VII
Détente: Zavidovo to San Clemente
FOUR days after the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman I was airborne for Moscow. No doubt the Soviets were bemused by this turn in our political scene; but it was too soon for even the most acute seismic ear to catch the scale of the pending earthquake. In the spring of 1973, Soviet-American relations were unusually free of tension. A second summit between Brezhnev and Nixon, this time on American soil, was due to take place in June and my few days in the Soviet Union, from May 4 to May 9, were to prepare for it. Away from the negotiating table on this trip I had a glimpse of Leonid Brezhnev that intrigues me today when I reflect on whether there can ever be a stable coexistence between us and the Soviet Union.
Upon arrival my colleagues and I were driven from Moscow’s Vnukovo II airport, not to the ponderous guest houses in the Lenin Hills in the western part of the capital, but to Zavidovo, the Politburo hunting preserve — the Soviet equivalent of Camp David — some ninety miles northeast of Moscow. We took off in a motorcade traveling at a speed of close to 100 miles per hour with cars tailgating each other and security vehicles scissoring in and out of the column. This reflected either deliberate psychological warfare or the propensity for suicide described in nineteenth-century Russian novels. The American party and its Soviet escorts could not possibly have survived if the lead car had stopped suddenly.
For all its perils, the journey was intended as a great honor. No Western leader had ever been invited to Zavidovo; the only other foreigners to visit it, I was told, had been Tito and President Urho Kekkonen of Finland. In light of what has happened since, the atmosphere of jovial if heavy-handed camaraderie may seem transparent. But at the time our Soviet hosts, headed by Brezhnev, certainly did their best to convey that good relations with the United States meant a great deal to them. They went out of their way to be hospitable, on occasion stiflingly so. Our meetings were conducted with easy banter and a minimum of the squeezing for extra advantage that is the usual hallmark of Soviet diplomacy.
Was it a ruse to lull us while the Kremlin prepared a geopolitical offensive? Or were the Soviets sobered by Nixon’s firmness into settling for a period of restraint reinforced by the possible gains from economic relations? Did they seek détente only as a tactical maneuver? Or was there a serious possibility for a long period of stability in US–Soviet relations? Could the Moscow summit of 1972 have been a turning point, or was it always destined simply to be an ephemeral moment of euphoria?
We can never know, and probably neither can the Soviet leaders. Within twelve months both Nixon’s capacity to oppose Soviet expansion and his authority to negotiate realistically had been undermined by Watergate. We lost both the stick and the carrot. Whether our East-West policy was doomed in any event by the dynamics of the Soviet system or by the inherent ambiguity of our conception will be debated for a long time. The issue became moot when the executive power in the United States collapsed. Fortunately for our state of mind, that future was still obscure when we arrived in Zavidovo.
The American party was housed in an East German-built villa resembling an oversized Swiss chalet blown out of scale by the heavy stolidity that in the Communist world denotes status. The exterior looked vaguely Alpine; the inside was all velvet-covered Victorian opulence. Some junior members of my party were housed in an old dormitorylike structure diagonally across a wide lawn from my residence. They spread out happily in a number of suites that had formerly been reserved for the Politburo before a newer and more modern wing had been added.
The largest private residence in the compound belonged to Brezhnev. It was a two-story chalet built in the same style as my residence, though on an even grander scale. The ground floor contained a number of large reception rooms filled with heavily upholstered furniture, a dining room, and a movie theater. The upper floor had a large living room, a study, and a bedroom. Each upstairs room opened on a balcony shaded by an overhanging roof. At right angles to Brezhnev’s villa and connected with it by passageways on each floor was a fully equipped gymnasium containing an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
Brezhnev came to my residence soon after my arrival and greeted me boisterously. A little later he invited my colleagues and me to dinner at his villa, which he first showed off with all the pride of a self-made entrepreneur. He asked me how much such an establishment would cost in the United States. I guessed tactlessly and mistakenly at four hundred thousand dollars. Brezhnev’s face fell. My associate Helmut Sonnenfeldt was psychologically more adept: Two million, he corrected — probably much closer to the truth. Brezhnev, vastly reassured, beamed and resumed his guided tour. He showed us with boyish pride a scrap-book of clippings and congratulatory telegrams from various Communist leaders on the occasion of his being awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. The near-absolute ruler of the Soviet Communist Party seemed to see nothing incongruous in boasting of an award from his own appointees and congratulations from those whose careers and political survival depended on him.
Brezhnev conducted almost all the negotiations for the Soviets; only highly technical subjects, such as the European Security Conference, were left to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Brezhnev’s repertory of jokes seemed as inexhaustible as the previous year’s, now spiced with a new familiarity that probably went further than he intended. His drinking was less restrained; one of his jokes, allegedly a Russian folk tale, was vaguely anti-Semitic — indicating perhaps that I had been promoted to an honorary equal!
The timetable was, as usual, enigmatic. No schedule or advance indication of subject matter was ever given, even though Brezhnev had no other visible program. Meetings occurred randomly, with little, if any, advance warning. Except for concluding the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War (which I shall discuss later), there was no definable agenda. Twice, when our conversations did not come up to Brezhnev’s hopes — on the Middle East, and on some dispute over the nuclear agreement — he sulked in his villa and refused to schedule another session. The Soviet Ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, did his best to minimize tensions; making Brezhnev appear like a man whose tender feelings required careful cultivation, he explained that his chief needed to regain his composure. When I maintained my position — simply by putting forward no additional thoughts — Brezhnev suddenly materialized again as if nothing had happened. His ploy having failed, he would then do the best with what he had and set about to restore an atmosphere of ebullient goodwill.
My team — Hal Sonnenfeldt, Philip Odeen, William Hyland, Peter Rodman, and Richard Campbell — had the usual problem of how to communicate with one another without becoming immortalized in the KGB tape library. In a strange way we felt somewhat more secure in the Politburo hunting lodge than in our usual haunt of the state guest house in Moscow. We thought the KGB was likely to be somewhat less exuberant in wiring the vacation retreat of its own top leadership than in doing so to the residences specifically designed for foreign guests. We came equipped, of course, with the so-called babbler, the cassette tape machine emitting incoherent gibberish that allegedly drowned out the sound of our voices for eager listeners. I do not know whether it worked and I hate to think that I may have subjected my emotional balance to that infernal noise-making machine to no avail. It was a close race between KGB technology and our sanity. In any event, my colleagues and I occasionally escaped the babbler by identifying what we considered one absolutely secure place: the balcony outside Brezhnev’s study to which we repaired during breaks in our meetings. We thought it improbable that Brezhnev would be so imprudent as to allow the Soviet secret police to install eavesdropping equipment in his own office.
The dominant impression from the potpourri of buoyancy, watchfulness, and random negotiation was Brezhnev’s insecurity about his forthcoming trip to the United States. It is one of the glories of our country that it seems endowed with a special, almost magical quality even to its adversaries. Brezhnev might be the General Secretary of a party dedicated to world revolution, the leader of the assault on the capitalist system that we epitomize. Still, his major concern seemed to be whether he would be treated as an equal in what his media never ceased to describe as the citadel of imperialism.
The Communist form of government had not mellowed and had perhaps accentuated an age-old Russian ambivalence about America. This was reflected in a relentless insistence on status and a doubt that it would be conceded; a boastful assertion of strength coupled with uncertainty that it would be recognized. Whatever Brezhnev’s systems analysts might tell him of the emerging parity in the military power of the two countries, to him America seemed to be what he had learned of it in his youth — a land of superior technology and wondrous industrial and agricultural capacity, a country of marvelous efficiency compared with the cumbersome Soviet colossus.
Brezhnev could not hear often enough my avowal that we were proceeding on the premise of equality — an attitude inconceivable in Peking, whose leaders thought of themselves as culturally superior whatever the statistics showed about relative material strength. Brezhnev endlessly sought reassurance that he would be courteously received in America, that he would not be exposed to hostile demonstrations, and that he would have the chance to meet “ordinary” people. This was a tall order and its various elements were not necessarily consistent with each other. He spoke of bringing his family with him and of a number of side trips he planned to take — always with a mixture of awe, wonder, and uncertainty. No doubt his gesture of spending five days in the Politburo hunting lodge with me was to establish a standard for us to emulate.
I confess that I was touched by this insecurity even while I recognized that the country he represented had a record of seeking reassurance in bullying and safety in domination. On this occasion Brezhnev’s vulnerability allowed a human contact that was not to recur. He would suddenly appear and whisk me off to some excursion in the rolling countryside of lakes, meadows, and vast forests. One day he called for me in the black Cadillac sedan that Dobrynin had suggested might be a suitable State gift for Nixon to bring the year before. (Brezhnev, an automobile enthusiast, collected national cars as souvenirs on every State visit to every country; his ambassadors were not bashful about suggesting them.) With Brezhnev at the wheel, we took off along narrow winding country roads at speeds that made one pray hopelessly for some policeman’s intervention, unlikely as it was that a traffic cop — if indeed they existed in the countryside — would dare halt the General Secretary. Thus propelled to a boat landing, Brezhnev bundled me off onto a hydrofoil — mercifully not driven by him — which nevertheless seemed determined to break the speed record established by the General Secretary in getting me there. My brain being addled by these multiple jolts, I lack a precise recollection of this excursion. Another morning, Brezhnev kidnapped my attractive secretary, Bonnie Andrews, and took her on a boat ride. She was returned, by her account, equally shaken and unharmed.
One afternoon I returned to my villa and found hunting attire, which our hosts had ordered for me since my arrival. It was an elegant, military-looking olive drab, with high boots, for which I am unlikely to have any future use. Brezhnev, similarly attired, collected me in a jeep driven, I was grateful to notice, by a game warden. Since I hate the killing of animals for sport, I told Brezhnev that I would come along in my capacity as adviser. He said some wild boars had already been earmarked for me. Given my marksmanship, I replied, the cause of death would have to be heart failure.
After more heavy joshing, Brezhnev nevertheless whisked me off to the hunting preserve. Simultaneously, Gromyko took Sonnenfeldt away in another direction. Deep in the stillness of the forest a stand had been built about halfway up a tree, with a crude bench and an aperture for shooting. Brezhnev, the interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev, the game warden, and I waited there for the wild boar to be lured by the bait that various foresters in green uniforms were spreading on the ground. All was absolutely still. Only Brezhnev’s voice could be heard, whispering tales of hunting adventures: of his courage when a boar once attacked his jeep; of the bison that stuffed itself with the grain and potatoes laid out as bait and then fell contentedly asleep on the steps of the hunting tower, trapping Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Rodion Malinovski in the tower until a search party rescued him.
After about an hour of this, as dusk was settling, a herd of wild boar came toward the bait. I was struck by the grace and wariness of their movements, though clearly their desire for food overcame all prudence. While Brezhnev calmly selected his victim, I reflected on the vulnerability of the greedy — only to have my rudimentary philosophy quickly disproved by a very large wild boar that emerged from the forest. One could see easily why it had attained such a size. It was not greedy; it set about to investigate the bait. It examined the ground before every step. It looked carefully behind every tree. It advanced in a measured pace. It had clearly survived and thrived by taking no unnecessary chances. All its precautions attracted Brezhnev’s attention, however, and he felled it with a single shot. Only Brezhnev’s jubilation prevented me from launching on another train of thought about the perils of excessive intellectualism.
There is no telling what other contribution to pop philosophy I might have generated on this expedition had not Brezhnev’s hunting instinct propelled him to move us to another stand even deeper in the forest. By then, fortunately for the boars — for whom I was rooting — night was beginning to fall and Brezhnev missed two shots at long range.
Brezhnev and I remained in the second stand for some hours, and someone brought cold cuts, dark bread, and beer from the jeep. Brezhnev’s split personality — alternatively boastful and insecure, belligerent and mellow — was in plain view as we ate together in that alfresco setting. The truculence appeared in his discussion of China. He began describing the experiences of his brother who had worked there as an engineer before Khrushchev removed all Soviet advisers. He had found the Chinese treacherous, arrogant, beyond the human pale. They were cannibalistic in the way they destroyed their top leaders (an amazing comment from a man who had launched his career during Stalin’s purges); they might well, in fact, be cannibals. Now China was acquiring a nuclear arsenal. The Soviet Union could not accept this passively; something would have to be done. He did not say what.
Brezhnev was clearly fishing for some hint of American acquiescence in a Soviet preemptive attack. I gave no encouragement; my bland response was that the growth of China was one of those problems that underlined the importance of settling disputes peacefully. Brezhnev contemptuously ignored this high-minded theory and returned to his preoccupation. China’s growing military might was a menace to everybody. Any military assistance to it by the United States would lead to war. I reminded him (irrelevantly) that we did not even have diplomatic relations with Peking; I warned that history proved America would not be indifferent to an attack on China. But the Soviet leaders were not content to let the matter rest on that note; the next day Dobrynin took me aside to stress that the China portion of the discussion in the hunting blind was not to be treated as social. Brezhnev had meant every word of it.
Reflecting the duality of the national character and of his own personality, Brezhnev shifted suddenly from menace to sentimentality. He spoke of his youth in the Ukraine and his father’s experience in the First World War. His father had learned from that carnage that peace was the noblest goal; he had never stopped insisting on this theme. Brezhnev agreed: We had reached the point in history where we should stop building monuments for military heroes. Public memorials should be reserved for peacemakers and not generals. His father had wanted one constructed on the highest point in the Ukraine (which, unless my knowledge of geography betrays me, is not a very towering eminence). Brezhnev wanted to dedicate his tenure to bringing about a condition in which war between the United States and the Soviet Union was unthinkable.
Brezhnev reminisced about his rise through the Communist hierarchy, his sudden elevation in 1936, and the human impact of World War II. Before he went off to serve in that war, his wife and he had pledged never to question each other about the interval no matter how long it might be; it turned out to be four years. He described movingly their reunion over the gulf of a long separation and how both of them kept their promise and their trust. He told me of his difficulty in finding a uniform for the victory parade in Red Square in 1945 under the conditions of wartime scarcity and how he succeeded, only to have his resplendent garment ruined by a daylong torrential downpour. In this account he spoke gently, with none of the braggadocio so evident even a few moments earlier. His theme now was peace. And with his slightly slurred and halting speech he was suddenly an old man somewhat drained by a lifetime of struggle.
Which was the real Brezhnev? The leader who spoke so threateningly of China or the old man who recited his devotion to peace? Probably both were genuine. Was the peace of which he spoke only the stillness of Soviet hegemony, or an acceptance of the imperatives of coexistence? Again, the answer is almost surely both. Which strand predominated would depend on circumstance and opportunity. And probably the West’s ability to address the two antiphonal trends of Soviet policy simultaneously and effectively would decide the issue of peace or war. The Bolshevik believed in the prevalence of material and military factors; the aged leader was exhausted by the exaction of a pitiless system. Doubtless no more than any Soviet leader would Brezhnev resist taking advantage of an opportunity to alter the power balance; nothing can take off our shoulders the imperative of preparedness. But within that constraint some leaders, driven by the impossibility of suppressing human aspiration forever, may well emerge eventually to explore the requirements of genuine coexistence. The West’s policy must encompass both possibilities: uncompromising resistance to expansionism and receptivity to a serious change of course in Moscow.
