Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  As with all civil wars, the conflict between the Nixon Administration and its conservative critics was bitter. Shared premises inevitably caused disagreements to be ascribed to bad faith. Suspicion of motives came to overwhelm discussion of substance. Nixon, like me, was substantially in accord with Senator Henry Jackson. As on Soviet emigration, we differed with him primarily as to tactics: The Administration thought that we could best sustain domestic support for a strong defense if we had demonstrated that we were also concerned with arms control. Jackson was convinced that SALT would ultimately drain Congressional support for our military programs by creating a misleading impression that peace had arrived.

  The two sides should have joined forces behind a strong defense program and a realistic arms control approach. Instead, Jackson insisted on a showdown, egged on by Nixon’s traditional liberal opponents who seized the opportunity of this intramural squabble but whose newfound militancy on human rights did not divert their pressures for cutting the military budget. On March 8, 1973, Nixon gloomily told the National Security Council:

  I had breakfast this morning with Senator [John] McClellan and Senator [Milton] Young. Both of them have always been strong supporters of our policy, particularly where military matters are concerned. They said that as far as the Senate was concerned, we were going to have real troubles on defense matters. Even Senator McClellan is talking of making cuts in our NATO forces. He said he is doing this not because he wants to, but he needs to take this position in order to avoid even deeper cuts that would be imposed by the Senate. The Senate, with the exception of Senators Jackson and [John] Tower, simply won’t back us on these issues.

  In these circumstances Nixon naturally had the greatest difficulty crediting the seriousness of those who accused him in effect of being soft in negotiating with the Soviets. And it was hard to take after the abuse we had suffered in the lonely determination to preserve American honor and credibility in the first term. A meeting of minds would have been difficult in the best of conditions; Watergate froze the mutual distrust beyond any hope of understanding.

  The SALT II Stalemate

  IN theory our defense problem should have been amenable to the rational weighing of carefully elaborated choices that outsiders see as the process of government. Reality is not like that. Decisions emerge from a combination of personal convictions, bureaucratic self-interest, administrative trade-offs, and Congressional and public pressures, with the dividing line between these elements often blurred in the discussion and even in the minds of the participants. In this instance, astonishing as it may seem, hawks and doves alike were reluctant to face the implications of our evaporating strategic superiority. The programs being pushed by the Pentagon — Trident, B-I, and improved warheads — generally enhanced our second-strike capacity. They were an insurance against a Soviet surprise attack. They did not deal with the dilemma of how to respond to Soviet expansionism when we no longer possessed a credible counterforce capacity and were inferior in conventional forces. The Defense Department did not dare address the issue of conventional forces when the national policy was to abolish the draft — which in turn was needed to defuse the antiwar movement. The doves thought even existing forces were excessive. They perceived no threat to international security in the fateful combination of nuclear parity and local inferiority.

  In this environment our preparations for SALT II fell between two stools. Our deliberations neither rose to a true analysis of our long-term strategy nor addressed the fundamental question of whether a SALT negotiation was the right way to deal with our emerging security problems. The Defense Department generally defended its existing programs, though the rationale for them was growing threadbare. It was torn between its desire to support Presidential policy (which favored a new round of SALT talks) and its fear of retribution from Senator Jackson, the second ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, whose support was essential to steer military appropriations through the Congress. The State Department and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) — before Fred Iklé took over as its director — were concerned with negotiability, defined at least in a general sense by what the Soviets had said they would accept. They were thus objectively opposing the few new strategic programs that had passed the Congressional gauntlet.

  How Nixon would have reacted to these pressures in normal times is difficult to determine. He had an overwhelming mandate. He had pulled off more difficult feats than reconciling a strong defense with arms control. But the question soon became moot when Watergate deprived him of the attention span he needed to give intellectual impetus to SALT. Even in his first term I had had difficulty getting Nixon to focus on the technical issues of SALT. Now in the wake of the resignations of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, he explicitly told me (on May 1) to follow my own judgment in choosing among options. I did not do so. I continued to submit the options to him. But this merely added one bureaucratic step. His approval of staff recommendations on SALT was nearly automatic.

  The practical result, however, was a governmental stalemate. Presidential assistants can be powerful in influencing Presidential decisions; they cannot make the decisions, especially when major departments have strong convictions. In the first term my influence had been greatest where the departments were eager to avoid the onus of public controversy (as on Vietnam negotiations), or where no one wanted to take the responsibility for a major change of course (as on China).

  In that period, my chairmanship of interdepartmental committees had enabled me to learn the views of the various agencies, encourage analysis, and narrow the options. I could then use this knowledge in secret negotiations with some confidence as to where I had bureaucratic support and what would cause difficulties. The agencies still assumed that they shared responsibility for the outcome of a negotiation, including its failure.

  But by 1973 they had discovered that the major negotiations took place without their knowledge. Hence I could be blamed for failure, or be made to bear the brunt of whatever controversy even success was sure to bring. Each department thereafter would stake out its maximum objective, whatever sense it made. If that pristine position was not achieved, the agencies were not responsible. The inevitable compromise that would be necessary for a solution, and which in normal procedures they would have urged, could now be blamed on inadequate vigilance by the negotiator. My position, in short, had become bureaucratically untenable.

