Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  As for the B-I bomber, the Brookings study — again reflecting widespread Congressional sentiment — expressed fear that in 1975, the date of the scheduled procurement decision, “the B-I will be chosen simply because it is the only option available.” It suggested postponing a decision on any new bomber until SALT II discussions “shed more light on future requirements.” Another alternative was to “postpone a decision for two or three years and invest now in the parallel development of a different kind of strategic aircraft: a standoff bomber carrying long-range cruise missiles.”8 (That view, too, eventually prevailed with our successors in the Carter Administration.)

  The impact of these assaults could not be measured in victory and defeat on specific votes. A vicious circle was produced in which the Pentagon, to ease the harassment and to protect key programs, tried to preempt Congressional criticism by curtailing its research and its programs. Generally, only one type of weapon was pursued lest the Congress select from among various projects those which in the Pentagon’s view least advanced its purposes. For example, I have already noted in Chapter VII the Pentagon’s reluctance to proceed with the cruise missile, fearing it would be used as an excuse to kill the B-I bomber. These premonitions were in fact borne out by events. Similarly, after Nixon approved funds for research and development on the MX ICBM in 1973, the military abandoned a project for increasing the number of warheads on Minuteman III, fearing that this might reduce the incentive to proceed with the newer missile. The result was that for the better part of a decade we had neither an improvement of Minuteman III nor a new ICBM.

  The Trident lived on precariously. On September 27, 1973, the Senate by just two votes (47 to 49) rejected a proposal that would have emasculated the entire program. The victory took its toll. During the fall of 1973 the Pentagon, in the budget planned for submission in January 1974, was proposing to reduce the rate of procurement of Trident submarines from three a year to one a year. It took major White House pressure to reverse that decision — and then only partially.

  My own attitude toward the controversial Trident and B-I programs was heavily affected by our domestic debate. Ideally, I would have favored a systematic reexamination of our strategic doctrine in the light of changes brought about by the massive Soviet defense effort, the declining significance of our strategic forces, and the increased importance of conventional defense. But I was painfully conscious of the fact that any reexamination would lend itself to procrastination as easily as to clarification; in the existing climate of opinion, probably more so. If every new American weapons system was gutted while the Soviets were known to be developing four new missile types, we would sooner or later fall behind, whatever the airy calculation of systems analysts. Over a foreseeable period Soviet missiles would become more accurate and ours would grow more vulnerable; our refusal to participate in the competition would amount to unilateral disarmament.

  The MX found itself immediately embroiled in the contradictory crosscurrents of the defense debate. The argument for it — Minuteman’s vulnerability — was rebutted with the proposition that our triad of land-and sea-based missiles backed up by bombers made a Soviet first strike too dangerous for them — all the more so as there was no operational experience with so massive an attack. The deprecation of a Soviet first strike did not prevent some of the same groups from opposing the MX because it might be so threatening to the Soviets as to tempt a first strike after all (despite the triad). How the Minuteman could be safe and the MX vulnerable was rarely explained; one result was the elaboration of basing modes of a complexity and cost certain to undermine Congressional and public support. My own view was that the Soviets were more vulnerable to a first strike than we since most of their strategic force was land-based and fixed. An American counterforce capability gave us some insurance, and the Soviets additional reasons for restraint. But it did not obviate or even diminish the need for a major reorientation of our defense policy toward regional defense.

  As for the Trident submarine, I did not think much of the concept. I thought it a mistake to put twenty-four missiles on a large vessel instead of the sixteen on the smaller Polaris and Poseidon submarines. Each Trident risked a larger percentage of our sea-launched missile force than did its predecessors, and since some improvement in antisubmarine technology was nearly inevitable, it was my view that we should have moved in the opposite direction — fewer missiles on more boats. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger shared this view and in fact had ordered research on a smaller submarine. Yet I also feared that if we changed designs every time we were ready to go into production, we would play into the hands of those who really wanted to freeze all our programs; no weapons would ever be built. I therefore appealed the preliminary Defense Department decision to reduce the rate of Trident production in a memorandum to Nixon at the beginning of January 1974:

  I share Schlesinger’s concern regarding the size and cost of the Trident boats and fully support his efforts both to develop a smaller, cheaper boat and to speed-up the Trident I missile deployment. Nevertheless, we will have to procure at least 6 Trident boats if we wish to have an operational force of practical size. Given this requirement for at least 6 boats, funding the three per year rate for another year would not foreclose the option to deploy a cheaper, smaller boat in place of further Tridents when it becomes available.

  In the event, the smaller boat proved impractical; a combination of factors slowed down the rate of Trident production. While the Trident I missile went forward, the Trident II missile was deferred. Neither of these delaying decisions originated in the White House.

  The concern that the attainable was being blocked by a quest for the ideal was also my immediate reason for supporting the B-I. Whether its particular design was optimum is for weapons experts to decide; it seemed inarguable to me then that the United States could not indefinitely rely on an airplane older than many of its pilots (the B-52). We had to break the cycle by which new weapons were defeated by appealing to the virtues of an obsolescent system or to the glories of designs barely on the drawing boards. (At this writing, the prospect of future “stealth” radar-evading technology is being invoked in the classic manner as another argument for not building the B-I.)

