Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  By the Sixties, another theory had emerged. Instead of unilateral restraint, it asserted a shared interest in strategic stability to be achieved by invulnerable strategic forces on both sides. Arms control negotiations were to seek a situation in which neither side could benefit from a first strike or avoid cataclysmic destruction in retaliation. With the elimination of the fear of surprise attack, there would disappear as well the danger of hairtrigger decisions that might escalate a crisis into conflagration.

  Nuclear strategy is abstract and theoretical because there does not exist — fortunately for mankind — any experience on which to draw. In the hands of academicians it was barely noticed that even mutual restraint had unprecedented strategic consequences. Never had a major power considered the invulnerability of the forces of its principal opponent, or the vulnerability of its own population, a contribution to stability. And it involved a corollary that not all of its proponents were willing to accept. If mutual invulnerability of strategic forces was to be the objective — or even the tendency of technology — our strategic power would no longer compensate for the Soviet superiority in conventional strength or the Soviet capacity for regional intervention. Under conditions of strategic parity, whether resulting from arms control or technology or both, the democracies would have to build up their conventional strength if they wanted to avoid political blackmail.

  Regrettably, the fewest advocates of arms control were prepared to face these consequences; in general, the groups favoring control of strategic weapons opposed increases in other categories of military power. This produced the anomaly that opponents of SALT generally sought to redress the strategic balance by restoring our traditional nuclear superiority, which in view of the large numbers of warheads on both sides was largely chimerical. On the other hand, proponents of SALT were reluctant to draw the consequences for local defense from the strategic parity they were both advocating and accelerating. Both schools of thought for different reasons therefore tended to neglect the need for a strengthening of regional or conventional forces.

  By the time Nixon came into office, arms control doctrine was well established among opinion leaders; it had also been given institutional expression in the creation of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), charged with developing policies and negotiating agreements. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations had started negotiations with the Soviet Union on the subject. Kennedy had concluded an atmospheric test ban; Johnson had signed a nonproliferation treaty. SALT had been on the agenda of a projected meeting between President Johnson and Soviet leaders in 1968 that was canceled because of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

  The Nixon Administration at first sought to link SALT to Soviet geopolitical conduct. But while never abandoning the theory, it found itself under mounting pressures to begin arms control talks — in effect unconditionally.11 Finally, the Defense Department, hitherto institutionally leery of the enterprise, seized on SALT as a means to close the gap that Congressional budget cuts were opening up between Soviet and American strategic forces; the Pentagon urged us to put a numerical ceiling on Soviet offensive missile deployments through arms control negotiations. A memorandum from Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard in 1970 urged that our SALT delegation be given new instructions “with which we can attempt to achieve an agreement at Vienna by mid-October or, at the latest, November.” An early, though limited, agreement, he believed, was important because the coming “squeeze on the national budget,” which was “likely” to result in “large reductions in defense programs, including strategic forces,” would have “significant effect on the timing of our SALT tactics.” The cuts dictated by the budget would be more acceptable in the United States and a “sign of good intentions” to the USSR if there had been progress at SALT but would “decrease our bargaining leverage” if there had not.12

  All these strands had come together to produce SALT I. They were present as well in the formal negotiations for SALT II that got under way in 1973. There were many arguments, at once theoretical and highly technical, about the nature of the agreement to be sought (see Chapter VII). But the major division was the one I have already noted, between the psychiatric and the theological approaches to foreign policy. The “psychiatrists” saw in SALT a major step toward a relaxation of tension and a world from which the specter of nuclear war was being lifted. The “theologians” were suspicious of any agreement with the Soviet Union, which was evil incarnate; anything the Kremlin was willing to sign could not be in our interests. They sought to defeat SALT because they objected not to its terms but to the principle of it.

  In this debate I was in a lonely position. I was a hawk on defense and a dove on SALT, earning opponents on both sides. I was opposed to the “assured destruction” theory of emphasizing civilian casualties in a nuclear war, and I was convinced we had to strengthen conventional forces. But I also saw an important role for SALT in a well-defined national security policy. I did not believe that arms control could by itself alleviate tensions. Indeed, if not linked to some restraint of the geopolitical competition, strategic arms control might become a safety valve for Soviet expansionist designs — a vehicle for Soviet peace offensives to mask or compensate for some new act of aggression. Every time there was a Soviet aggressive move, there would be appeals that the new tensions now made arms control talks even more important. This is why I favored linkage.

  But I parted company with some conservative critics in my conviction that nuclear weapons added a new dimension of horror to warfare and a new dimension of responsibility for national leaders. Technology tended toward parity in any case; arms control could thus stabilize the strategic race and free resources for building up our conventional and regional forces, where clear and present imbalances existed.

  Large sections of American and allied opinion insisted on an effort to curb the arms race. The worst posture was to be dragged kicking and screaming into a negotiation by outside pressures; a statesman should always seek to dominate what he cannot avoid. And we also faced a highly practical problem in the strategic field: If the Soviets MIRVed all of their land-based missiles with accurate warheads, our land-based missiles would be at risk by the early part of the Eighties. SALT II seemed to me to provide an opportunity to postpone this danger for a significant period of time.

