DIPLOMACY BLUNTS A NEW SOVIET MISSILE THREAT
One of Jimmy Carter’s most sterling attributes was his capacity to bounce back from defeat. He did so in winning allied support to deploy Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe to counter a new Soviet threat. As part of the Soviet military buildup, Brezhnev made the decision during Carter’s first year in office to deploy what were called theater or tactical nuclear weapons, in contrast to the intercontinental ballistic missiles targeted by the superpowers at each other. Across Eastern Europe the Soviets were deploying their new SS-20 mobile missiles, carrying multiple warheads that could take out the cities of Western Europe at the press of a button. They could target one country without directly threatening its neighbor, and their deadly accuracy made them ideal for Soviet political blackmail of individual European countries. Brezhnev was testing the limits of Soviet power by putting our NATO allies at risk—one by one if he wished—and seeking to undermine American influence by trying to demonstrate that the United States could not protect its European allies from Soviet power.
Allied governments agreed at the London summit of 1977 that something had to be done in the European theater. But what? Since the 1950s NATO had relied on its combined U.S., British, and French nuclear weapons to offset the Soviet conventional military advantage in tanks, artillery, and manpower. But the NATO nuclear forces, while significant, were composed mainly of aging short- and medium-range tactical weapons, and the alliance had a very limited capability to threaten nuclear retaliation with weapons based in Europe alone.
On August 24 1977, Carter signed a national strategy directive, NSD-18, to counterbalance Soviet influence and military power in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia.89 Carter also reaffirmed that the United States would fulfill its commitment to raise the level of defense spending by approximately 3 percent per year along with our NATO allies.90
Carter followed this up at the start of 1979 with a summit meeting on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe with Britain’s Callaghan, France’s Giscard D’Estaing, and Germany’s Schmidt, during which he argued that NATO had to respond to the Soviet buildup. He had been increasingly frustrated that European nations seemed agreeable to U.S. development of new weapons, while no European leader was willing to accept them in his own country. Giscard supported Carter, and Schmidt said he would accept new U.S. weapons only if other leaders would too. Callaghan also supported Carter, adding that the European medium-range systems should be included in negotiations for the overall limitations of nuclear weapons through SALT.
After intensive negotiations the NATO summit on December 12, 1979, adopted the “dual-track” policy of simultaneous preparations to install new intermediate nuclear missiles in Western Europe, and to hold disarmament negotiations with the Soviet Union. The United States would continue to pressure the Soviets at SALT talks to limit or remove their SS-20 nuclear force, and if Moscow refused, a retaliatory nuclear force of 464 new cruise missiles and 108 Pershing II ballistic mobile missiles would be deployed in Europe, where they could strike targets in the Soviet Union from Germany, Italy, Britain, and the Netherlands.91 The policy required firm American leadership, but those on the diplomatic front lines found themselves facing a new level of skepticism about American motives and power.
Reginald Bartholomew, the senior staffer handling the nuclear brief at the National Security Council (and later a distinguished ambassador to Lebanon and Italy), was dispatched to a NATO meeting in Brussels. He remarked privately to American reporters: “Only a few years back, if we had needed to station some weapons or divisions across NATO, someone would have come from Washington, informed the Europeans, and said, ‘You take so many here, and you station some more there, and so on’—and that would be that. Not anymore.”92
Brezhnev publicly attacked the deployment plans and turned the dual-track strategy against NATO by advocating arms-control negotiations that would disrupt the NATO decision. He launched a major “peace offensive” by announcing unilateral troop and tank withdrawals from East Germany, and offering to reduce the number of Soviet medium-range missiles in exchange for a NATO promise not to deploy any missiles at all.