I give this account in full awareness of the brutalities of Brezhnev’s tenure, from Czechoslovakia to Afghanistan. It is quite possible that the KGB suggested these basic themes as a way to display a human bond and pretend a sincere desire for peace. But fairness compels me to say that I know of no other Soviet leader who could have made it credible. Perhaps this is a tribute to Brezhnev’s acting skill. I doubt it. As a good Communist Brezhnev was, of course, dedicated to the victory of his ideology; as a believer in objective factors he could not justify failing to take advantage of a superior position of strength that our domestic divisions increasingly presented to him. It was then — and remains — our principal responsibility to prevent such temptations from arising. But there was also in Brezhnev a clearly evident strain of the elemental Russia, of a people that has prevailed through endurance, that longs for a surcease from its travails and has never been permitted by destiny or the ambitions of its rulers to fulfill its dream.
The mellow mood of the evening in the hunting stand proved evanescent. Once returned to Zavidovo, we were engulfed again in the routine of the negotiations and preparations for Brezhnev’s visit to the United States. And they, as well as other circumstances, soon overwhelmed this single, brief glimpse of humanity that was not repeated while I was in office.
NEGOTIATIONS with the Soviet Union have had a checkered history in the past decade. Urged on us insistently when we entered office, hailed exorbitantly as a turning point when three years later we carried it out, later blamed for all our contemporary dilemmas, détente has been more a barometer of our domestic controversies than a subject of serious analysis. For the statesman in any event, a foreign policy issue does not present itself as a theory but as a series of realities. And the realities of Nixon’s first term were stark. We had to end a war in Indochina in the midst of a virulent domestic assault on all the sinews of a strong foreign policy. It was followed by the impotence of the Presidency as a result of Watergate. Détente was not the cause of these conditions but one of the necessities for mastering them. Any discussion of it must begin with understanding this fact.
Now in the retrospective of a decade, détente is being made to bear the burden for the consequences of America’s self-destructive domestic convulsions over Vietnam and Watergate. The former made Americans recoil before foreign involvement and thus opened an opportunity for Soviet expansionism; the latter weakened executive power to resist Soviet pressure. For the better part of a decade policymakers had to contend with a public opinion that had turned inward and a Congress that systematically reduced defense programs and the scope of executive action. To court confrontation in these circumstances was to invite a debacle. Those of us charged with the nation’s foreign policy could never forget that we were operating at the edge of a precipice.
A collective amnesia has seized the participants in that tragedy. Liberals have been understandably reluctant to assume any responsibility for the consequences of their two great causes of the 1970s. Conservatives have fudged the issue because an Administration they considered their own fell over Watergate and because many of them were more interested in an ideological anti-Communist crusade at home than in the geopolitical contest in the distant lands where the foreign policy issues are in fact decided. Many conservatives resurrected traditional isolationism, protecting American moral purity against contamination by the tactical and expedient. And some of the “neoconservatives,” who had moved from the liberal to the conservative side after the end of the war in Vietnam, had the passion of the convert and few incentives to recall their own contributions to the collapse of international restraints. They forgot that they had assaulted as far too bellicose the same foreign policy that five years later they denounced as strategic retreat.I That the Nixon Administration manned the barricades almost alone against such critics, defending American military strength and geopolitical credibility, did not figure prominently in the later, revisionist analysis that blamed Nixon, not his opponents, for the weakening of both.2 For years we had been ferociously attacked from the left for resisting the Communist takeover in Indochina — a policy we carried out precisely because we feared the global consequences of a collapse of American credibility. Now suddenly we had to ward off assaults from some of the same people, who had joined the right, for our attempts to navigate the ship of state through the turmoil we had both predicted and opposed.
It is therefore important to recall what détente was and what it was not.
Richard Nixon came into office with the well-deserved reputation of a lifetime of anti-Communism. He despised liberal intellectuals who blamed the Cold War on the United States and who seemed to believe the Soviet system might be transformed through the strenuous exercise of goodwill. Nixon profoundly distrusted Soviet motives; he was a firm believer in negotiations from positions of strength; he was, in short, the classic Cold Warrior. Yet after four tumultuous years in office, it was this man, so unlike the conventional intellectual’s notion of a peacemaker, who paradoxically was negotiating with the Soviets on the broadest agenda of East-West relations in twenty-five years. And not long afterward he found himself accused of what had been a staple of his own early campaign rhetoric: of being “soft on Communism.”
The paradox was more apparent than real. We did not consider a relaxation of tensions a concession to the Soviets. We had our own reasons for it. We were not abandoning the ideological struggle, but simply trying — tall order as it was — to discipline it by precepts of national interest. Nor was detente without its successes. There is no doubt that our better relations with the Soviet Union (and China) isolated Hanoi. In 1972 Moscow acquiesced in the mining of North Vietnamese harbors and the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong; by the end of the year Hanoi settled for terms it had contemptuously rejected for years. In Europe the knowledge that the Americans, too, could talk to the Russians reined in the temptation to blame all tensions on the United States and to seek safety in quasi-neutralism. And later on it helped us to bring about a diplomatic revolution in the Middle East.
I also believe that the evidence proves exactly the opposite of what our critics charged: Détente helped rather than hurt the American defense effort. Before the word détente was even known in America the Congress cut $40 billion from the defense budgets of Nixon’s first term; even so dedicated a supporter of American strength as Senator Henry M. Jackson publicly advocated small defense cuts and a “prudent defense posture.”3 After the signature of SALT I, our defense budget increased and the Nixon and Ford administrations put through the strategic weapons (the MX missile, B-I bomber, cruise missiles, Trident submarines, and more advanced warheads) that even a decade later are the backbone of our defense program and that had been stymied in the Congress prior to the easing of our relations with Moscow.
Détente did not prevent resistance to Soviet expansion; on the contrary, it fostered the only possible psychological framework for such resistance. Nixon knew where to draw the line against Soviet adventure whether it occurred directly or through proxy, as in Cienfuegos, Jordan, along the Suez Canal, and during the India-Pakistan war. He drew it with cool fortitude, and all the more credibly because there was national understanding that we were not being truculent for its own sake. If the Vietnam war had taught us anything, it was that a military confrontation could be sustained only if the American people were convinced there was no other choice.
Any American President soon learns that he has a narrow margin for maneuver. The United States and the Soviet Union are ideological rivals. Détente cannot change that. The nuclear age compels us to coexist. Rhetorical crusades cannot change that, either.
Our age must learn the lessons of World War II, brought about when the democracies failed to understand the designs of a totalitarian aggressor, sought foolishly to appease him, and permitted him to achieve a military superiority. This must never happen again, whatever the burdens of an adequate defense. But we must remember as well the lesson of World War I, when Europe, despite the existence of a military balance, drifted into a war no one wanted and a catastrophe that no one could have imagined. Military planning drove decisions; bluster and posturing drove diplomacy. Leaders committed the cardinal sin of statecraft: They lost control over events.
An American President thus has a dual responsibility: He must resist Soviet expansionism. And he must be conscious of the profound risks of global confrontation. His policy must embrace both deterrence and coexistence, both containment and an effort to relax tensions. If the desire for peace turns into an avoidance of conflict at all costs, if the just disparage power and seek refuge in their moral purity, the world’s fear of war becomes a weapon of blackmail by the strong; peaceful nations, large or small, will be at the mercy of the most ruthless. Yet if we pursue the ideological conflict divorced from strategy, if confrontation turns into an end in itself, we will lose the cohesion of our alliances and ultimately the confidence of our people. That was what the Nixon Administration understood by détente.
The Nixon Administration sought a foreign policy that eschewed both moralistic crusading and escapist isolationism, submerging them in a careful analysis of the national interest. America’s aim was to maintain the balance of power and seek to build upon it a more constructive future.4 We were entering a period when America’s responsibility was to provide a consistent, mature leadership in much more complex conditions than we had ever before faced and over a much longer period of time than we ever had had to calculate.
The late 1960s had marked the end of the period of American predominance based on overwhelming nuclear and economic supremacy. The Soviet nuclear stockpile was inevitably approaching parity. The economic strength of Europe and Japan was bound to lead them to seek larger political influence. The new, developing nations pressed their claims to greater power and participation. The United States would have to learn to base its foreign policy on premises analogous to those by which other nations historically had conducted theirs. The percentage of the world’s Gross National Product represented by our economy was sinking by 10 percent with every decade: from 52 percent in 1950 to 40 percent in i960, to some 30 percent in 1970 (it is at this writing 22 percent). This meant that if all the rest of the world united against us or if some hostile power or group of powers achieved the hegemony Peking warned of, America’s resources would be dwarfed by its adversaries’. Still the strongest nation but no longer preeminent, we would have to take seriously the world balance of power, for it it tilted against us, it might prove irreversible. No longer able to wait for threats to become overwhelming before dealing with them, we would have to substitute concept for resources. We needed the inward strength to act on the basis of assessments unprovable when they were made.
How to avoid nuclear war without succumbing to nuclear blackmail, how to prevent the desire for peace from turning into appeasement; how to defend liberty and maintain the peace — this is the overwhelming problem of our age. The trouble — no, the tragedy — is that the dual concept of containment and coexistence, of maintaining the balance of power while exploring a more positive future, has no automatic consensus behind it. Historically, America imagined that it did not have to concern itself with the global equilibrium because geography and a surplus of power enabled it to await events in isolation. Two schools of thought developed. The liberal approach treated foreign policy as a subdivision of psychiatry; the conservative approach considered it an aspect of theology. Liberals equated relations among states with human relations. They emphasized the virtues of trust and unilateral gestures of goodwill. Conservatives saw in foreign policy a version of the eternal struggle of good with evil, a conflict that recognized no middle ground and could end only with victory. Deterrence ran up against liberal ideology and its emotional evocation of peace in the abstract; coexistence grated on the liturgical anti-Communism of the right. American idealism drove both groups to challenge us from different directions. The mainstream of liberalism found anything connected with the balance of power repugnant: Through the early part of the twentieth century the United States thought of itself as standing above considerations of national interest. We would organize mankind by a consensus of moral principles or norms of international law. Regard for the purity of our ideals inspired conservatives, contrarily, to put Communism into quarantine: There could be no compromise with the devil. Liberals worried about the danger of confrontation; conservatives about funking it.
I sought to convey a sense of the complexity of our policy toward the USSR in a speech before the Pacem in Terris Conference in Washington on October 8, 1973:
This Administration has never had any illusions about the Soviet system. We have always insisted that progress in technical fields, such as trade, had to follow — and reflect — progress toward more stable international relations. We have maintained a strong military balance and a flexible defense posture as a buttress to stability. We have insisted that disarmament had to be mutual. We have judged movement in our relations with the Soviet Union, not by atmospherics, but by how well concrete problems are resolved and by whether there is responsible international conduct.
Coexistence to us continues to have a very precise meaning:
— We will oppose the attempt by any country to achieve a position of predominance either globally or regionally.
— We will resist any attempt to exploit a policy of détente to weaken our alliances.
— We will react if relaxation of tensions is used as a cover to exacerbate conflicts in international trouble spots.
The Soviet Union cannot disregard these principles in any area of the world without imperiling its entire relationship with the United States.
But our effort simultaneously to resist expansionism and to keep open the option of historical evolution — in effect, to combine the analysis and strategy of the conservatives with the tactics of the liberals — proved too ambitious in a bitter period when a domestic upheaval over Vietnam was followed immediately afterward by another upheaval over Watergate. Conservatives at least remained true to their beliefs. They wanted no truck with Communism whatever the tactical motivation. They equated negotiations with Moscow with the moral disarmament of America. They rejected our argument that if we did not take account of the global yearning for peace we would isolate ourselves internationally and divide our nation again over the same issues that had polarized America over Vietnam.
The liberals’ position was more complex. Viscerally they opposed the balance of power theory implicit in containment. But what could they say about détente, so long championed by them and now put forward by that hated Cold Warrior Nixon? Their frustration mounted when Nixon, in stealing some of their clothes, could not resist taunting them with some of their own rhetoric. The tendency to hyperbole, unnecessary for such a sensible case, provoked liberal critics at first into attacking détente as just another version of balance of power, as not going far enough, as a tactic — almost as a Cold War tactic — rather than as policy for the genuine relaxation of tensions.
But liberals soon left this uncomfortable position, which, however, had the merit of attacking our policy for what were, for better or worse, its premises. In early 1973, liberal critics suddenly shifted the vector of their assault. In that twilight period when Nixon was haunted by his looming perils even while his opponents were still obsessed by his seeming invulnerability, many liberals began to move in a direction that the master manipulator had considered inconceivable. They adopted the very positions that he had vacated in his march toward the center. Suddenly it was the liberal community that began to find ideological flaws in the détente that for so long it had passionately championed. The argument gained currency that Nixon had “oversold” détente; that he neglected human rights in his desire to get along with the Kremlin; that the Administration was insensitive to the moral problem of dealing with Communism. These arguments were natural from conservatives who were seriously worried lest the erosion of dividing lines sap the Western will to resist. They came with less grace from those who had systematically opposed higher defense expenditures and who had decried the resistance to Soviet expansion in distant theaters that was the essence of our commitment to containment.
The result was a dangerous contradiction. On the one hand, the lesson of Vietnam was alleged to be that we had no moral right to engage in distant enterprises. On the other hand, the Administration was now accused of amoral callousness in not insisting on the internal amelioration of all other societies, be they friendly or adversary. A new doctrine of political intervention into the domestic affairs of other states emerged, even while we were being pressed to withdraw American power from remote continents. With respect to the USSR, our liberal critics did not explain how we would handle the resulting confrontations with the Kremlin in the middle of a Watergate-inspired attack on both defense budgets and executive power.
In the process, our policy toward the Soviets was turned by its disparate critics into a caricature of itself. We had conceived it as managing the relations among adversaries; our critics faulted it for falling short of establishing friendship. In every crisis there were cries that détente had failed to prevent it. We measured the success of our policy in the ability to achieve strategic goals even in crises, while mitigating risks — the Middle East war of 1973 is a good example. Until there is a major domestic change in Moscow, no East-West policy can abolish crises altogether. This is especially true if both the carrot and stick are removed, as occurred in the attack on executive discretion from 1973 onward. The alternative offered by our critics, moreover, was simply to needle the bear, inviting constant crises without tactical flexibility. Every evidence of Soviet ulterior motive was eagerly seized upon as if it were a new discovery. We took it for granted that the Communist superpower did not wish us well. We thought we could defeat its designs more effectively by a policy of firmness, maneuver, and positive aspiration that had a better chance of sustained public and allied support over the long-term future than simply by the mindless reiteration of truculent slogans.