  Philip Odeen, then responsible for defense matters on the NSC staff, had warned me in a memorandum of August 10, 1973:

  We are entering the late 1970s relying on two high-risk modernization programs (Trident and B-I) to guarantee the future survivability of our bombers and SLBMs. Our flexibility is limited by the lack of hedge programs such as mobile ICBMs and a viable cruise missile program. Moreover, we are working ourselves into an increasingly untenable position to respond to a failure of SALT II. [Emphasis in original.]

  I shared his uneasiness and I pushed not only the cruise missile but research on an airborne ICBM to reduce the vulnerability of our land-based force. At a minimum, if a weapons system was to be given up, I favored doing so not as a unilateral budgetary decision but as part of SALT — thereby exacting some Soviet concession.

  The vehicle I chose for making these points was the review of the upcoming defense budget in the Defense Program Review Committee. On October 3, 1973, in my capacity as chairman, I issued a directive asking that the Defense Department urgently study a strategic cruise missile program.

  That memorandum caused me to run afoul of the redoubtable Secretary of Defense. Schlesinger had one of the most brilliant analytical minds I have encountered in government. He was at that moment engaged in a heroic effort to overcome many of the dilemmas I have recounted here, being thwarted occasionally by insufficient resources, never by lack of insight. Our views on strategy were nearly identical. But no academic likes to cede pride of place to another; no Secretary of Defense willingly accepts directives from the Secretary of State.

  Moreover, Schlesinger’s vanity matched my own; he would not tolerate having what he considered Defense Department prerogatives challenged by the chairman of an interdepartmental committee. On October 29, I l
earned indirectly that Schlesinger had ordered all copies of my directive impounded. Beyond issues of jurisdiction, Schlesinger undoubtedly calculated that he had his hands full with Trident and the B-I without taking on a fractious Congress with new weapons systems. October 29 was the height of the Mideast crisis; it was urgent that State and Defense cooperate. Nixon was preoccupied with Watergate. I chose not to make an issue of the challenge and did not take the case to the President.

  I mention this not to settle a bureaucratic score at the remove of eight years but to illustrate the cross-currents eroding defense policy at the very moment we were being urged into confrontation with the Soviets. We had to defend, at one and the same time, our commitments both to upgrading our national defenses and to negotiating with the Soviet Union; the allies of one battle became the adversaries of the other. The military services were defending what they had; they did not dare propose a revision of defense doctrine lest they lose existing forces. Even Cabinet members with comparable views — like Schlesinger and me — found it difficult to settle differences in the absence of a White House capable of enforcing discipline.

  The impasse was even more serious with respect to conventional forces, in which the always existing gap continued to widen against us despite the increase in our defense budget. The bulk of budget cuts had fallen on forces for regional defense. Since its peak during the Vietnam war, the Army had been reduced by five divisions; it desperately needed modernization. The Air Force had absorbed budgetary cuts by the hallowed method of maintaining its force structure but reducing its readiness. By 1973 this had gone as far is it could. As a result, the Defense Department program for Fiscal Year 1974 cut five wings from the previously planned fighter force, a reduction of slightly over 20 percent. The Navy was one lap behind the Air Force. It was still paying for modernization by skimping on maintenance. My staff estimated that 50 percent of Navy ships were at best only marginally ready.

  Despite this, the Congressional pressures for troop reductions abroad had not diminished since the battles over the Mansfield amendment of 1971. On September 27, 1973, the Senate by a vote of 49 to 46 legislated a 40 percent reduction in the number of American troops overseas. After strenuous Administration effort, the amendment was defeated (by 51 to 44), to be replaced by another version proposing a reduction of 110,000 men (a 23 percent reduction). When that too, was overcome, the Senate voted a cut in troops stationed in any country that did not in fact pay for them. We headed off these measures but in 1973 it seemed only a question of time until one of these crippling amendments would pass.

  The same tendency to reduce our capacity for foreign intervention caused the Congress to prohibit the construction of permanent installations or the basing of B-52s at our newly established facility of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

  The details of the annual budget battles are best consigned to the oblivion their intellectual merit deserves. Their significance is that we were being urged to confront the Soviet Union on issues of peripheral importance while defense policy was stalemated by the Congress and the authority of the President was reduced by Watergate and by a host of restrictive legislation. Revisionist historians tend to suppress the fact that the Administration was fighting on two fronts: against those who accused it of being insufficiently confrontational and against those who wanted to deprive it of the military means to meet even the foreseeable challenges. The confrontational stance of many of our critics neither reflected the public mood nor was it backed by the realities of Congressional attitudes on defense. Rhetorical toughness allied with neither strategic concept nor public support creates not a policy but an anomaly; that is where our domestic debate was driving us.

