It depended, he said 'on whether we were willing to make the defence expenditures permitted under the agreement, and that was a matter of American decisions, not Soviet acquiescence.'

**PERLE:** It's fair to ask what was the point of arms control that set the stage for a requirement that we make massive additional investments in precisely the strategic arms that were the subject of the negotiation, while permitting the Soviets also to make massive investment in additional strategic forces. That was the point about the failure of the Interim Agreement. It permitted very sizeable growth on both sides. In my view it didn't restrain the Soviet Union at all, in any significant way.

**CHARLTON:** But when you and Jackson drafted the ratification of SALT I (and the Jackson Amendment), Kissinger appears to have taken the view that your attack was fundamental. It caught him unawares. 'They sought to destroy our policy', he has said, 'not to ameliorate it.'

**PERLE:** No, the reality was that the Interim Agreement was going to pass the Senate. There was no doubt in our minds about that. So we sought instead to condition, or attempt to condition, future agreements. The Jackson Amendment says simply that future agreements must be on the basis of equality – because the 1972 agreement clearly was not.

**CHARLTON:** Do you take the view that equality can be established as a fact? Because if it can't, isn't that tantamount to saying that no agreement is possible?

**PERLE:** I think equality can be established as a fact, but I think it is very difficult to freeze equality. The strategic forces of both sides are in a constant state of flux and evolution. And as vulnerabilities are discovered, they need to be fixed; as imbalances develop they need to be corrected. The role of arms control in accomplishing that is a much more difficult proposition.

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

45

46

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

missile defences. We in fact proposed, and we opened, the MIRV discussion – admittedly with an unacceptable proposal. The proposal was that there should be a stoppage of all testing. The Soviets countered with a proposal that there should be a stoppage of all *deployment*, but that *testing* should be permitted, of course, this was an easy way for them to catch up, *CHARLTON: Rather like the SDI issue now?*

KISSINGER: Right. So that is where it stalemated. Now, should we also have proposed, at that point, that there should be a stop to *both* testing and deployment? Well, this is a tactical issue. Historical experience with the Soviets shows that, if they wanted an agreement limiting MIRVs, we could not have driven them off the table with it. They would have deluged us with it. Our primary problem at that point was to keep enough support for the agreements that we *were* making, and MIRV was the one programme that the Defence Department had that was not being contested in any significant way – or any decisive way – by the Congress.

As soon as we had the SALT I agreement, we made a whole series of proposals on MIRVs to the Soviet Union which would have imposed severe limitations – none of which they accepted. So, should we have made it two years earlier? It's easy to say in the light of all that happened. One always has to consider the option in any one field compared to the totality of issues that were before us.

CHARLTON: In December 1974 you said, of MIRV, that it was the same question people faced when the H-bomb was developed. It raises the issue whether it's the United States development which then in turn produces that same development on the other side.

KISSINGER: And I think the answer is the same. The Soviets started deploying MIRVs in 1973, which means that they were well along by 1970 and 1971, which is the time we may have had an opportunity. As it turned out, we exploded our H-bomb about nine months before the Soviets. We deployed our MIRVs about eighteen months before the Soviets. It is impossible therefore that they could have developed MIRVs just in that short interval *between* the time we did and they did.

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

47

At that time the build-up of Soviet offensive forces was in its infancy. We made a unilateral statement (or we had our delegation make a unilateral statement) to read into the record that the United States considered the continued existence of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to depend on significant *cuts* in offensive forces. If these offensive forces were not reduced within the time limit of the offensive agreement, then the conditions for abrogation of the treaty would exist.

Rather than this leading to a reduction of offensive forces, the Soviets built up their offensive forces to a remarkable degree. So the balance between offensive and defensive forces was substantially destroyed. As soon as the ABM treaty and SALT I were signed, we initiated negotiations for the limitation of multiple warheads and reductions to very small numbers. *That* the Soviets consistently refused. So we have a totally new situation today.

48

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

would find it difficult to collaborate at all – for essentially the reasons given by Senator Jackson's associate (and now President Reagan's Assistant Secretary for Defence) Richard Perle.