No doubt the Soviet leaders hoped to convince the democracies — abetted by Communist-sponsored front groups and the West’s own hopeful interpretation of world affairs — that what had produced the seeming relaxation of tensions was not our vigilance but a basic change in Soviet purpose. More and more Western leaders, the hard men in the Kremlin reasoned, would gear their domestic positions to a relaxation of tensions, pay a growing price for it, and seek refuge from the perils of confrontation by blaming the United States for all crises. That danger was real. But the opposite course was even more perilous. Confrontations not perceived as necessary by the public will divide each country, split our alliances, and produce a quest for peace at any price. No self-respecting democratic leader can sustain himself by treating vigilance and peace as if they were opposites. Our alliances will be sundered if they appear as obstacles to peace. To be sure, détente is dangerous if it does not include a strategy of containment. But containment is unsustainable unless coupled with a notion of peace. The remedy is not to evade the effort to define coexistence; it is to give it a content that reflects our principles and our objectives.
The subtlest critique of our policy held that our emphasis on the national interest ran counter to American idealism and national character. Americans, on this thesis, must affirm general values or they will lack the resolution and stamina to overcome the Soviet challenge. In other words, America must commit itself to a moral opposition to Communism, not just geopolitical opposition to Soviet encroachment, or its policy will be based on quicksand.5 But while I sympathize with this point of view, a statesman must relate general theorems to concrete circumstances. Crusades rarely supply the staying power for a prolonged struggle. Obsession with ideology may translate into an unwillingness to confront seemingly marginal challenges, depicting them as unworthy because they appear not to encapsulate the ultimate showdown. This happened over Angola and Vietnam (after the Paris Agreement), and later in the Persian Gulf. In an era of growing Soviet boldness and radical quests for ascendancy, an American failure to deal with the geopolitical challenge would risk the global equilibrium as surely as a failure to preserve the military balance. And the overemphasis on ideology would create a characteristically American vulnerability: The doctrine of redemption would make us peculiarly receptive to Soviet peace offensives that seemed to imply that Soviet purposes had changed. Our moral convictions must arm us to face the ambiguity inseparable from the long haul or else they will wind up disarming us.
Whatever policies they conduct, statesmen always gamble on their assessment of the future. Clearly, the United States and the Soviet Union each expected history to be on its side. Just prior to the summit of 1973, I analyzed Brezhnev’s motivations in a memorandum to Nixon, and there is a glimpse of his own attitude at the time in the way he underlined some portions (in italics here):
Like all Soviet postwar leaders, Brezhnev sees the US at once as rival, mortal threat, model, source of assistance and partner in physical survival. These conflicting impulses make the motivations of Brezhnev’s policy toward us ambivalent. On the one hand, he no doubt wants to go down in history as the leader who brought peace and a better life to Russia. This requires conciliatory and cooperative policies toward us. Yet, he remains a convinced Communist who sees politics as a struggle with an ultimate winner; he intends the Soviet Union to be that winner. His recurrent efforts to draw us into condominium-type arrangements — most notably his proposal for a nuclear non-aggression pact — are intended both to safeguard peace and to undermine our alliances and other associations.
Almost certainly, Brezhnev continues to defend his detente policies in Politburo debates in terms of a historic conflict with us as the main capitalist country and of the ultimate advantages that will accrue to the USSR in this conflict. Brezhnev’s gamble is that as these policies gather momentum and longevity, their effects will not undermine the very system from which Brezhnev draws his power and legitimacy. Our goal on the other hand is to achieve precisely such effects over the long run. . . .
The major, long term question is whether the Soviets can hold their own bloc together while waiting for the West to succumb to a long period of relaxation and to the temptations of economic competition. Certainly, our chances are as good as Brezhnev’s, given the history of dissent in East Europe.
In short, I rejected the proposition of our critics that the Soviet Union stands to benefit more from peaceful competition than do the democracies. It is a counsel of despair, the opposite of what I believe to be reality. It shows an unwarranted historical pessimism, a serious lack of faith in the American people. Nixon would have no part of it. In his famous 1959 “Kitchen Debate” in Moscow he scoffed at Khrushchev’s boast that he would bury us — and Nixon was right. Nothing has changed in the intervening two decades to suggest that the Communist world, inferior in resources and organization, can outstrip the West in prolonged competition. If the Soviet Union overtakes the West in military power, this will be caused not by détente but by the failure of the democracies to do what is clearly necessary. The argument that the American people cannot understand a complex challenge and a complex strategy to meet it, that unable to handle both deterrence and coexistence it must base its policy on truculence, reflects a lack of faith in democracy.
If the West saw to containment, I was convinced that it would win its historical bet. The Soviet Union’s economic system was glaringly weak; its ideological appeal had faded; its political base and empire were precarious. In the sixty-year history of the state, it had never managed a legitimate, regular, succession of leadership. There had in fact been only three changes of leader: Of the four General Secretaries of the Communist Party, two (Lenin and Stalin) died in office; the third (Khrushchev) was replaced in a couplike procedure; the fourth (Brezhnev) was still consolidating his powers in early 1973, though even then signs of declining health could be noticed. The system had failed to deal seriously with the desire for political participation of the intellectual and managerial elite that industrialization inevitably spawns. Or else it sought to preempt their political aspirations by turning the ruling group into a careerist “new class” bound to produce stagnation. Moreover, the Soviet Union has yet to cope with the looming reality of its growing non-Russian population, soon to be a majority, with the severe problem of adjustment that it will entail.
The increasingly intractable problems of the Soviet economy were already becoming apparent. In 1972 its growth rate was estimated to be 1.5 percent, about equal to the population growth; this was stagnation incarnate. Total planning seems to obstruct growth in direct proportion to the scale of the economy. All incentives work in the wrong direction. Factory managers understate their potential output lest they be locked into targets that bottlenecks outside their control will prevent them from meeting. Planners do not have the test of the market to gauge the preferences of consumers (even industrial consumers). In such a vacuum they produce merchandise that is both unwanted and inferior. Quality is impossible to guarantee by directives; hence each manager tends to fulfill his quota in the manner least dependent on other sectors of the Soviet system. (An East European planner once told me that if the quota for locomotives was expressed in weight, his country produced the heaviest locomotives in the world; when it was expressed in numbers, they were the lightest and shoddiest — in each case the line of least resistance was followed.)
With no discretion to change plans, managers are forced to operate at the margin of bureaucratic legality: to hoard scarce materials or to seek reliable suppliers on the sly. This culminates in the paradox that a totally planned economy requires a black market, that is, a secret free market, to function at all. But this only magnifies the classic weakness of Communist economies: chronic shortages and chronic surpluses side by side.6 The dilemma of Communism is that it seems impossible to run a modern economy by a system of total planning, yet it may not be possible to run a Communist state without a system of total planning.
The Communist Party’s raison d’être is its monopoly of power — but this produces another anomaly. The small group of votaries who arrogate to themselves superior insight into the processes of history derive from this conviction the monomaniacal intensity required to make revolution. But once they are firmly established in power, what is their function? They are not needed to run the government or the economy or the military. They are guardians of a political legitimacy that has long since lost its moral standing as well as its revolutionary élan. They specialize in solving internal crises that their centralized system has created and external crises into which their rigidity tempts them. The Party apparatus duplicates every existing hierarchy without performing any function. Its members are watchdogs lacking criteria, an incubus to enforce order, a smug bastion of privilege inviting corruption and cynicism.
In every Communist state — it is almost an historic joke — the ultimate crisis, latent if not evident, is over the role of the Communist Party. In Poland, the Party was almost swept away because it was irrelevant and impotent. And we are still only at the beginning of that process of transformation. If Moscow is prevented by a firm Western policy from deflecting its internal tensions into international crises, it is likely to find only disillusionment in the boast that history is on its side. I remain convinced that a long period of peace will favor the pluralism of a democratic system — the economic vitality, genius for technological innovation, and creativity of free peoples.
The Nixon Administration’s hard-headed geopolitical approach to East-West relations, though not easily grasped at home, was in fact effective with the Soviet leaders. For while the men in the Kremlin do not mind playing on Western preconceptions that identify diplomacy with good personal relations, they really do not know how to deal with a sentimental foreign policy. No Western leader who specialized in “understanding” them, as if foreign policy were like personal relations, ever succeeded. Soviet leaders have come up through a hard school. They have prevailed in a system that ruthlessly weeds out the timid and the scrupulous. Only a great lust for power — or near-fanatical ideological conviction — can have impelled them into careers in which there are few winners and disastrous penalties for losers. Personal goodwill, that mirage of Western diplomacy, cannot move them. Their ideology stresses the overriding importance of material factors and the objective balance of forces. They cannot defend conciliatory policies toward the outside world amid the struggle for power that characterizes the Soviet system except by emphasizing that objective conditions require them.
This is why unsentimental realists seem to find greater favor in that capital whose ideology rejects the proposition that man can alter the foreordained course of history. And Nixon was nothing if not a realist. Few leaders were less likely to confuse coexistence with psychotherapy or peace with good personal relations. His personal insecurity made him doubt that he could charm anyone — especially the dour Soviet leaders. He knew that there was no substitute for posing calibrated risks that would make aggression appear unattractive; he strove mightily to preserve the balance of power. But he was not afraid to explore incentives to give the Soviets a stake in cooperation even while he sought to make expansionism too dangerous. Over time, as other factors came into play, a stable peace might be founded on conviction and not only on necessity. On this basis in May 1972 the erstwhile Communist-baiter and the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party had met in Moscow to explore the boundaries of coexistence.
I believe that a normal Nixon Presidency would have managed to attain symmetry between the twin pillars of containment and coexistence. Nixon would have been able to demonstrate to the conservatives that détente was a means to conduct the ideological contest, not a resignation from it. And he could have handled the liberal pressures by rallying a majority of moderates behind his policy of settling concrete issues. He could then have used his demonstrated commitment to peace to marshal the free peoples of the Alliance behind a new approach to defense.
But early in his second term Nixon was no longer a normal President. And the damage was nearly irreparable. Between the Moscow summit of 1972 and Vladivostok in 1974, the chances for stable long-term coexistence between the United States and the Soviet Union were the best they have ever been in the postwar period. The USSR suffered a major setback in the Middle East and accepted it; the conflicts between us, while real, were managed. We had laid extensive foundations through a network of agreements. We had assembled incentives and penalties that seemed to moderate Soviet behavior. Never were conditions better to test the full possibilities of a subtle combination of firmness and flexibility.
We will never know what might have been possible had America not consumed its authority in that melancholy period. Congressional assaults on a weakened President robbed him of both the means of containment and the incentives for Soviet moderation, rendering resistance impotent and at the same time driving us toward a confrontation without a strategy or the means to back it up. The domestic base for our approach to East-West relations eroded. We lost the carrot in the debate over Jewish emigration that undercut the 1972 trade agreement with the Soviet Union. And the stick became ineffective as a result of progressive restrictions on executive authority from 1973 to 1976 that doomed Indochina to destruction, hamstrung the President’s powers as Commander-in-Chief, blocked military assistance to key allies, and nearly devastated our intelligence agencies. In time the Soviets could not resist the opportunity presented by a weakened President and a divided America abdicating from foreign responsibilities. By 1975 Soviet adventurism had returned, reinforced by an unprecedented panoply of modern arms.
Partly as a result of our domestic weakness and Soviet power, for many of our allies détente became what conservatives had feared: an escape from the realities of the balance of power, a substitution of atmospherics for substance. In a period of recession induced by the oil price explosion, several European countries turned to East-West trade as an economic lifeboat, not an instrument of a well-thought-out foreign policy. Their leaders played to a domestic gallery, appearing as “mediators” between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Thus America sacrificed a great deal to its domestic divisions. The process began with the debate over the relationship of trade with the Soviet Union to human rights.
NO issue of foreign policy saw such a drastic reversal of positions as East-West trade. From the moment the Nixon Administration came into office in 1969, liberal critics pressed us to relax Cold War restrictions on trade.7 Less than six months after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, leading journals, academics, and the Democratic Congressional majority (as well as liberal Republicans) attacked our doctrine of linkage that tied trade relaxation to Soviet foreign policy behavior. Since 1969 and 1970 were turbulent years in US–Soviet relations, we granted no export licenses whatever. This, we were told, was dangerous and ineffective: We were playing into the hands of Stalinist hard-liners in the Kremlin; trade with the Soviets was not a favor to them but to us; it would promote peace; it would speed the liberalization of the Communist regime; and in any case, if we did not trade, our allies would. Some conservative businessmen joined the liberal side of the debate, regarding the linkage of trade to foreign policy benefits as an illegitimate attempt to bargain with their assets for objectives in which they had no direct interest.
The Nixon Administration held to its course. We eased restrictions slightly after the first breakthrough in SALT in May 1971 and the completion of the Berlin negotiations in August of that year. Only after the 1972 Moscow summit did we agree to a progressive improvement — always taking care to relate our moves to Soviet restraint in foreign affairs. We granted credits only to specific projects, never on a blanket basis. The Soviets were given to understand that our relative flexibility would not survive a foreign policy challenge.
Later on, when the public mood changed, it was sometimes said that the Nixon Administration had naively relied on economic incentives to moderate Soviet behavior. In light of Nixon’s firm commitment to military containment, and the grudging East-West trade policy of his first term, this is a serious misconception. We did believe that carefully controlled trade would reinforce a coexistence based on a balance of forces. Economic ties in our view could make a difference but only if the Soviets were deprived of the option of adventurism. Having blocked Soviet encroachment in 1970 and 1971, we were prepared to test the possibilities of coexistence soberly and carefully, but not by adopting arguments we had been refuting for nearly four years.
The first brouhaha was over the US–Soviet grain deal. In 1972 the Soviets exploited our free market, buying up nearly a billion dollars’ worth of grain on concessional terms — almost the whole of our agricultural surplus — before anyone knew what was happening.8 The real trouble, as it turned out, was not the eagerness of the government to sell, though Nixon was surely not blind to the political benefits of a grain deal in an election year. The Soviets’ coup was due primarily to their shrewd calculation that each grain company would try to keep its sales secret from its competitors. Thus, if they spread their orders widely, the Soviets reasoned (accurately), the greed of the companies would obscure the extent of Soviet purchases until the contracts were signed.
The Soviets’ task was eased because no governmental monitoring system existed; the event dramatized the difficulty of relating a market economy to foreign policy objectives. If any buyer can enter the market, the sole restraint on him is his ability to pay. Therefore to achieve foreign policy goals the government must be able to interfere with the market to hold up sales, regardless of economic conditions, until its political terms are met. A system of licenses or similar restraints is inevitable — which is anathema to many entrepreneurs, including some who consider themselves fiercely anti-Communist.
Early in 1973, we became aware of another potential shortfall in the Soviet harvest. As a quid pro quo for our help we sought to force the Soviets to spread their purchases over several years. The White House insisted on a five-year agreement with a ceiling on permitted purchases that would enable our farmers to plan, prevent disruption of our markets, and give us extended foreign policy leverage. But this was possible only if we held up the grain sales until our terms were met. Our farmers were happy enough about the objective of a long-term agreement. They were much less keen on postponing immediate sales in order to achieve it; and they had acquired in Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz a wily, passionate, and indefatigable advocate. He had been schooled in the deadliest of bureacratic arenas, as the dean of a university. When I asked Butz to study whether he had the legal authority to delay sales (by ordering that grain sales be reported to the Department of Agriculture), he evaded a clear-cut answer. Several weeks later, on May 3, I jogged his memory:
My concern in this matter is that we should not permit the Soviets to corner, quietly, a large part of this year’s grain crop, leaving the U.S. consumer and our other international customers to bid up the price on the remainder.