The administration response was that the Soviets needed to be convinced that their military moves would be met with serious retaliation by NATO, and that this restored balance would in turn lead to restraint on both sides. Carter believed that the United States needed to take a stronger stance against the Soviet offensive, rather than remaining content in the state of détente that preceded his administration; and he followed through with strong allied support. But Carter’s position was as unpopular with the European public as the neutron bomb, and there were enormous anti-American, anti-Carter demonstrations in Europe. The administration pressed ahead, and Soviet propaganda proved less effective with elites than with the public. The missiles themselves were finally deployed in 1983 by Ronald Reagan on the basis of the Carter-led 1979 NATO agreement, after negotiations failed to achieve a Soviet withdrawal of the SS-20s.93
With Carter’s leadership, the steps taken by NATO marked a historic turning point in reaffirming the military and political value of the alliance, as well as an important change in Soviet relations with Washington and Europe, that had been dwindling in influence and importance for several years. Gates gave Carter the credit for “the lion’s share of the work and the leadership that shaped an alliance consensus.”94
A historic figure to attest to this was no less than the last head of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. He would later assert that Brezhnev’s deployment of the SS-20s was “an unforgivable adventure,” and that the deployment of the Pershing and cruise missiles “was a pistol held to our head” that helped convince him that Brezhnev’s aggressive policies needed to be replaced by disarmament and cooperation. As a result, in 1987, he proposed the complete elimination of the SS-20s and the U.S. missiles, a mutual withdrawal that Reagan accepted.
Gorbachev also felt it “represented the first well-prepared step on our way out of the Cold War, the first harbinger of the new times.”95 It does nothing to diminish Ronald Reagan’s legacy to place Jimmy Carter’s role in proper perspective. Gorbachev’s own words could stand as Jimmy Carter’s enduring legacy, even if he had done nothing else.
Why, then, is Carter seen as weak on defense to this day? Partly because of his campaign rhetoric to cut the defense budget, when in fact he substantially increased it. But the simple answer is that his more visible decisions to limit the Pentagon’s characteristic and expensive programs to develop the ultimate weapon, his opposition to the B-bomber, and a debacle like the neutron bomb, were so highly visible that they overwhelmed progress elsewhere. The president emphasized other military priorities and was so focused on cost-effectiveness that he sent mixed messages. This cut across the rivalry among the Joint Chiefs of Staff for expensive weapons, even when they duplicated those in rival services.96 It is no surprise that his relationship with his military leaders was never warm and that it spread to their supporters in Congress, where members of the House Armed Services Committee accused Carter of ignoring advice from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Given their rivalry, it is not hard to understand why.
During the first few months of the administration none of the Joint Chiefs was invited to dinners with visiting foreign leaders, and one incident left a sour taste. Brown was pushing for a pay raise of 4 or 5 percent for the military, many of whom the secretary felt were grossly underpaid. Carter sent Brown a handwritten letter saying that when he served in the Navy, his principal motivation certainly was not money. Brown locked the potentially explosive letter in his safe, but someone in the White House leaked a copy, most likely under the misapprehension that it would demonstrate Carter’s humility and hardworking devotion. It did exactly the reverse. Military leaders saw it as a jibe at them for seeking higher pay, and this only helped perpetuate the sense that Carter’s values were at odds with their own.97
MORE SALT
One of Carter’s most heartfelt goals was r
educing the threat of nuclear war. He inherited the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, SALT I, between the United States and the Soviet Union, signed in 1972, an essential tenet of the policy of détente. Kissinger, with some hyperbole, declared the agreement’s acceptance of mutually assured destruction as “one of the greatest diplomatic coups of all time.” It limited the number of ballistic missiles that each nation could deploy to 2,360 for the Soviets and 1,710 for the Americans, and gave the USSR a numerical advantage in the number of land- and sea-based ballistic missile launchers, further enhanced by the number of MIRV missiles mounted on them.98
SALT I, which was an interim agreement of five years due to expire in October of Carter’s first year in office, did not place a ceiling on the number of heavy bombers or missiles equipped with these MIRVs. A framework agreement for an updated treaty—SALT II—was negotiated by Kissinger and signed by Ford at a summit with Brezhnev in Vladivostok in November 1974 to correct the imbalance in SALT I. The goal was a ceiling on each side of 2,400 for all launchers of strategic nuclear delivery vehicles, of which a maximum subceiling could be 1,320 launchers for MIRV missiles. But politics intervened during the 1976 primaries, when Ronald Reagan challenged Ford for making concessions to the Soviet Union, and Ford backed away from his own agreement.
