Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  The pity was that Senator Jackson and the Nixon Administration were both committed to the same objective: increasing emigration from the Soviet Union. The dispute was over tactics. The Administration doubted that overt pressure could succeed; Jackson insisted that no other method would work. Sometimes it was hard to avoid the impression that he was as interested in the symbolism of confrontation as in the result. He also sought to appeal to a Jewish constituency for his Presidential ambitions — a not unworthy motive for a public figure fortunate enough to be a native-born citizen of the United States.

  A weakened Nixon was at a grave disadvantage. The Jackson amendment, originated to maintain existing levels of Jewish emigration, was being pursued even after the Soviets had lifted restrictions in order to bring about increased emigration of all nationalities. Nixon and I did not help matters by misunderstanding Jackson’s thrust. We thought that eventually he would work out some accord with us for what was attainable. In fact, he kept escalating his demands.

  The collapse of national civility and cohesion made it difficult for the disputants to hear each other. The Administration felt aggrieved, not the best attitude in dealing with the Congress; our critics sensed our vulnerability, not the ideal precondition for serious dialogue. My nightmare was that under the conditions of Watergate it was wildly risky to provoke a confrontation with Moscow over an issue on which it had already substantially yielded, our leverage was weak, and the resulting crisis might find us without public support. Jackson believed Watergate gave him the opportunity to insist on his total program, and once he was embarked on his course, his constituency gave him added impetus. To his banner flocked many willing enough to strike a pose, not nearly so prepared to face confrontation. In my speech to the Pacem in Terris Conference on October 8, 1973, I tried, almost despairingly, to point out the dangers:

  We shall never condone the suppression of fundamental liberties. We shall urge humane principles and use our influence to promote justice. But the issue comes down to the limits of such efforts. How hard can we press without provoking the Soviet leadership into returning to practices in its foreign policy that increase international tensions? Are we ready to face the crises and increased defense budgets that a return to Cold War conditions would spawn? And will this encourage full emigration or enhance the well-being or nourish the hope for liberty of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? Is it detente that has prompted repression — or is it detente that has generated the ferment and the demand for openness which we are now witnessing? . . .

  These questions have no easy answers. The government may underestimate the margin of concessions available to us. But a fair debate must admit that they are genuine questions, the answers to which could affect the fate of all of us.

  It was to no avail. The struggle over the Jackson amendment continued through 1974. (I shall describe the later negotiations with Jackson in Chapter XXII.) The Congress progressively weakened the constraints on Soviet conduct without providing us the tools to see it through in the form of increased defense (though Jackson himself was always in the forefront of the fight for a strong defense). It was a part of a larger pattern — the product of Vietnam trauma and the corrosion of Watergate — that stripped away both the incentives and penalties needed to conduct an effective policy toward Moscow.

  Missiles and Fantasy

  SENATOR Henry Jackson was the indispensable link between the two groups critical of our relations with the Soviets — the liberals, preoccupied with human rights; and the conservatives, who became anxious about any negotiations with the Soviets. Nixon, great tactician that he was, never conceived that he, the renowned Cold Warrior, would in the end be attacked from his old base on the right wing of the Republican party. But when in 1972 he culminated a year of negotiations with a summit in Moscow and a series of agreements, his erstwhile friends were at first baffled and then disillusioned. Some found solace in blaming me; others started a guerrilla war, attacking especially the agreement limiting strategic arms. Much of the issue was fantasy, much of it politics, and in the Watergate era it had perverse consequences. Conservatives tore each other apart, only to produce a more liberal Congress just as foreign perils were mounting.

  There was a revolutionary element in the first strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT I). This lay in the agreement of the Soviet Union and the United States permanently to limit their deployment of antiballistic missile systems (ABMs) to no more than two sites 1,300 kilometers apart and to no more than 200 missiles. For the first time in history two major powers deliberately rested their security on each other’s vulnerability. But it was not this unprecedented feature that led to acrimony. What drew fire was an issue few had thought controversial when the accords were being negotiated. This was the five-year Interim Agreement that pledged both sides to freeze their strategic offensive missile forces, whether land- or sea-based, at the levels of mid-1972. It was expected that during the five-year period a follow-on, long-term agreement would be negotiated.11

  The Interim Agreement did not affect our strategic arsenal or our force planning; it was a snapshot, as of the moment of signature, of the strategic relationship as it had evolved over the previous decade. The Soviet Union had expanded its missile force at a rapid rate after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. By 1971 it had equaled us in numbers of intercontinental missiles; at the time of the 1972 summit it had more. We retained a large advantage in the total number of warheads, however — an advantage that would, in fact, grow over the five years of the agreement. We were already equipping our missiles with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), whereas the Soviets had not yet tested such a system.

