Dear Mr. Foreign Minister:

I wanted you to know that Dr. Daniel Boorskin, Chief of the U.S. Library of Congress, will be in Oslo until September 4. He is a good friend, and I would personally appreciate any courtesy you could extend to him. Should you have the chance to meet him, I believe you would find him stimulating and interesting.

THE POLITICS OF STRATEGIC RESTRAINT:
TOWARD A NEW CONCEPTION

by
Alton Frye

Back home in Tennessee they recall the moonshiners of Salt Hollow.
A revenue agent once hired a local boy to lead him to the still. When
the boy asked for his dollar in advance, the agent said he would pay him
when they got back. "No sir," said the youngster, "pay me now. You ain't
comin' back."

In considering the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), many
Americans may well feel as alarmed as that "revenooer." Before proceeding
up "SALT Hollow," they want to know what the price will be, and whether
they will be coming back.

Amid such apprehensions, the long-running strategic arms negotiations
between the United States and the Soviet Union approach a crucial junction.
Not only are the two parties running out of time for negotiating a new
agreement to replace the interim accord on offensive weapons which expires
in October 1977; they are running out of ideas for concrete measures which
would carry them beyond the numerical ceilings on strategic forces antici-
pated in the Vladivostok Agreement of 1974.

The understandable caution engendered by contemplation of the issues
involved in the SALT discussions has drawn Moscow and Washington together
in a common preoccupation with the details of the strategic balance. Neither
government can neglect those details, but neither is likely to find in them

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a durable solution to its security dilemmas. If SALT is to make a lasting
contribution to the security of the American and Soviet peoples, leaders
on both sides will have to devise a larger and more far-sighted conception
of the functions and possibilities of such negotiations. It would be folly
compounded to proceed from an arms competition with no formal limitations
to one in which superficial restraints gave a misleading impression that the
world had grown safer than it really is.

The limitations on ABM defenses now in force and the ceilings on
strategic offensive forces now in prospect do not mean that the lid has been
placed on the strategic cauldron; they mean only that fewer ingredients will
be added to the pot. We must never forget that the stew may still boil over
unless we find a better method to regulate the temperature. How this might
be accomplished -- how we might devise a more encompassing framework to regu-
late Soviet and American behavior in future strategic arms negotiations -- is
the subject of this essay.

At the outset, however, we need to take account of the particularly
precarious phase into which the SALT negotiations have now moved. In some
quarters there is a creeping indifference to the success or failure of SALT II.
The reasons for this indifference are manifold. Some observers feel that the
Soviet Union has exploited the restraints negotiated in the SALT I agreements
of 1972 in order to build up its forces on a massive front ranging from the
most exotic strategic arms to the most pedestrian conventional weaponry.
Others view the offensive force limitations incorporated in the Interim Agree-
ment and proposed in the Vladivostok Accord as too puny to be significant --
indeed, as an incentive to build up weaponry rather than to reduce it.

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Committed proponents of arms control worry about the perverse incentives which have led to a major expansion of the qualitative arms race, thus undercutting the value of the modest quantitative controls so far imposed. Committed skeptics of detente fret that the ingenious Soviets have once again outdone the ingenuous Americans, obscuring malicious purpose under the soothing gauze of diplomacy. Both groups are allied in their disappointment at the manner in which recent SALT negotiations have proceeded.

This alliance of anxiety undoubtedly has its counterpart in the Kremlin. There the advocates of negotiated arms restraint will have had difficulty understanding the delays in reducing to treaty form the numerical ceilings on strategic launchers which President Ford and Secretary Brezhnev specified in their November 1974 summit conference. Proponents of expanded military deployments certainly point to recent technological innovations in American forces as evidence of U.S. violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the prevailing arms agreements. Thus, despite the hopeful inclinations which President Carter expresses, there are apprehensions and tendencies in both governments which could well conspire to frustrate the negotiating process.

Would it make any difference? From the American standpoint, would the United States really be less secure if SALT II proves abortive? If the five-year agreement limiting strategic missiles on land and sea runs out in late 1977, leaving only the treaty restricting ABM deployments, would mutual deterrence really become less stable? These questions require the most scrupulous analysis, but the fact that they are now being posed with increasing frequency tells much about the turn in expectations which has occurred in the years since the first strategic arms agreements. They suggest a degree

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of tentativeness about American interest in arms control which has not existed in many years. Considerations of this nature indicate the fragility of the diplomatic process which, having borne fruit at the end of the first Nixon Administration, has now been barren for five years. And they foretell the immense difficulties which the political leaders of both nations must surmount if policies of strategic restraint are to regain momentum.

