Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  It was on the Middle East that we had our most difficult talks. Brezhnev bristled. As had Gromyko six weeks earlier in Washington, he accused us of violating the understanding on joint auspices, first with respect to Egypt and now with Syria. As then, I replied that the “appropriate auspices” had been intended to facilitate negotiations between the parties, not to prevent them from talking in the most convenient forum. I offered to meet Gromyko or other Soviet representatives for regular discussions on the Middle East. Brezhnev growled — not inaccurately — that I was talking procedure; he was concerned with substance. I was offering information; he wanted participation. After listening to a half-hour quibble between Gromyko and me about methods of our consultations, Brezhnev got to the heart of the matter, in the process demonstrating the Soviet adaptability to reality. He broke his silence to say that he had been listening “attentively” to the colloquy between Gromyko and me, and felt it only pointed up the correctness of his original complaint: Never before, Brezhnev avowed, had he heard such an open statement of the American intention to exclude Soviet participation. The two sides having stated their views on this question, he concluded darkly, it left “hands free to act at one’s own discretion.”

  I said somewhat irrelevantly that five kilometers one way or another on the Golan Heights were less important than US–Soviet relations. Brezhnev professed his own dedication to the relationship, which meant that he would not let the Middle East impair it.

  But it also gave him no reason to hasten any progress on SALT, the discussion of which framed the other subjects. We took it up during our first two sessions on March 25 and during our last session on March 27. At the first session Brezhnev put forward a proposal to extend the Interim Agreement through 1980 and add to it an equal limitation of 1,000 MIRVs for each side. The United States and the Soviet Union would be free to decide on the composition of their forces; in technical terms there would be “freedom to mix” between the land-based or sea-based missiles. Strangely enough — except for keeping the unequal aggregates left over from SALT I — this proposal came closer to the real preferences of the Joint Chiefs of Staff than what I had brought with me to Moscow. But it did not really meet our needs, for reasons that I gave to Brezhnev in the evening session on March 25:

  Let me explain our difficulties, and let me explain how it will present itself in the United States. You will remember from my public testimony when Senator Jackson attacked the first agreement, we defended it on the grounds that MIRV made up for the imbalance in numbers in the first phase. If we now extend that agreement, and add to it a provision of 1,000 MIRVed missiles, there will be two criticisms made, at least: One, that the numerical advantage now will become effective because of the number of warheads. Second, because the Soviet Union has more MIRVs on each launcher than we do, you will have a numerical advantage not only in the number of missiles but in the number of warheads. Thirdly, because the Soviet warheads are heavier than ours, it means the land-based force of the Soviet Union will be able to acquire a first-strike capability against ours. And therefore if there is not some ceiling on land-based missiles that takes account of the different numbers of warheads on each of these missiles, the position will become very complicated. In addition, we have the problem that at the level of 1,000, we would have to stop deploying MIRVs soon, while you would be starting yours. We would have no way of knowing if you are stopping. You will reach 1,000 at the very end of this process. So if you put, say, 500–800 on your land-based missiles — I give you the arguments quite honestly as they will be put to us — and if our calculation is correct that you have six on each, you would have 3,000–5,000 warheads, and you would be able to destroy our Minuteman.

  I don’t want to give you ideas, but these are the arguments that will be made. I just wanted to give you the reasoning of our people.

  Brezhnev, of course, strenuously denied that the Soviet leadership could have in mind anything so gross as an attack on our Minuteman force. And he rejected the proposition that SALT I was unequal. He produced a map showing areas of the Soviet Union that could be reached from our forward-based systems in Europe or in the Mediterranean. It was reasonably accurate if one assumed one-way missions for our fighter bombers, which Soviet planners — applying their own version of the “worst case” scenario — are bound to do. Our proposal to confine Soviet land-based deployments to 270 ICBMs was impossible for the Soviet Union. Said Brezhnev: “If I agree to this, this will be my last meeting with Dr. Kissinger, because I will be destroyed.” After reviewing all kinds of technical matters, we agreed to allow time for further study before another discussion.