But Butz had no intention of facing the wrath of the farmers. Much better to blame the striped-pants boys of diplomacy. He therefore suggested that I induce the Soviets to limit their purchases. This was great advice: Instead of using our agricultural strength as leverage on the Soviets, he was suggesting that we ask the Soviets to do us the favor of buying less than market conditions allowed. In the real world this would work only if I implied that otherwise we would find another way of limiting sales. Butz’s approach was an elegant way of preventing foreign policy criteria from interfering with Soviet grain purchases.
The pro-trade coalition of liberals and entrepreneurs was gradually overtaken by another grouping of conservatives and liberals who sought to hold East-West trade as hostage to changes in Soviet emigration policy. They accepted our doctrine of linkage but gave it its most extreme formulation — far beyond the original intention. Concessions on trade were now related not to Soviet foreign policy, with which we agreed, but to Soviet domestic practices. East-West trade thereby turned into a political issue in America that over time seriously jolted our relationship with the Soviet Union without supplying a strategy for handling the resulting tension. Ironically, the vehicle for this challenge was a measure that liberals had been pressing on us since early in the Nixon Administration: the extension of Most Favored Nation (MFN) status to the Soviet Union.
Most Favored Nation status is, of course, a misnomer. It grants no special favors; it extends to the recipient country only the tariff treatment already afforded to all other nations (over a hundred) with which we have normal commercial relations. In other words, MFN treatment ends discrimination against the country that receives it. It allows normal trade to develop as commercial conditions warrant. It benefits our traders as well as foreign ones. Even with MFN, Soviet exports to the United States were not expected to grow rapidly or significantly. The MFN status was important to the Soviets for symbolic rather than for commercial reasons; it conveyed the appearance of equality in the economic field.
In September 1972, we concluded the negotiations on the Soviet Lend-Lease debt (dormant for twenty-five years) that had been conducted with skill and ingenuity by Secretary of Commerce Peter G. Peterson. This cleared the way for the trade agreement with the USSR, of which MFN was a key part. On April 10, 1973 — as Watergate was about to explode — Nixon submitted the agreement to the Congress. And thereby, just as he was faltering, he sparked a debate that blighted US–Soviet relations ever after.
It was galling that the issue chosen by our critics was a subject in which we had every reason to take pride: Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. Early in Nixon’s first term we had decided to raise this in the special Channel we maintained through Anatoly Dobrynin to the Soviet leadership. We proceeded without publicity, calculating that the Soviets could alter practices within their domestic jurisdiction more easily if they were not overtly challenged. Starting in 1969, I approached Dobrynin with the proposition that we would take note of any voluntary Soviet regard for the moral concerns of our people with respect to Soviet emigration practices. The effort was low-key but persistent; we sought action, not acclaim. Whether as a result of our representations or for reasons of its own that it did not divulge to us, Moscow changed its emigration policy. Whereas only 400 Soviet Jews had been allowed to emigrate in 1968, the number rose to nearly 35,000 in 1973.
In addition, I periodically handed over lists of hardship cases: individuals who were barred from emigration by some technicality of security regulations or for other difficulties with Soviet authorities. I told Dobrynin if the Soviets heeded our humanitarian appeals we would not as a government exploit the propaganda value of those released. Dobrynin accepted the lists without comment. But we noted that a majority of the hardship names we submitted were permitted to leave. In one instance, Dobrynin formally gave us statistics summarizing the Soviet treatment of hardship cases.
Why the Soviet Union interrupted the process right after the Moscow summit will have to be left to the publication of the Soviet archives or the memoirs of Soviet leaders. Whatever the reason, on August 3, 1972, an administrative decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet imposed a substantial “exit tax” on emigrants. The tax was theoretically designed to refund the Soviet state for the expenses of the emigrants’ education; the practical consequence was to slow emigration to a trickle. The decision was nearly inexplicable in light of the generally improved state of US–Soviet relations and the goodwill the Soviets had acquired from liberalizing emigration.
The least plausible explanation was the one advanced by Dobrynin: that some middle-level functionary had made a routine decision mechanically ratified by the relevant minister who himself was a technician. The Soviet system does not work that way, expecially on an issue of demonstrated foreign policy sensitivity. My guess is that the exit tax was a panicky reaction to Sadat’s expulsion of Soviet troops from Egypt. Afraid for their position in the Arab world, the Soviet leaders sought for some way to refurbish their credentials (since most of the Jewish emigrants settled in Israel). But I took Dobrynin’s lame explanation to indicate that the Kremlin was having second thoughts; it was looking for both a scapegoat and an exit.
By then the genie was out of the bottle. On October 4, 1972, the redoubtable Senator Henry Jackson sponsored an amendment to the trade bill that precluded granting Most Favored Nation status to any Communist country restricting emigration. Senator Jackson had a long record of opposition to Soviet tyranny. He had courageously warned of the Soviet military buildup when it was highly unfashionable to do so. He had cooperated closely with the Administration during Nixon’s first term on the struggle for an adequate defense budget, an honorable exit from Vietnam, and a strong foreign policy. To my astonishment, I found myself in confrontation with a former ally in what became an increasingly tense relationship. What made the conflict both strange and painful was that I felt more comfortable with Jackson on most issues than with many newfound allies who questioned his amendment from a different philosophical perspective.
Up to a point Jackson’s efforts and ours complemented each other. But gradually his amendment became for him an end in itself. Once it was passed, it was no longer useful as leverage; the Soviets could not possibly change their policies in response to the act of a capitalist legislature; they were more likely to move in the opposite direction. Far from spurring emigration, the Jackson amendment in fact wound up substantially reducing it.
But the times were not propitious for a rational dialogue. Jackson suddenly found supporters among liberals who had consistently fought his views on national defense and foreign policy. The New York Times, which in 1969 and 1970 had castigated us for what it considered the outrageous proposition that trade should be linked to Soviet foreign policy conduct, suddenly discovered the importance of using it to accomplish the domestic transformation of Soviet society. In an editorial on November 25, 1972, the Times began its conversion to its own definition of linkage:
Russia’s brutal repression of the civil rights of many of its own people, the imposition of a head tax on Jews to prevent them from leaving the Soviet Union and the threat of more serious restrictions still to come, the encouragement of other countries to expropriate American interests — all such actions are calculated to inflame American public opinion and to jeopardize the future growth of Soviet-American economic relations.
On February 21, 1973, the Washington Post, another long-time advocate of East-West trade, turned a hard-won and tacit change in Soviet practice into a nonexistent formal Soviet pledge:
The strong Hill sentiment to tie trade and emigration gives the President the solid practical ground he needs to inform the Russians that in order for him to make good his pledge on tariff equality, they must make good their pledge on Jewish emigration.
Later in 1973 this debate, like many others, became mired in Watergate. On September 3 the New York Times professed to see no difference between Watergate and Soviet police-state repression of dissidents; indeed, it made its own contribution to the prevailing paranoia by discovering a Nixon-Brezhnev alliance to suppress opposition in both countries:
The administration announced that Treasury Secretary Shultz will soon lead a high level delegation to Moscow to renew discussions on expanding Soviet-American trade. Soviet repression apparently disturbs the White House as little as Watergate bothers the Kremlin. The world now sees a de facto Nixon-Brezhnev alliance against dissent in each other’s country.
On October 10, 1972, Representative Charles Vanik of Ohio introduced an amendment similar to Jackson’s in the House. He was supported by such previous stalwart defenders of East-West trade as Representatives Donald M. Fraser of Minnesota and Benjamin S. Rosenthal of New York, who joined Representative John H. Buchanan, Jr., of Alabama on a visit to the Soviet Union in December 1972. They published in April 1973 a report on “Tension and Detente” that concluded in hitherto most uncharacteristic fashion:
We are convinced that improved relations with the Soviet Union — and, specifically, improved trade ties — are useful to both countries and to the cause of world peace. But both the President and Soviets must understand that normal relations between our countries cannot proceed while Jews and others in the Soviet Union are harassed and prevented, by whatever means, from exercising their right of emigration.9
On the one hand, we were being pushed to do what we had already largely accomplished: to spur Soviet emigration. On the other, it was becoming clear that the pressure hid a deeper purpose: to extend the conventional criticism of Nixon’s alleged moral insensitivity into new areas of policy, including foreign affairs, in which Nixon’s competence had heretofore gone unchallenged. It was not free of recklessness, for while Jackson was prepared to face the consequences of a confrontation with the Soviet Union, many of his supporters, as they were soon to prove, were not. If baiting Moscow led to increased Soviet adventurism, which of the crusaders for human rights would support our determination to resist it? Within two years many of the rhetorical hard-liners had a chance to answer that question over the issue of Soviet-Cuban intervention in Angola. Most of the members of the liberal-conservative coalition that had spoiled for a confrontation over human rights avoided it over a blatant threat to international security.
At the beginning of the campaign on Soviet emigration practices, it was luckily not yet apparent that we were facing a fundamental challenge to one of the pillars of our foreign policy. We dealt with it on its merits, as an attempt to lift the newly imposed exit tax. And the threat of the Jackson amendment undoubtedly helped to convince the Soviet leaders that a change of course was indicated. On March 30, Dobrynin came to see me with a statement labeled “confidential for the President.” It proclaimed, naturally enough, that emigration policy fell exclusively within the jurisdiction of the Soviet state; it complained of the “noisy campaign” on emigration that it denounced as “artificial and ill-meaning.” But the upshot of all the tough talk was the good news that the tax was being lifted. The Soviet note claimed that the new law had always been intended to be discretionary; it would be applied only in “unusual” circumstances of state security. Accordingly, only such “usual and insignificant duties which were also being collected before the decree of August 3, 1972 are being collected. . . .”
Private messages from Brezhnev were generally not communicated to the Congress; hence, unless the Soviets made an exception, the note would not help us in dealing with Jackson. Moreover, the emphasis on the discretionary nature of the law did not preclude a future sudden tightening of the regulations. I therefore asked for permission to transmit the communication to the Congress; going far beyond diplomatic custom, I inquired whether I might inform the government of Israel. I also asked for more specific assurances than the mere statement that discretionary authority would not be applied — specifically a de facto ending of the tax.
The Soviets replied on April 10 in a manner that underlined how much importance they attached to US–Soviet relations; they authorized us to communicate Brezhnev’s message to the Congress as an official statement. As for informing Israel, Moscow stressed that Israel had no standing to discuss Soviet emigration policies, especially via the United States. Still, this was only bravado: “It is a matter for the President to decide how to use our communication and whom he will inform about its contents.” To avoid any misunderstanding, I worked out a formal statement of the Soviet position, including a proviso that the tax would not be reintroduced. I cleared it with Dobrynin for submission to the Congress. Dobrynin agreed to it on April 16. (The full text is reprinted in the backnotes.)10
Once the Soviet Union agreed formally to drop the exit tax, I informed Dobrynin that no outstanding issues stood in the way of implementing the US–Soviet trade agreement of 1972. I proved wildly off the mark.
For the growing enfeeblement of the President had changed all previous assumptions. Nixon expected to celebrate a great achievement when he called the Congressional leaders, including Senator Jackson, to the White House on April 18, to inform them of the Soviet note. The Soviet Union under American pressure had repealed domestic legislation and given written assurances to that effect, which we could transmit to the Congress. Nixon had removed the major obstacle to the granting of MFN and had proved the advantage of quiet diplomacy on human rights. Or so he thought.
By then Nixon was badly wounded. The day before, he had acknowledged the possibility that Watergate involved high levels of his Administration. In these circumstances the Congress was not seeking a collaboration; it was looking for opportunities to prove its independence. The legislators assembled in the Roosevelt Room of the White House listened politely. None had thought such a Soviet collapse possible. Yet it was difficult to avoid the impression that a few of them up for reelection in 1974 preferred to have the issue rather than its resolution. They sat in grumbling silence at another of Nixon’s coups when they were rallied by the redoubtable Jackson. What the Soviets had done was not enough, he said coolly. The Soviets would have to give assurances not only as to the exit tax; they had to guarantee a minimum number of exit visas; and they had to ease emigration not only for Jews but for all nationalities.
It was an amazing demand. Anyone even vaguely familiar with the Soviet system knew that there was no chance whatever that such terms would be met. The Soviet Union could not commit itself publicly to a fixed number, which implied that there was an unlimited mass of Soviet citizens eager to emigrate. And if it made that concession to all nationalities, there was literally no telling what would happen to the Soviet system. Yet in the prevailing public mood in America, no legislator could afford to dissociate himself from the demand and risk charges of being “soft” on Soviet emigration. And if Congressional pressures led to deadlock, one could always blame the Administration for not having pursued a Congressionally mandated objective with adequate energy and conviction. So Jackson’s colleagues remained silent and we were left to sort out the confusion. It was our first exposure to what came to be a staple of Watergate and its aftermath: a Congressional mandate for an unfulfillable course that sapped our credibility abroad without giving us the tools to deal with the consequences of the resulting tension.
No doubt Communist nations are prepared to pay some price for increased trade; indeed, this theory lay behind our own linkage approach. But in our view concessions were more likely to be obtainable in the field of international conduct, with respect to which foreign countries have a defined interest and legal standing, than over matters traditionally considered within the domestic jurisdiction of a state, particularly a state historically and ideologically so obsessed with internal security. For the Soviet Union to alter its domestic practices in response to a frontal public assault by a foreign nation would be perceived by its already nearly paranoid rulers as a direct impairment of their authority. And it was likely to be resisted all the more strenuously because the Soviet Union had modified its emigration policy as a result of our private diplomacy.
The pity was that Senator Jackson and the Nixon Administration were both committed to the same objective: increasing emigration from the Soviet Union. The dispute was over tactics. The Administration doubted that overt pressure could succeed; Jackson insisted that no other method would work. Sometimes it was hard to avoid the impression that he was as interested in the symbolism of confrontation as in the result. He also sought to appeal to a Jewish constituency for his Presidential ambitions — a not unworthy motive for a public figure fortunate enough to be a native-born citizen of the United States.
A weakened Nixon was at a grave disadvantage. The Jackson amendment, originated to maintain existing levels of Jewish emigration, was being pursued even after the Soviets had lifted restrictions in order to bring about increased emigration of all nationalities. Nixon and I did not help matters by misunderstanding Jackson’s thrust. We thought that eventually he would work out some accord with us for what was attainable. In fact, he kept escalating his demands.
