Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  To argue that the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party required a pretext to participate in Soviet bureaucratic decisions was to elevate chutzpah into an art form. But once launched on it, Dobrynin was infinitely inventive in developing variations on the theme of a beleaguered Brezhnev assailed on all sides by fractious colleagues. The Soviet Ministry of Defense, according to Dobrynin, did not have much use for SALT. It consistently put its most unimaginative and unenterprising general on the SALT delegation, he said, with instructions to block any initiative put forward by the Foreign Ministry, which was technically in charge of the negotiations. If the general was asked by the head of the Soviet delegation, Vladimir Semenov, to request new instructions, he refused to do so, arguing that if new instructions were needed the Ministry of Defense would issue them on its own. And the Defense Ministry’s attitude was allegedly summed up in a remark on SALT by Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Grechko, to Dobrynin: “If you want my personal opinion, I’ll give it to you. If you want my official opinion, the standard answer is no.”

  The idea that the head of a Soviet negotiating team would not have a Politburo mandate was preposterous. The proposition that elements of the Soviet government would squabble while dealing with foreigners was cleverly geared to American preconceptions of the “doves” in the Kremlin fighting a valiant battle against “hard-liners.” The general assigned to SALT in 1973, Nikolai Ogarkov, eventually became Soviet Chief of Staff — a position unlikely to be given to a man perceived to be second-rate — though I do not doubt that the Soviet military were as suspicious of the newfangled theories of arms control as generals the world over.

  The stalled negotiations in Geneva were enlivened from time to time by hopeful reports from our negotiating team, who in the best tradition of American negotiators soon developed a vested interest in their own success. Thus on March 27 the team reported an alleged hint by a member of the Soviet delegation to the effect that if we agreed to continue SALT I’s inequality in total numbers of launchers, the Soviets might go along with limiting each side to 300–500 MIRVed land-based missiles of one type. This was not an uninteresting proposition from our point of view. It would have put off the day of Minuteman’s vulnerability and prevented the Soviets from MIRVing their heavy missiles. And we never intended to MIRV more than 550 of our own. On the other hand, it sounded uncharacteristically complicated and conceptual for a Soviet opening position. Dobrynin never raised it, and he was the channel through which the Soviets pursued those issues about which they were serious. Nor did Dobrynin respond when I questioned him. It may thus have been a case of an eager American representative construing stupefaction at one of his complex expositions as assent and reporting his preferences as a Soviet proposal. It would not have been the first time.

  What we received from the Soviets officially was a proposal so onesided that one wonders how any serious person could ever have believed that it might be discussed, much less negotiated. Quite simply, the Soviets proposed to ban any new strategic weapons during the period of the new agreement. Conveniently, they allowed modernization to proceed. By a strange coincidence every Soviet missile being tested (we were aware of four new types) was defined as a “modernized” version of an existing one. Since we were just beginning to develop our first new strategic missile in ten years (the Trident), the scheme did not invite much dispassionate analysis in our government.

  At the end of April 1973, as I was preparing for my trip to Zavidovo, I convened three more Verification Panel meetings, on April 25, 27, and 30. No one had any new ideas to offer. Defense and the Joint Chiefs had only one position: equal aggregates in every category and every weapons system, no matter how different the design of our own forces from that of the Soviets. After hearing for years about the dangers of the Soviet heavy missile if MIRVed, we were now told that stopping their MIRVing was “not worth much.” This caused me to ask: “If this is true, can someone explain what the hell this negotiation is all about?” Clements modified the position slightly: MIRVing of the Soviet SS-9 missile was not such a formidable prospect; halting it “would be desirable but only if we don’t pay too much” — in other words, not at the price of giving up the negotiating goal of equal aggregates (for which Defense continued to offer no building program in the absence of a SALT agreement). But if there was no limit on MIRVs, what became of all the fine theories of arms control based on discouraging a first strike by reducing the advantage of the attacker? I stated my concern at the Verification Panel meeting of April 25:

  Equal MIRVs with equal numbers would give the first striker a great advantage. It would be only a cosmetic equivalence, not real. It would put a premium on striking first. It may be unavoidable, but if you have five times as many warheads as missiles, and your aiming points are fewer than your missiles, it puts a premium on the first strike. That creates a massive element of instability.

  Whereas Defense wanted SALT II to ratify all existing programs, State and ACDA either were prepared to abandon all new programs or were asking for the right to go on a fishing expedition in the name of conducting a “probe.” The proposition that we should probe without having a position of our own — indeed, after we had explicitly failed to reach an internal agreement — was guaranteed to elicit my sarcasm:

  What do you probe for without knowing what we want? I’d rather go from our own position than from theirs. It’s a sad commentary on the ability of our government if our own position would not be better for us than theirs would be.

