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Brown, as a matter of fact, suggested that we should embrace it at least calmly, if not enthusiastically.

But if the United States urges the Germans to start moving closer with the French for their defensive needs, might that not be used as a rationale to say, there they go again, the Americans are decoupling.

Dr. KISSINGER. There is no doubt, first one has to recognize that the Germans suffer from congenital insecurity. Partly because of their geographic location and partly from the fact that a big part of their history has been blocked out, so that it is a more rootless society than many others. I do not think the United States should urge a Franco-German cooperation. I think it should be tolerant of it and supportive of it.

And the coupling between the two sides of the Atlantic has to emerge from the merits.

The big danger, in my view, in Germany is that feeling abandoned, rightly or wrongly, they will start pursuing nationalist policies in the guise of neutralization, of parallel policies between East and West Germany, and all other kinds of vague ideas.

And again, if you look at German history, if in the year 1900 anyone had predicted that within 10 years France, Britain, and Russia would be on the same side, it would have been considered crazy. It was the German inability to choose among objectives that helped drive these erstwhile enemies together.

So Germany operating alone in the center of Europe will be a factor of great instability.

Senator COHEN. If I could just pose one more question on the INF Treaty. You indicate that it is by the board now for all practical purposes.

But the INF Treaty poses another problem for us on a strategic level, because the Soviets can now take SS-25s, unlimited in production, and conceivably use them in an INF mode or intermediate targeting mode.

Would that not support the argument on behalf of having a reduction in strategic systems to minimize that problem? That would be one question.

Second, you were part of that group which produced the report *Discriminate Deterrence*, which recommended deployment of strategic defenses.

The question I would have, if the Soviets were to deploy large-scale defenses, what would that do to the credibility of the United States' threat to use its strategic retailatory forces, should the Soviet move conventionally in Europe? What would large-scale defensive deployments on their part do to the credibility of that threat?

And you may take as long as you like to answer that.

Dr. KISSINGER. One would have to assess how effective these defenses are supposed to be against what kind of American strategy.

Obviously, if the Soviets were to deploy large-scale defenses, it would complicate the American, any American retaliation to an attack on Europe. But I think in part this is inherent in the current situation, because I find it difficult to visualize the precise purpose of an American strategic strike. For people who do not have to make the decisions, it is easy to say the United States must

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be prepared for an all-out blow. But then when you ask yourself, what is the man who walks into the President's office going to say to the President what are the targets, and what risks is he running for what benefit?

And this is a question that is becoming increasingly difficult to answer, with or without defenses. Now, to me, to go back to what Senator Glenn mentioned, I would like to see a negotiated level of offense and a negotiated level of defense, and hopefully these two will be brought into a relationship with each other so that they produce the maximum degree of strategic stability.

Having said that, if you ask me what that level is that would, I could not give you a good answer.

Senator COHEN. Well, I think that the Chairman and others on this committee have tried to argue that very point, trying to strike a balance between the acceleration of our offensive systems and matching that against defenses.

Dr. KISSINGER. I have not favored the version of SDI that states that its purpose is to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether.

On the other hand, we cannot, in my view, base strategy totally on unopposed offensive systems. That must in the long term have a demoralizing effect on a democracy. We must be able to define a strategic objective for defense similar to a strategic objective for offense and then relate the two to each other in the negotiations.

Chairman NUNN. Thank you, Senator Cohen. Senator Levin, I believe you are next.

Senator LEVIN. Let me add my welcome to you, Dr. Kissinger. I would like to ask about your position on linkage between conventional arms control and START.

You have written, and I believe you reiterated today, that we should not take a step towards START unless it is linked with measures that reduce Soviet preponderance in conventional weapons.

Now, if I thought, frankly, that linking those two would produce a better conventional arms control agreement, I would favor linkage also. Because I think of the two, a START agreement and conventional agreement, that a good conventional agreement is more important.

I happen to favor a good START agreement, but I would put a conventional agreement, if it is a good one, on a higher plateau.

We recently visited Europe and talked to a lot of people there, and we heard Prime Minister Thatcher on this subject. She and the people that we talked to in Europe, I would say almost unanimously, feel that if we linked a START agreement to conventional arms, that we would give the Soviets leverage over the conventional arms control agreement.

If a popular START agreement were held up, while a conventional agreement were being negotiated, that would give the Soviets great public political leverage over those conventional arms control negotiations.

In addition to that, we have been the ones who have struggled to delink, for instance, SDI from the other talks. And so we, in a way, would be playing into the Soviet hands when they seek to link if we did some linkage of our own.

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And finally, we do not have a conventional arms control position, as you have so eloquently pointed out here today. In short, linkage could create problems for a number of reasons.

But in any event, I am wondering if you would put yourself in our framework. Would you favor some kind of a resolution during the INF ratification debate which stated that the President or the administration should not bring us a START agreement for ratification until it has negotiated a conventional arms control agreement?

Dr. KISSINGER. In my statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I modified my linkage proposal to the extent that I said that before we go ahead with the START agreement we should know at least the parameters within which the conventional reductions are to be negotiated.

In other words, I would like to know what the Soviets understand by asymmetrical reduction. I admit the 50 percent reduction is highly popular. The INF reduction is highly popular.

At some point the leadership of this country and of the democracies has an obligation to tell its people what the realities are. And if we cannot explain in what way a 50 percent reduction improves the situation, then it is a false popularity for which we will pay further fown the road.

As all of you know, all Europeans profess to rely on the American nuclear guarantee. If the Soviets managed to conduct arms control negotiations in such a way that nuclear weapons become systematically delegitimized, in the preamble of every agreement there is a statement that nuclear war can never be fought, and if secondly the resulting balance from these agreements makes it less and less plausible that the United States can use its nuclear weapons because it has no rational targets for them, then the conventional balance becomes increasingly crucial.

