Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  This amendment pushed to its logical conclusion the reasoning underlying the original ABM agreement. If deterrence was enhanced by leaving each side’s population vulnerable to attack, it was better that there be one site than two; in fact, it made little sense to have any. What all this left unexamined was the validity of the reasoning that led to the treaty in the first place, and this silence is an interesting reflection of the impact of conventional wisdom. After 1972, the numbers of offensive weapons permitted in the first SALT agreement became controversial though in fact they did little more than ratify what both sides were planning anyway. What went nearly unremarked was the extraordinary doctrine that based a nation’s security on the vulnerability of its population and of its missile fields. In retrospect it is less clear to me than it seemed then, as I went along with the consensus, why protection of the missile fields would not have added to strategic stability especially after the MIRV threat emerged. Leaving fixed ICBM silos totally undefended reduces an attack on them into a mere engineering problem; as accuracy improves and the number of attacking warheads expands, it is not irrational to consider ABM defense of missile fields as a possible protection if the requisite technology is available. Be that as it may, the ABM agreement of 1974 was another modest step forward on a route to which there was literally no opposition.

  The most interesting agreement was the “threshold” nuclear test ban. A staple of Soviet disarmament schemes had been the proposal for a complete ban on nuclear testing. (The 1963 test ban, negotiated by the United States, Britain, and the USSR, prohibited nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space, or under water, but permitted underground testing to continue.) In the usual Soviet version, all testing would be banned and other nations would be asked to accede. If they did not, the signatories would have the right to renounce the treaty. The Soviet proposal had been consistently rejected by American administrations of both parties. The Defense Department and its scientific advisers argued persuasively that our weapons arsenal could not be improved without testing and that it was difficult to detect clandestine underground tests. The State Department objected to the pressure against other nuclear powers — for example, China or France — implicit in the withdrawal clause. In early February 1974, Dobrynin, true to the Soviet maxim that you can never know whether a door has been unlocked until you try it, trotted out the by-now venerable Soviet scheme for a comprehensive test ban. We turned it down. On February 4, Gromyko tried to find out whether our cold-shouldering Dobrynin’s overture might be a question of rank; so he, a member of the Politburo, repeated it to the President. The answer was again in the negative. The Soviets retreated to the idea of a quota ban — that is, limiting both sides to an agreed number of tests per year. That was less dangerous than the comprehensive ban but presented significant verification problems.

  During my visit to Moscow in March, I raised the verification problems and refused any agreement involving — even tacitly — pressure on third countries. Brezhnev countered with a proposal of a “threshold” test ban — that is, banning underground tests of nuclear weapons above a certain yield. This I was prepared to discuss. Soviet strategy was more dependent on high-yield weapons than ours; limiting tests to the lower ranges should therefore on balance favor us. The major verification problems, moreover, were in the lower-yield explosions. And such an agreement would cause less offense to allies like France and friendly countries like China; it involved no implied pressure on them because it was independent of their actions. In the months prior to the 1974 summit, we refined the concept of a threshold ban both within our government and in talks with the Soviets. The original concept of defining the threshold by the seismic shock of the explosion was replaced by the simpler idea of setting the ceiling at 150 kilotons.

  Though the arms control utility of a threshold test ban was marginal, it opened up discussions on verification that represented a major advance. If we were to verify that nuclear tests were below the 150-kiloton threshold, the Soviet Union would have to reveal its test sites, agree to test at no other site, and supply information about the geological formations at each site to permit us to calibrate our equipment. This — surprisingly — the Soviet Union agreed to do. The question of “peaceful nuclear explosions” then arose — that is, the theoretical use of nuclear devices to build canals or divert waterways. Neither side wanted to close off this possibility, but the United States especially did not want to permit the loophole of masking a military device as a peaceful explosive. Since the locale of peaceful explosions would be impossible to specify by international agreement in advance, we asked for on-site inspection. After prolonged wrangling, the Soviet Union agreed, for the first time in its history, to the principle. The details were to be worked out, according to a protocol attached to the agreement, before the threshold test ban would go into effect in 1976.