Like many other Democrats, Carter felt that the treaty had to be renegotiated. But his national security team was divided on whether to use the Vladivostok framework or pursue a more robust agreement with the Soviets to slow the arms race. Carter understood that any American negotiator would have to proceed from a position of military strength, but the Soviets were worried by Carter’s strong rhetoric advocating the reduction of nuclear weapons, and his human rights campaign on behalf of Soviet dissidents.
Undeterred, Carter wrote a generally friendly letter to Brezhnev during his first week in the White House emphasizing his goal of improving relations and the importance of arms control. Dobrynin told him at their first meeting that the Soviets had decided not to confront the new president early in his term, but warned that departing from the Vladivostok agreement would create serious problems for the Kremlin in future arms talks.99 Nevertheless, even in the face of Dobyrin’s warning, Carter acted quickly, decisively, and dramatically, setting a characteristically bold course toward comprehensive arms reductions over incremental advances, just as he had on other issues touching his deep personal goals, such as energy and the Middle East.
He faced two options, and again they put Vance and Brzezinski on opposite sides. The new secretary of state saw the advantage of deep cuts in gaining support from defense hawks like Scoop Jackson, but he realized that the Soviets would likely reject them, and argued that Carter should have a backup approach to take advantage of the new administration’s momentum and reach a quick agreement based on the Vladivostok formula. Then a third treaty, SALT III, later on, could tackle more contentious issues like limitations on cruise missiles and the new Soviet Backfire bomber.100 On the contrary, argued Brzezinski, the presidential honeymoon period offered the perfect opportunity to take steps toward long-term security goals by pressing at once for cuts to slow the nuclear arms race, even though it was unlikely that such a demanding negotiation could be completed by the October expiration of SALT I. He later denied he foisted this go-for-broke negotiating strategy of deep cuts on Carter, but that is what the president did—significantly on his own initiative.101
Even before making this fateful choice, Carter had made another during the transition as president-elect, when I organized postelection briefings at Miss Lillian’s Pond House in Plains. The session on national security quickly devolved into a remarkable half-hour debate between Paul Warnke and Paul Nitze on the decisions looming about SALT II. These were two experienced arms-control experts. Nitze was deeply skeptical about Soviet intentions, and Warnke was certain that a better and more comprehensive agreement could be reached. Both had impeccable credentials, although Nitze’s were deeper. Slim, intense, and unsmiling, Nitze had been an investment banker, headed the State Department’s policy-planning staff under Truman, and served as navy secretary and deputy secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He had also been a member of the SALT I delegation but resigned because he felt the treaty yielded too much to the Soviets.
Warnke, chunky, smiling, and avuncular, was a distinguished Washington lawyer, and like Nitze had held a senior Pentagon position during the Johnson administration, although he became a skeptic on the Vietnam War and later served as a principal adviser to George McGovern in his 1972 presidential campaign.102
They went at each other as if world peace were at stake every bit as much as their next jobs in government. Warnke had published an article in Foreign Affairs describing the United States as an offender in the arms race, along with the Soviets, that made both superpowers push for increased defense capabilities, on the ground that aping each other “has meant the absence of restraint.” He argued that the United States could present a worthier model and take the first steps toward disarmament, based on his belief that the arms race could be reversed by a strong American commitment. As a nonexpert, I felt Nitze made the best points, and that given his credentials any SALT agreement he could negotiate would have instant credibility in Congress. But Carter was the one who counted, and he saw a kindred spirit in Warnke, whom he named chief arms negotiator and head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency to deal with all nuclear issues in the U.S.-Soviet relationship, and beyond.
