Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  But the Soviets never waste time presenting their bill. The very next day — May 12 — Dobrynin appeared for his quid pro quo. In order to prepare Brezhnev’s conversation with Nixon, he asserted blandly, his masters had armed him with a brief draft treaty to be signed as soon as convenient. In the first paragraph the United States and the Soviet Union renounced the use of nuclear weapons against each other. The second paragraph stated peremptorily that the two parties “shall prevent” situations whereby actions of third countries might produce a nuclear war. It was strong stuff. We were being asked to dismantle the military strategy of NATO and at the same time to proclaim a virtual US–Soviet military alliance designed to isolate or impose our will on China or any other country with nuclear aspirations.

  The draft handed over by Dobrynin, while outrageous, presented a tactical problem. Nixon, as did I, wished to keep the discussion going, so as to give the Soviets an additional incentive to remain quiet while we broke the back of Hanoi’s offensive. At the same time we could not accept the Soviet draft without grave peril. So we engaged in a complicated fencing match in which we sought to parry the characteristic Soviet lunge with fancy footwork. But we knew that sooner or later we had to take a stand.

  During the Moscow summit of 1972, as we had expected, Brezhnev bearded Nixon on the treaty. Nixon and I had agreed that Nixon should be noncommittal while evincing ambiguous interest — a pose at which Nixon was a master. If Brezhnev pressed, we had prepared a counter-draft that emphasized our constant theme that peace ultimately depended on the restrained conduct of the superpowers. We evaded the Soviet proposal of banning nuclear weapons in war and substituted for it a clause abjuring the threat of force in peacetime. Nor would we undertake an obligation to concert US–Soviet actions toward third countries; we would go no further than to offer our best efforts to see that the actions of third countries did not lead to nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Brezhnev received the document without comment; Gromyko, however, was too experienced not to realize that we were stalling. Nixon extricated himself from embarrassment by airily suggesting that any difference between the two drafts could be dealt with by Dobrynin and me. How we were to reconcile the irreconcilable he did not explain to the baffled Soviets. As for me, I understood that he did not want to hear of the enterprise again until after the election.

  But the Soviets were working on a different timetable. On July 21, back in Washington, Dobrynin presented himself to carry out the assignment given to him and me by our principals. Unfortunately, he said, our draft would not do. Moscow had helpfully tried its hand at a new version, which he handed over. It maintained the bilateral renunciation of the use of nuclear weapons but — aware that we would not abandon our NATO commitments — added a clause to the effect that nothing in the agreement affected existing obligations to third parties, or the right of collective self-defense. This seemed to take care of our allies, but only highlighted the vulnerability of nonallied countries, such as China, whose territorial integrity was also essential to the international equilibrium.

  We still needed time to finish the war in Vietnam. To stall, I put three hypothetical questions to Dobrynin. If the new Soviet draft were accepted, would the United States have the right to use nuclear weapons in defense of NATO? Would either side have the right to use nuclear weapons in defense of traditional friends toward whom we had no formal treaty obligations (for example, in the Middle East)? Would either side have the right to use nuclear weapons in defense of a major nonaligned country, the loss of whose independence might affect the global balance? (I mentioned India as an example, although the Soviet leaders could have had no doubt that we were really talking about China.)

  I had not expected a formal answer. Indeed, I had asked such pointed questions because I thought that the Soviet reluctance to reply would bury the increasingly awkward project. To my amazement, a written Soviet reply was received on September 7, 1972, articulating their purposes unabashedly. The answer to my three questions was as follows: The proposed agreement did not preclude the use of nuclear weapons in a war involving NATO and the Warsaw Pact; however, their use would have to be confined to the territory of allies; employment against the territory of the United States and the Soviet Union was proscribed. In a Middle East war, nuclear weapons could not be used by either side. Even less could they be used if there were a conventional attack on an important third country such as India.