In gauging the prospects for strategic diplomacy in and beyond SALT II, one must acknowledge other gloomy truths. Technology continues to outpace politics. One after another the myriad innovations of the 70s have created a situation fully as fluid as that which prevailed in the early 1960s when bombers gave way to missiles as the principal instruments of strategic warfare. Unlike the competition in rocketry spawned by Sputnik, when the United States surged to a commanding lead in both the numbers and quality of long-range missiles, the last decade has seen the Soviet Union surpass the United States in strategic forces deployed, although the latter retains the advantage in total numbers of warheads, reliability, and precision delivery. Soviet strategic advances are all the more impressive, if not alarming, when coupled with even larger expenditures on development and procurement of conventional capabilities, including an unprecedented expansion of the Soviet navy. To explain these trends we have contending hypotheses -- the dictates of Marxist ideology, the dynamics of the Soviet Union's military-industrial bureaucracy, the drive toward empire of Great Russian nationalism. Whatever the explanation for the altered facts of the strategic relationship, the United States must deal with them. If it is not possible to curb the Soviet Union's military momentum by means of diplomatic arrangements, there can be no doubt that

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the United States will have to respond appropriately in its own military
deployments. The likely costs of such countervailing deployments are but
one reason why a collapse of the SALT negotiations is not a prospect to be
taken lightly.

It does not excuse Moscow's single-minded pursuit of political advan-
tage through military investment for one to note the extraordinary context
in which these strategic developments have unfolded. With the conclusion of
the historic ABM treaty, which bolstered the stability of deterrence by in-
suring the neither side could deny the other an effective opportunity to
retaliate for any nuclear attack, there seemed good reason to believe that
further progress could be made in curbing offensive weaponry as well. In-
deed, the Interim Agreement on strategic offensive weapons, by defining the
interim as five years, intimated that the parties would move promptly to
extend the scope of their understandings. Yet, partly because of the basic
convictions of the political leaders in both governments and partly because
of the bureaucratic bargains struck to win domestic acceptance of the 1972
agreements, both the United States and the Soviet Union began to move for-
ward with substantial strategic programs.

Whether conceived as bargaining chips or not, a number of strategic
innovations on both sides might have been curtailed had diplomacy not been
disrupted by the turmoil of American domestic politics. One may reasonably
speculate that the strong electoral endorsement which Richard Nixon won in
1972 might have enabled him to proceed toward an early resolution of the
issues arising in SALT II. The self-destruction of his Administration
blighted the opportunity and cast a pall over the negotiations from which

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his struggling successor never escaped. Analysts sensitive to the problems of succession in the Soviet system must have some sympathy for the dilemmas Moscow faced in dealing with an American government torn by an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy. When political relations between the two governments bogged down, and when the hoped-for economic accommodations proved as elusive as a shared perception of human rights, the Soviet military programs were left to evolve unimpeded. In the circumstances of Kremlin politics, who was there to gainsay them, and for what reason?

The wonder is not that SALT faltered but that it failed to disintegrate. It is an achievement of no mean import that Henry Kissinger managed to sustain the process in a period when the meager results scarcely warranted the effort. It is also a feat not likely to be repeated. SALT must produce results or it may dissolve in the uncertainties and suspicions now impending.

The first order of business, quite apparently, is to nurse the negotiations back to health by settling the final terms of the ceilings on strategic forces suggested by Ford and Brezhnev almost three years ago. It would be unfortunate but not intolerable to delay action on the most controversial points in the recent discussions, namely, whether to include limits on cruise missiles and the Soviet Backfire bomber under the ceilings agreed to at Vladivostok. If those items are deferred for later negotiations, the SALT II agreement might compensate partially for their exclusion by lowering the Vladivostok ceilings of 2,400 strategic launchers on each side, which critics ranging from Henry Jackson to Paul Warnke have denounced as too high. The crucial goal now is to wrap up an agreement expeditiously in order to regain momentum in the process.

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The same consideration argues for early ratification of the threshhold ban on nuclear weapons tests and the related agreements on limiting peaceful nuclear explosions. While a comprehensive nuclear test ban would be preferable and should remain the United States' clear objective, it would not be a wholesome development for Washington to refuse to move forward with agreements duly concluded at the highest levels of the two governments. And there are some aspects of the pending arrangements on nuclear test limitations which would serve well the larger program of strategic restraint to be set forth later in this article. President Carter's expressed preference for a comprehensive ban on testing, perhaps facilitated by an initial moratorium for three to five years, should spur renewed efforts in that direction, particularly as an element of anti-proliferation policy.