The collapse of national civility and cohesion made it difficult for the disputants to hear each other. The Administration felt aggrieved, not the best attitude in dealing with the Congress; our critics sensed our vulnerability, not the ideal precondition for serious dialogue. My nightmare was that under the conditions of Watergate it was wildly risky to provoke a confrontation with Moscow over an issue on which it had already substantially yielded, our leverage was weak, and the resulting crisis might find us without public support. Jackson believed Watergate gave him the opportunity to insist on his total program, and once he was embarked on his course, his constituency gave him added impetus. To his banner flocked many willing enough to strike a pose, not nearly so prepared to face confrontation. In my speech to the Pacem in Terris Conference on October 8, 1973, I tried, almost despairingly, to point out the dangers:
We shall never condone the suppression of fundamental liberties. We shall urge humane principles and use our influence to promote justice. But the issue comes down to the limits of such efforts. How hard can we press without provoking the Soviet leadership into returning to practices in its foreign policy that increase international tensions? Are we ready to face the crises and increased defense budgets that a return to Cold War conditions would spawn? And will this encourage full emigration or enhance the well-being or nourish the hope for liberty of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? Is it detente that has prompted repression — or is it detente that has generated the ferment and the demand for openness which we are now witnessing? . . .
These questions have no easy answers. The government may underestimate the margin of concessions available to us. But a fair debate must admit that they are genuine questions, the answers to which could affect the fate of all of us.
It was to no avail. The struggle over the Jackson amendment continued through 1974. (I shall describe the later negotiations with Jackson in Chapter XXII.) The Congress progressively weakened the constraints on Soviet conduct without providing us the tools to see it through in the form of increased defense (though Jackson himself was always in the forefront of the fight for a strong defense). It was a part of a larger pattern — the product of Vietnam trauma and the corrosion of Watergate — that stripped away both the incentives and penalties needed to conduct an effective policy toward Moscow.
SENATOR Henry Jackson was the indispensable link between the two groups critical of our relations with the Soviets — the liberals, preoccupied with human rights; and the conservatives, who became anxious about any negotiations with the Soviets. Nixon, great tactician that he was, never conceived that he, the renowned Cold Warrior, would in the end be attacked from his old base on the right wing of the Republican party. But when in 1972 he culminated a year of negotiations with a summit in Moscow and a series of agreements, his erstwhile friends were at first baffled and then disillusioned. Some found solace in blaming me; others started a guerrilla war, attacking especially the agreement limiting strategic arms. Much of the issue was fantasy, much of it politics, and in the Watergate era it had perverse consequences. Conservatives tore each other apart, only to produce a more liberal Congress just as foreign perils were mounting.
There was a revolutionary element in the first strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT I). This lay in the agreement of the Soviet Union and the United States permanently to limit their deployment of antiballistic missile systems (ABMs) to no more than two sites 1,300 kilometers apart and to no more than 200 missiles. For the first time in history two major powers deliberately rested their security on each other’s vulnerability. But it was not this unprecedented feature that led to acrimony. What drew fire was an issue few had thought controversial when the accords were being negotiated. This was the five-year Interim Agreement that pledged both sides to freeze their strategic offensive missile forces, whether land- or sea-based, at the levels of mid-1972. It was expected that during the five-year period a follow-on, long-term agreement would be negotiated.11
The Interim Agreement did not affect our strategic arsenal or our force planning; it was a snapshot, as of the moment of signature, of the strategic relationship as it had evolved over the previous decade. The Soviet Union had expanded its missile force at a rapid rate after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. By 1971 it had equaled us in numbers of intercontinental missiles; at the time of the 1972 summit it had more. We retained a large advantage in the total number of warheads, however — an advantage that would, in fact, grow over the five years of the agreement. We were already equipping our missiles with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), whereas the Soviets had not yet tested such a system.
SALT imposed a sacrifice on the Soviets if it did on anyone. They had been building 200 new launchers a year. They had to dismantle some 210 ICBMs of older types to come down to the agreed ceiling. We had stopped building during the Johnson Administration; we had no new missile program in production and the Vietnam-era Congress would not have approved one. For us the sacrifice was theoretical. The only area where we could have been inhibited by SALT was in submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). But the Joint Chiefs of Staff were adamant in their opposition to building more of the submarine-launched Poseidon missiles then available or the submarines to carry them. They preferred to wait for the more powerful Trident submarine and missile, which would not be ready until at least 1978, or after the expiration of the Interim Agreement.12 Moreover, SALT I did not count or limit strategic bombers, in which we were vastly superior, or our forward-based aircraft and carriers in and around Europe and the Pacific, or the nuclear weapons of France and the United Kingdom (or China). In short, if there was an imbalance, SALT did not create it; it reflected self-limiting decisions made over a decade. SALT did provide a time span in which they could be remedied. SALT I caused us to give up not a single offensive weapons program. The freeze was essential, indeed, if we were ever going to catch up. And we followed SALT I with a substantial modernization of our strategic forces.
But a man from Mars arriving to observe our domestic debate would never have known this. He would have read that SALT I “conceded” an inequality in missiles to the Soviets. He would have deduced that the treaty sanctified a missile gap — instead of reducing that gap. He would not have been aware of the strange phenomenon that a force level we had adopted voluntarily, and that we were in no position to change over the life of an agreement, suddenly became “dangerous” when it was reaffirmed as part of that agreement.
Instead of flailing about in this fog of obscurantism, the real debate should have been about how we got into the position in the first place. The roots of the discrepancy in numbers lay in the strategic doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” developed in the Sixties. According to this doctrine, it did not matter whether we had more or fewer missiles than the Soviet Union so long as we had enough to obliterate the citizens and factories of large parts of the Soviet Union.II Similarly, the Soviet Union was considered to possess a capacity to deter the United States so long as it had enough missiles to destroy American popular and industrial centers. Strategy thus turned into economic analysis: As long as enough of our weapons survived a Soviet nuclear strike to wreak the theoretically calculated havoc, deterrence would be maintained. According to this rationale, our requirement for strategic forces was thought to be largely independent of the threat we faced. The vulnerability of part of our forces — such as ICBMs — was irrelevant provided enough warheads from all sources would survive to inflict “unacceptable” damage.
The reliance on nuclear retaliation had been developed when America enjoyed overwhelming strategic superiority. In an era of parity, the willingness of any President to put the American population at risk for the protection of distant countries was bound to lose credibility. The doctrine ignored or vastly underestimated the psychological and political inhibitions on leaders who have to give the orders. The targeting scenarios left a President with only two options in a crisis: to give in, or to initiate the extermination of tens of millions of people (first Soviet citizens and then our own in the inevitable retaliation). This strategy was morally questionable even in an era when we had superiority. In an age of approaching strategic equality it threatened to turn into a formula for either suicide or surrender. All would depend on the Soviet leaders’ having enough fear of our intentions to be deterred from running risks. This could be sustained only by a reckless diplomacy through which it would become plausible that if pressed we would unleash a cataclysm even if it destroyed our population and urban centers — an approach most incompatible with the convictions of our people and most likely to evoke panic or appeasement among our allies.
In other words, it was not necessary to postulate a Soviet advantage in strategic weapons to be concerned about the altered military balance. Even US–Soviet equality in strategic weapons implied a revolutionary change in the assumptions on which the West’s security had been based in the entire postwar period. For the first twenty-five years of the nuclear age, maintaining the military equilibrium was relatively straightforward. The Soviet Union was always superior in ground forces on the Eurasian continent, yet its military reach was generally limited to regions accessible to motorized ground transport, that is, adjacent territories in Europe and, to some extent, China. On the other hand, Africa, most of the Middle East, even Southeast Asia, were beyond the range of major Soviet military intervention. And even the areas theoretically hostage to Soviet ground armies were protected by three factors:
• First, by American strategic forces so preponderant that they could disarm the Soviet Union or at least reduce its counterblow to tolerable levels;
• Second, by a vast American superiority in so-called theater nuclear forces everywhere around the Soviet periphery;
• And third, in Europe, by substantial American and allied ground forces that posed a high risk to the Soviets that a ground attack would trigger nuclear retaliation from the United States.
Not surprisingly, the major crises in the first twenty years of the postwar period — whether in Berlin, Korea, the Middle East, or Cuba — were ultimately contained, because the costs of pushing them beyond a certain point always appeared exorbitant to Moscow.
Starting in the 1960s, the military balance began to change, almost imperceptibly at first, so great was our superiority, but with growing momentum as the years went by. By the 1970s it was already foreseeable that when the Soviets developed multiple warheads of their own, the larger size of their missiles (in technical language, their bigger throwweight) was bound to be translated eventually into more warheads of superior explosive power. Not only would we lose our “counter-force” capability (our ability to destroy their land-based missiles); our land-based missiles would become substantially vulnerable. The strategic equation of the entire postwar period would be reversed: Our threat to initiate a nuclear exchange would become hollow. If crises no longer produced fear of escalation to all-out war, they would also become more likely. There would be an exponential increase in the danger to allies at levels of violence below general nuclear exchange.
The imminent transformation of the strategic balance should have forced a reappraisal of the strategy of relying on the threat of general nuclear war even to protect Europe and certainly other areas; and it should have led to major efforts to strengthen local and regional conventional forces. Unfortunately, in the early Seventies the civil strife over Vietnam prevented a rethinking of old verities just when it became most urgent. The defense budget was the focal point of antiwar pressures, not of thoughtful analysis.
New weapons were decried as excessive, as symptoms of a military psychosis, as wasteful and dangerous. The ABM program passed the Senate by only one vote and was then emasculated in the appropriations process. The C-5A transport aircraft that later saved an ally in the 1973 Middle East war was challenged repeatedly. Even MIRVs, the only new strategic system available to us to offset the Soviet numerical superiority in the 1970s, were not immune; in 1970 forty Senators signed an appeal to stop MIRV testing. In 1973 the Trident submarine and missile, then the only strategic offensive program ready for production, escaped cancellation by one vote. Ironically, it was those most opposed to the arms race who rejected flexible military options; they clung to the most bloodthirsty nuclear targeting strategies because mass extermination of civilians, in the weird logic of the nuclear age, requires the smallest number of strategic forces.
In this atmosphere, maintaining even the arsenal inherited from the Sixties absorbed the energies of the Nixon Administration up to the end of the Vietnam war. Obtaining funds for new programs, nuclear or conventional, was enormously difficult. This is why the initiative for negotiating a freeze on offensive weapons originated in the Pentagon itself, in an October 1970 memorandum from Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard — a fact later conveniently forgotten. The best that could be accomplished in the conditions of the early 1970s was to strengthen our military posture as much as the Congress allowed and to adjust the doctrine of assured destruction so that less catastrophic options were possible.III
In short, the first SALT agreement was not extracted from us by clever Soviet negotiators; the conditions it reflected were conditions we had imposed on ourselves by our earlier decisions and our domestic turmoil. It was therefore in our power to alter these. And the Administration set about to do exactly that. It used the debate over SALT to renew its request for a supplementary appropriation to strengthen our strategic forces — the B-I strategic bomber; the Trident submarine and missile; cruise missiles; and more accurate missile warheads — all of which were to be available to go into production after the Interim Agreement expired (in 1977). We would then be in a position either to match the Soviets in an arms race or to trade bargaining chips in a new round of SALT.
But as Nixon’s second term began, the political and moral authority he needed to pursue simultaneously the military balance and a sophisticated policy of arms control was beginning to erode. Congressional liberals resisted increases in the defense budget; it was not the “peace dividend” they had expected. (The Congressional climate did not begin to support major defense increases until about 1975.) And conservatives were uncomfortable with the ideological ambiguity of arms control. Erstwhile allies became adversaries. Watergate poisoned the atmosphere.
The fact of the matter was that each side in the debate had a point; Jackson and the Administration would have served the country better as allies than as opponents. The Nixon Administration deserves great credit for having preserved the sinews of our defense in the face of a relentless Congressional and media assault. Every new strategic program in existence a decade later (together with some canceled by the Carter Administration) had its origin under the stewardship of Nixon and Ford.
But Jackson and his friends were not wrong in their fear that theories of arms control may in fact have reinforced the reluctance of some in Congress, key opinion-makers, and even Administration officials, to face the relentless Soviet military buildup squarely. After arms control became fashionable in the Sixties, new weapons systems had to overcome not only the traditional objection of liberals that they were unnecessary (because we already possessed an “overkill” capacity) but the added one that they endangered the prospects of SALT. Indeed, many new programs could be put through the Congress less on their merits than as bargaining chips. They were needed, various Administration spokesmen — including me — argued, so that they could be traded in a negotiation. Whatever the tactical utility of this argument, it tended to reduce the energy with which new programs were pursued. The Pentagon found it difficult to muster enthusiasm — or scarce resources — for projects that were defined as negotiable. After a while the Soviet Union began to play the game deliberately. From ABM to cruise missiles, it systematically sought to use SALT to inhibit our military and technological development; it tried to fuel our domestic debate, adding its own propaganda to Congressional pressures against new weapons.
The theory that new American weapons weakened the prospects of arms control thrived despite all evidence to the contrary. In 1967, before we had an ABM program, President Lyndon Johnson had suggested to Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin at Glassboro that both sides renounce ABMs. Kosygin contemptuously dismissed the idea as one of the most ridiculous he had ever heard. By 1970, after the Nixon Administration had won its Congressional battle for ABM by one vote, Soviet SALT negotiators refused to discuss any other subject. Only by the most strenuous negotiating effort did we ensure that limits on offensive, as well as defensive, weapons were included. (Conversely, the Carter Administration’s abandonment of the B-I strategic bomber, its stretch-out of the MX missile, and slowdown of the Trident program did not speed up SALT II negotiations or improve the terms.)
As with all civil wars, the conflict between the Nixon Administration and its conservative critics was bitter. Shared premises inevitably caused disagreements to be ascribed to bad faith. Suspicion of motives came to overwhelm discussion of substance. Nixon, like me, was substantially in accord with Senator Henry Jackson. As on Soviet emigration, we differed with him primarily as to tactics: The Administration thought that we could best sustain domestic support for a strong defense if we had demonstrated that we were also concerned with arms control. Jackson was convinced that SALT would ultimately drain Congressional support for our military programs by creating a misleading impression that peace had arrived.
The two sides should have joined forces behind a strong defense program and a realistic arms control approach. Instead, Jackson insisted on a showdown, egged on by Nixon’s traditional liberal opponents who seized the opportunity of this intramural squabble but whose newfound militancy on human rights did not divert their pressures for cutting the military budget. On March 8, 1973, Nixon gloomily told the National Security Council:
I had breakfast this morning with Senator [John] McClellan and Senator [Milton] Young. Both of them have always been strong supporters of our policy, particularly where military matters are concerned. They said that as far as the Senate was concerned, we were going to have real troubles on defense matters. Even Senator McClellan is talking of making cuts in our NATO forces. He said he is doing this not because he wants to, but he needs to take this position in order to avoid even deeper cuts that would be imposed by the Senate. The Senate, with the exception of Senators Jackson and [John] Tower, simply won’t back us on these issues.
In these circumstances Nixon naturally had the greatest difficulty crediting the seriousness of those who accused him in effect of being soft in negotiating with the Soviets. And it was hard to take after the abuse we had suffered in the lonely determination to preserve American honor and credibility in the first term. A meeting of minds would have been difficult in the best of conditions; Watergate froze the mutual distrust beyond any hope of understanding.