  Since the agencies could not agree on a position and the President was immobilized by Watergate, the instruction sent on May 3 to our SALT delegation was a mélange of every agency’s preference. No one was overruled; everyone’s pet project was included. The proposal called for equal aggregates at a ceiling of 2,350 delivery vehicles, some 250 below existing Soviet numbers and some 150 above ours. It included a freeze on, and a ban on further testing of, land-based MIRVs. This neatly shut the Soviets out of MIRVing their ICBM force, which comprised 85 percent of their total throw weight, without significantly curtailing any program of our own. We offered, in other words, to trade 450 warheads (on the 150 Minuteman IIIs that we would forgo) for a minimum of 5,000 Soviet warheads (depending on how many they would have put on each land-based missile). Not surprisingly, this proposal quickly disappeared into the limbo of one-sided proposals by which each side pleased its bureaucracy while it decided whether painful decisions were in fact necessary.

  Thus when I reached Zavidovo in May 1973, SALT was stalemated. I tried out on Brezhnev the MIRV portion of the Presidential instructions, which had been sent to Geneva but not yet been presented there. (I had met our chief negotiator, the able and unflappable U. Alexis Johnson, on May 4 at the airport in Copenhagen on the way to Moscow and asked him to hold that part back so I could present it to Brezhnev as a special Presidential suggestion.)

  Brezhnev was crude but far from stupid. He would not fall for transparent ploys. He could hear nothing of a scheme that precluded the Soviets from putting MIRVs on their best missiles. I hinted to Dobrynin at another scheme — just “thinking out loud,” I said — namely, a Soviet promise not to MIRV their heavy missiles in return for an American pledge not to develop stand-off bomber weapons (cruise missiles) of a range of more than 3,000 kilometers. The trouble with that scheme was the Pentagon’s reluctance to develop or produce such a weapon (a neglect I corrected as soon as I returned) and the range, which was too great to make the offer truly attractive to the Soviets. Dobrynin checked with Brezhnev, who showed some interest but said he would have to consult his military and therefore could not make a decision while I was in Zavidovo. He never came back to it. Almost certainly he was not ready to discuss any MIRV limits prior to the completion of the Soviet MIRV testing program.

  We retreated to the idea of signing some “general principles” on SALT at the June summit. This is the usual refuge of diplomats unable to agree, unwilling to admit the impasse, and skillful in finding formulas to permit each
side to maintain its original position. On April 6 at Geneva, the Soviets had put forward a draft, which repeated their onesided positions in the guise of general principles. We had ignored it, neither negotiating on it nor offering alternative formulations. On April 25 Dobrynin handed me a condensed version of the Geneva draft, still heavily loaded in favor of the Soviet position. It implied strongly, for example, that our airplanes based in Europe should be included in the aggregates. This would have forced us either to reduce the number of our strategic weapons (to compensate for the planes based in Europe) or to withdraw some of the air forces assigned to the defense of NATO. It was therefore worrisome to our NATO allies both on strategic grounds and because they did not relish having their security arrangements the subject of negotiations in which they did not participate. While they were at it, the Soviets sneaked in a clause that would require us, in effect, to end our nuclear cooperation with Britain. And they made the numbers of the Interim Agreement permanent, thus institutionalizing the inequality in launchers without any compensating Soviet concession. We had no incentive to pursue this scheme.

  Our counterdraft will not be recorded by historians as a model of precision. It sought neutral ground, keeping open the options of each side. It finessed the Soviet desire to include our forward-based systems by the same formula employed in the SALT I agreement: a pledge that there would be no circumvention via third countries. This implied that there could be no significant increase in the number of our European-based weapons capable of reaching the USSR; but it did not require that the existing weapons be counted in the totals. Our draft also eliminated the proposal permanently to freeze the unequal numbers of the Interim Agreement. (Ironically, after fighting for years to exclude forward-based systems from SALT, we seem to have reached a point at this writing of negotiating about forward-based systems without SALT.)

  Thus emerged a statement of “general principles” that did not exactly mark a memorable turn in the history of diplomacy or of arms control. The document enshrined the hallowed principle of “equal security.” This could mean anything: equal aggregates and equal MIRVs without regard to overseas bases; unequal MIRVs in return for unequal aggregates; or any other schemes either government might devise. A little more specific was the clause that a new SALT agreement should include restraints on “qualitative” development; this was a euphemism for conveying that certain — as yet unspecified — MIRV limitations would be part of SALT II. The most concrete provision was that the parties would seek to conclude a new agreement before the end of 1974. Gromyko worried about this because he feared that a failure to meet the deadline, even for technical reasons, might sour our relations. We thought that a deadline was the only way to stop endless procrastination within our government and at Geneva. (We got in just under the wire with the Vladivostok agreement of November 1974.)

  But none of this esoteric maneuvering, either by supporters or opponents of SALT, reached the central reality. During the course of the Seventies we would lose our residual counterforce capability (our ability to destroy Soviet ICBMs). Sometime in the Eighties our land-based missiles would become vulnerable, depending on the rapidity with which the Soviets placed multiple warheads on their land-based missile launchers and improved their accuracy. If each side had an equal number of MIRVed vehicles and if there was “freedom to mix” (another hallowed Pentagon principle allowing each side to decide on the composition of its force), then it was certain that the Soviets would MIRV many more of their land-based missiles than we and, since theirs were larger, would place more warheads on each than the three on our Minuteman. The result would be an overwhelming Soviet capacity to destroy our ICBM force, not offset by any American buildup in other categories of strategic weapons. Our only new program, the Trident submarines, gave us no counterforce capability because SLBMs were generally not accurate enough to pinpoint silos and presented technical problems of simultaneous launching.