  Soviet technological progress indicated that there was some urgency about the task. By 1973 we had become aware that the Soviets were developing four new missiles — which it pleased them to call “modernization” of existing models. SALT I did not prohibit “modernized” ICBMs provided the dimensions of the silo were not increased by more than 15 percent. But clearly what the Soviets were doing was hardly arms restraint; these weapons were new by any rational definition. Emerging so soon after the signature of SALT I, they left little doubt that the Soviet perception of stability was not the same as that of our arms controllers. Two new MIRVed Soviet ICBMs were identified in the process of testing by the summer of 1973: the new “light” ICBM, the SS-17, which would replace the SS-11 and carry three to four warheads; and the huge SS-18, to be the replacement for the SS-9 and to carry an estimated nine MIRV warheads (in the end, eight). Both of these missiles were launched by a new technique called “cold launching” — that is, “popping up” the missiles out of the silo with an auxiliary engine, after which the rocket engine would ignite and start the missile on its flight path. This technique saved fuel, and increased throwweight and therefore the number of warheads that could be carried; it also allowed the silos to be reused. Later in 1973 yet another missile appeared — the SS-19 — which used the old “hot” launching technique but turned out to be the most formidable of the new weapons. It was technically a medium-sized missile if measured against the monster SS-18. But by any other calculation it approached in effectiveness the “heavy” missile limited in number to 308 by SALT I. The Soviets were using the quantitative freeze to engage in a qualitative race. It was now mathematically predictable that by the middle Eighties at
the latest, our Minuteman land-based missile force would be vulnerable to a Soviet strike.

  But opinions on how to deal with this danger diverged radically. Our critics fundamentally wanted to destroy the SALT process; their specific objections were less significant than their passionate desire to defeat SALT to put an end to détente. Insofar as they gave their attack a concrete content, it was under the banner of “equal aggregates.” In 1972 Jackson had added another one of his amendments to the Senate approval of SALT I, requiring equality in the follow-up negotiations and thereby implying that the existing agreement had fallen short. The Defense Department interpreted it as meaning numerical equivalence in every category of weapons. It was an interesting example of the precedence of political emotion over cool calculation. Even should the hotly contested Trident and B-I programs pass the Congress, we would still be short of the numerical equivalence in delivery vehicles that the Joint Chiefs of Staff nevertheless insisted was the precondition for their support of SALT. They had put forward no building program to reach numerical equivalence, yet they were asking me to negotiate that result with the Soviet Union. If that meant anything, we were going to demand that the Soviets reduce to our level in an agreement; unfortunately, the penalty we threatened if they refused was to concede them numerical superiority in the absence of agreement! The Soviets were thus better off without arms control than with it — a curious way of standing a theory on its head.

  In my judgment, the issue was more complex: Numerical equivalence of delivery vehicles was only one criterion, and not the most important one. I sought to use SALT negotiations to push the vulnerability of our land-based strategic forces as far into the future as possible; that required slowing down the rate at which the Soviets placed multiple warheads on their missiles. Any other goal, in my view, was simply playing with numbers. No one challenged the desirability of the objective. The debate concerned what we would be willing pay for it. And the truth was that no one was willing to pay much. Our last formal proposal, in May 1973, had simply ducked the issue. It proposed equal aggregates and a freeze on the MIRVing of all land-based missiles (see Chapter VII). Since we had already deployed 350 MIRVed Minuteman IIIs (out of a total planned deployment of 550) and the Soviets had deployed none, there was no likelihood that the Soviets would let us take them so neatly out of the MIRV field. The Soviets saw no benefit in a scheme where we would give up 400 warheadsIV for potentially 7,000 Soviet ones. The proposal was put forward despite its implausibility because it was a good way to stifle our domestic debate. No one could be accused of softness if we asked for a number of delivery vehicles beyond our intention to build while restricting the Soviets to levels of MIRVs far below their capacity. It was fairy-tale diplomacy: If one wished hard enough, one could achieve all one’s aims without having to pay any price.

  Once the numbers game had started, even equal aggregates became controversial — in spite of the fact that we were far from achieving them. Our missiles were smaller, hence they carried fewer warheads. Pentagon analysts thus came up with a new definition of equivalence: equal throwweight. (All this was in the absence of any American program to correct the deficiencies.) Throwweight, too, was a largely theoretical measurement depending, for its impact, entirely on where it was set. If the throwweight ceiling was at our level, the Soviets would either have to reduce their existing strategic force to something like a fifth of ours or else tear it down and rebuild it in our image — a highly improbable outcome of SALT. If it was set at the higher, Soviet, level, it would be meaningful only if we dismantled our force and rebuilt it in the Soviet image. Or else we could double the number of our Minute-men, achieving something like a two-to-one advantage. Neither course was ever put forward or enjoyed any prospect of support in the Congress.