IN theory our defense problem should have been amenable to the rational weighing of carefully elaborated choices that outsiders see as the process of government. Reality is not like that. Decisions emerge from a combination of personal convictions, bureaucratic self-interest, administrative trade-offs, and Congressional and public pressures, with the dividing line between these elements often blurred in the discussion and even in the minds of the participants. In this instance, astonishing as it may seem, hawks and doves alike were reluctant to face the implications of our evaporating strategic superiority. The programs being pushed by the Pentagon — Trident, B-I, and improved warheads — generally enhanced our second-strike capacity. They were an insurance against a Soviet surprise attack. They did not deal with the dilemma of how to respond to Soviet expansionism when we no longer possessed a credible counterforce capacity and were inferior in conventional forces. The Defense Department did not dare address the issue of conventional forces when the national policy was to abolish the draft — which in turn was needed to defuse the antiwar movement. The doves thought even existing forces were excessive. They perceived no threat to international security in the fateful combination of nuclear parity and local inferiority.
In this environment our preparations for SALT II fell between two stools. Our deliberations neither rose to a true analysis of our long-term strategy nor addressed the fundamental question of whether a SALT negotiation was the right way to deal with our emerging security problems. The Defense Department generally defended its existing programs, though the rationale for them was growing threadbare. It was torn between its desire to support Presidential policy (which favored a new round of SALT talks) and its fear of retribution from Senator Jackson, the second ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, whose support was essential to steer military appropriations through the Congress. The State Department and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) — before Fred Iklé took over as its director — were concerned with negotiability, defined at least in a general sense by what the Soviets had said they would accept. They were thus objectively opposing the few new strategic programs that had passed the Congressional gauntlet.
How Nixon would have reacted to these pressures in normal times is difficult to determine. He had an overwhelming mandate. He had pulled off more difficult feats than reconciling a strong defense with arms control. But the question soon became moot when Watergate deprived him of the attention span he needed to give intellectual impetus to SALT. Even in his first term I had had difficulty getting Nixon to focus on the technical issues of SALT. Now in the wake of the resignations of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, he explicitly told me (on May 1) to follow my own judgment in choosing among options. I did not do so. I continued to submit the options to him. But this merely added one bureaucratic step. His approval of staff recommendations on SALT was nearly automatic.
The practical result, however, was a governmental stalemate. Presidential assistants can be powerful in influencing Presidential decisions; they cannot make the decisions, especially when major departments have strong convictions. In the first term my influence had been greatest where the departments were eager to avoid the onus of public controversy (as on Vietnam negotiations), or where no one wanted to take the responsibility for a major change of course (as on China).
In that period, my chairmanship of interdepartmental committees had enabled me to learn the views of the various agencies, encourage analysis, and narrow the options. I could then use this knowledge in secret negotiations with some confidence as to where I had bureaucratic support and what would cause difficulties. The agencies still assumed that they shared responsibility for the outcome of a negotiation, including its failure.
But by 1973 they had discovered that the major negotiations took place without their knowledge. Hence I could be blamed for failure, or be made to bear the brunt of whatever controversy even success was sure to bring. Each department thereafter would stake out its maximum objective, whatever sense it made. If that pristine position was not achieved, the agencies were not responsible. The inevitable compromise that would be necessary for a solution, and which in normal procedures they would have urged, could now be blamed on inadequate vigilance by the negotiator. My position, in short, had become bureaucratically untenable.
Our preparations for SALT II suddenly took on a theological cast. For ten years we had deliberately designed a force structure quite asymmetrical with that of the Soviets. Our missiles were small and presumably versatile; theirs were heavy and powerful. The Soviets put most of their emphasis on land-based missiles with heavy payloads; we had diversified to include bombers and submarine-based missiles. The Soviets were ahead in numbers of land-based missiles and throwweight; we in multiple warheads. This was the force structure we had chosen. Throughout my period in office not a single request came forward from either the civilian or the military element of the Pentagon to change the mix of our forces. What they did ask for, when SALT II negotiations began, was that we demand in negotiations the perfect symmetry that their own unilateral decisions had never sought, and had indeed prevented, and that they never attempted to achieve even once the principle had been conceded.
Perhaps we should have declared a moratorium on SALT for a year to get our intellectual house in order. But bureaucratic momentum, and the fear that delay would be blamed on Watergate and thus weaken the President, made it impossible. And we hoped to repeat the experience of SALT I, in which we had clarified our thinking as we went along. Our dilemma was that we were constrained by domestic pressures from choosing either of the two options that made strategic sense: building up massively to bring about Soviet restraint through the threat of a counterforce capability, or freezing the status quo while we still had an edge in warheads.
The Defense Department had a clear-cut different view. It would be prepared to live with the number of launchers we had decided to build though they spelled inequality; it was not willing to see these numbers written down in an agreement. For an agreement, it insisted on “equal aggregates,” or equality in every weapons system — ICBMs, SLBMs, and heavy bombers. This was a symbolic objective that reflected domestic pressures, not a political or strategic analysis.IV It is impossible to achieve by negotiation what one is not willing to pursue by one’s own effort. In effect, the proposal meant asking the Soviets to reduce unilaterally without sacrificing any American program or threatening any American buildup if the proposal were not accepted. How to accomplish it was generously left to my discretion. The proposition reminded me of the story of the admiral who during World War II claimed to have found a solution to the submarine problem: He proposed heating the ocean and boiling the enemy to the surface. Asked how to accomplish this feat, he replied: “I have given you the idea; its technical implementation is up to you.”
The State Department went to the other extreme. It proposed a moratorium on all MIRV testing and deployment. This was no more negotiable since it would have excluded the Soviets from the MIRV field altogether. It was also greeted with little enthusiasm in the Pentagon because it would have forced us to abandon the Trident, the only new American missile then under development. Such MIRV limits were also alleged to raise a host of verification issues. (These on closer examination proved soluble.)
So it was that for the first time since I had come to government I was bureaucratically isolated — and confronted with palpable absurdities.
While these esoteric debates were going on, and despite its obsession with equality, the Defense Department continued to reduce our forces by administrative decisions throughout the nearly seven years that SALT II was being negotiated. For example, under its published 1973 five-year program — without any White House guidance or any reference to SALT — the Pentagon planned to retire some 100 B-52s and to build only 250 B-IS to replace the remaining B-52s, for a total numerical decline in our strategic forces of some 290 units. It thus gave the Soviets for nothing benefits for which we could at least have attempted to exact some reciprocity in the negotiations.
It may seem strange that decisions of such consequence could be made by a department of the government without White House clearance. And technically they were not. But the White House faces a serious decision in determining at what point to intervene in the budgetary process. Our defense budget is larger than the entire expenditures of any European country. In the early phases the Office of Management and Budget in the White House can have considerable influence — but only on the gross totals. For the NSC to intervene in detail at this stage and to specify weapons systems that we wanted to preserve for a SALT tradeoff would have affronted the Defense Department and the uniformed military. They are acutely sensitive about what they consider their prerogative in making the initial recommendation about how to divide up approved funds among the services.
The Pentagon had been too badly burned by what it considered interference by armchair civilian strategists in the Sixties to be hospitable to high-level review of its planning. In 1971 I had sent an inquiry to the Defense Department asking why Soviet weapons should cost less than comparable American ones. It was still under study five years later when I left the government. The same fate befell a request for a comprehensive review of naval strategy and requirements. In each case the Joint Chiefs objected, by the time-honored method of foot-dragging, to the principle that their detailed plans might be subject to review by officials outside the Department of Defense. It was not until James Schlesinger became Secretary of Defense in 1973 that we succeeded in obtaining the review of targeting for our strategic forces that we had requested in 1969. By then the growth of the Soviet strategic forces had severely constricted our choices.
Early in the Nixon Administration I thought some progress was being made when a Defense Program Review Committee was set up, including State and the economic agencies. Secretary of Defense Laird supported it because he wanted to bring home to the claimants for larger expenditures for social services the grave consequences of taking them out of the defense budget. I agreed happily because I thought it would give me the opportunity to influence strategic doctrine and force levels at an earlier stage than had been customary. As things turned out, Laird served his purposes better than I mine. As a practical matter Laird invoked the committee only to stave off gross cuts in the budget. The White House saw the outlines of the detailed defense program only during the summer before it was put into final form in October. By then the services had made their various trade-offs. Weapons considered obsolescent were the first to go, partly because as they disappeared they strengthened the case for entirely new systems. The unresolved issues were kept to a minimum and were usually highly technical, satisfying Presidential insistence on having the last word without enabling his staff to undertake a serious strategic review. So it happened that we continued to hand to the Soviets as part of our budgetary process what we should have used as bargaining chips — to my vocal but futile dismay; the budgetary and the negotiating cycles were simply out of phase.
It was hardly an environment conducive to conceptual thought when SALT II got under way in October 1972. The Soviets proposed the withdrawal of American ballistic-missile submarines from forward bases as well as mutual “restraint” in the development of new strategic weapons. Since our government had not yet formulated any position, and was preoccupied by the Presidential elections and the final negotiations on Vietnam, we arrived at a tried and true response: We proposed an “exploratory” meeting. Its purpose, as laid down in instructions to the SALT delegation on November 8, 1972, was to elicit Soviet reactions and to develop a “work program” — in short, to make sure that nothing much controversial could occur.
Our delegation carried out these instructions with the meticulousness that our own internal divisions made obligatory. For six months theoretical papers were pushed back and forth while we consumed ourselves in near-academic debates about options that, even had we been able to agree on them, had no relationship to any negotiating reality.
Early in 1973, SALT talks resumed. The negotiations met in Geneva and presented maximum positions to each other without a serious effort to bridge the gaps. This had to await internal review by both governments. I do not know what deliberations, if any, the Soviet leadership undertook. As for us, at NSC Verification Panel meetingsV in February and March 1973, it became clear that there were political limits to any proposal that impinged on our MIRV program. The State Department was leaning toward proposing a moratorium on MIRV testing. Deputy Secretary of Defense William Clements and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer were strongly opposed. They argued that though we would still be able to test our new Trident missiles with single warheads, the Trident program without MIRVs would lose its rationale and be killed in Congress. The new Secretary of Defense, Elliot Richardson, agreed. In this they were undoubtedly right; with our budgetary process, a moratorium tends to kill the weapons system to which it applies. One cannot obtain appropriations for what one is seeking to ban through negotiations.
A National Security Council meeting on March 8, 1973, confronted the President with having to decide whether any kind of MIRV limitation should be included in our position. If so, which approach — a ban on MIRVing large Soviet missiles, a freeze and a MIRV test ban for two or three years, or some other variation? And what were we prepared to pay for limitations on Soviet multiple warheads? The desultory discussion merely reaffirmed old perplexities. Unbeknownst to his foreign policy advisers, Nixon was already preoccupied with the unraveling of Watergate. And technical discussions of throw weight, aggregates, or fractionization (the number of warheads on each launcher) bored him in the best of circumstances. His distracted look and sporadic sarcastic comments underlined that he wanted nothing so much as for the meeting to end without having to confront a decision that could only add a foreign policy controversy to his domestic agonies.
Nixon also had an acute instinct for the right moment to act. The Soviets had given no indication that they were ready for serious discussion. Our own deliberations were largely exploratory and theoretical. No one understood better than Nixon the principle that a President should not spend political capital unless he can calculate high odds for success. So the outcome of the meeting was the Solomonic decision that a new interagency paper would be prepared, summing up — and possibly simplifying — the many options before us. Given the raging disputes within our government, even agreeing on a definition of the disagreements would not be a simple matter. Resolving them would have taken months without Watergate; Watergate caused the issue in effect to be deferred into the Ford Presidency. While not prepared to rule on SALT, Nixon had no hesitation in pronouncing on our strategic goals. He concluded the meeting with a peroration that we could never afford to be Number 2; we had to do what was necessary to maintain at least equivalence. But he gave no guidelines by which to measure whether this criterion was met either in strategic planning or in SALT. That, after all, was the issue.
The divisions in Washington were matched by foot-dragging in Moscow. The American debate about “inequality” must have had its counterpart in Moscow. After all, SALT I constrained no American program; it stopped several Soviet programs. The Soviets had not yet tested any MIRVs, moreover, and were undoubtedly not ready to undertake a serious negotiation on limiting them.
These inhibitions were reinforced by Brezhnev’s eagerness to conclude the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War (discussed below). He was afraid that to pursue intensive negotiations on both subjects simultaneously would delay his cherished project. At times he even attempted to use SALT to speed that Agreement. This was reflected in two conversations I had with Dobrynin in early March 1973. Dobrynin alleged that the Soviet military did not see any point in a strategic arms limitation agreement when the existing one had still four years to run. We had to understand, said Dobrynin, that left to the Soviet bureaucratic processes SALT was bound to move very slowly. To intervene personally, Brezhnev needed the excuse of a successful conclusion of the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War.
To argue that the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party required a pretext to participate in Soviet bureaucratic decisions was to elevate chutzpah into an art form. But once launched on it, Dobrynin was infinitely inventive in developing variations on the theme of a beleaguered Brezhnev assailed on all sides by fractious colleagues. The Soviet Ministry of Defense, according to Dobrynin, did not have much use for SALT. It consistently put its most unimaginative and unenterprising general on the SALT delegation, he said, with instructions to block any initiative put forward by the Foreign Ministry, which was technically in charge of the negotiations. If the general was asked by the head of the Soviet delegation, Vladimir Semenov, to request new instructions, he refused to do so, arguing that if new instructions were needed the Ministry of Defense would issue them on its own. And the Defense Ministry’s attitude was allegedly summed up in a remark on SALT by Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Grechko, to Dobrynin: “If you want my personal opinion, I’ll give it to you. If you want my official opinion, the standard answer is no.”
The idea that the head of a Soviet negotiating team would not have a Politburo mandate was preposterous. The proposition that elements of the Soviet government would squabble while dealing with foreigners was cleverly geared to American preconceptions of the “doves” in the Kremlin fighting a valiant battle against “hard-liners.” The general assigned to SALT in 1973, Nikolai Ogarkov, eventually became Soviet Chief of Staff — a position unlikely to be given to a man perceived to be second-rate — though I do not doubt that the Soviet military were as suspicious of the newfangled theories of arms control as generals the world over.
The stalled negotiations in Geneva were enlivened from time to time by hopeful reports from our negotiating team, who in the best tradition of American negotiators soon developed a vested interest in their own success. Thus on March 27 the team reported an alleged hint by a member of the Soviet delegation to the effect that if we agreed to continue SALT I’s inequality in total numbers of launchers, the Soviets might go along with limiting each side to 300–500 MIRVed land-based missiles of one type. This was not an uninteresting proposition from our point of view. It would have put off the day of Minuteman’s vulnerability and prevented the Soviets from MIRVing their heavy missiles. And we never intended to MIRV more than 550 of our own. On the other hand, it sounded uncharacteristically complicated and conceptual for a Soviet opening position. Dobrynin never raised it, and he was the channel through which the Soviets pursued those issues about which they were serious. Nor did Dobrynin respond when I questioned him. It may thus have been a case of an eager American representative construing stupefaction at one of his complex expositions as assent and reporting his preferences as a Soviet proposal. It would not have been the first time.