  SALT imposed a sacrifice on the Soviets if it did on anyone. They had been building 200 new launchers a year. They had to dismantle some 210 ICBMs of older types to come down to the agreed ceiling. We had stopped building during the Johnson Administration; we had no new missile program in production and the Vietnam-era Congress would not have approved one. For us the sacrifice was theoretical. The only area where we could have been inhibited by SALT was in submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). But the Joint Chiefs of Staff were adamant in their opposition to building more of the submarine-launched Poseidon missiles then available or the submarines to carry them. They preferred to wait for the more powerful Trident submarine and missile, which would not be ready until at least 1978, or after the expiration of the Interim Agreement.12 Moreover, SALT I did not count or limit strategic bombers, in which we were vastly superior, or our forward-based aircraft and carriers in and around Europe and the Pacific, or the nuclear weapons of France and the United Kingdom (or China). In short, if there was an imbalance, SALT did not create it; it reflected self-limiting decisions made over a decade. SALT did provide a time span in which they could be remedied. SALT I caused us to give up not a single offensive weapons program. The freeze was essential, indeed, if we were ever going to catch up. And we followed SALT I with a substantial modernization of our strategic forces.

  But a man from Mars arriving to observe our domestic debate would never have known this. He would have read that SALT I “conceded” an inequality in missiles to the Soviets. He would have deduced that the treaty sanctified a missile gap — instead of reducing that gap. He would not have been aware of the strange phenomenon that a force level we had adopted voluntarily, and that we were in no position to change over the life of an agreement, suddenly became “dangerous” when it was reaffirmed as part of that agreement.

  Instead of flailing about in this fog of obscurantism, the real debate should have been about how we got into the position in the first place. The roots of the discrepancy in numbers lay in the strategic doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” developed in the Sixties. According to this doctrine, it did not matter whether we had more or fewer missiles than the Soviet Union so long as we had enough to obliterate the citizens and factories of large parts of the Soviet Union.II Similarly, the Soviet Union was considered to possess
a capacity to deter the United States so long as it had enough missiles to destroy American popular and industrial centers. Strategy thus turned into economic analysis: As long as enough of our weapons survived a Soviet nuclear strike to wreak the theoretically calculated havoc, deterrence would be maintained. According to this rationale, our requirement for strategic forces was thought to be largely independent of the threat we faced. The vulnerability of part of our forces — such as ICBMs — was irrelevant provided enough warheads from all sources would survive to inflict “unacceptable” damage.

  The reliance on nuclear retaliation had been developed when America enjoyed overwhelming strategic superiority. In an era of parity, the willingness of any President to put the American population at risk for the protection of distant countries was bound to lose credibility. The doctrine ignored or vastly underestimated the psychological and political inhibitions on leaders who have to give the orders. The targeting scenarios left a President with only two options in a crisis: to give in, or to initiate the extermination of tens of millions of people (first Soviet citizens and then our own in the inevitable retaliation). This strategy was morally questionable even in an era when we had superiority. In an age of approaching strategic equality it threatened to turn into a formula for either suicide or surrender. All would depend on the Soviet leaders’ having enough fear of our intentions to be deterred from running risks. This could be sustained only by a reckless diplomacy through which it would become plausible that if pressed we would unleash a cataclysm even if it destroyed our population and urban centers — an approach most incompatible with the convictions of our people and most likely to evoke panic or appeasement among our allies.

  In other words, it was not necessary to postulate a Soviet advantage in strategic weapons to be concerned about the altered military balance. Even US–Soviet equality in strategic weapons implied a revolutionary change in the assumptions on which the West’s security had been based in the entire postwar period. For the first twenty-five years of the nuclear age, maintaining the military equilibrium was relatively straightforward. The Soviet Union was always superior in ground forces on the Eurasian continent, yet its military reach was generally limited to regions accessible to motorized ground transport, that is, adjacent territories in Europe and, to some extent, China. On the other hand, Africa, most of the Middle East, even Southeast Asia, were beyond the range of major Soviet military intervention. And even the areas theoretically hostage to Soviet ground armies were protected by three factors:

  • First, by American strategic forces so preponderant that they could disarm the Soviet Union or at least reduce its counterblow to tolerable levels;

  • Second, by a vast American superiority in so-called theater nuclear forces everywhere around the Soviet periphery;

  • And third, in Europe, by substantial American and allied ground forces that posed a high risk to the Soviets that a ground attack would trigger nuclear retaliation from the United States.

  Not surprisingly, the major crises in the first twenty years of the postwar period — whether in Berlin, Korea, the Middle East, or Cuba — were ultimately contained, because the costs of pushing them beyond a certain point always appeared exorbitant to Moscow.

  Starting in the 1960s, the military balance began to change, almost imperceptibly at first, so great was our superiority, but with growing momentum as the years went by. By the 1970s it was already foreseeable that when the Soviets developed multiple warheads of their own, the larger size of their missiles (in technical language, their bigger throwweight) was bound to be translated eventually into more warheads of superior explosive power. Not only would we lose our “counter-force” capability (our ability to destroy their land-based missiles); our land-based missiles would become substantially vulnerable. The strategic equation of the entire postwar period would be reversed: Our threat to initiate a nuclear exchange would become hollow. If crises no longer produced fear of escalation to all-out war, they would also become more likely. There would be an exponential increase in the danger to allies at levels of violence below general nuclear exchange.

