Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  It was maddening to see a policy that our Administration had originated and nursed to success become part of a political tug-of-war — and just when we needed all our assets for the effort to tranquilize the Soviet Union for the Syrian-Israeli shuttle about to begin. To keep the Soviets from harassing that negotiation, I met Gromyko in Geneva on April 28 and 29. To keep faith with the Senators, I felt honor bound to raise the emigration issue again — a subject hardly calculated to calm Gromyko. I found myself in the position of a matador trying to deflect a bull with complicated capework while, behind his back, someone waves a red flag focusing the animal’s attention on the bullfighter. I reminded Gromyko that both he and Brezhnev had told me that there was no legal bar to emigration except for those holding security clearances; that there would be no harassment. Why could I not express these assurances, which had been volunteered by Soviet leaders? The complex of these assurances, if implemented in the right spirit, I added, was certain to yield some increase in emigration. Could I transmit them to the Senators upon my return, together with a target figure of 40,000 to 45,000 emigrants (an increase of nearly 15 to 30 percent over the previous figures)?

  Gromyko’s reply was grudging but generally positive. I could transmit the criteria for emigration to the Senators. The figure of up to 45,000 could be conveyed “approximately as a trend,” though not as a Soviet commitment since the Soviets could not know how many applications there would be. The Soviet leadership, deadpanned Gromyko, did not want to put itself into the position where it had to recruit citizens to emigrate to fulfill a moral obligation to the United States.

  I decided to press my luck and raised the issue of geographic distribution of emigrants. Gromyko managed to keep his temper though the temperature became chilly. He would check with Moscow, he said icily. Our ingenuity in coming up with new demands seemed inexhaustible.

  Normally, an increase of emigration to 45,000 would have been treated as a major concession. And, in fairness, Jackson deserved a great deal of credit for his role in pushing matters to this point. But the controversies of the previous months had drawn heavily on the stock of mutual confidence between the Senator and the Administration. I did not dare to cable to Washington what Gromyko had told me because I was fearful that Jackson would declare it inadequate while I was on the shuttle and unable to respond, complicating our Mideast peace efforts, already hanging by a thread. I therefore decided to brief the Senators personally after the shuttle, which I expected to last ten days at most. Instead, it went on for a maddening thirty-four days, during which Jackson mobilized his forces against any compromise.

  After I had returned to Washington, on June 4, Dobrynin confirmed the figure of 45,000 orally and conveyed to me in writing that only 1.6 percent of those applying for exit permits had been turned down. He supplied a month-by-month breakdown of the disposition of applications over a period of six months — another unprecedented gesture. Now, if ever, was the moment to settle. Jackson unfortunately wanted an issue, not a solution.

  That issue was détente. In this Jackson differed from Javits and Ribicoff. At my next meeting with the three Senators, they agreed to consider a draft letter regarding Soviet practices as I had suggested to the Finance Committee. On June 8 Jackson made what from him was a conciliatory statement: “We are not asking for everyone to be let out of the Soviet Union at once.”

  Soon it appeared that Jackson wanted to put himself into a position to ask for just that. What was being given with one hand was being withdrawn by the other. For the Jackson forces had been organizing for two months to put a double lock on East-West trade. They arranged that whatever happened to MFN in the trade bill, US–Soviet commerce could be throttled by turning off credits from the Export-Import Bank.

  In a big government it is impossible to give equal attention to all issues simultaneously. Hence, a skillful adversary can occasionally transform what has heretofore been a routine decision into a major crisis. On June 30, 1974, the President’s authority to use the facilities of the Export-Import Bank came up for renewal in the Congress, as it had biannually for decades without controversy. But this time a preoccupied Administration was caught flat-footed by opponents who espied a double opportunity in restricting credits: either as a fallback position should the Jackson amendment be defeated or else as another, supplementary lever against East-West trade.

  As a result, in the name of reasserting Congressional control over the conduct of foreign policy, a package of amendments was put forward by Senators Adlai Stevenson and Henry Jackson and supported by eighteen other Senators. It provided for Congressional authority to review any Eximbank loan in excess of $50 million, and it put a flat ceiling of $300 million on all loans to the Soviet Union. Stevenson left no doubt about the motive: “This amendment reflects [Jackson’s] concerns as well as a prodigious commitment of his time and effort.”

  Though it would take weeks before final Congressional action, the implications were clear immediately. The Jackson forces would have a vehicle for raising obstacles to every loan even of medium size, on any ground whatever. They would thus be able to generate new conditions at will even if Soviet assurances on emigration led to a compromise of MFN. And the credit ceiling would prohibit substantial financing in any event. The result was a vicious circle: The assault on credits reduced Soviet readiness to spell out the assurances on emigration; failure to feed the seemingly insatiable appetite for additional assurances provided an excuse for foot-dragging on a compromise.