What we received from the Soviets officially was a proposal so onesided that one wonders how any serious person could ever have believed that it might be discussed, much less negotiated. Quite simply, the Soviets proposed to ban any new strategic weapons during the period of the new agreement. Conveniently, they allowed modernization to proceed. By a strange coincidence every Soviet missile being tested (we were aware of four new types) was defined as a “modernized” version of an existing one. Since we were just beginning to develop our first new strategic missile in ten years (the Trident), the scheme did not invite much dispassionate analysis in our government.
At the end of April 1973, as I was preparing for my trip to Zavidovo, I convened three more Verification Panel meetings, on April 25, 27, and 30. No one had any new ideas to offer. Defense and the Joint Chiefs had only one position: equal aggregates in every category and every weapons system, no matter how different the design of our own forces from that of the Soviets. After hearing for years about the dangers of the Soviet heavy missile if MIRVed, we were now told that stopping their MIRVing was “not worth much.” This caused me to ask: “If this is true, can someone explain what the hell this negotiation is all about?” Clements modified the position slightly: MIRVing of the Soviet SS-9 missile was not such a formidable prospect; halting it “would be desirable but only if we don’t pay too much” — in other words, not at the price of giving up the negotiating goal of equal aggregates (for which Defense continued to offer no building program in the absence of a SALT agreement). But if there was no limit on MIRVs, what became of all the fine theories of arms control based on discouraging a first strike by reducing the advantage of the attacker? I stated my concern at the Verification Panel meeting of April 25:
Equal MIRVs with equal numbers would give the first striker a great advantage. It would be only a cosmetic equivalence, not real. It would put a premium on striking first. It may be unavoidable, but if you have five times as many warheads as missiles, and your aiming points are fewer than your missiles, it puts a premium on the first strike. That creates a massive element of instability.
Whereas Defense wanted SALT II to ratify all existing programs, State and ACDA either were prepared to abandon all new programs or were asking for the right to go on a fishing expedition in the name of conducting a “probe.” The proposition that we should probe without having a position of our own — indeed, after we had explicitly failed to reach an internal agreement — was guaranteed to elicit my sarcasm:
What do you probe for without knowing what we want? I’d rather go from our own position than from theirs. It’s a sad commentary on the ability of our government if our own position would not be better for us than theirs would be.
Since the agencies could not agree on a position and the President was immobilized by Watergate, the instruction sent on May 3 to our SALT delegation was a mélange of every agency’s preference. No one was overruled; everyone’s pet project was included. The proposal called for equal aggregates at a ceiling of 2,350 delivery vehicles, some 250 below existing Soviet numbers and some 150 above ours. It included a freeze on, and a ban on further testing of, land-based MIRVs. This neatly shut the Soviets out of MIRVing their ICBM force, which comprised 85 percent of their total throw weight, without significantly curtailing any program of our own. We offered, in other words, to trade 450 warheads (on the 150 Minuteman IIIs that we would forgo) for a minimum of 5,000 Soviet warheads (depending on how many they would have put on each land-based missile). Not surprisingly, this proposal quickly disappeared into the limbo of one-sided proposals by which each side pleased its bureaucracy while it decided whether painful decisions were in fact necessary.
Thus when I reached Zavidovo in May 1973, SALT was stalemated. I tried out on Brezhnev the MIRV portion of the Presidential instructions, which had been sent to Geneva but not yet been presented there. (I had met our chief negotiator, the able and unflappable U. Alexis Johnson, on May 4 at the airport in Copenhagen on the way to Moscow and asked him to hold that part back so I could present it to Brezhnev as a special Presidential suggestion.)
Brezhnev was crude but far from stupid. He would not fall for transparent ploys. He could hear nothing of a scheme that precluded the Soviets from putting MIRVs on their best missiles. I hinted to Dobrynin at another scheme — just “thinking out loud,” I said — namely, a Soviet promise not to MIRV their heavy missiles in return for an American pledge not to develop stand-off bomber weapons (cruise missiles) of a range of more than 3,000 kilometers. The trouble with that scheme was the Pentagon’s reluctance to develop or produce such a weapon (a neglect I corrected as soon as I returned) and the range, which was too great to make the offer truly attractive to the Soviets. Dobrynin checked with Brezhnev, who showed some interest but said he would have to consult his military and therefore could not make a decision while I was in Zavidovo. He never came back to it. Almost certainly he was not ready to discuss any MIRV limits prior to the completion of the Soviet MIRV testing program.
We retreated to the idea of signing some “general principles” on SALT at the June summit. This is the usual refuge of diplomats unable to agree, unwilling to admit the impasse, and skillful in finding formulas to permit each side to maintain its original position. On April 6 at Geneva, the Soviets had put forward a draft, which repeated their onesided positions in the guise of general principles. We had ignored it, neither negotiating on it nor offering alternative formulations. On April 25 Dobrynin handed me a condensed version of the Geneva draft, still heavily loaded in favor of the Soviet position. It implied strongly, for example, that our airplanes based in Europe should be included in the aggregates. This would have forced us either to reduce the number of our strategic weapons (to compensate for the planes based in Europe) or to withdraw some of the air forces assigned to the defense of NATO. It was therefore worrisome to our NATO allies both on strategic grounds and because they did not relish having their security arrangements the subject of negotiations in which they did not participate. While they were at it, the Soviets sneaked in a clause that would require us, in effect, to end our nuclear cooperation with Britain. And they made the numbers of the Interim Agreement permanent, thus institutionalizing the inequality in launchers without any compensating Soviet concession. We had no incentive to pursue this scheme.
Our counterdraft will not be recorded by historians as a model of precision. It sought neutral ground, keeping open the options of each side. It finessed the Soviet desire to include our forward-based systems by the same formula employed in the SALT I agreement: a pledge that there would be no circumvention via third countries. This implied that there could be no significant increase in the number of our European-based weapons capable of reaching the USSR; but it did not require that the existing weapons be counted in the totals. Our draft also eliminated the proposal permanently to freeze the unequal numbers of the Interim Agreement. (Ironically, after fighting for years to exclude forward-based systems from SALT, we seem to have reached a point at this writing of negotiating about forward-based systems without SALT.)
Thus emerged a statement of “general principles” that did not exactly mark a memorable turn in the history of diplomacy or of arms control. The document enshrined the hallowed principle of “equal security.” This could mean anything: equal aggregates and equal MIRVs without regard to overseas bases; unequal MIRVs in return for unequal aggregates; or any other schemes either government might devise. A little more specific was the clause that a new SALT agreement should include restraints on “qualitative” development; this was a euphemism for conveying that certain — as yet unspecified — MIRV limitations would be part of SALT II. The most concrete provision was that the parties would seek to conclude a new agreement before the end of 1974. Gromyko worried about this because he feared that a failure to meet the deadline, even for technical reasons, might sour our relations. We thought that a deadline was the only way to stop endless procrastination within our government and at Geneva. (We got in just under the wire with the Vladivostok agreement of November 1974.)
But none of this esoteric maneuvering, either by supporters or opponents of SALT, reached the central reality. During the course of the Seventies we would lose our residual counterforce capability (our ability to destroy Soviet ICBMs). Sometime in the Eighties our land-based missiles would become vulnerable, depending on the rapidity with which the Soviets placed multiple warheads on their land-based missile launchers and improved their accuracy. If each side had an equal number of MIRVed vehicles and if there was “freedom to mix” (another hallowed Pentagon principle allowing each side to decide on the composition of its force), then it was certain that the Soviets would MIRV many more of their land-based missiles than we and, since theirs were larger, would place more warheads on each than the three on our Minuteman. The result would be an overwhelming Soviet capacity to destroy our ICBM force, not offset by any American buildup in other categories of strategic weapons. Our only new program, the Trident submarines, gave us no counterforce capability because SLBMs were generally not accurate enough to pinpoint silos and presented technical problems of simultaneous launching.
Sooner or later, even if the overall number of warheads were equal, the Soviets would combine their growing counterforce capability with their traditional conventional superiority to bring about changes in the geopolitical balance. Two weeks after the June 1973 summit, the Soviets conducted their first MIRV test on their SS-17 ICBM, the new missile that was to replace the obsolescent SS-11. A strategic revolution was now only a question of time.
On July 13, 1973, I wrote to Bill Clements insisting that we proceed with a long-range cruise missile. The Pentagon was thinking of canceling this weapon both for budgetary reasons and to prevent its being used as an excuse to kill off the Air Force’s cherished new bomber, the B-I. (Later events proved that the careful maneuvering of the services is not always the result of parochialism, as folklore has it, but the result of long experience. The B-I was canceled by the Carter Administration, which indeed argued that the cruise missile, carried by the existing B-52 bomber, made the B-I unnecessary.) I argued to Clements “that a long range bomber-launched cruise missile program makes sense strategically and could help our SALT position.” Clements went along enthusiastically and the cruise missile program was saved.VI
The SALT process thus went on while both sides were developing new weapons — we, the cruise missiles, the Trident submarine, and the B-I bomber; the Soviets, four new land-based ICBMs, and MIRVs. In America, our domestic divisions prevented a clear articulation of either strategy or an arms control doctrine, and in the resulting vacuum each issue became a philosophical as much as a technical one, settled on essentially political grounds. It was not until 1975 that Congress would take the Soviet threat seriously. A strategic nightmare was developing, in which the Soviets in the Eighties might use the “window” provided by the combination of counterforce capability (or even simply growth of its strategic arsenal) and local superiority to exploit or generate crises and to insist on geopolitical changes favorable to it. The issue of how to relate defense to arms control, how to maintain our strength while negotiating reciprocal limitations, has remained one of the central problems of American foreign policy.
The Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War
CURIOUSLY, there was another negotiation going on simultaneously with the debates on trade and SALT, which received very little attention: the diplomacy leading to the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War. On the tactical level, the handling of the talks was rather subtle. We skillfully pulled the teeth of a dangerous Soviet maneuver to lure us into renouncing the use of nuclear weapons, on which the free world’s defense after all depended. On the other hand, while it was a good illustration of the stamina required to deal with Soviet diplomacy, when it was all over we had avoided danger, but achieved little that was positive.
Soviet diplomacy knows no resting places. A scheme is presented as a major contribution to relaxing tensions; if we will only accept it there will be an “improvement in the atmosphere.” But as often as not, no sooner has one agreement been completed than the Kremlin advances another, which is pursued with characteristic single-mindedness and with the identical argument that failure to proceed will sour the atmosphere.
The origin of these projects is obscure. They may represent a deep strategic design. They may be carried forward by habit and inertia. They may represent the banner of one faction in some arcane maneuvering of the Politburo. Whatever their immediate motivation, Soviet initiatives once launched are pursued with almost monomaniacal intensity. Starting in 1972, we were exposed to such a Soviet steamroller. On my secret visit to Moscow in April 1972, Brezhnev took me aside to propose what he was pleased to call a “peaceful bomb” — a treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States renouncing the use of nuclear weapons against each other.14 This was at the height of North Vietnam’s spring offensive, when the Nixon Administration had all but decided to cancel the summit if Hanoi’s military push succeeded. And we were also determined to resume bombing of North Vietnam if the offensive were not halted in the next few days. To introduce the renunciation of nuclear weapons at that stage was a colossal piece of effrontery since NATO’s defense depended on the American nuclear guarantee. Given the Soviet superiority in conventional weapons, such a move would demoralize our allies and deeply disquiet China, which would see it as a sign of the much dreaded US–Soviet collusion.
On the other hand, the moment was well chosen for avoiding a flat rejection. Our strategy was to obtain a free hand in ending the war in Vietnam by separating Moscow from Hanoi. We therefore did not mind setting additional bait that would give the Soviets a stake in not turning on us if we increased pressure on Hanoi. This led us into a delicate maneuver: We sought to give Brezhnev and his associates some hope that their project might lead somewhere, without committing ourselves to it in the form in which it was presented. Our first move was to play for time; I turned it aside by in effect deferring it to the summit.
After Nixon, on May 8, 1972, had ordered the resumption of full-scale bombing of North Vietnam and the mining of its harbors, we were preparing for a cancellation of the summit until on May 10 Dobrynin nonchalantly asked me whether the visiting Soviet trade minister Nikolai Patolichev would be received by the President. Needless to say, we arranged for Patolichev to meet Nixon the next day. When eager journalists afterward pressed him for a public statement, Patolichev turned away questions about whether the summit was still on with wide-eyed amazement. “Have you any doubt?” he asked with a smile, as if the bombing of a Soviet ally and the mining of its harbors were an everyday occurrence.
But the Soviets never waste time presenting their bill. The very next day — May 12 — Dobrynin appeared for his quid pro quo. In order to prepare Brezhnev’s conversation with Nixon, he asserted blandly, his masters had armed him with a brief draft treaty to be signed as soon as convenient. In the first paragraph the United States and the Soviet Union renounced the use of nuclear weapons against each other. The second paragraph stated peremptorily that the two parties “shall prevent” situations whereby actions of third countries might produce a nuclear war. It was strong stuff. We were being asked to dismantle the military strategy of NATO and at the same time to proclaim a virtual US–Soviet military alliance designed to isolate or impose our will on China or any other country with nuclear aspirations.
The draft handed over by Dobrynin, while outrageous, presented a tactical problem. Nixon, as did I, wished to keep the discussion going, so as to give the Soviets an additional incentive to remain quiet while we broke the back of Hanoi’s offensive. At the same time we could not accept the Soviet draft without grave peril. So we engaged in a complicated fencing match in which we sought to parry the characteristic Soviet lunge with fancy footwork. But we knew that sooner or later we had to take a stand.
During the Moscow summit of 1972, as we had expected, Brezhnev bearded Nixon on the treaty. Nixon and I had agreed that Nixon should be noncommittal while evincing ambiguous interest — a pose at which Nixon was a master. If Brezhnev pressed, we had prepared a counter-draft that emphasized our constant theme that peace ultimately depended on the restrained conduct of the superpowers. We evaded the Soviet proposal of banning nuclear weapons in war and substituted for it a clause abjuring the threat of force in peacetime. Nor would we undertake an obligation to concert US–Soviet actions toward third countries; we would go no further than to offer our best efforts to see that the actions of third countries did not lead to nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Brezhnev received the document without comment; Gromyko, however, was too experienced not to realize that we were stalling. Nixon extricated himself from embarrassment by airily suggesting that any difference between the two drafts could be dealt with by Dobrynin and me. How we were to reconcile the irreconcilable he did not explain to the baffled Soviets. As for me, I understood that he did not want to hear of the enterprise again until after the election.
But the Soviets were working on a different timetable. On July 21, back in Washington, Dobrynin presented himself to carry out the assignment given to him and me by our principals. Unfortunately, he said, our draft would not do. Moscow had helpfully tried its hand at a new version, which he handed over. It maintained the bilateral renunciation of the use of nuclear weapons but — aware that we would not abandon our NATO commitments — added a clause to the effect that nothing in the agreement affected existing obligations to third parties, or the right of collective self-defense. This seemed to take care of our allies, but only highlighted the vulnerability of nonallied countries, such as China, whose territorial integrity was also essential to the international equilibrium.
