In the four years I worked with him, and in later subsequent government assignments, like the Defense Policy Board in the Obama administration, I had never seen him angry. But it was clear that he was unhappy with the decision and—with good reason—by the way it was being conveyed to him. He carefully walked me through the technical, strategic, and fiscal arguments and warned in characteristically measured terms: “I will have a hard time supporting any of the justifications for killing the B-1 before congressional questioning.” He went on to recommend that the cancellation statement should start by saying that alternative systems represented “better ways to do the same thing” and should avoid any implication that the B-1 was a complete waste of money.64 Carter followed this advice when the formal announcement was made on July 30.
DOVE TO HAWK
Carter’s transformation from a dove to a hawk on defense spending did not come overnight. Until his shift, the Pentagon’s own study of Brown’s tenure as Defense secretary ominously noted that the Soviet Union “came closer to matching the U.S. in strategic power than it had in any other period.”65 Paid for by Soviet oil, as OPEC prices rose sharply in the 1970s, Soviet technology was converted into advanced weapons. Always suspicious of the Pentagon’s expense budget requests and expansive promises, Carter rigorously scrutinized them along with his national security team at a critical June 4, 1979, meeting. Intelligence was pouring into the Pentagon about the size and scope of the Soviet military buildup, leading to a new and more pessimistic NSC assessment of Soviet strength. Carter was still suspicious, complaining that the assessment of relative strength was based on a perception of weakness he complained had been created by “people in the room,” who in turn created a problem “by their own excessive concentration on our weaknesses.” But by the end of the meeting, Carter agreed to deploy theater nuclear weapons in Europe and the MX missile. This was not only because of the unanimous view of his advisers, even the dovish Vance, but as a way to convince conservative hawkish senators to support the forthcoming SALT II arms control treaty. Carter’s about-face on significantly raising defense spending thus came well before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.66
That same day, I gained a personal perspective on how difficult it was to make the shift on defense spending at a senior White House staff meeting. Carter told us the MX missile would cost $78 billion in 1980 dollars, and was “a total waste.… I am almost physically nauseated [emphasis added] by the NSC deferring to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then they sit back and critique my decisions. I need someone on the international side like Stu on the domestic side, who looks at issues from the perspective of being president.”67 However complimented I felt, we were already moving toward the larger military budgets that he had envisioned, but doing so cautiously, not only because of his conservative nature, but his own experience in the military. But change he did, however grudgingly, and in a big way.
Soon afterward, Carter told congressional leaders that while defense spending had declined before he took office, it had now actually risen in real (inflation-adjusted) terms during his presidency and, he promised, would continue to rise until 1985. As a Pentagon study concluded years later, the investments in new weaponry that Carter mapped out at midterm represented the largest increases in defense spending since the Vietnam War and laid the foundation for Reagan’s huge defense spending.68 Carter maintained his pledge to our NATO allies to increase defense spending by an average of 3 percent in real terms, even with high inflation during his term, according to a U.S. Army War College study cleared by the Defense Department decades after he left office.69 Defense spending during his term increased from 4.7 percent of GDP to 5.2 percent of GDP.70
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Despite all of its dissonance, Carter eventually developed a coherent Cold War strategy in the second half of his administration, focusing first on new ground weapons systems. Funding for missiles increased by two-thirds as the army received tube-launched, optically-tracked, wire-guided antitank missiles and Roland air-defense missiles. A new wave of armored combat vehicles increased that part of the defense budget by one-quarter, and the president requested funds to accelerate deployment of the army’s heavy divisions, to stockpile ordnance in Europe, and to fund reserve units.
It is totally unrecognized that Carter’s top priority, given his engineering background, was American strategic superiority over the Soviet Union through technology. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan at the end of 1979, his final budget outlined funding for the XM-1 tanks, armored troop carriers with antitank missiles, stand-alone antitank missiles, howitzers, laser-guided artillery shells that could home in on a tank up to ten miles away, large-scale antitank rockets, antitank attack helicopters, Hellfire missiles, and more accurate target guidance for the army’s M-60 tanks.
His goal was not simply to stock up on nuclear bombs, but to maintain superiority through diverse weapons systems and “advanced technology to stay ahead in the arms race,”71 including new Stealth technology that could not be detected by Soviet radar. To counter the Soviets’ larger missile launchers and multiple warheads, Carter and Brown viewed it as essential for the United States to diversify its forces so that no possible combination of attacks would leave the country unable to retaliate. In Brown’s strategic view—and he had led development of the submarine-launched Polaris missile while still at Cal Tech—in a nuclear war it would not matter whether you had one hundred or ten thousand warheads. The Soviets were spending all their money on duplicating their forces, but the Carter administration was creating an adaptable military that could retaliate against any attack. Carter was the ideal president to support Brown’s innovations because he understood them: One of his assignments had been as an electronic warfare officer testing the navy’s latest fire-control systems.72
Although wary of spending billions on ineffective weapons systems with fatal strategic flaws like the B-1, Carter nevertheless realized he needed to silence defense hawks to gain their support for SALT II, so he supported the MX missile system. The MX was a massive intercontinental ballistic missile with up to ten independently targeted reentry vehicles, with greater accuracy and range than the aging Minuteman missile, and designed to evade increasingly accurate Soviet guidance systems. In 1979 Carter gave the go-ahead for its development and basing plan, and it was deployed during the Reagan administration.
