We need a new policy that recognizes the Soviets for what they are but which is designed to deal with them in an effective way. In developing a strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union, we must first take the steps necessary to assure a sound American economy. A strong, productive, growing economy is the indispensable foundation for the role the United States must play in the world. Without a strong economy we cannot have a strong foreign policy. Without a strong economy we will not be able to afford the defense expenditures necessary to deter Soviet aggression. Without a strong economy we will not be able to finance our foreign-assistance program for our friends and allies threatened by aggression. Most important, a strong, free economy can be a powerful example for newly developing countries that are searching for the road to progress with freedom. A protectionist, isolationist, fiscally irresponsible America weakens our ability to lead through the power of our ideas as well as through our military power.
In U.S.–Soviet relations, what America needs is a comprehensive policy that combines deterrence, competition, and negotiation.
We must start by recognizing that we must undertake whatever actions are necessary to ensure the security of the United States and its allies. That must involve keeping up our nuclear deterrent. We will not be able to agree with Moscow on total disarmament. We will not be able to build a perfect defense against nuclear weapons. We should decide today what kinds of strategic forces we need to best deter the Soviet Union in the future. We must also maintain forces sufficient to deter a Soviet attack on our key allies in Europe and the Far East and on our vital interests in the Persian Gulf.
Our task is to deter the Soviet Union not only at the nuclear level but also on the conventional level in Europe and elsewhere. Great as the task may be, we can succeed. As B. H. Liddell Hart wrote of the Soviets, “Their very belief in force makes them more susceptible to the deterrent effect of a formidable opposing force.”
Beyond deterrence, the United States must adopt the policies necessary to compete effectively with the Soviet Union across the board on those issues and in those areas in which mutual agreements are not possible. There will eventually be a winner and a loser in the American–Soviet rivalry—and we cannot win if we fail to compete.
Our negotiating strategy must also be founded on an understanding of what the two superpowers can agree about and what we cannot agree about.
We can agree on measures to reduce the likelihood of accidental nuclear war. We can agree on ways to reduce and stabilize the strategic nuclear balance. We can agree on means to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. We can agree on ways to resolve some—but not all—conflicts in contentious regions of the world. We can agree on ways to structure mutually beneficial relations, such as trade and cultural exchange. We should work with the Soviet Union to prevent conflicts in the Third World from erupting into a major war, while not expecting to settle all the differences that divide the two superpowers in those conflicts. All of those issues belong in the negotiating process.
We should make it clear that we are prepared for a genuinely peaceful and cooperative relationship whenever they are. But we should also make it clear that the burden of overcoming Western suspicion rests with the Kremlin, because it arose not from paranoia on our part but from a long history of aggression on their part. We should reward positive change but must keep the reward proportionate to their actions, not to our hopes.
We have never had an adequate comprehensive strategy for deterring Moscow, for competing with Moscow, and for negotiating with Moscow. We must develop one today or risk repeating the failures of the recent past. If we ignore any one of these three key tasks—deterrence, competition, and negotiation—we will do irreparable damage to the chances of forging real peace between the superpowers.
Finally, in our election campaigns and in the halls of Congress we should debate our differences about policy toward the Soviet Union fairly and freely. Let us agree that those who are anti-Soviet are not prowar and that those who are antiwar are not pro-Soviet. The issue is not whether a policy is anticommunist. Anticommunism is not a policy. It is a faith—faith in freedom. Most Americans support the faith, but they disagree about the policy that will best defend or extend the faith. We should debate the policy without questioning the faith of those who disagree with us.
If Tocqueville were alive today, what would he predict for the future of the American–Soviet struggle?
No doubt he would shake his head over the sorry state of American policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. He would conclude he was correct in writing that in “foreign affairs democractic governments do appear decidedly inferior to others” and that “a democracy finds it difficult to coordinate the details of a great undertaking and to fix on some plan and carry it through with determination in spite of obstacles.” Consequently, he would be forced to acknowledge that Moscow holds a natural advantage in the American–Soviet conflict.
We should not despair at Tocqueville’s hypothetical conclusion. We should take it as constructive criticism and turn it to our advantage. His pessimism about the capabilities of a democracy in foreign policy does not tell the whole story. America’s inherent economic and political strength is so great that it overcomes our weakness in executing foreign policy. Moscow’s inherent economic and political weakness is so great that its strength in executing policy cannot compensate. If the United States sharpens its skills in strategy and foreign policy, it will have overcome the key weakness about which Tocqueville warned.
If we adopt a strategy combining deterrence, competition, and negotiation, we can succeed in building a structure for real peace beyond 1999.
The change we would like to see in the Soviet Union will not come soon, but we should never lose patience in trying to bring it about. Most important, we must put it into historical perspective. Before I went to Moscow in 1959 Harold Macmillan pointed out to me that one hundred years had elapsed between Queen Elizabeth I, who sent her advisers who fell out of favor to the scaffold, and Queen Anne, who sent those she did not like into exile. Only five years elapsed between Stalin, who had his adversaries executed, and Khrushchev, who sent Malenkov out to run a power plant in Siberia.