  Implicit in all this maneuvering — contributing to its success — was the fear that Nixon might seek to use the forthcoming summit in Moscow to escape Watergate. Normally, the imminence of a summit produces a bipartisan closing of ranks. In the summer of 1974 many were worried that Nixon might be planning some spectacular in Moscow to cheat his pursuers. It was a misreading of Nixon, so conscious that his place in history now more than ever would depend on lasting foreign policy accomplishments, not public relations gimmicks. But it had a certain plausibility if one knew Nixon only through the media or his public persona. Jackson and others in the anti-détente lobby were determined that Nixon should have no negotiating chips in Moscow. To this end, they sought — successfully — to drag out the “compromise” discussions until after Nixon’s return from Moscow and with luck beyond the date that his fate would be decided. On June 24 — two days before Nixon left for Moscow — Jackson announced that he was going to put forward new, unspecified conditions, thereby interrupting all negotiations and preventing Nixon from discussing the emigration issue meaningfully in Moscow. Jackson admitted that some progress had been made but he declared it insufficient; in his view it was possible to achieve more concessions “if we remain steadfast. . . . Why give them concessions and ask for nothing back?” He did not specify what concessions we had been making, or why what the Soviets had proposed on emigration was “nothing.” He was not concerned, he added, about risking the summit since he felt that it should not be held in the first place.

  By now the opponents of détente had achieved one part of their objective. They had turned what we had conceived as a safety valve into a contentious issue both domestically and vis-à-vis the Soviets. Our policy toward the Soviets was based on a balance between the carrot and the stick. But we had failed to produce MFN; we seemed to be unable to organize the financial mechanisms for even such trade as there was — and all this despite Soviet concessions on Jewish emigration that would have been considered inconceivable a few years earlier. By the summer of 1974, the carrot had for all practical purposes ceased to exist.II

  Defense Dilemmas

  WE were not, however, given a bigger stick, either. The rhetoric of confrontation did not lead to a willingness to support an increased defense effort. Liberals might favor an ideological showdown over human rights; they saw no connection between that and increased military preparedness. Indeed, for another two years defense budgets continued to be under assault in the Congress. Our critics were thus tempting crises that at the same
time they were denying us the means of managing.

  Some took refuge in arguing that it was détente which was sapping our defense effort. This was standing history on its head. In Nixon’s first term, before détente had been heard from, $40 billion had been cut by Congress from our defense budget with the argument that only in this manner could the Administration be forced into conciliatory policies. For the first term Nixon had to fight a desperate continuing battle against Congressional cuts, assaults on new weapons, and a concerted effort to withdraw our overseas forces even from Western Europe.6 The cumulative impact of these stringencies and of changes in military technology had, by the beginning of Nixon’s second term, brought about worrisome deficiencies in our military posture.

  We never believed détente would ease our defense burden. On the contrary, soon after the 1972 Moscow summit, Nixon proposed a rise in defense expenditures of $4.5 billion. It was ironic, but not accidental, that after years of trying, vainly, to preempt critics with a trimmed-down budget, we were able after the conclusion of the SALT agreements to submit formal increases. Nixon with my encouragement consistently picked the highest budget option presented by the Defense Department. No weapons system recommended by the Joint Chiefs and the Defense Department was ever disapproved in the White House. We sought, in fact, to increase our military options, to build a credible force to meet foreseeable levels of aggression.

  The challenge turned out to be defense direction even more than defense spending. Vietnam war expenditures had tilted the defense budget toward consumables for military operations, leaving many gaps in our force structure, and the Congress had resisted almost all the programs we recommended to adapt to new military realities. We had lived for over a decade through a revolution in technology. After their humiliation in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, as I have pointed out, the Soviets started a relentless building program to catch up with us in strategic forces. This was bound in time to challenge the basis of our strategy since 1945: the reliance on superior American strategic nuclear power to compensate for the Soviets’ advantage in conventional forces and geographic proximity to key strategic areas, such as Western Europe and the Middle East. By the beginning of Nixon’s second term, the Soviets had achieved parity in numbers of strategic delivery vehicles and superiority in throwweight (the total aggregate weight of warheads). Thus, resort to strategic nuclear war as the principal instrument of defense became less and less credible. The prohibitive price of a nuclear exchange — rising to over a hundred million casualties in a matter of days — was as likely to inhibit resistance as to discourage aggression. Our capacity to resist would be questioned, especially in crises in the vital so-called gray areas not protected by alliances, such as the Middle East. And in the democracies, pacifism was bound to be nurtured by the stark alternatives of nuclear warfare: surrender or cataclysm. “Better red than dead” turned from a parody into a program.

  The paradox of contemporary military strength is that a momentous increase in the element of power has eroded the traditional relationship of power to policy. Until the end of World War II, it would never have occurred to a leader that there might be an upper limit to useful military power. Since the technological choices were limited, strength was largely defined in quantitative terms. Today, the problem is to ensure that our strength is relevant to our foreign policy objectives. Under current conditions, no matter how we or our adversaries improve the size or quality of our strategic arsenals, one overriding fact remains: An all-out strategic nuclear exchange would risk civilized life as we know it.