While Reagan usually gets the credit for overwhelming the Soviet Union with military spending, it was Carter who laid the groundwork for a more balanced force. The Kremlin understood the future implications of Carter’s strategic weapons program and began to feel increasingly impotent and isolated. Soviet concern about Carter’s military buildup is validated in a book written by the CIA’s longtime employee Benjamin B. Fischer and published by the agency’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, disclosing secret Soviet KBG documents of the time.73 They show that the Soviet Politburo recognized it was facing a new reality as the Carter administration began catching up with the Soviet military buildup, a race that Reagan, to his credit, later accelerated. Fischer cites a compelling summary of an interview with then KGB head Yuri Andropov (later General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party), supported by a top-secret KGB document: “Carter’s presidency created great concern in the Kremlin, because he had presented a defense budget of more than $157 billion, which he invested in the MX and Trident missiles and nuclear submarines.” This was more than the Soviets and their allies could match.74
While Reagan doubled down on all of this, in the view of no less than Bush’s and Obama’s former defense secretary Robert Gates, who served on the NSC staff in the Carter administration, the perception of revived American strategic power and strength that emerged in the first half of the 1980s was, in fact, “Reagan reaping the harvest sown by Nixon, Ford, and Carter.”75
THE REAL STORY OF THE NEUTRON BOMB
In the efforts to separate the effective weapons from the duds, none proved more troublesome than an ingenious proposal for a nuclear device unde
r the typically euphemistic label of “enhanced radiation weapon”—soon to be widely known and reviled as the neutron bomb. It had been proposed in Ford’s final military budget as an antitank weapon to be deployed in Europe. Only a Dr. Strangelove might have found it innocuous. If it were possible for any nuclear weapon to be relatively humane, it was this one, by killing Soviet tank crews while limiting damage to civilians and Europe’s historic cities.76 This was the reasoning of its inventor, a nuclear physicist named Samuel Cohen, who lobbied the Pentagon for years and finally sold it as a moral and sane weapon to James Schlesinger, then Ford’s intellectual Defense secretary and later Carter’s energy secretary.
Dr. Cohen’s nuclear brainstorm took the incoming Carter administration totally by surprise. The genesis of the weapon lay in NATO’s need to counteract a classic Soviet defensive strategy of bunching a mass of tanks like an iron fist, first to break an invasion force from the West and then to counterattack through enemy lines and sweep across Europe’s northern plains. That was the way the might of the Red Army defeated the highly maneuverable Panzer divisions led by Hitler’s generals in the decisive 1943 Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history. Brezhnev’s military buildup raised fears it might happen again, with Warsaw Pact tank forces outnumbering NATO’s three to one. A neutron bomb, launched from artillery or airplanes, would force Soviet tank formations to spread out and lose their advantage. Brown also realized it would force Soviet military planners to rethink their entire conventional-war strategy, because the weapon’s destructive force came from intense radiation within a small radius.
Walter Pincus, a respected investigative reporter for the Washington Post, found the funding for the device buried in the Defense Appropriations Bill, and on June 6, 1977, the newspaper ran a story headlined “Neutron Killer Warhead Buried in ERDA [Energy Research and Development Agency] Budget.” This was the first time Vance, Brzezinski, and the president had ever heard of a weapon they would have to decide whether to deploy. Not to be outdone, the New York Times referred to it as an “especially ugly weapon.”77 Within days a panicky sense of crisis spread to Western Europe.
As Brown later lamented, if the original headline had read “Bomb Kills Tank Commanders, Leaves Building and Its Inhabitants Undamaged,” the result might have been vastly different, although perhaps not. What did not seem to penetrate the walls of the Pentagon was the European fear that this weapon could be a potential trigger for a wider nuclear war on their homeland, and that it could be started by a beleaguered American general on the battlefield without considering the consequences to European lives.78 It was quickly and angrily rejected by America’s European allies as a science-fiction horror that would kill people while leaving their homes standing empty. It became a first-rate embarrassment for the president and his top advisers, gave fodder to those who criticized his hardware buildup, and sowed dissension in the Western alliance it was designed to protect. A moral firestorm arose about the inhumanity of the neutron bomb, as if it was somehow worse than other nuclear weapons.