  The imminent transformation of the strategic balance should have forced a reappraisal of the strategy of relying on the threat of general nuclear war even to protect Europe and certainly other areas; and it should have led to major efforts to strengthen local and regional conventional forces. Unfortunately, in the early Seventies the civil strife over Vietnam prevented a rethinking of old verities just when it became most urgent. The defense budget was the focal point of antiwar pressures, not of thoughtful analysis.

  New weapons were decried as excessive, as symptoms of a military psychosis, as wasteful and dangerous. The ABM program passed the Senate by only one vote and was then emasculated in the appropriations process. The C-5A transport aircraft that later saved an ally in the 1973 Middle East war was challenged repeatedly. Even MIRVs, the only new strategic system available to us to offset the Soviet numerical superiority in the 1970s, were not immune; in 1970 forty Senators signed an appeal to stop MIRV testing. In 1973 the Trident submarine and missile, then the only strategic offensive program ready for production, escaped cancellation by one vote. Ironically, it was those most opposed to the arms race who rejected flexible military options; they clung to the most bloodthirsty nuclear targeting strategies because mass extermination of civilians, in the weird logic of the nuclear age, requires the smallest number of strategic forces.

  In this atmosphere, maintaining even the arsenal inherited from the Sixties absorbed the energies of the Nixon Administration up to the end of the Vietnam war. Obtaining funds for new programs, nuclear or conventional, was enormously difficult. This is why the initiative for negotiating a freeze on offensive weapons originated in the Pentagon itself, in an October 1970 memorandum from Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard — a fact later conveniently forgotten. The best that could be accomplished in the conditions of the early 1970s was to strengthen our military posture as much as the Congress allowed and to adjust the doctrine of assured destruction so that less catastrophic options were possible.III

  In short, the first SALT agreement was not extracted from us by clever Soviet negotiators; the conditions it reflected were conditions we had imposed on ourselves by our earlier decisions and our domestic turmoil. It was therefore in our power to alter these. And the Administration set about to do exactly that. It used the debate over SALT to renew its request for a supplementary appropriation to strengthen our strategic forces — the B-I strategic bomber; the Trident submarine and missile; cruise missiles; and more accurate missile warheads — all of which were to be available to go into production after the Interim Agreement expired (in 1977). We would then be in a position either to match the Soviets in an arms race or to trade bargaining chips in a new round of SALT.

  But as Nixon’s second term began, the political and moral authority he needed to pursue simultaneously the military balance and a sophisticated policy of arms control was beginning to erode. Congressional liberals resisted increases in the defense budget; it was not the “peace dividend” they had expected. (The Congressional climate did not begin to support major defense increases until about 1975.) And conservatives were uncomfortable with the ideological ambiguity of arms control. Erstwhile allies became adversaries. Watergate poisoned the atmosphere.

  The fact of the matter was that each side in the debate had a point; Jackson and the Administration would have served the country better as allies than as opponents. The Nixon Administration deserves great credit for having preserved the sinews of our defense in the face of a relentless Congressional and media assault. Every new strategic program in existence a decade later (together with some canceled by the Carter Administration) had its origin under the stewardship of Nixon and Ford.

  But Jackson and his friends were not wrong in their fear that theories of arms control may in fact have reinforced the reluctance of some in Congress, key opinion-makers, and even Administration officials, to face the relentless
Soviet military buildup squarely. After arms control became fashionable in the Sixties, new weapons systems had to overcome not only the traditional objection of liberals that they were unnecessary (because we already possessed an “overkill” capacity) but the added one that they endangered the prospects of SALT. Indeed, many new programs could be put through the Congress less on their merits than as bargaining chips. They were needed, various Administration spokesmen — including me — argued, so that they could be traded in a negotiation. Whatever the tactical utility of this argument, it tended to reduce the energy with which new programs were pursued. The Pentagon found it difficult to muster enthusiasm — or scarce resources — for projects that were defined as negotiable. After a while the Soviet Union began to play the game deliberately. From ABM to cruise missiles, it systematically sought to use SALT to inhibit our military and technological development; it tried to fuel our domestic debate, adding its own propaganda to Congressional pressures against new weapons.

  The theory that new American weapons weakened the prospects of arms control thrived despite all evidence to the contrary. In 1967, before we had an ABM program, President Lyndon Johnson had suggested to Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin at Glassboro that both sides renounce ABMs. Kosygin contemptuously dismissed the idea as one of the most ridiculous he had ever heard. By 1970, after the Nixon Administration had won its Congressional battle for ABM by one vote, Soviet SALT negotiators refused to discuss any other subject. Only by the most strenuous negotiating effort did we ensure that limits on offensive, as well as defensive, weapons were included. (Conversely, the Carter Administration’s abandonment of the B-I strategic bomber, its stretch-out of the MX missile, and slowdown of the Trident program did not speed up SALT II negotiations or improve the terms.)