And they will be magnified if we have not even a clue to what the Soviets mean by asymmetrical reductions I admit that we will not be able to negotiate it for many years. But we can ask for at least that much, to have a frame of reference within which the negotiation will then take place.

Senator LEVIN. Putting yourself now again in our framework, are you saying that you would recommend that we adopt a resolution as part of the INF ratification debate, which says something like, hold off bringing us a START agreement until you can present to use the parameters as identified by the Soviets of a conventional arms proposal?

Dr. KISSINGER. I would favor an expression by the Senate that says we are very worried about the conventional imbalance.

We are also worried about the kind of strategy that will result after all these agreements are made. And we would like you to come to us when you present START with the parameters of the next negotiation, and secondly, some explanation of the strategic doctrine underlying this agreement, so that we can explain to the public or debate before our committees whether this in fact increases the security of the Western world.

And this should be, in fact if the Soviets are interested in stability, that should be in their interests too.

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Senator LEVIN. Would the agreement on a mandate for those talks satisfy your parameters?

Dr. KISSINGER. The existing mandate?

Senator LEVIN. If we finally agree upon a mandate for the conventional arms control negotiations, would that mandate agree-ment satisfy your requirement?

Dr. KISSINGER. If it was sufficiently specific, it would meet that requirement. But I have to tell you I am not wild about this par-ticular agreement. It is another step down a road in which num-bers become a substitute for thought.

Senator LEVIN. My time is up. Thank you.

Chairman NUNN. Thank you, Senator Levin. Senator Quayle?

Senator QUAYLE. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And con-gratulations for another excellent statement. We all appreciate you and your thoughts.

Let me just follow along the lines of Senator Levin's question and ask you this. We have got INF behind us. We negotiate START 50 percent reduction. We have got a ban for chemical and biologi-cal weapons on the table. As you say, we have got this fixation with numbers.

Once we negotiate those things, what leverage do we have with the Soviets to begin these asymmetrical reductions that need to take place on conventional forces? I do not see what leverage, once we get those things out of the way and move in that direction, what we have left.

Dr. KISSINGER. Well, I suppose you could argue that the Soviets will want to reduce the expenses of maintaining large conventional forces, and cannot reduce them unilaterally.

But I am worried about the facts that the Soviet Union, in a period of obvious difficulty, has managed to focus the negotiations on those weapons on which, for better or worse, we have relied, and have managed to keep out of the negotiation those weapons that have represented the greatest threat to the security of their neighbors. That is not a healthy situation.

Chairman NUNN. Could I interrupt one second or that? I would like to just venture that perhaps they have not managed that, we have managed that.

Dr. KISSINGER. We have managed it.

Chairman NUNN. I think you give the Soviets too much credit. We cannot figure out what we want.

Dr. KISSINGER. You are quite right.

Senator QUAYLE. We have managed that, but we have negotiated things that are in the greatest interest to them rather than focus-ing on this conventional imbalance.

And once we negotiate the things that are of interest to them, I ask again the leverage that we have with the Soviet Union beyond the economic considerations. Certainly they have to make resource allocations in the Soviet Union.

But past tradition and precedence do not seem to indicate that they have too much reluctance to invest in defense whatever they want to.

Dr. KISSINGER. But the point that Senator Levin implied is also important, that we go four-fifths of the way down a road and at

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that point we raise the considerations we probably should have raised at the beginning of the road.

And that makes it much more difficult with people like Margaret Thatcher and others, who really are basically very well disposed towards us.

Senator QUAYLE. So therefore it would make sense to put the conventional issue on the front burner?

Dr. KISSINGER. I would certainly put it on the front burner. We probably cannot now insist upon having it completed, but I would want to see whether the Soviet idea of conventional disarmament is so preposterous that we are in a ball game in which they want to maintain their conventional threat at all costs.

Senator QUAYLE. Senator Cohen outlined in some of the concerns he came away with from Wehkundi, and I would just like to continue that train of thought.

Not only did Hagar and Bahr and Vogel join in in congratulating Chancellor Schmidt, but Strauss had some rather revealing comments about the threat of the Soviet Union that I had not heard before. Some I had read, but had not heard before.

I do not believe, from a political sense, I do not see Chancellor Kohl really getting any stronger down the road. Two years from now, 5 years from now, most predict that he would have a re-election capability. I think they are being held in 1990.

Given that, and that perhaps they are not going to get politically stronger, given the fact that you have got this momentum going with zero-zero, 50 percent reduction, I mean from a political sense, despite the call for a steady American foreign policy, how are we realistically going to deny that third zero, when the Soviets put it on the table?

You have a situation in Germany now where the politicians are out ahead of the public on this issue. In this particular discussion of modernization. I did not detect it when I was over there in the public that there are a lot of demonstrations, a lot of talk about this.

I detected it with the politicians. And it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the public will certainly begin to focus on this, once that gets on the table. But how do we realistically think in the next decade that we are going to stop this triple zero?

And once you have that you basically have the denuclearization, you have got the concern of whether our troops will be in harm's way or in safety. I am just sitting here and walking away, having spent a week over there, not terribly optimistic.

And if I look at this thing just from a political sense, how do we stop this? What do we need to do? How do we recommit ourselves—

Dr. KISSINGER. In fairness to some of the people you have mentioned, Kohl, Strauss, Dregger, none of them wanted the double zero solution. That they did in response to us. That now has been released the triple zero.

The only hope, if there is a hope, that there are certainly trends in Germany that may move faster than we can, than anything we can do. I suspect that there will be more and more economic lures put out by the East.

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