Mass rallies, petitions, and negative polls across Europe posed a dilemma for a president who had pledged in his inaugural address to move toward the goal of “the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this Earth.” It was one thing for the Americans and the Soviets to have intercontinental missiles aimed at each other in a Cold War standoff, but it was another for a new and frightening kind of nuclear weapon to be deployed on European—and particularly on German—soil. While the Europeans feared the Soviet buildup and looked to the United States for support, they were wary of what seemed like American callousness; to them it looked like a weapon meant to wage war on European territory while keeping America from suffering any real harm. The intense public backlash, egged on by sophisticated Soviet propaganda, gave the administration little room to maneuver. The production and deployment of the weapon was seen as a test of Carter’s plans to strengthen NATO, yet he was personally torn by the perceived inhumanity of the weapon, indeed of all nuclear weapons.
At a Democratic leadership breakfast in July,79 Carter urged Congress to approve funding for the bomb while giving him time to decide whether to produce it. But he doubted the concept of a supposedly cleaner bomb, and saw the potential for escalation because “once you go to an atomic war, it will be uncontrollable.” That of course was exactly what the Europeans feared. He astutely withdrew to the position that the United States would produce the weapon, but only if European nations agreed to deploy it on their soil.80
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Thus began one of the most serious decision-making messes of the administration. Vance, Brown, and Brzezinski spent almost a year working together to gain European assent. In October 1977 Brzezinski told the cabinet that the leaders of France, Britain, and Germany opposed its deployment in Europe.81 But things were more complicated than that. Within each nation there was a severe split between military leaders who wanted the bomb and political leaders who did not.82 It was easy enough to sell the project to military commanders and defense officials, but not to the politicians who would suffer the backlash from their own voters.
The longer the negotiations dragged on, the more doubtful deployment seemed. Carter had campaigned on a platform of nuclear nonproliferation, and his principal goal with the Soviets was to come to an arms agreement. The festering issue of the neutron bomb was undermining his negotiating position, to say nothing of simply going against his personal values. He was concerned about being remembered as the president who green-lighted a bomb that would kill people but leave property intact.
But Brown, Vance, and Brzezinski continued their complex negotiations to gain European assent. Most difficult of all was the leader most directly involved, Helmut Schmidt of West Germany, whose country stood as the front line against the Soviets, and who seemed to enjoy disparaging Carter as a provincial unfit for international diplomacy. Although able and respected throughout Europe, he was no diplomat himself; one of his nicknames at home was Schmidt Schnauze (Schmidt the Lip). He finally agreed to deployment, but only if other allied nations agreed too—not just those who had their own nuclear weapons, like the British, but others whose weak coalition governments were most likely too fragile to bear the political burdens. By mid-March 1978, after what Vance called a “nerve-wracking week of nonstop negotiations,”83 the British, Germans, French, Dutch, Belgians, and the Scandinavians finally agreed to a NATO alliance statement of collective support for the neutron bomb, an ambiguous declaration worded to protect any individual politician from becoming a target.
A meeting of the North Atlantic Council of political leaders was set for March 20, and two days before, the administration negotiating team sent a joint memo to the president outlining the plan, whereupon he exploded over this final communiqué, so carefully drafted. He was vacationing on the islands off the Georgia coast when he first learned how far his team had come in promising the neutron bomb. He “raised hell about it,” seeing it as equivalent to “cluster bombs,” obviously thinking the Europeans would never agree to deploy the neutron bomb.84
He immediately requested cancellation of the NATO Council meeting, summoning the three exhausted cabinet-level draftsmen for an angry session that lasted four and one-half hours. Carter complained that his cautionary words about the bomb had been ignored, and the ambiguous declaration meant that all the political responsibility for producing it would be placed on him. He told the three that they had backed him into a corner. Angry recriminations and mutual misunderstandings flew back and forth, and at one point Carter said: “I wish I had never heard of this weapon.” Zbig confided to me that he was “very low and despondent” that Carter did not support his team’s success in finally obtaining European approval, and the president had been unduly cautious only because of “public opinion.”85 Brzezinski made one last try to salvage something from the wreckage, outlining yet another diplomatic course linked to arms-control negotiations. Carter penned a curt reply on the memo: “Zbig, I must say that you never give up.�
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Militarily not much was lost by cancellation of the project; even if Carter had agreed to produce the bomb it most likely would never have been deployed in Europe. But Carter’s ability to lead NATO was attacked, and European governments felt that they had been forced out on a limb and then abandoned. The clumsy handling of the whole affair made it appear to the Europeans that the United States did not know what it was doing, a not-unreasonable conclusion given the painful decision-making process. This was exacerbated by Schmidt’s public denunciations when Carter backed out, that he had been made to look like “a fool in the understanding of my countrymen,” as Schmidt later put it to me.87
Carter himself recognized the breakdown of communication within his own administration, and that he had not made it clear enough that he actually abhorred the weapon.88 Of such different perspectives is history made. The one thing, however, that emerged intact was Carter’s adherence to his moral values and his strength of character in making what he considered the correct choice. But as with so many of his righteous decisions, he paid a frightful political cost at home and abroad.
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