  All concerned with the verification problem — as must be all serious students of arms control — should have welcomed the threshold test ban as a potentially important pilot project. Never before had the Soviets agreed to on-site inspection; never had they been willing to give so much information about a military testing program. And since not even those most rabidly suspicious of Soviet motives thought the threshold test ban worked to our military disadvantage, the Soviet conciliatoriness with respect to it must have been to maintain some momentum in the flagging détente.

  But by then détente had been engulfed in controversy in America and growing doubt in Moscow. As a result, the threshold test ban did little to enliven the summit or to raise its level of discourse. Its subject matter was too technical to attract the undivided attention of the leaders, or for that matter to concentrate their minds on just what was being talked about. When it came up, on Friday, June 28, Kosygin must have forgotten his script or was so used to the old dispensation that he returned constantly to the familiar litany, in effect attacking the threshold test ban as inferior to a comprehensive one. Gromyko and I were supposed to report on the progress of the negotiations. But Kosygin had other ideas. As soon as he heard what the subject was, he launched himself into a passionate advocacy of a complete end of nuclear testing. He shrugged off any counterargument, including that of Nixon, who also seemed oblivious to the fact that we were assembled to laud a completed agreement, not to pursue one laid aside. Nixon resorted to his standard rebuttal to the effect that he really agreed with Kosygin but was reaching the same goal by a different route, which was news to me. Kosygin was arguing against an agreement his own government was about to sign and Nixon accepted as an objective what he had turned down four months earlier. After creating total confusion for about an hour, the principals subsided and the subject was remanded to the foreign ministers.

  At home, the threshold test ban failed not by attracting bitter animosity, as was the case with the SALT agreement, but by indifference. It simply had no constituency, except possibly for a small group of professional arms controllers interested in the principle of on-site inspection. Most liberals preferred a comprehensive test ban; thus they mocked the 150-kiloton ceiling, fought against the agreement, and thereby killed the first breakthrough toward on-site inspection. It was a classic case of the best being the enemy of the good. Conservatives did not oppose the threshold test ban. But they surely would not fight for causes abandoned by the liberals who had generated them. A coalition formed between those who wanted to do more and others who were not willing to press for it. The Carter Administration abandoned it. The treaty still awaits Senate ratification nearly eight years after its signature. And once it became apparent that the treaty was going nowhere in America, the Soviets lost interest in it and returned to their campaign for a complete test ban. Nothing could better symbolize the fact that the policy of détente and arms control was losing its domestic base in the United States.

  SALT remained the most difficult issue. The problems were partly self-inflicted. It was, after all, only the second year of the 1972 five-year Interim Agreement, which would not run out until 1977. The hurr
y toward a new agreement was internal. The Nixon Administration had come up with a surprise at each previous summit: in 1972, the fact that it took place at all, coupled with the rapid conclusion of SALT and the principles of international conduct; in 1973, the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War. Regardless of Watergate, it would have been in our interest in 1974 to make clear that if summits were becoming annual events they could not possibly produce a major announcement each time. Relations between two nations cannot be geared to a schedule of spectaculars; even less, relations between ideological and geopolitical adversaries. There simply were not that many controversies susceptible to yearly solution. Indeed, once East-West summits became institutionalized, their utility lay in the opportunity they afforded each leader to explore the other’s mind and to understand the limits of pressure as well as the possibilities of agreement. In that sense, the 1974 summit was a “normal” summit and the others unusual.

  But in the tumultuous summer of 1974, that insight was not widespread. The public, the media, and, to some extent, the Administration had become hooked on the dramatic like a dope addict on his fix. Any meeting with the Soviets at the Presidential or Secretary of State level that did not lead to a breakthrough was dismissed by the media as a failure even if its other accomplishments were not negligible. The imminence of any meeting at a high level triggered a bitter bureaucratic debate in the United States. Even when all agencies should have known that no major breakthrough was possible, they were not sure that something might not be going on in backchannels and they sought to block an outcome with which they disagreed.