  It would have been difficult to draw up a more bald or cynical definition of condominium. The proposed treaty would protect the superpowers against nuclear destruction even in a European war while guaranteeing the devastation of each country’s allies. Nothing would have been better designed to promote European neutralism or to depreciate the value of alliances. The defense of the vital Middle East would have to depend on conventional weapons, in which we were inferior, and even more so in the capacity to reinforce that distant theater. All other countries were to be left to their fate. For example, China could be attacked by Soviet armies that would be free of the fear of American nuclear response. On this interpretation of the treaty, our alliances would be shredded and friendly countries’ confidence in us destroyed.

  These propositions could not stand unchallenged. Despite our wish to gain time I replied on the very same day, September 7, to remove any doubt about our priorities. I handed Dobrynin a paper restating our willingness to explore general principles of restrained international conduct. But I emphasized as well the limits beyond which we were not prepared to go:

  — We believe it important to avoid any formulation that carried an implication of a condominium by our two countries;

  — We believe it important that an agreement between our two countries should not carry any implication that we were ruling out only nuclear war between ourselves but were leaving open the option of nuclear war against third countries;

  — We think it important that in concentrating on the prevention of nuclear war we should not at the same time appear to be legitimizing the initiation of war by conventional means;

  — We think it important that past agreements, whether alliances or other types of obligations, designed to safeguard peace and security should be enhanced by any additional agreement between ourselves relating specifically to the prevention of nuclear warfare.

  Our response owed no little to discussions we had initiated with the British government. During the summer we had briefed our major European allies, and China, on the outlines of the Soviet proposal. At the end of July 1972, I had used the regular visit to Washington by Sir Burke Trend, the British Cabinet Secretary, to show him the Soviet draft of July 21. I asked for British advice, and indicated that we would proceed only in tandem with London. On August 10 the Foreign Office sent its Soviet expert, Sir Thomas Brimelow, and a small group of advisers to Washington to review the project in detail.

  London could not have made a happier choice. Cherubic, unflappable, not quite successful in obscuring his penetrating intelligence behind the bland exterior of the perfect civil servant, Brimelow became an indispensable part of the negotiations. He was a profound student of Soviet behavior. He had an unsentimental assessment of Soviet purposes. He was convinced that the threat of general war was one of the chief fears of the Soviet Union; anything that lessened Soviet concerns on that score would weaken deterrence. In his view, the Soviets wanted to reduce the margin of their own uncertainty while seeking to magnify allied inhibitions against the use of nuclear weapons. Our course must thwart those designs.

  Brimelow, as did we, judged existing Soviet drafts unacceptable. I outlined a possible strategy of seeking to transform the Soviet approach into a statement of principles of political restraint proscribing the threat of force, nuclear or conventional. Brimelow agreed with the objective and counseled stalling — easy to accept since it coincided with what we were already doing. We knew that we would be able to achieve Soviet acquiescence only if we could slow down exchanges until some new deadline — like a summit �
� would produce Soviet anxieties sufficient to modify Brezhnev’s proposal fundamentally. So we marked time, using the need to end the Vietnam war as a pretext.

  Patience was not Brezhnev’s strong suit. He used every opportunity to try to speed up negotiations. On my visit to Moscow in September 1972, he tried to lure me into a drafting session by urging me to indicate my objections to the Soviet text line by line. But this would make the Soviet draft the basic document and we objected to it in principle, not in details. I temporized by repeating at inordinate length the position that I had given to Dobrynin on September 7: no condominium; no implication that the United States and Soviet Union were seeking to protect only their own territory; no suggestion that conventional war was acceptable while nuclear was not. Brezhnev professed to be puzzled about such base suspicions of Soviet motives. If the Soviet Union renounced the use of nuclear weapons, he argued soothingly, we could be “two hundred percent” sure that it would also refrain from employing conventional weapons against us or our allies. (This, of course, left China and the Middle East conveniently uncovered.) Brezhnev sought to give force to this assurance — qualified by region as it was — with an appeal to Soviet constitutional practice: “Such a prospect would be completely contrary to the declarations of the Party Congress of our Party.” It was mind-boggling to imagine what would happen if we presented an agreement to the North Atlantic Council, much less to Peking, based on our confidence in a pledge made to itself by the Congress of the Soviet Communist Party.