  Sooner or later, even if the overall number of warheads were equal, the Soviets would combine their growing counterforce capability with their traditional conventional superiority to bring about changes in the geopolitical balance. Two weeks after the June 1973 summit, the Soviets conducted their first MIRV test on their SS-17 ICBM, the new missile that was to replace the obsolescent SS-11. A strategic revolution was now only a question of time.

  On July 13, 1973, I wrote to Bill Clements insisting that we proceed with a long-range cruise missile. The Pentagon was thinking of canceling this weapon both for budgetary reasons and to prevent its being used as an excuse to kill off the Air Force’s cherished new bomber, the B-I. (Later events proved that the careful maneuvering of the services is not always the result of parochialism, as folklore has it, but the result of long experience. The B-I was canceled by the Carter Administration, which indeed argued that the cruise missile, carried by the existing B-52 bomber, made the B-I unnecessary.) I argued to Clements “that a long range bomber-launched cruise missile program makes sense strategically and could help our SALT position.” Clements went along enthusiastically and the cruise missile program was saved.VI

  The SALT process thus went on while both sides were developing new weapons — we, the cruise missiles, the Trident submarine, and the B-I bomber; the Soviets, four new land-based ICBMs, and MIRVs. In America, our domestic divisions prevented a clear articulation of either strategy or an arms control doctrine, and in the resulting vacuum each issue became a philosophical as much as a technical one, settled on essentially political grounds. It was not until 1975 that Congress would take the Soviet threat seriously. A strategic nightmare was developing, in which the Soviets in the Eighties might use the “window” provided by the combination of counterforce capability (or even simply growth of its strategic arsenal) and local superiority to exploit or generate crises and to insist on geopolitical changes favorable to it. The issue of how to relate defense to arms control, how to maintain our strength while negotiating reciprocal limitations, has remained one of the central problems of American foreign policy.

  The Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War

  CURIOUSLY, there was another negotiation going on simultaneously with the debates on trade and SALT, which received very little attention: the diplomacy leading to the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War. On the tactical level, the handling of the talks was rather subtle. We skillfully pulled the teeth of a dangerous Soviet maneuver to lure us into renouncing the use of nuclear weapons, on which the free world’s defense after all depended. On the other hand, while it was a good illustration of the stamina required to deal with Soviet diplomacy, when it was all over we had avoided danger, but achieved little that was positive.

  Soviet diplomacy knows no resting places. A scheme is presented as a major contribution to relaxing tensions; if we will only accept it there will be an “improvement in the atmosphere.” But as often as not, no sooner has one agreement been completed than the Kremlin advances another, which is pursued with characteristic single-mindedness and with the identical argument that failure to proceed will sour the atmosphere.

  The origin of these projects is obscure. They may represent a deep strategic design. They may be carried forward by habit and inertia. They may represent the banner of one faction in some arcane maneuvering of the Politburo. Whatever their immediate motivation, Soviet initiatives once launched are pursued with almost monomaniacal intensity. Starting in 1972, we were exposed to such a Soviet steamroller. On my secret visit to Moscow in April 1972, Brezhnev took me aside to propose what he was pleased to call a “peaceful bomb” — a treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States renouncing the use of nuclear weapons against each other.14 This was at the height of North Vietnam’s spring offensive, when the Nixon Administration had all but decided to cancel the summit if Hanoi’s military push succeeded. And we were also determined to resume bombing of North Vietnam if the offensive were not halted in the next few days. To introduce the renunciation of nuclear weapons at that stage was a colossal piece of effront
ery since NATO’s defense depended on the American nuclear guarantee. Given the Soviet superiority in conventional weapons, such a move would demoralize our allies and deeply disquiet China, which would see it as a sign of the much dreaded US–Soviet collusion.

  On the other hand, the moment was well chosen for avoiding a flat rejection. Our strategy was to obtain a free hand in ending the war in Vietnam by separating Moscow from Hanoi. We therefore did not mind setting additional bait that would give the Soviets a stake in not turning on us if we increased pressure on Hanoi. This led us into a delicate maneuver: We sought to give Brezhnev and his associates some hope that their project might lead somewhere, without committing ourselves to it in the form in which it was presented. Our first move was to play for time; I turned it aside by in effect deferring it to the summit.

  After Nixon, on May 8, 1972, had ordered the resumption of full-scale bombing of North Vietnam and the mining of its harbors, we were preparing for a cancellation of the summit until on May 10 Dobrynin nonchalantly asked me whether the visiting Soviet trade minister Nikolai Patolichev would be received by the President. Needless to say, we arranged for Patolichev to meet Nixon the next day. When eager journalists afterward pressed him for a public statement, Patolichev turned away questions about whether the summit was still on with wide-eyed amazement. “Have you any doubt?” he asked with a smile, as if the bombing of a Soviet ally and the mining of its harbors were an everyday occurrence.