Look at the other agreements of that period. I don't think one can take the arms control agreements in isolation. There was an agreement on grain which led immediately to a massive Soviet raid on the American grain harvest, pushing up the price of grain to American consumers and solving a very serious Soviet problem. There were agreements on science and technology that led to very significant transfers of technology to the Soviet Union, and we now see them showing up in Soviet military systems. There was a general agreement on principles governing the relationship that crowned a thirty-year Soviet effort to induce the West to accept the principles contained in that document – the Soviet policy line of 'peaceful co-existence' and the like. I think, looking back on that period, that the agreements signed were in every case advantageous to the Soviet Union, and I think that's all one needs to know in order to explain their readiness to sign them.

NEITHER HENRY KISSINGER NOR PRESIDENT NIXON had any desire to accommodate their critics. To a large extent they shared the philosophical case against the Soviet state and its ideology. Dr Kissinger thought of Senator Jackson as an ally and regretted that the Senator chose to oppose him. It was, wrote Kissinger in his memoirs, 'a national tragedy that those who shared a similar strategic analysis should conduct a civil war over tactics...'

DETERRENCE THROUGH DÉTENTE

49

HENRY KISSINGER: That is absolutely correct. I do not believe that you can rely on a first-strike strategy as the defence against all contingencies. Again, one has to consider this in the context of events. That remark was made in late June 1974 in Moscow, a month before Nixon was forced out of office. We found ourselves in the position of being harassed on détente at a time when we had absolutely no capacity for confrontation. And I still believe this: I do not think it is possible to achieve the degree of strategic superiority that existed in the 1940s and 1950s, such that we can rely on nuclear superiority to defend Europe and other parts of the world. I remind you that Reagan has never tired of pointing out in the last two or three years that we are not trying to win a war. In what way does that differ from what I said ten years earlier?

DR HENRY KISSINGER'S HAND WAS EVERYWHERE during one of the most creative periods in post-war diplomacy, of which he is one of the great public figures. Why did he think disenchantment with détente set in so early? 'Overall,' Kissinger says, détente was 'ground down between a liberal idealism unrelated to a concept of power and the liturgical anti-Communism of the right'. But, Kissinger has said, although we made our share of mistakes, the fundamental assault on détente was made by the Soviet Union: with the Soviet-Cuban expeditionary forces in Angola and Ethiopia; their appearance in Aden; the Kremlin's encouragement of North Vietnam's takeover of the South: the pressures on Poland; and the invasion of Afghanistan. Détente had not deterred.

RED ALERT

53

ROSTOW: Exactly. Calling for rearmament and a strengthening of the policy of solidarity. Trying to repair the damage which had been done to the national foreign policy consensus by Vietnam.

CHARLTON: No doubt there were many ingredients in the making of your decision, but what was the final spur to forming the Committee on the Present Danger?

ROSTOW: The final spur was the sense that we had very little time; that the hopes that had been invested in SALT I, and in Nixon's policy of détente, were manifestly proving to be false; and that the Soviets were gaining so rapidly in nuclear strength, despite the provisions of SALT I and the prospective provisions of SALT II, that we soon would have no alternative but to surrender. The Soviet policy with regard to nuclear weapons and therefore with regard to arms control agreements was extremely astute and well conceived; but it was a policy not of détente, not of relaxation of tensions, but of nuclear blackmail.

EUGENE ROSTOW'S PERCEPTIONS of the Soviet Union were those which had been broadly endorsed by the Americans during the period of the Cold War. It was central to the crusade of the Committee on the Present Danger that events had once more shown the Soviet Union to be incorrigibly militant. The hopes nurtured by the activity called 'détente', and the process of arms control conducted by Henry Kissinger, stood, by these lights, confounded.

The basic concept of parity in the SALT negotiations, as an acceptable strategic relationship with the Soviet Union, was attacked as placing the United States at a disadvantage. While the United States adhered to deterrence and retaliation, parity – plus the Soviet policy of strategic initiative (a belief in a first strike, and weapons assigned with that use in mind) – in fact gave the Russians *superiority*.

