RED ALERT

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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 Nitzé say anything like that when he was in a position of responsibility. You've only heard Nitzé 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 Nixón 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

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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.

The principal formulation of American strategic policy during the era of containment of Soviet power, which began under Président 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