Gorbachev is in an enviable position. He can become not just the man of the year but the man of the century. He comes on the center stage of history at a time when his decisions as to which way he leads his country will affect the lives of not only his own people but all of the people in the world. Change in the Soviet Union can lead to a safer world or to a more dangerous world. How much, what kind, and how fast change will take place under Gorbachev depends on him and on us.
3
HOW TO
DETER MOSCOW
We live in a world with nuclear weapons. Since that fact is not going to change, we must learn to live with the bomb. We must also recognize that achieving our two most important goals, avoiding nuclear war and avoiding defeat without war, depends on the existence of the bomb. We cannot begin to build real peace unless we can deter the Kremlin leaders from engaging in nuclear war or nuclear blackmail. A structure of real peace can only be founded on the bedrock of nuclear deterrence.
Nuclear weapons revolutionized the way the world works. In the age of balance-of-power politics, war was an accepted tactic of statecraft. Armed conflict took place between armies and left civilian populations largely untouched. Not so today. A direct clash between the superpowers would almost certainly escalate to nuclear weapons. Over 400 million people in the United States and the Soviet Union alone would be killed in an all-out exchange. In the nuclear age, war can no longer be used as an instrument of policy by one superpower against the other. It is no longer an exaggeration to say that the next war would be a “war to end all wars,” because it would also end civilization as we know it.
Some analysts contend that since firing nuclear weapons risks catastrophic retaliation, no rational leader could ever contemplate their use and that therefore they are useless. That view is wrong. While the great nuc
lear arsenals of the superpowers would have no military utility in a total war, they continue to have political utility in the American–Soviet rivalry: nuclear weapons can still be used to intimidate. What has been termed the unusability of nuclear weapons makes them more usable to the Soviet Union than to the West. As Stalin once said, “Nuclear weapons are things that can be used to frighten people with weak nerves.”
Soviet nuclear blackmail, not nuclear war, is the principal danger facing the United States and our allies in the remainder of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. If we hope to make progress toward real peace in the years before 1999, we must understand the meaning of superiority in the nuclear age and adopt the arms-control and defense policies needed to keep Moscow from acquiring it.
Ironically, the enormous destructive power of nuclear weapons has spawned three contradictory ideas about how to avoid war. Some argue that total disarmament is the only answer to the nuclear dilemma. Others hold that the sole remedy lies in total military superiority. Still others contend that a perfect defense will make nuclear weapons obsolete. All three of these views are deceptive myths. Looking directly at a nuclear explosion would leave a person blind. Contemplating the horrors of an irradiated planet or a world ruled from the Kremlin has apparently left many people intellectually blind.
Those who believe in the myth of peace through disarmament argue that the source of all evil in the world is the arms race and that therefore absolute priority in superpower negotiations should go to arms-control talks. They contend that the United States should not link progress in arms control to progress on other issues. These talks should seek to eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth or at least to reduce massively the current nuclear stockpiles of the superpowers. Total disarmament, in their view, would guarantee peace.
Arms controllers fail to understand the basic fact that since arms are not the cause of war, arms control cannot produce peace. War results not from the existence of arms but from the political differences among nations that lead to the use of arms. An arms race has never caused a war, but aggressive powers with territorial ambitions often have. War becomes most likely not when a defensive power and an offensive power both engage in an arms race, but when a defensive power falls behind and loses the race. A buildup of arms is a symptom, not a cause, of political conflicts. While we should seek to alleviate the symptom, we must not ignore the disease.
A great reduction in the nuclear arsenals will not solve the nuclear dilemma. Since the 1950s, we have reduced the actual explosive power of the U.S. nuclear arsenal by a factor of twenty, but we still have enormous destructive power. Even if the two superpowers were to agree to destroy half of their current nuclear weapons, each side would still have over five thousand strategic warheads, each many times more powerful than the atomic bombs that wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A war between the superpowers would still bring the end of civilization. As Deng Xiaoping commented to me in 1985, “The United States and the Soviet Union now have the power to destroy the world ten times over. Would the world be any safer if they could destroy it only five times over?”
Those who call for the elimination of nuclear weapons are living in a dream world. People understandably long for the day when the threat of nuclear war will be lifted. Talking as if we could bring this about by an arms-control agreement to get rid of all nuclear weapons may be good politics, but it is bad statesmanship. If men were angels, we could ban the bomb. But they are not. We should not advocate arms-control policies that pretend that they are.
To sign an agreement with the Soviet Union to eliminate nuclear weapons would be a catastrophe. Our defense policy is decided in public; theirs is formed in total secrecy. Moscow could be sure that the United States would keep the agreement, but we would never know whether the Kremlin was breaking it. That would risk disaster. Cheating would give the Kremlin a nuclear monopoly and would imperil our national survival. Even if the Soviet Union did not cheat, banning the bomb is not in our interest. Moscow has overwhelming superiority in conventional forces. The West counters that edge with the threat of nuclear escalation. A world without nuclear weapons would be a world under Soviet domination.