  I did not differ with the goal of reducing the Soviet throwweight. My disagreement arose over the attempt to assign to SALT the burden it was being asked to carry; over whether negotiations could achieve what our unilateral building programs did not seek. Some of our critics seemed to think so. Since the schemes were advanced by highly intelligent men, the impression is unavoidable that they were more afraid of the lash of Senator Jackson than of aborting the negotiations on SALT. Indeed, by 1973 the Joint Chiefs were so insistent on “strategic equivalence” that they were willing to pay the price of abandoning all MIRV limitations for exact equivalence in launchers — thereby giving the Soviets a huge potential edge in warheads in return for a nonexercised right to build a few hundred additional launchers. Moreover, if each side was free to MIRV its entire force, numerical ceilings on delivery vehicles — equal or not — would become nearly meaningless; each side’s land-based missiles would become vulnerable as the number of warheads increased enormously while the number of targets remained fixed.

  I asked incredulously at a Verification Panel meeting of August 15, 1973: “So you would drop all MIRV restrictions, go to equal aggregates with freedom to mix, maybe reductions — never mind [Soviet] MIRV superiority as long as we have the right to become a mirror image of the Soviet force?” Which, I might have added, the Defense Department had never shown an interest in doing.

  Schlesinger understood at least as well as I the strategic vulnerability we faced if the Soviets MIRVed most of their land-based missiles. But he had Jackson to deal with and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to placate. Under his urging, the Pentagon put forward as a “compromise” a new variant — equal MIRVed throwweight — to be added to the Joint Chiefs’ proposal of an equal aggregate ceiling of 2,350 delivery vehicles. It landed us right back at the dilemmas of the earlier schemes. Since the Soviets’ throwweight per missile was much larger than ours, this would mean that they would be able to MIRV many fewer missiles than we — the precise number would depend on which type of missile they would elect to MIRV. It was an ingenious proposal whose sole drawback was its lack of reality; under it we would give up nothing, and if the Soviets refused it we had no program to reach equality unilaterally.

  By the summer of 1973 the equal aggregates doctrine had led to an inherently inconsistent position. The agencies were prepared to live with the inferior numbers of launchers and the inferior throwweight they had decided to build (and maintained through every succeeding Administration, including Reagan’s). They were not willing to see these numbers specified in an agreement, even though in doing so we might collect the prize of limiting total Soviet warheads to a number considerably inferior to our own. The negotiators were being pressed to produce a theoretical equality in every category — but they were given nothing to trade.

  It is against this background that the internal debate on SALT must be considered. A month after Brezhnev’s visit to America — on July 26, 1973 — I reviewed SALT with Dobrynin. Our proposal to stop Soviet land-based deployment, he said, had been taken very badly by Brezhnev; land-based ICBMs were, after all, the “principal weapon” in the Soviet strategic arsenal. The Soviets would be willing to consider limits on both land-based and submarine-based MIRVs according to the principle of “equal security.” The next day the Soviets submitted an “oral note” elaborating on these propositions. Lest we get the illusion that détente had altered its pettifogging style, the Kremlin asked as a matter of right for a superiority in numbers all across the board. Moscow arrived at this conclusion by including American forward-based nuclear weapons in our totals (aircraft in Europe or on carriers) — the bugbear of Europeans afraid that in the guise of SALT we would bargain away their security in their absence. (This would have added 600 launchers to Soviet totals.) And the Soviets asked for additional “compensation” for having to prepare against China in addition to preparing for a war in Europe. Modesty is not an attribute of Soviet opening positions; the Soviets asked for a numerical advantage in strategic weapons as “compensation” for the number of enemies they had made through a diplomacy of pressure and threat.

  In a memorandum of August 1, my staff pointed out that the Soviet proposal contained the “usual shabby verbal tricks.” The willingn
ess to include MIRVed submarine-launched ballistic missiles meant little since the USSR would not be ready to deploy that kind of weapon for five years and it might thus use up its entire quota of permitted MIRVs on the land-based systems we were most eager to limit. On the other hand, the Soviet message defined the issue: The Soviets would not give up land-based MIRVs, certainly not for what we had heretofore offered (stopping our own deployment of Minuteman III only after it was 60 percent completed) and almost surely not for any other terms. We were thus left with the question of how to define limits for MIRVs that made strategic sense and were verifiable.

  On August 9, I met Dobrynin to discuss the Soviet “oral note” of July 27. I said that I did not know what the Soviets meant by “equal security” as applied to MIRVs. If they wanted equal numbers of missiles, we would insist on equal numbers of warheads. Another way of approaching the problem, I added, putting forward Jim Schlesinger’s point, would be to proceed on the basis of equal throwweight. (I did not explain that this meant far fewer Soviet missiles could be MIRVed.)

  Dobrynin’s reply was startling. Instead of going into all this technical detail, he said, the United States and the Soviet Union should take a “big step” and agree not to deploy any new missiles for ten years. In reply to my question Dobrynin suggested that this, of course, applied to Trident. Carried away, he threw the Soviet SS-17 and SS-19 into the pot as well. By our next meeting he was back in line: Our weapons were all “new,” hence proscribed; the Soviet missiles were only “modernized,” therefore did not fall under the ban. This piece of effrontery ended the only apparently innovative Soviet SALT proposal of my public life.