  Had the democracies focused on their necessities, they would have drawn two conclusions from the new state of affairs. First, it was in their interest to maintain for as long as possible a counterforce capability, that is, a capacity to threaten the Soviet land-based missiles — the backbone of Soviet strategic forces. So long as the Soviets had to fear a counterforce attack in response to local aggression, their inhibition against such adventures would be considerable.III

  Secondly — and contrarily — even major efforts to modernize our strategic forces could only delay, not forever prevent, a decline in the reliance we could place on them. No nuclear weapon has ever been used in modern wartime conditions or against an opponent possessing means of retaliation. Indeed, neither side has even tested the launching of more than a few missiles at a time; neither side has ever fired them in a north-south direction as they would have to do in wartime. Yet initiation of an all-out surprise attack would depend on substantial confidence that thousands of reentry vehicles launched in carefully coordinated attacks — from land, sea, and air — would knock out all their targets thousands of miles away with a timing and reliability exactly as predicted, before the other side launched any forces to preempt or retaliate, and with such effectiveness that retaliation would not produce unacceptable damage. Any miscalculation or technical failure would mean national catastrophe.

  For these reasons, the strategic arsenals of the two sides find their principal purpose in matching and deterring the forces of the opponent and in making certain that third countries perceive no inequality. In no postwar crisis has an American President come close to considering the use of strategic nuclear weapons. There was, in short, no more urgent task for American defense policy than to increase substantially the capacity for local resistance. American defense policy had announced this goal since the early 1960s, but the necessary strengthening of conventional and tactical nuclear forces had been prevented by the Vietnam war and the resulting antimilitary mood.

  By 1973, a strong President serving for a full term was needed to impose a reexamination of doctrine and weapons systems, and the expenditures for a new strategy. Nixon’s heart was in the right place but the authority of the Presidency was declining. Congress was much more preoccupied with multiplying restrictions on the discretion of the Chief Executive than with building up American strength. Opposition to the war in Vietnam had been transmuted into an attack on military preparedness across the board. A buildup of strategic forces was resisted as being provocative and unnecessary; a buildup of conventional forces was decried as dangerous because it would tempt distant adventures. This rationale twice enabled Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield to defeat a Nixon Administration proposal for rapid-deployment logistical ships — an idea revived years later to protect the Persian Gulf. Conservatives were uncomfortable with Mansfield’s line of reasoning but they knew that public opinion was inhospitable to the massive increases in military spending that a real change in the composition of our forces would have required.

  After the Vietnam cease-fire, we managed to increase the defense budget by some 5 percent. The programs were mostly attempts to offset growing Soviet strategic power: the B-I strategic bomber; the Trident submarine and missile; the cruise missile; and a new, heavier, land-based intercontinental missile named the MX. The reorientation toward regional defense was started but did not gain momentum until after the change in Congressional attitudes.

  Even this relatively modest change ran up against the lingering inhibitions of Vietnam, compounded by Watergate. After the end of the Vietnam war some of the more extreme arguments — that America was bellicose and congenitally interventionist — lost some of their currency; the line of attack shifted to less emotional themes equally inhospitable to increased defense spending. Every new strategic weapons system had to run the gauntlet of objections not always consistent with each other: that it was unnecessary because we already had an “overkill” capability; that it was dangerous because it would compel offsetting Soviet moves, spurring an arms race; that it would jeopardize SALT negotiations. As time went on, new variants appeared: that a new system would even weaken us in a strange way because it might preclude newer and even better weapons some ten years down the road. Even if opponents failed to kill a weapons system, they could delay it by bringing about endless studies — of the mode of deployment; of its environmental impact; of its implications for arms control.

  Since the middle Sixt
ies, every new strategic weapons system in whatever administration has been attacked on some or all of those grounds, and the casualty list — either in delay, atrophy, or cancellation — is an impressive tribute to the combined impact of the various antidefense lobbies: The B-70 bomber, the ABM, the B-I, MX, the Trident II missile have all been canceled or delayed for years — sometimes for a decade — by constant reexamination. The principal target is whatever weapon is under consideration at the moment.

  On September 30, 1973, the Chicago Tribune commented accurately:

  The critics attack important new weapons programs, not by the frontal assault of calling these programs totally wrong but by subtle hints that we are going too fast or too far or in the wrong way or at too great an expenditure of money. They seek restrictive changes which may not actually kill a useful weapon but will castrate it.

  In 1973, the targets were the Trident nuclear submarine and missile and the B-I strategic bomber. The B-I was designed to replace the B-52 bomber, by then over twenty years old. The Trident would increase the range of our submarine-based missiles (as well as their payload), reducing their vulnerability by providing a larger operating area in the oceans.

  The arguments against these weapons followed the new stereotype. In the early Seventies, the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, began publishing an annual report entitled Setting National Priorities, which tended to reflect the view of the Democratic majority of the Congress and of some Republicans as well. With respect to Trident, it argued in 1973 not that the system was unnecessary but that its objectives could be accomplished “at a more moderate pace and at a significantly lower cost over the balance of this decade without jeopardizing U.S. security.”7 It proposed either slowing down the program or deferring it until a new, more accurate missile — the Trident II — was ready in the early Eighties. (By the late Seventies, of course, the Nixon Administration having proceeded with the Trident I missile, opponents of new strategic programs criticized the Trident II missile as unnecessary and succeeded in postponing it further.)