  This took place on my last day in Moscow, March 27. On that occasion a kind of conceptual breakthrough did in fact occur, though it was not treated as such by a skeptical press corps or for that matter by all elements of our government. A six-hour Politburo session delayed our meeting with Brezhnev; characteristically, we were given no explanation until afterward. Our morning meeting was canceled; we waited in our guest house in the Lenin Hills for the summons that did not come until about 5:00 P.M. I had told a protocol officer sarcastically that I had always wanted to spend a winter vacation in Moscow. But then the meeting convened — not, I am sure, because of my comment but because the Politburo meeting had ended. After opening pleasantries Brezhnev announced that the Soviet Union was now prepared to accept the principle of unequal MIRV aggregates. Brezhnev proposed 1,100 MIRVed vehicles for the United States, 1,000 for the Soviet Union.

  It was a major step forward, advanced in a characteristically grudging manner. The Soviets always leave room for bargaining; I knew no instance where a Soviet opening position was anywhere close to the final outcome. Once the principle of unequal MIRV aggregates in our favor had been conceded, the gap would almost certainly be subject to improvement through negotiations.

  Brezhnev presented his proposal with considerable ingenuity. The figure for total aggregates was fair, he argued, because the Soviets were scrapping 210 missiles as part of SALT I and they did not count the 90 missiles in the British and French strategic forces. In other words, the Kremlin out of the goodness of its heart was giving up precisely the 300 missiles we claimed constituted their advantage. (That turned out to be wrong; even after scrapping 210 missiles the Soviets would retain a numerical advantage.) And now to carry generosity almost to extremes, in Brezhnev’s version, they were throwing another 100 missiles into the bargain. This gave Brezhnev even simpler arithmetic. He could have argued that by agreeing to an advantage of 100 MIRVed missiles for us he was giving us 500 extra warheads, thus closing the gap. Equal aggregates would then have been achieved.

  Brezhnev implied but never made these arguments explicitly — perhaps because his arms controllers had not yet reached the abstruse level of sophistication of ours. In any event, these arguments would not have been conclusive. The breakthrough was as yet conceptual; the numbers remained inadequate. Given the Soviet advantage in throwweight, the total of 1,000 Soviet MIRVed missiles was far too high, the gap in our favor far too small. We doubted whether the Soviet Union would be able to deploy more than 1,000 MIRVed missiles before the end of 1980 when the proposed agreement would expire; we would thus be doing little more than ratifying each side’s program. (There would, of course, be a presumption that the limits might be extended upon expiration of the interim period.) More worrisome, Brezhnev’s proposal was consistent with an attempt to freeze our deployment while the Soviet Union was catching up in MIRVs — especially because we would have fulfilled our program by 1977 (except for Trident) while the Soviets were still building. Thus the Soviets could theoretically build their permitted MIRVs on land and switch to sea-based MIRVs only after 1980 when the agreement would have expired.

  This is why I insisted that any ceiling on MIRVs must contain a sublimit on land-based missiles. But Brezhnev adamantly refused to make any such commitment. He was prepared, he said, to promise an informal understanding to notify us each year of planned submarine-launched miss
ile deployments; he would not accept a formal limit. Such notification was meaningless. If there were no agreed limits we would have no basis for objecting; and a yearly report would be too late to affect our decisions and would not add much, if anything, to what we knew from our own intelligence reports.

  We thus were in a position not unfamiliar from previous negotiations: The concept of an inequality of MIRVs in our favor was extremely important. The particular application of it was preposterous; I turned it down without even checking with Washington. I stressed that the prospect of converting Brezhnev’s “breakthrough” into an agreement would depend on two factors: whether the gap in MIRVs between the two forces could be increased; and whether the Soviets would accept a ceiling on the total number of MIRVed land-based missiles. Without these two conditions, a SALT agreement would be largely optical. We left it that both sides would reexamine their positions and continue their exchanges.