This critique was put forward in answer to Henry Kissinger's much-quoted question, uttered in Moscow in June 1974: 'What in the name of God is strategic superiority?' The claim that the SALT talks had acquiesced in an American disadvantage and that Kissinger's approach was fatally flawed is, naturally, in conflict with the views of Henry Kissinger himself, particularly concerning the 'quality' of the SALT I Interim Agreement – the target of what would become the prevailing indictment of détente.

HENRY KISSINGER: At the time of the Interim Agreement, the Soviets were building about 240 missiles a year, and we were building none. We considered it a considerable achievement that we were stopping the build-up of Soviet forces. Now, of course, you can say that the Soviets would have stopped anyway. Nobody can ever prove that. We thought the

54

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

I do not believe that the Soviets are relying on a first strike. I do believe that the Soviet Union has designed its strategic forces with a more military concept than the United States has. They do have the capacity to prevent a tit-for-tat, because they can respond with more military options than we can. In other words, they can force us into initiating the destruction of civilian targets earlier than *they* have to. That gives them a

RED ALERT

55

great advantage - not to wipe out our retaliatory forces, though they may be able to do that to our *land-based* retaliatory force.

**KISSINGER:** Exactly. That's right. And now with the Strategic Defence Initiative he has stated criteria that are in fact unfulfillable, so that operationally he is working more in that direction. But the option of superiority did not exist at the time. There was no programme that we could get through the Congress. There is no programme that we *stopped* in the Nixón Administration.

**CHARLTON:** Yet there is this division still, isn't there, over these perceptions of power which the central nuclear balance conveys. Between those who say the Nicaraguas and Angolas are assisted into history because the central nuclear balance has altered ... that Khruschev withdrew from Cuba because of that ultimate reality, American strategic superiority, and ...

56

THE STAR WARS HISTORY

KISSINGER: Yes, but without being willing to pay the price for it.

CHARLTON: '... and in the middle of the worst domestic crisis for a century'.

KISSINGER: And, I repeat, without being willing to pay any price. They thought that if you blow the trumpet hard enough the walls of Jericho were going to collapse automatically.

THE SITUATION WITH WHICH Kissinger had been confronted was the one which Nitze and his associates campaigned to redress. Whereas Kissinger had sought to transcend the ideological differences in the cooperative entanglements of détente, the Committee on the Present Danger examined the Soviet challenge much more in terms of the ideological concepts which the Soviet leadership used to describe and defend their policies.

PAUL NITZE: If I might say a word about the origin of it. This was at a time when we found out that the Soviets had tested an atomic weapon in 1949. It was also right after Chiang Kai-Shek had been driven from the mainland of China. I'd been much impressed by a book written by a man called Nathan Leites, who talked about the 'standard operating code' of the Kremlin. In it he stressed the fact that when the 'correlation of forces' was unfavourable, Lenin had adopted the doctrine that that was a time when one ought to throw dust into the enemy's eyes, so that one would have time to rebuild and to change the correlation of forces. So these two events, the removal of our monopoly and the consolidation of Communist control over the mainland, would be two radical changes in the correlation of forces which the Soviets were bound to take into account if they were still following the precepts that Lenin had laid down.

CHARLTON: As in Lenin's famous remark: 'Probe with bayonets, and if you strike mush, go on - if you meet resistance, retreat.'

NITZE: That's correct. Up to that time, US policy and Allied policy generally had been emphasising entirely the economic and the political elements of policy and had paid little attention to the military aspects. Our

OFFICE OF
HENRY A. KISSINGER

September 17, 1986

Dear Ms. Shandloff:

In response to your query on the
publication of Dr. Kissinger's
interview with Michael Charlton
for the Star Wars History series,
Dr. Kissinger has asked to see a
copy of the transcript before
authorizing its publication.

Ms. Nina Shandloff
Editor
BBC Publications
The British Broadcasting Corp.
35 Marylebone High Street
London W1M 4AA
England