That choice came at a heavy political cost. An early sign of the trouble for any future arms-control agreement was on vivid display in the Senate’s consideration of Warnke’s nomination, when no less than Nitze himself testified against his rival. Majority Leader Byrd came away from Warnke’s hearing declaring that many senators felt the nominee was “too soft to negotiate with the Soviet Union.” Warnke was eventually confirmed by a lukewarm vote of 58–40, which was well below the constitutional two-thirds Senate majority needed to confirm treaties, and lacked the support of Scoop Jackson and other defense hawks. It was a shot across the bow of SALT II; that did not stop Carter from favoring a new and more sweeping approach for nuclear arms. In his view the United States already had more than enough weapons to blow up the world, and stockpiling more was not only irrational, but negotiating cuts in that stockpile would mark a major change in the entire nuclear arms race.103 Carter believed that the Soviet side was also composed of rational men who would adopt his and Warnke’s goal of halting the nuclear arms race for the mutual benefit of the two superpowers and indeed the whole world.
To quiet the contending forces within the administration and to give the Soviets flexibility, Carter sent Vance to Moscow in March with two alternatives—either agree to extending Vladivostok with slightly lower limits on nuclear weapons of about 10 percent on each side, or begin negotiating deeper cuts. But, more important, Vance was to tell the Soviets the deep-cut option was the president’s preferred course. Indeed, in a departure from protocol that annoyed the Soviets, Carter had already told the UN General Assembly of his priority before private negotiations began.104
Moscow rejected both options. Their sclerotic leadership could not adapt to unexpected changes, and they began stretching out these complex negotiations with moves and counterproposals worthy of a team of chess grand masters. The SALT talks convened, adjourned, and reconvened through the spring and summer in Moscow, Washington, Geneva, and Vienna. By early autumn it appeared that progress could be made in narrowing the gap between the two sides on the number, size, and delivery capabilities of both ICBMs and new bombers.
Roused by news of progress, SALT opponents became more outspoken and warned that the Soviets were deceiving Carter and leading him into unilateral disarmament. Defense hawks and SALT critics released classified materials, published false allegations about U.S. concessions in the secret talks, and accused the Soviets of cheating on the first, interim SALT I agreement. The administration made special efforts to counter the inflam
matory rhetoric and cage the congressional hawks by arguing that lower nuclear limits would free up more money to modernize the American military, while playing an essential political role in improving relations with Moscow and disengaging from the arms race. Jackson and his allies were unconvinced and dismissed Carter’s approach as naive and dangerous—“McGovernism without McGovern,” they called it. 105
SALT II AND LINKAGE, AGAIN
As the talks dragged on, the diplomatic and political atmosphere was polluted by Moscow’s suspicions about Carter’s support for Soviet dissidents and Brezhnev’s military adventures in postcolonial Africa. Vance was at pains to insist that there was no connection, and that a SALT agreement “should be negotiated on its own merits.”106 Carter also publicly refused to link the war in Angola and the Horn of Africa to the SALT negotiations. But with more than 40,000 Cuban troops serving as Soviet proxies on both sides of the continent, Brzezinski felt otherwise. He argued that it was impossible to decouple these wars from nuclear diplomacy. He urged Carter to warn Brezhnev of the dangers to the superpower relationship if he persisted, with profound impact on American allies. Brzezinski declared on March 1 that Soviet involvement in Africa would inevitably complicate the SALT talks, only to have Carter immediately deny it and refuse to consider any options that might derail his principal goal of negotiating a reduction of nuclear weapons.107
But on June 17 Carter met with Brezhnev and changed his tone. Voicing concern at increasing Soviet intervention, he told Brezhnev: “I have tried to achieve peace, but the Soviet leaders have done just the opposite.”108 Brezhnev’s response showed total disdain and was laced with outright lies. He baldly asserted that Moscow did not control Cuba’s actions in Africa, even though it was funding Fidel Castro’s troops, supplying weapons, and even airlifting them into conflict zones. Twisting the knife, he lectured Carter: “Many foreign troops fought with George Washington during your own revolution.”109
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