Even if we succeeded in eliminating the bomb, no agreement between the superpowers could abolish the knowledge of how to make the bomb. Nuclear weapons are based on simple principles of physics, and nuclear technology is within the reach of a dozen countries. Both the United States and the Soviet Union could assemble a new nuclear arsenal in a matter of days. A world without the bomb would be a world far more perilous than today’s. A crisis between the superpowers would be like a showdown between two gunslingers at high noon: A quicker hand to the draw in assembling new nuclear weapons would lead to total victory. But while a showdown in the Old West might kill one person, a shootout in the nuclear age could kill one hundred million.
Calling for the “elimination of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth” is nothing more than a political applause line. When elevated to the level of a presidential policy, as occurred during both the Carter and Reagan administrations, it has clouded the public debate and diverted our efforts toward unrealistic goals. We must recognize that the “ban the bomb” syndrome has no place in a serious discussion of how to create real peace in the nuclear age.
Regaining total military superiority is another myth of peace in the nuclear age. Those who advocate this view contend that if the United States spends enough money and builds enough missiles it can regain the superiority it enjoyed from 1945 until the late 1960s. To achieve total offensive nuclear superiority, the United States would need to build strategic forces capable of destroying all of the Soviet Union’s retaliatory weapons in a first strike. That would require construction of over a thousand new highly accurate land-based missiles. This idea fails the test of basic common sense. Since Congress has in the last eight years cut the MX-missile deployment from 200 to 100 to 50, and finally to 40, no one can seriously argue that it would provide the funds for building 1,000. Also, there is no way that the Soviet Union would acquiesce as the United States moved to gain total superiority. Whatever its economic problems, Moscow would spend the money needed to prevent the United States from attaining that decisive lead. Neither superpower can accept nuclear superiority by the other. The security of one superpower cannot be based on the insecurity of the other.
A call for a perfect defense against ballistic missiles is just an updated version of the myth of perfect peace through total military superiority. A defense to protect the American people from nuclear attack by ballistic missiles would have to be perfect. Even if a defense were to stop 99 percent of enemy warheads, in an all-out war the remaining one percent would represent 100 nuclear bombs, which would inflict cataclysmic casualties on the American people. What is worse, the likelihood that we could build a 99-percent-effective defense is remote. Advocates of a total population defense call for us to create a “space shield.” But for now all we can realistically build is a space sieve. Research on a population defense should continue, but we cannot assume that it is the answer to our problem until we know what it will be able to do.
Even a perfect shield against ballistic missiles would not make nuclear weapons obsolete. It could not defend against nuclear bombs carried on long-range bombers. It could not defend against nuclear warheads carried on cruise missiles, which can be launched from any Soviet aircraft, ship, or submarine and which can fly so low that radar cannot detect them. It certainly could not defend against small nuclear devices smuggled into the United States. No one who understands the issue can seriously argue that the United States—whose borders are so porous that thousands of drug smugglers and millions of illegal immigrants cross them with little risk—could deploy a perfect defense against the bomb in the foreseeable future.
While we cannot make nuclear weapons obsolete by a perfect defense, a limited defense of U.S. strategic forces is possible now. It is also desirable. As we think about the role of strategic defense in det
errence, we must always make the distinction between a population defense, which is a dream in the next century, and a defense of U.S. strategic forces, which could be a reality in this century. We should pursue the Strategic Defense Initiative to enhance deterrence, not to substitute for it.
At the Reykjavik summit in 1986, the United States made the mistake of combining the myth of total disarmament and the myth of a perfect defense and calling it a strategy. President Reagan agreed to Gorbachev’s proposal that the United States and the Soviet Union eliminate all nuclear weapons in ten years. The President also insisted that after ten years each superpower be allowed to deploy a nationwide defense of its population as an insurance against Soviet cheating. What happened at Reykjavik was a classic example of an administration becoming a captive of its own rhetoric.
Our subsequent progress in arms-control negotiations has been in spite of, not because of, the Reykjavik summit. No genuine progress on the central issue of arms control—the strategic balance between the superpowers—will be possible until the mythologists of Reykjavik abandon the twin fantasies of eliminating all nuclear weapons and of making nuclear weapons obsolete.
There are those who contend that, since the United States cannot resurrect its nuclear superiority of the 1950s and 1960s, superiority does not matter in the nuclear age. That view is wrong. While the United States no longer seeks superiority, we must deny superiority to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union clearly will do whatever is necessary to prevent the United States from acquiring total superiority. It is an open question whether the opposite is true. If there is an arms race between the superpowers, the United States can certainly keep up. The problem is that for the last two decades the Soviet Union has been racing and the United States has not left the starting line.
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