  SALT Again

  WHAT gave the national debate its nightmarish quality was that each issue seemed to produce its own constituency with no obvious logical relationship to any other. The majority for the Jackson amendment did not necessarily back a strong defense. But perversely the antidefense majority would not rally behind the negotiations on strategic arms limitations, which became even more controversial than the effort to strengthen our defenses. Like the Jackson amendment, SALT increasingly turned into a symbol; its opponents sought to defeat it independently of the merit of its particular provisions or of the alternatives that were left to us if it failed.

  If Soviet domestic policies had provided the liberals with a target to thwart East-West trade, SALT performed a similar function for the conservatives. Senator Jackson merged the two groups. Once again, a single Senator demonstrated what a determined, able man of strong convictions could achieve in the vacuum of a disintegrating Presidency. Even more than with respect to MFN, Jackson was in a position to affect the prospects of SALT. As the second-ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, he was a force for the Pentagon to reckon with. He could punish by withholding funds; merely withdrawing to the sidelines, he could tilt the scales toward the antimilitary lobby. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the senior officials of the Defense Department faced an impossible choice: between their convictions, or at least loyalty to the Administration, and the imperative that they needed Jackson’s support on key issues, programs, and personnel choices.

  SALT differed from East-West trade also in that it cannot be demonstrated that a more united America would have been able to improve the outcome. The Soviets never put forward a proposal that any of the parties to our domestic debate considered accepting. Technically, our government’s positions reflected a unanimous viewpoint. In that sense, our internal controversies were shadowboxing; they never concerned an actual decision, only fears over what might happen. At the same time, there is no doubt that our unified positions as often as not represented an uneasy compromise rather than a conceptual thrust. And this fact created a vacuum in the negotiation.

  Experience has shown that the Soviet bureaucracy may be structurally incapable of originating a creative SALT position. If Dobrynin was to be believed, each Soviet department was confined to issues in its jurisdiction. Thus the Foreign Ministry was not entitled to a view of strategic programs, which were within the competence of the Defense Ministry. Allegedly, the Defense Ministry could not comment on diplomatic proposals — though I had difficulty believing this when its head, first Andrei Grechko and then Dmitri Ustinov, was serving on the Politburo. In this view overall goals emerge from the Politburo or perhaps the General Secretary’s personal office. This, Dobrynin claimed, was easier to do in response to an American proposal than as a Soviet initiative; the Soviet bureaucracy is apparently no exception to the rule that no one likes to volunteer for the role of having proposed a concession. Thus, Soviet proposals tend to be formalistic and outrageously one-sided. I know no instance in which a breakthrough did not result from an American initiative. And as other elements of détente systematically disintegrated, there were fewer and fewer nonmilitary incentives for the Soviets to respond to our increasingly feeble attempts to break the deadlock.

  I have described in Chapter VII the debate generated by the SALT I agreement, in which force levels unilaterally established by the United States for over ten years by administrations of both parties — without opposition — suddenly were declared “dangerous” when embodied in an agreement. In fact, both sides’ force levels reflected deliberate decisions taken long before the acronym “SALT” had been coined or there were serious talks on arms control. In total numbers of strategic systems — land- and sea-based missiles, and bombers — the United States was slightly behind, if one counted the 150 overage Soviet strategic bombers as serious weapons. On the other hand, the United States was far ahead in the technology, accuracy, and numbers of multiple warheads for its missiles and these were after all what reached targets.

  The significance of the trends therefore depended on the time frame selected. If both sides continued their existing programs without restraint, then during the better part of the decade of the Seventies, the United States would be ahead in the number, quality, and accuracy of deliverable weapons, that is, miss
ile warheads and bombs. On the other hand, sooner or later the Soviets would be able to translate the heavier throwweight of its missiles into more individual warheads. Sometime in the Eighties our land-based missiles would be vulnerable to a Soviet first strike unless either we built up or the Soviets slowed down. We would still retain a large force of submarine-launched missiles and of heavy bombers; these were useful as retaliatory weapons and as means of destroying cities, but they were not considered accurate or secure enough to be used against Soviet land-based missiles in underground silos.

  The debate concerned what role arms limitations could play in the effort to overcome the vulnerability of our retaliatory force. It was part of a larger controversy over whether arms control enhanced our security or damaged it. Arms control by the Seventies had had a complicated history. In the earliest days of the nuclear age, some concerned scientists had argued that unilateral restraint would induce the Soviets to follow suit. For example, in the early Fifties a significant body of opinion led by J. Robert Oppenheimer urged us to forgo development of the hydrogen bomb on the ground that this would prompt the Soviets to show similar restraint. The notion reappeared in the debate over the antiballistic missile defense;9 it was later a contributing factor in President Carter’s decision to cancel the B-I bomber. There was not the slightest proof that the Soviets operated by such a maxim, and overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Soviet weapons programs do not seem driven by our decisions. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown said later in the Carter Administration: “We have found that when we build weapons, they build; when we stop, they nevertheless continue to build. . . .”10