  Our preparations for SALT II suddenly took on a theological cast. For ten years we had deliberately designed a force structure quite asymmetrical with that of the Soviets. Our missiles were small and presumably versatile; theirs were heavy and powerful. The Soviets put most of their emphasis on land-based missiles with heavy payloads; we had diversified to include bombers and submarine-based missiles. The Soviets were ahead in numbers of land-based missiles and throwweight; we in multiple warheads. This was the force structure we had chosen. Throughout my period in office not a single request came forward from either the civilian or the military element of the Pentagon to change the mix of our forces. What they did ask for, when SALT II negotiations began, was that we demand in negotiations the perfect symmetry that their own unilateral decisions had never sought, and had indeed prevented, and that they never attempted to achieve even once the principle had been conceded.

  Perhaps we should have declared a moratorium on SALT for a year to get our intellectual house in order. But bureaucratic momentum, and the fear that delay would be blamed on Watergate and thus weaken the President, made it impossible. And we hoped to repeat the experience of SALT I, in which we had clarified our thinking as we went along. Our dilemma was that we were constrained by domestic pressures from choosing either of the two options that made strategic sense: building up massively to bring about Soviet restraint through the threat of a counterforce capability, or freezing the status quo while we still had an edge in warheads.

  The Defense Department had a clear-cut different view. It would be prepared to live with the number of launchers
we had decided to build though they spelled inequality; it was not willing to see these numbers written down in an agreement. For an agreement, it insisted on “equal aggregates,” or equality in every weapons system — ICBMs, SLBMs, and heavy bombers. This was a symbolic objective that reflected domestic pressures, not a political or strategic analysis.IV It is impossible to achieve by negotiation what one is not willing to pursue by one’s own effort. In effect, the proposal meant asking the Soviets to reduce unilaterally without sacrificing any American program or threatening any American buildup if the proposal were not accepted. How to accomplish it was generously left to my discretion. The proposition reminded me of the story of the admiral who during World War II claimed to have found a solution to the submarine problem: He proposed heating the ocean and boiling the enemy to the surface. Asked how to accomplish this feat, he replied: “I have given you the idea; its technical implementation is up to you.”

  The State Department went to the other extreme. It proposed a moratorium on all MIRV testing and deployment. This was no more negotiable since it would have excluded the Soviets from the MIRV field altogether. It was also greeted with little enthusiasm in the Pentagon because it would have forced us to abandon the Trident, the only new American missile then under development. Such MIRV limits were also alleged to raise a host of verification issues. (These on closer examination proved soluble.)

  So it was that for the first time since I had come to government I was bureaucratically isolated — and confronted with palpable absurdities.

  While these esoteric debates were going on, and despite its obsession with equality, the Defense Department continued to reduce our forces by administrative decisions throughout the nearly seven years that SALT II was being negotiated. For example, under its published 1973 five-year program — without any White House guidance or any reference to SALT — the Pentagon planned to retire some 100 B-52s and to build only 250 B-IS to replace the remaining B-52s, for a total numerical decline in our strategic forces of some 290 units. It thus gave the Soviets for nothing benefits for which we could at least have attempted to exact some reciprocity in the negotiations.

  It may seem strange that decisions of such consequence could be made by a department of the government without White House clearance. And technically they were not. But the White House faces a serious decision in determining at what point to intervene in the budgetary process. Our defense budget is larger than the entire expenditures of any European country. In the early phases the Office of Management and Budget in the White House can have considerable influence — but only on the gross totals. For the NSC to intervene in detail at this stage and to specify weapons systems that we wanted to preserve for a SALT tradeoff would have affronted the Defense Department and the uniformed military. They are acutely sensitive about what they consider their prerogative in making the initial recommendation about how to divide up approved funds among the services.

  The Pentagon had been too badly burned by what it considered interference by armchair civilian strategists in the Sixties to be hospitable to high-level review of its planning. In 1971 I had sent an inquiry to the Defense Department asking why Soviet weapons should cost less than comparable American ones. It was still under study five years later when I left the government. The same fate befell a request for a comprehensive review of naval strategy and requirements. In each case the Joint Chiefs objected, by the time-honored method of foot-dragging, to the principle that their detailed plans might be subject to review by officials outside the Department of Defense. It was not until James Schlesinger became Secretary of Defense in 1973 that we succeeded in obtaining the review of targeting for our strategic forces that we had requested in 1969. By then the growth of the Soviet strategic forces had severely constricted our choices.