Even if these outstanding agreements are implemented, however, they will impart only slight impetus to the ponderous process of shaping a stable equilibrium between the two super-powers. SALT both feeds and feeds upon the general political relationship between the countries. It is a vital but narrow strand in a fabric woven of many threads, and even if one abjures the direct linkage of SALT to other strands, one cannot effectively isolate it from the overall relationship. To divine a path toward genuine security the Soviets and Americans will have to raise their sights in the negotiations which are to come and form a more coherent idea of the ways in which strategic arms talks can promote the high politics of peace. What conceptions might guide the two sides toward this higher politics? Without pretending to offer a comprehensive design, one may identify three major elements which deserve to be considered in framing such a conception: (1) the role of strategic

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forces in crisis management, (2) the need for a common strategic doctrine, and (3) methods for assessing strategic intentions.

(1) In the fifteen years since the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet Union and the United States have managed to avoid the most direct and acute confrontations, although the near-misses in Southeast Asia during 1972 and the Middle East during 1973 were too close for comfort. In this interval, the developing dialogue in SALT, the Mutual Balanced Force Reduction talks and elsewhere has proved a useful form of sensitivity training. Yet, paradoxically, this relative success in managing or avoiding crises may have lulled the two sides into underestimating the mounting risks associated with future crises. There is reason to believe that the next major crisis between Moscow and Washington is likely to be far more dangerous than any yet experienced.

The reasons for this dire prognosis have much to do with the transformation of the strategic balance. It is a truism that neither side should base its strategic force planning primarily on analysis of the worst case which might arise, but both nations need to recognize that they are veering toward a "worst case" which cries for alert study and joint resolution.

Consider the context of a future crisis in the Middle East, Africa, or in some other arena where the two sides' interests clash. The Soviet Union is bound to enter that engagement with vivid recollections of Khrushchev's demeaning backdown in the 1962 missile crisis. Indeed, some analysts explain much of Soviet behavior in the intervening years as a determined effort to overcome the strategic disadvantages so often cited to explain

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President Kennedy's success in pressuring the Soviet government to remove the missiles from Cuba.

Having invested a decade and a half and countless billions of rubles to achieve rough equivalence with U.S. strategic might, the Soviet Union may well enter that future crisis with a felt need to demonstrate that its costly nuclear deployments are worth their weight in political leverage. The technical and party bureaucracies which have led the campaign for the massive Soviet build-up will be impelled to demonstrate that all the sacrifices of these years are justified. There will be tremendous pressures on the Soviet leadership not to back down, not to yield, not to accommodate. In short, there is likely to be maximum compulsion on Moscow to extract a political victory from the crisis.

But look at the United States' posture when facing such a contingency. Having acknowledged Soviet achievement of strategic parity and knowing the widespread belief that strategic momentum is with Moscow, Washington will be reluctant to accept an outcome which appears to confirm that the shifts in the strategic balance have given the Soviet Union unwonted political leverage. To permit that impression to take hold would only damage the United States' potential influence in other quarters, strengthen the hand of those Soviet figures pressing for an aggressive stance in world politics, and tempt Moscow to further interventions.

If these anticipations are correct, they are a recipe for both sides entering some future crisis with their backs up and with less flexibility than such situations require. This worrisome prospect points to the need for candid discussion of this phenomenon at high levels of the two govern-

ments. While the strategic nuclear factor can hardly be eliminated as a
background element in any Great Power crisis, it would be useful for the
parties to draft some ground rules to moderate its inflammatory potential.

Two such ground rules commend themselves immediately, and thoughtful
diplomacy may devise others. First of all, Moscow and Washington would
do well to avoid any overt invocation of their strategic nuclear power in
reference to any local crises, particularly those outside their respective
zones of alliance. President Kennedy's threat during the Cuban missile
crisis to order a "full retaliatory strike" against the Soviet Union for
any nuclear attack launched from the island, while understandable, is hardly
a desirable precedent. Given the altered strategic circumstances to which
we have referred, verbal restraint during any crisis assumes heightened
importance. Both sides should foreswear such provocative threats. Their
object should be to disconnect so far as possible proximate disputes from
the ultimate coercion of nuclear intimidation. Pledges of moderate rhetoric
are normally of little value, but in this instance they could be quite use-
ful as a sign of both sides' willingness to refrain from seeking political
success by means of strategic bluster.

Secondly, and more concretely, so far as possible the two governments
might wish to offer assurances that they would not introduce nuclear-capable
forces in a region where a crisis engages major interests of the Soviet Union
and the United States. Here numerous difficulties arise. Such a policy
could not apply to NATO, the Warsaw Pact, or certain other allied territories
covered by the nuclear umbrellas of Moscow and Washington. The Middle East
and the Mediterranean pose special problems, since, whether or not allied to