  By the summer of 1974, SALT had become too politicized; as I have said, it was a whipping boy in a deeper struggle over the entire nature of US–Soviet relations and even over Nixon’s fitness to govern. In retrospect, it would have been wiser to announce ahead of time — surely after the disastrous NSC meeting of June 20 — that no basis for a breakthrough existed and that the leaders would defer their consideration of SALT until more progress had been made at a lower level. Such a sensible course was never considered, partly because of my preoccupation with the Middle East; partly because it would have been blamed on Watergate and would have fueled pressures to remove Nixon from office; partly because it would have been used by opponents of SALT to show that the basic thrust of Nixon’s East-West policies was failing.

  So we wound up with the worst of all worlds. A bitter domestic controversy prevented us from pursuing the coherent, persistent strategy without which no negotiation with the Soviets can succeed. After the Soviets had conceded the principle of inequality in MIRVs in March, Dobrynin had told me privately that it would be possible to widen the MIRV differential as we favored. But the United States never managed to put forward and stick to a consistent scheme; Nixon and I constantly had to protect our flanks against sniping from those who specialized in showing the weakness of any position by comparing it with some ideal world, but who felt no similar compulsion to analyze what would happen in the absence of an agreement.

  What had emerged as the Defense Department position at the NSC meeting of June 20 guaranteed a deadlock. No forensic skill could produce an agreement that simultaneously raised our total aggregates and lowered the Soviet MIRV program in return for absolutely nothing.

  And it did not. Even the setting symbolized our difficulties. The main town near where we met in the Crimea on June 30 was Yalta. Nixon was not eager to revive memories of the controversy over Franklin Roosevelt’s 1945 conference there with Stalin, long a target of conservative criticism. Therefore, the White House insisted on referring to the site of Nixon’s meetings as the suburb of Oreanda, where the Politburo villas in fact were located and the meetings took place. Unfortunately, the press center was set up in a hotel in downtown Yalta and all news reports to America went out under the dreaded dateline “Yalta” after all.

  We were meeting in the garden of Brezhnev’s residence, an elaborate beach complex set into the steep hills that dropped down to the Black Sea. Brezhnev took Nixon into what was aptly called the grotto, a cave-like structure cut into the limestone at the foot of a cliff — a romantic, nineteenth-century conceit somewhat incongruous for the leader of a country avowing a materialistic interpretation of history. While they talked alone, Gromyko and I sat with our aides near the huge Olympic-size swimming pool surrounded by glass walls that could be opened or closed electrically. This time the pool area was open to the surrounding breezes on a beautiful, clear, sunny day. Nixon and Brezhnev were secluded for over three hours. As in Moscow, I did not learn right away what they discussed — nor did the Soviets ever refer to it or claim that Nixon made any commitment. Eventually we were invited to join the principals.

  The subject clearly had not been SALT. The two leaders had apparently waited for the arrival of Gromyko and me to get into the topic. Nixon, who had not mastered all the statistics, asked me to lead the SALT discussions for our side. He was seconded by Brezhnev:

  I was telling the President that we appreciate him sending Dr. Kissinger to Moscow. He took a tough line with us in March, and we candidly told him our view. We told him our limits. The truth is there somewhere, so he should tell us where we should start to reach agreement.

  It was an invitation to propose a compromise, put forward in a manner that was by Soviet standards conciliatory, suggesting that he would not insist on the original Soviet position. I presented a variant of the Defense Department’s plan; this found no favor and in fact got us off into a futile and acrimonious debate. Brezhnev would not consider any of its aspects. He pointed out that our proposal would give us 4,000 more warheads than the Soviet Union, which was roughly true. He had discovered, almost surely from published accounts, that the limits we proposed for ourselves substantially coincided with our planned program: “It is important to reach an agreement but it should be one that restrains the race, slows it down. Under the proposal Dr. Kissinger is making, the US does not do far less than they would do without an agreement.” I replied that in fact under our scheme our MIRV buildup would move at a slower rate than the Soviet Union’s. But Brezhnev understood that this was because we were close to completing our program. He said he did not regard it as much of a concession; we were far ahead and we should not pretend otherwise.