  This outcome, when it became known, led to many lugubrious comments in our media about the failure of the Moscow trip, reflecting substantial ignorance of Soviet negotiating tactics. At the end of the talks in Moscow we were not, in fact, in a bad tactical position: A new proposal had been put forward by the Soviets in the most ungenerous manner possible, raising the prospect of strenuous bargaining to achieve the final result. We had been through that particular wringer before. It is not possible to prove whether the approach of differential MIRV limits would have ultimately succeeded. One can say that we were basically heading in the right direction. Agreement would depend on many factors: pressures on the Soviet system, trade-offs for gains that the Soviets might seek in other areas, single-mindedness and unity in the American negotiating position, and the Soviets’ assessment of Nixon’s staying power.

  Regrettably, the single-mindedness and unity of our bargaining position were far from evident. One of the gravest problems was the galloping weakness of the President. By April 1974, the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives was clearly heading for impeachment. The omens were so apparent that Gromyko in April inquired into the procedures of our government in that contingency. The likelihood that the Nixon Presidency was coming to an early end must certainly have affected the Politburo’s calculations about how many more concessions were sensible in this round of negotiations.

  Previous experience had shown that if one wanted progress, one had to keep up the pressure on an agreed concept, exploring the many variations and permutations until the Soviets could convince themselves concessions were imperative if they wanted to avoid a blowup. A functioning Nixon could have imposed this on a bureaucracy that had acquiesced in the new approach but did not have its heart in it. But under Watergate conditions, internal divisions became self-perpetuating. Clearly, the agencies preferred an agreement enshrining a numerical equality in launchers across the board — even though this would eventually lead to far more Soviet warheads than my preferred scheme (and even the unacceptable Soviet scheme). One of the principal reasons for this seemingly perverse attitude was the calumny to which officials would be exposed in testifying before the Congress.

  Whatever the reason, a Verification Panel meeting of April 27 made clear that there was little enthusiasm for our official position. I was scheduled for talks with Gromyko in Geneva on April 28–29; our major purpose was to deal with Syria but we were certain to review SALT as well. At the Verification Panel I favored a counterproposal to the Soviets limiting Soviet MIRVed missiles to no more than 850 by 1980. My staff and I — backed by intelligence reports — calculated that the Soviets were likely to deploy some 200 submarine-based MIRVed missiles in that period; the practical effect would therefore be to reduce Soviet land-based MIRVed ICBMs to around 600. I now heard the astonishing proposition that this figure — which reduced the Soviet potential by several thousand warheads — was insignificant because even 600 ICBMs could threaten our Minuteman force. The corollary was that it made no difference how many warheads the Soviets had beyond a certain number. In that case, of course, it was hard to understand why there was such an uproar about the unequal aggregates in launchers of the SALT I agreement — amounting to a Soviet edge of only 300 single warheads, counterbalanced by our large superiority in bombers. There was merit in the proposition that even 600 MIRVed missiles could threaten our Minuteman force. What was less clear was how our critics proposed to improve the situation by torpedoing an agreement and why the saving of a few thousand warheads was without significance (which, if true, raised profound questions about our own defense program).

  By now our domestic debate had turned liturgical. Slogans had become the weapons in a philosophical dispute over the nature of East-West relations. We encountered a dilemma already familiar from our experience in Vietnam: Philosophical opponents were even more afraid of the success of a negotiation than of its failure. Whenever we seemed to make even marginal progress, they surfaced new objections: demands for equal aggregates for which we had no unilateral program; complaints about throwweight totals that we had imposed upon ourselves and never tried to alter; now a denial of the significance of any MIRV limits. After all, we could have mitigated the throwweight gap by equipping Minuteman with six or seven warheads and the disparity in numbers by pushing cruise missiles. Nor was a new missile precluded by any of the SALT proposals on the table. SALT was both resented and given unrealistic tasks. In exasperation I said at the April 27 meeting:

  What’s all this I read about the throwweight problem? I want to know why it is that we are always talking ourselves into a lather. If we want a bigger missile, why aren’t we building one? Who’s stopping us? I’ve certainly never heard of a proposal for a new ICBM since I’ve been here. . . .