  I suggested that we proceed in two stages as we had with SALT: a general declaration of principles, to be followed by a more formal agreement. This found no favor with Brezhnev, who under Gromyko’s tutelage understood that the principles could only restate what had already been signed at the 1972 summit, that drafting them would take months, and that we would then claim that they exhausted the subject. But hours were consumed in debating this point — which served my purpose. I finally agreed to try my hand at another draft, which I promised to give Gromyko when he visited Washington in early October. This got us out of Moscow without a blowup.

  When Gromyko arrived in Washington, I handed him on October 2 a draft that eliminated the obligation not to use nuclear weapons and stated a series of political conditions involving restraint in international behavior that had to be met before the renunciation of nuclear weapons could be considered. Gromyko was an expert draftsman. He understood immediately what I had done. He complained that we were not proceeding in the “spirit” of the initial exchanges. He noted (correctly) that “nothing” remained of the original Soviet proposal of the renunciation of the use of nuclear weapons.

  To mount pressure, Gromyko told Nixon that Brezhnev’s return visit to America in 1973 was conditional on progress on the nuclear treaty. But that maneuver had lost its effectiveness. We were becoming confident that we would be free of the Vietnam war by 1973; a summit was no longer important to separate Moscow from Hanoi.

  Still, during the final phase of the Vietnam negotiations, we were not eager for additional disputes. So I went back to stalling. Using the tried-and-true tactic of Presidential assistants, I hid behind Nixon, claiming somewhat disingenuously that the nuclear field was an area in which I had less latitude than in others. Duc to the Presidential campaign, I would not be able to get Nixon’s attention until November; at that point I would work on a redraft. I doubt that Gromyko believed me. After all, in Moscow Nixon had evaded talking about the nuclear treaty by assigning the subject to Dobrynin and/or Gromyko and me. Now I was reversing the argument. But Gromyko had few cards to play. So he acquiesced, as the Soviets usually do when faced with an unchangeable reality.

  During the final agony of our negotiations over Vietnam, even the persistent planners in the Kremlin understood that we had no time to deal with the nuclear draft. This did not keep Dobrynin from some not-too-subtle pressures over the forthcoming summit. In December, he suggested two dates, June or November 1973, and implied that in the absence of the nuclear treaty Moscow was leaning toward November. The flaw in his stratagem was that, all things considered, we preferred November as well. We wanted to complete the Year of Europe and progress further in our relations with Peking. So we ignored the heavy hint.

  By the end of February 1973, the Paris Agreement on Vietnam had been achieved and our triangular diplomacy was beginning to operate. I was barely back from China with the announcement that liaison offices were to be established in Peking and Washington, when the Soviet chargé d’affaires, Yuli Vorontsov, asked for an appointment to deliver a letter to Nixon from Brezhnev. Dated February 21, the letter purported to be a reply to Nixon’s acknowledgment of the good wishes sent by the Politburo on the conclusion of the Vietnam war. Nixon’s letter had carefully avoided listing the nuclear agreement in a catalogue of issues on which we were ready to proceed. It had referred elliptically to our willingness to consider whatever points Dobrynin had submitted to me with “a constructive spirit.” (This could refer to a whole list of subjects, including the Middle East.) It was thin gruel, but enough for Brezhnev to resume his campaign.