  Despite these exchanges, the mood in the Crimea was mellow. The Soviets were not eager to embarrass Nixon. Indeed, all the American participants were convinced that the Soviets did not relish a deadlock. Brezhnev and his colleagues kept inviting new proposals within the context of counterbalancing asymmetries. But our domestic situation gave us no flexibility and it provided the Soviets with no incentive to be generous — never their forte in the best of circumstances. Brezhnev, backed up by two generals, produced maps that showed how the Soviets calculated our own first-strike potential, taking into account our overseas bases — the same presentation I had been given in March. To be sure, Brezhnev did not give himself the worst of the analysis; at the same time, the argument was not preposterous; it was the classic worst-case scenario of military planning, the nightmare of the strategist in which everything goes wrong simultaneously. It is as unlikely to occur as it is necessary to prepare for it. The difficulty is how to negotiate restraints when two worst-case scenarios confront each other.

  The grotto meeting ended inconclusively. But neither side was eager to admit failure. It was decided that I would not accompany Nixon on the ceremonial visit to Minsk the next day but would return with Brezhnev to Moscow to see whether some progress could be made. But Brezhnev was not eager, either, to give the impression that he could be persuaded in a face-to-face encounter with the American Secretary of State. We talked little about SALT on the plane. At the airport we were greeted by Dmitri Ustinov, at this writing Soviet Minister of Defense and then a Politburo member with responsibility for defense industries. In the VIP lounge of the airport, Brezhnev made me repeat my basic proposition on counterbalancing asymmetries, together with the numbers I had put forward in the Crimea. In my presence h
e ordered a Politburo meeting for that afternoon. Afterward, Gromyko and I should meet for one more review.

  Gromyko and I discussed SALT again later that evening. The American numbers provided no basis for a solution, Gromyko stated; the constraints were too heavy and the time period (to 1979) too short. I suggested that the problem was to relate time to quality and quantity. We had been talking about extremes: either a permanent agreement that sounded forbidding and caused everyone to protect against every conceivable contingency, or a two- to three-year extension that led to an endless debate about equities for too short a period of time. Perhaps we should aim for a new agreement that would supersede the Interim Agreement and run for a longer period, say ten years, from 1975 to 1985. I put forward the idea to give ourselves the choice of either pursuing “equal aggregates” or “counterbalancing asymmetries” within a time frame relevant to military planning. It would enable the Soviets to change the numbers in the Interim Agreement without loss of face; it gave us another opportunity to review the MIRV problem. Gromyko accepted this, and the negotiations were placed in a different framework. Nixon and Brezhnev agreed to meet during the winter to implement the new approach. That gave the Soviets a chance to assess the prospects of Nixon’s survival without breaking off the SALT process.

  The new framework for SALT was no minor achievement and might have been regarded in its true light except by media and a bureaucracy geared toward spectaculars. It opened the way to the Vladivostok accord and a serious negotiation on SALT II. Nevertheless, its reception at home was another clear sign that SALT had lost its conceptual grounding. Instead of a thoughtful analysis of different strategies, our domestic debate continued to be consumed in symbolism. Some opponents of détente came to see in the defeat of SALT the key to their preferred policy — as if (in the absence of other measures) the defeat of a treaty would improve America’s strategic position. Some of the defenders of a policy of relaxation of tensions began to treat SALT almost as an end in itself — as if the US–Soviet relationship did not also depend on a military balance and on responsible Soviet geopolitical conduct. The concept of equal aggregates dominated the SALT debate just when multiple warheads made the number of delivery vehicles a less and less reliable criterion of strategic equivalence. It was difficult to imagine any scheme that could survive the relentless ideological and sophisticated technical assault to which it would surely be subjected. We were edging ourselves into the worst possible position: with no SALT agreement to limit Soviet weapons and no support yet in the Congress for the necessary expansion of our own strategic programs.