  Nothing in the Interim Agreement stops you from deploying a new missile. No one is stopping [you] from deploying this; and I assure you the White House will not stop you. All we’ve got now is Trident under the Interim Agreement. In an extended Interim Agreement we could start a new missile. . .

  No one ever made the case that SALT would stop their programs. You can’t blame the Interim Agreement for that. Those are their decisions. Our program is the result of our decisions. SALT does not stop any of our programs.

  At the end I was authorized to “explore” my scheme; but I had little conviction that a united bureaucracy would sustain me if the Soviets were to accept it, even less once Jackson launched his predictable assault. Indeed, there was a strong probability that many of my associates would disavow the scheme in the end. It was not the most uplifting way to leave for a meeting with Gromyko.

  Predictably, the SALT portion of my talks with Gromyko on April 28–29 ended inconclusively. There were simply too many uncertainties on both sides to permit an all-out effort. Gromyko had other fish to fry; I had no latitude to explore variations. Gromyko asked the key question from the Soviet point of view: “What’s in it for us?” And in truth, there was little incentive for the Soviets to constrain their programs while we fulfilled ours. I painted a lurid prospect of what we would do in the absence of an agreement: MIRV all our Minutemen; continue building Tridents. But Gromyko knew our five-year projections because we were helpfully publishing them each year. And he must have doubted that the mortally wounded President would be able to get such programs through a rebellious Congress.

  By the time I returned from the Syrian shuttle a month later, our bureaucratic pattern had frozen. Nixon’s Presidency was in its terminal phase. Many serious senior officials were concerned that a SALT agreement achieved under these conditions would be badly flawed whatever its intrinsic merit; it would look like a Nixon ploy to escape his fate. And whatever the terms, they were bound to wonder whether a successor President might not improve on them.

  Such reasoning must have been behind Schlesinger’s decision to go into open opposition to what was still our official position, which he had approved a month earlier. Reversing his earlier support of the concept of unequal MIRVs offsetting unequal aggregates, he dramatically affirmed the concept of equal aggregates all
across the board and in the process embraced drastic reductions as well. The occasion was a reply to a letter from Jackson to Schlesinger on April 22 asking the Secretary to comment on his reductions proposal, which had also advocated equal aggregates. Schlesinger took his time but on June 3 he praised Jackson’s approach:

  Your proposal, generally, satisfies most criteria currently being used as guidelines for SALT, and also has other inherently attractive features, as discussed in the enclosed assessment.

  In practice this meant the end of the scheme we were negotiating. The Soviets, having seen what Jackson could do to block East-West trade, could have no doubt what he could accomplish when backed by Nixon’s own Secretary of Defense. In any event, ratification of an agreement not wholeheartedly supported by the Pentagon was unlikely, probably even undesirable. SALT II was reviewed again by our government in preparation for the summit, and Nixon and Brezhnev had a long discussion about it when we were in the USSR (see Chapter XXIV). But at least in retrospect, it is clear that serious prospects for SALT in the Nixon Presidency ended by early June 1974 with the Schlesinger letter.

  Conclusion

  EVEN with the perspective of nearly a decade, I believe that the approach we put forward in the spring of 1974 offered a better chance to constrain the buildup of Soviet MIRVs than any imposed on us afterward by domestic pressures. The equal aggregates that were the rallying cry of so many opponents turned out to be more symbol than substance. The Soviets agreed to equal aggregates at Vladivostok in November 1974. But none of the succeeding administrations (including Reagan’s) ever made any effort to build up to the permitted level; each has lived voluntarily with a numerical gap in delivery vehicles that it would not accept as part of the agreement. And in the meantime, Soviet MIRV deployment has reached a level far higher than what was envisaged in the run-up to the summit and then rejected by SALT opponents as too dangerous. They have thousands more warheads than they would have had if in 1974 we had succeeded in negotiating the schemes we pursued. And we have no more delivery vehicles.