  Brezhnev’s letter settled the issue of the summit first of all. It used the ploy of rejecting May as too early (a date that had never been discussed) and “postponed” the visit to the earliest date ever considered, the month of June. Nixon had enumerated SALT, European security, and Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions in Europe as the top items. Brezhnev listed the nuclear treaty and the Middle East as his priorities. He showed some interest in SALT, none in European force reductions. As always when the Kremlin wanted to make progress, Dobrynin suddenly reappeared in Washington from one of his frequent home consultations, catching me just before I was going on a vacation (which would have gained us ten more days).

  But the bargaining positions had changed. Once the Soviets had set the date for the summit, time worked against them. We had next to no interest in the project; Brezhnev had made it one of his priorities. The Soviets had to move in our direction if they wanted to have anything to show for Brezhnev’s visit. In early April 1973, Dobrynin tried halfheartedly to play games about setting the precise date of the summit, but they ended abruptly when I pointed out that unless we agreed soon, technical arrangements would prove impossible and the summit would have to be postponed to November after all. Shortly afterward I was invited to Zavidovo to complete preparations, and the date of the summit was firmly established for June 18.

  Now, if ever, was the moment of truth. We had skillfully avoided any final commitment to the project. We should probably have dropped it now that the Vietnam war was over and the summit was settled. But the price of stalling had been the implication that we would negotiate something; abandoning the negotiation — though in retrospect correct — seemed then too drastic.

  On March 5, 1973, I summed up for Brimelow my analysis of Soviet motives and our objectives:

  Their motives are obvious: to create the impression of detente, to create the impression of great power bilateralism and to give them a relatively free hand for blackmail — at the same time they are steadily increasing their strategic forces in an eerie way. Now it could also be to leave open the option of genuine detente further down the line. . . . So our objective . . . is to give them enough of the form without any substance.

  I asked Brimelow whether, now that the Vietnam war was over and we had achieved Soviet agreement to a summit, we should drop the whole project. Brimelow remained suspicious, but he acknowledged that we seemed stuck on SALT, the Mideast, and the European Security Conference; our long-range objective was to enmesh the Soviets in “a less competitive relationship, and we cannot get there by telling them to go to hell.”

  Of course Nixon and I bore the ultimate responsibility for proceeding. Brimelow’s job, after all, was not to make American policy but to help steer it in the safest directions. Once the strategy was settled, Brimelow applied his subtle mind to change the Soviet proposal from a renunciation of nuclear weapons to an agreement to renounce the threat of
force in diplomacy. What emerged was like a Russian matryoshka doll that has progressively smaller models nested each inside the other. By a series of carefully hedged conditions, the avoidance of nuclear war became an objective rather than an obligation; the objective in turn was made to depend on refraining from the use or the threat of force by one party against the other, against allies of the other, or against third parties. Thus nuclear weapons would be renounced only after a renunciation of the threat of war in diplomacy, and if that condition was not fulfilled, the basic premise of the agreement disappeared. Indeed, it then worked the other way: It legitimized nuclear defense. To reassure allies, the draft continued to stress that the agreement did not affect existing obligations or the right of collective (or individual) self-defense.

  Brimelow’s role was an example of the Anglo-American “special relationship” at its best, even at a time when the incumbent Prime Minister was not among its advocates. There was no other government which we would have dealt with so openly, exchanged ideas with so freely, or in effect permitted to participate in our own deliberations. All documents were made available to the British, sometimes with a time lag, but significant moves were always joint ones. Brimelow occasionally showed us British analyses. He did most of the actual drafting. The final version owed, in fact, more to British than to American expertise.

  When I set out for Zavidovo on May 4, I was thus left with selling Brezhnev a draft about 180 degrees removed from his original design. It was a weird negotiation extending over several evenings of occasionally heated exchanges. Brezhnev’s idea of diplomacy was to beat the other party into submission or cajole it with heavy-handed humor. My tactic was to reduce matters to easy banter to avoid personal showdowns and to give emphasis to our sticking points when I turned serious. The negotiation became a contest between a bull and a matador, except that at the end of the contest the matador for all his intricate cape-play had only slightly winded the bull, who was assembling his energies for a new charge.