  Early in the Nixon Administration I thought some progress was being made when a Defense Program Review Committee was set up, including State and the economic agencies. Secretary of Defense Laird supported it because he wanted to bring home to the claimants for larger expenditures for social services the grave consequences of taking them out of the defense budget. I agreed happily because I thought it would give me the opportunity to influence strategic doctrine and force levels at an earlier stage than had been customary. As things turned out, Laird served his purposes better than I mine. As a practical matter Laird invoked the committee only to stave off gross cuts in the budget. The White House saw the outlines of the detailed defense program only during the summer before it was put into final form in October. By then the services had made their various trade-offs. Weapons considered obsolescent were the first to go, partly because as they disappeared they strengthened the case for entirely new systems. The unresolved issues were kept to a minimum and were usually highly technical, satisfying Presidential insistence on having the last word without enabling his staff to undertake a serious strategic review. So it happened that we continued to hand to the Soviets as part of our budgetary process what we should have used as bargaining chips — to my vocal but futile dismay; the budgetary and the negotiating cycles were simply out of phase.

  It was hardly an environment conducive to conceptual thought when SALT II got under way in October 1972. The Soviets proposed the withdrawal of American ballistic-missile submarines from forward bases as well as mutual “restraint” in the development of new strategic weapons. Since our government had not yet formulated any position, and was preoccupied by the Presidential elections and the final negotiations on Vietnam, we arrived at a tried and true response: We proposed an “exploratory” meeting. Its purpose, as laid down in instructions to the SALT delegation on November 8, 1972, was to elicit Soviet reactions and to develop a “work program” — in short, to make sure that nothing much controversial could occur.

  Our delegation carried out these instructions with the meticulousness that our own internal divisions made obligatory. For six months theoretical papers were pushed back and forth while we consumed ourselves in near-academic debates about options that, even had we been able to agree on them, had no relationship to any negotiating reality.

  Early in 1973, SALT talks resumed. The negotiations met in Geneva and presented maximum positions to each other without a serious effort to bridge the gaps. This had to await internal review by both governments. I do not know what deliberations, if any, the Soviet leadership undertook. As for us, at NSC Verification Panel meetingsV in February and March 1973, it became clear that there were political limits to any proposal that impinged on our MIRV program. The State Department was leaning toward proposing a moratorium on MIRV testing. Deputy Secretary of Defense William Clements and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer were strongly opposed. They argued that though we would still be able to test our new Trident missiles with single warheads, the Trident program without MIRVs would lose its rationale and be killed in Congress. The new Secretary of Defense, Elliot Richardson, agreed. In this they were undoubtedly right; with our budgetary process, a moratorium tends to kill the weapons system to which it applies. One cannot obtain appropriations for what one is seeking to ban through negotiations.

  A National Security Council meeting on March 8, 1973, confronted the President with having to decide whether any kind of MIRV limitation should be included in our position. If so, which approach — a ban on MIRVing large Soviet missiles, a freeze and a MIRV test ban for two or three years, or some other variation? And what were we prepared to pay for limitations on Soviet multiple warheads? The desultory discussion merely reaffirmed old perplexities. Unbeknownst to his foreign policy advisers, Nixon was already preoccupied with the unraveling of Watergate. And technical discussions of throw weight, aggregates, or fractionization (the number of warheads on each launcher) bored him in the best of circumstances. His distracted look and sporadic sarcastic comments underlined that he wanted nothing so much as for the meeting to end without having to confront a decision that could only add a foreign policy controversy to his domestic agonies.

  N
ixon also had an acute instinct for the right moment to act. The Soviets had given no indication that they were ready for serious discussion. Our own deliberations were largely exploratory and theoretical. No one understood better than Nixon the principle that a President should not spend political capital unless he can calculate high odds for success. So the outcome of the meeting was the Solomonic decision that a new interagency paper would be prepared, summing up — and possibly simplifying — the many options before us. Given the raging disputes within our government, even agreeing on a definition of the disagreements would not be a simple matter. Resolving them would have taken months without Watergate; Watergate caused the issue in effect to be deferred into the Ford Presidency. While not prepared to rule on SALT, Nixon had no hesitation in pronouncing on our strategic goals. He concluded the meeting with a peroration that we could never afford to be Number 2; we had to do what was necessary to maintain at least equivalence. But he gave no guidelines by which to measure whether this criterion was met either in strategic planning or in SALT. That, after all, was the issue.

  The divisions in Washington were matched by foot-dragging in Moscow. The American debate about “inequality” must have had its counterpart in Moscow. After all, SALT I constrained no American program; it stopped several Soviet programs. The Soviets had not yet tested any MIRVs, moreover, and were undoubtedly not ready to undertake a serious negotiation on limiting them.

  These inhibitions were reinforced by Brezhnev’s eagerness to conclude the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War (discussed below). He was afraid that to pursue intensive negotiations on both subjects simultaneously would delay his cherished project. At times he even attempted to use SALT to speed that Agreement. This was reflected in two conversations I had with Dobrynin in early March 1973. Dobrynin alleged that the Soviet military did not see any point in a strategic arms limitation agreement when the existing one had still four years to run. We had to understand, said Dobrynin, that left to the Soviet bureaucratic processes SALT was bound to move very slowly. To intervene personally, Brezhnev needed the excuse of a successful conclusion of the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War.