We still needed time to finish the war in Vietnam. To stall, I put three hypothetical questions to Dobrynin. If the new Soviet draft were accepted, would the United States have the right to use nuclear weapons in defense of NATO? Would either side have the right to use nuclear weapons in defense of traditional friends toward whom we had no formal treaty obligations (for example, in the Middle East)? Would either side have the right to use nuclear weapons in defense of a major nonaligned country, the loss of whose independence might affect the global balance? (I mentioned India as an example, although the Soviet leaders could have had no doubt that we were really talking about China.)
I had not expected a formal answer. Indeed, I had asked such pointed questions because I thought that the Soviet reluctance to reply would bury the increasingly awkward project. To my amazement, a written Soviet reply was received on September 7, 1972, articulating their purposes unabashedly. The answer to my three questions was as follows: The proposed agreement did not preclude the use of nuclear weapons in a war involving NATO and the Warsaw Pact; however, their use would have to be confined to the territory of allies; employment against the territory of the United States and the Soviet Union was proscribed. In a Middle East war, nuclear weapons could not be used by either side. Even less could they be used if there were a conventional attack on an important third country such as India.
It would have been difficult to draw up a more bald or cynical definition of condominium. The proposed treaty would protect the superpowers against nuclear destruction even in a European war while guaranteeing the devastation of each country’s allies. Nothing would have been better designed to promote European neutralism or to depreciate the value of alliances. The defense of the vital Middle East would have to depend on conventional weapons, in which we were inferior, and even more so in the capacity to reinforce that distant theater. All other countries were to be left to their fate. For example, China could be attacked by Soviet armies that would be free of the fear of American nuclear response. On this interpretation of the treaty, our alliances would be shredded and friendly countries’ confidence in us destroyed.
These propositions could not stand unchallenged. Despite our wish to gain time I replied on the very same day, September 7, to remove any doubt about our priorities. I handed Dobrynin a paper restating our willingness to explore general principles of restrained international conduct. But I emphasized as well the limits beyond which we were not prepared to go:
— We believe it important to avoid any formulation that carried an implication of a condominium by our two countries;
— We believe it important that an agreement between our two countries should not carry any implication that we were ruling out only nuclear war between ourselves but were leaving open the option of nuclear war against third countries;
— We think it important that in concentrating on the prevention of nuclear war we should not at the same time appear to be legitimizing the initiation of war by conventional means;
— We think it important that past agreements, whether alliances or other types of obligations, designed to safeguard peace and security should be enhanced by any additional agreement between ourselves relating specifically to the prevention of nuclear warfare.
Our response owed no little to discussions we had initiated with the British government. During the summer we had briefed our major European allies, and China, on the outlines of the Soviet proposal. At the end of July 1972, I had used the regular visit to Washington by Sir Burke Trend, the British Cabinet Secretary, to show him the Soviet draft of July 21. I asked for British advice, and indicated that we would proceed only in tandem with London. On August 10 the Foreign Office sent its Soviet expert, Sir Thomas Brimelow, and a small group of advisers to Washington to review the project in detail.
London could not have made a happier choice. Cherubic, unflappable, not quite successful in obscuring his penetrating intelligence behind the bland exterior of the perfect civil servant, Brimelow became an indispensable part of the negotiations. He was a profound student of Soviet behavior. He had an unsentimental assessment of Soviet purposes. He was convinced that the threat of general war was one of the chief fears of the Soviet Union; anything that lessened Soviet concerns on that score would weaken deterrence. In his view, the Soviets wanted to reduce the margin of their own uncertainty while seeking to magnify allied inhibitions against the use of nuclear weapons. Our course must thwart those designs.
Brimelow, as did we, judged existing Soviet drafts unacceptable. I outlined a possible strategy of seeking to transform the Soviet approach into a statement of principles of political restraint proscribing the threat of force, nuclear or conventional. Brimelow agreed with the objective and counseled stalling — easy to accept since it coincided with what we were already doing. We knew that we would be able to achieve Soviet acquiescence only if we could slow down exchanges until some new deadline — like a summit — would produce Soviet anxieties sufficient to modify Brezhnev’s proposal fundamentally. So we marked time, using the need to end the Vietnam war as a pretext.
Patience was not Brezhnev’s strong suit. He used every opportunity to try to speed up negotiations. On my visit to Moscow in September 1972, he tried to lure me into a drafting session by urging me to indicate my objections to the Soviet text line by line. But this would make the Soviet draft the basic document and we objected to it in principle, not in details. I temporized by repeating at inordinate length the position that I had given to Dobrynin on September 7: no condominium; no implication that the United States and Soviet Union were seeking to protect only their own territory; no suggestion that conventional war was acceptable while nuclear was not. Brezhnev professed to be puzzled about such base suspicions of Soviet motives. If the Soviet Union renounced the use of nuclear weapons, he argued soothingly, we could be “two hundred percent” sure that it would also refrain from employing conventional weapons against us or our allies. (This, of course, left China and the Middle East conveniently uncovered.) Brezhnev sought to give force to this assurance — qualified by region as it was — with an appeal to Soviet constitutional practice: “Such a prospect would be completely contrary to the declarations of the Party Congress of our Party.” It was mind-boggling to imagine what would happen if we presented an agreement to the North Atlantic Council, much less to Peking, based on our confidence in a pledge made to itself by the Congress of the Soviet Communist Party.
I suggested that we proceed in two stages as we had with SALT: a general declaration of principles, to be followed by a more formal agreement. This found no favor with Brezhnev, who under Gromyko’s tutelage understood that the principles could only restate what had already been signed at the 1972 summit, that drafting them would take months, and that we would then claim that they exhausted the subject. But hours were consumed in debating this point — which served my purpose. I finally agreed to try my hand at another draft, which I promised to give Gromyko when he visited Washington in early October. This got us out of Moscow without a blowup.
When Gromyko arrived in Washington, I handed him on October 2 a draft that eliminated the obligation not to use nuclear weapons and stated a series of political conditions involving restraint in international behavior that had to be met before the renunciation of nuclear weapons could be considered. Gromyko was an expert draftsman. He understood immediately what I had done. He complained that we were not proceeding in the “spirit” of the initial exchanges. He noted (correctly) that “nothing” remained of the original Soviet proposal of the renunciation of the use of nuclear weapons.
To mount pressure, Gromyko told Nixon that Brezhnev’s return visit to America in 1973 was conditional on progress on the nuclear treaty. But that maneuver had lost its effectiveness. We were becoming confident that we would be free of the Vietnam war by 1973; a summit was no longer important to separate Moscow from Hanoi.
Still, during the final phase of the Vietnam negotiations, we were not eager for additional disputes. So I went back to stalling. Using the tried-and-true tactic of Presidential assistants, I hid behind Nixon, claiming somewhat disingenuously that the nuclear field was an area in which I had less latitude than in others. Duc to the Presidential campaign, I would not be able to get Nixon’s attention until November; at that point I would work on a redraft. I doubt that Gromyko believed me. After all, in Moscow Nixon had evaded talking about the nuclear treaty by assigning the subject to Dobrynin and/or Gromyko and me. Now I was reversing the argument. But Gromyko had few cards to play. So he acquiesced, as the Soviets usually do when faced with an unchangeable reality.
During the final agony of our negotiations over Vietnam, even the persistent planners in the Kremlin understood that we had no time to deal with the nuclear draft. This did not keep Dobrynin from some not-too-subtle pressures over the forthcoming summit. In December, he suggested two dates, June or November 1973, and implied that in the absence of the nuclear treaty Moscow was leaning toward November. The flaw in his stratagem was that, all things considered, we preferred November as well. We wanted to complete the Year of Europe and progress further in our relations with Peking. So we ignored the heavy hint.
By the end of February 1973, the Paris Agreement on Vietnam had been achieved and our triangular diplomacy was beginning to operate. I was barely back from China with the announcement that liaison offices were to be established in Peking and Washington, when the Soviet chargé d’affaires, Yuli Vorontsov, asked for an appointment to deliver a letter to Nixon from Brezhnev. Dated February 21, the letter purported to be a reply to Nixon’s acknowledgment of the good wishes sent by the Politburo on the conclusion of the Vietnam war. Nixon’s letter had carefully avoided listing the nuclear agreement in a catalogue of issues on which we were ready to proceed. It had referred elliptically to our willingness to consider whatever points Dobrynin had submitted to me with “a constructive spirit.” (This could refer to a whole list of subjects, including the Middle East.) It was thin gruel, but enough for Brezhnev to resume his campaign.
Brezhnev’s letter settled the issue of the summit first of all. It used the ploy of rejecting May as too early (a date that had never been discussed) and “postponed” the visit to the earliest date ever considered, the month of June. Nixon had enumerated SALT, European security, and Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions in Europe as the top items. Brezhnev listed the nuclear treaty and the Middle East as his priorities. He showed some interest in SALT, none in European force reductions. As always when the Kremlin wanted to make progress, Dobrynin suddenly reappeared in Washington from one of his frequent home consultations, catching me just before I was going on a vacation (which would have gained us ten more days).
But the bargaining positions had changed. Once the Soviets had set the date for the summit, time worked against them. We had next to no interest in the project; Brezhnev had made it one of his priorities. The Soviets had to move in our direction if they wanted to have anything to show for Brezhnev’s visit. In early April 1973, Dobrynin tried halfheartedly to play games about setting the precise date of the summit, but they ended abruptly when I pointed out that unless we agreed soon, technical arrangements would prove impossible and the summit would have to be postponed to November after all. Shortly afterward I was invited to Zavidovo to complete preparations, and the date of the summit was firmly established for June 18.
Now, if ever, was the moment of truth. We had skillfully avoided any final commitment to the project. We should probably have dropped it now that the Vietnam war was over and the summit was settled. But the price of stalling had been the implication that we would negotiate something; abandoning the negotiation — though in retrospect correct — seemed then too drastic.
On March 5, 1973, I summed up for Brimelow my analysis of Soviet motives and our objectives:
Their motives are obvious: to create the impression of detente, to create the impression of great power bilateralism and to give them a relatively free hand for blackmail — at the same time they are steadily increasing their strategic forces in an eerie way. Now it could also be to leave open the option of genuine detente further down the line. . . . So our objective . . . is to give them enough of the form without any substance.
I asked Brimelow whether, now that the Vietnam war was over and we had achieved Soviet agreement to a summit, we should drop the whole project. Brimelow remained suspicious, but he acknowledged that we seemed stuck on SALT, the Mideast, and the European Security Conference; our long-range objective was to enmesh the Soviets in “a less competitive relationship, and we cannot get there by telling them to go to hell.”
Of course Nixon and I bore the ultimate responsibility for proceeding. Brimelow’s job, after all, was not to make American policy but to help steer it in the safest directions. Once the strategy was settled, Brimelow applied his subtle mind to change the Soviet proposal from a renunciation of nuclear weapons to an agreement to renounce the threat of force in diplomacy. What emerged was like a Russian matryoshka doll that has progressively smaller models nested each inside the other. By a series of carefully hedged conditions, the avoidance of nuclear war became an objective rather than an obligation; the objective in turn was made to depend on refraining from the use or the threat of force by one party against the other, against allies of the other, or against third parties. Thus nuclear weapons would be renounced only after a renunciation of the threat of war in diplomacy, and if that condition was not fulfilled, the basic premise of the agreement disappeared. Indeed, it then worked the other way: It legitimized nuclear defense. To reassure allies, the draft continued to stress that the agreement did not affect existing obligations or the right of collective (or individual) self-defense.
Brimelow’s role was an example of the Anglo-American “special relationship” at its best, even at a time when the incumbent Prime Minister was not among its advocates. There was no other government which we would have dealt with so openly, exchanged ideas with so freely, or in effect permitted to participate in our own deliberations. All documents were made available to the British, sometimes with a time lag, but significant moves were always joint ones. Brimelow occasionally showed us British analyses. He did most of the actual drafting. The final version owed, in fact, more to British than to American expertise.
When I set out for Zavidovo on May 4, I was thus left with selling Brezhnev a draft about 180 degrees removed from his original design. It was a weird negotiation extending over several evenings of occasionally heated exchanges. Brezhnev’s idea of diplomacy was to beat the other party into submission or cajole it with heavy-handed humor. My tactic was to reduce matters to easy banter to avoid personal showdowns and to give emphasis to our sticking points when I turned serious. The negotiation became a contest between a bull and a matador, except that at the end of the contest the matador for all his intricate cape-play had only slightly winded the bull, who was assembling his energies for a new charge.
During breaks, while Brezhnev and his team disappeared into other rooms, my colleagues and I stepped out onto a balcony in Brezhnev’s office. We asked ourselves whether the text as it was evolving would help or hurt our ability to protect China and other third countries. We tended to think that it was marginally useful. In the meeting room Hal Sonnenfeldt attempted to apply in the Soviet Union the methods by which he kept abreast of my activities in Washington: He sought to read upside down Brezhnev’s briefing paper, which the General Secretary had left on the table in front of him. For once Sonnenfeldt failed.
On the first day of talks Brezhnev began with a long speech extolling the virtue of his version of the nuclear treaty — a “clear-cut and lucid agreement” that would contain provisions causing “no alarm,” he reassured me. “I wouldn’t bet on that,” I replied drily. Undeterred, Brezhnev rambled on about its historical importance for the United States and the Soviet Union, climaxing with the first of several sallies indicating that China was his real target:
And at least here in this group we should not pass over in silence the fact that there do exist in the world other nuclear powers as well, and there have to be such points in the agreement to show them it would be wrong to play with nuclear war.
Joining in a US–Soviet alliance against China was not exactly our idea of détente. Nor was I about to be bested in the department of long speeches, especially when the passage of each hour improved our bargaining position.
In my response I treated the proposed agreement as just one of many negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union, not as a unique historical event. I took a weak run at linkage by arguing that simultaneous progress on SALT II would enhance the significance of each negotiation. I shudder to think what would have happened had I proved more persuasive; the state of our internal deliberations hardly lent itself to serious negotiations on SALT. I noted, slightly sarcastically, that without the President’s personal relationship with Brezhnev the proposed agreement would have never gotten so far — implying that it was not a top priority for us from the point of view of national interest. I mentioned the necessity of informing allies (which we had already done, of course). Brezhnev replied that he would not prescribe how we should treat our allies; as for him, he was going to East Germany and Poland soon but would not inform them of the project. This was an unlikely proposition, not to mention that his equating East Germany with, say, France, would not, I suspected, have gone over well in Paris. Indeed, he added — perhaps to flatter me that our own procedures could be adapted to the Soviet Union — that only a few of his colleagues in the Politburo knew of the project. (This also raised a question in my mind about Dobrynin’s constant theme that failure to complete the agreement would weaken Brezhnev’s position in the Politburo. He could hardly be blamed for not finishing what his colleagues did not know about.)
The first session adjourned without going beyond general principles. On Saturday evening, May 5, after an introductory period of Brezhnev jokes, we turned at last to the text. At once a haggle broke out over which text to use. We had won three-quarters of the battle when it was decided to use our (more accurately Brimelow’s) text as a point of departure. Then we found ourselves in a typical pettifogging debate. Hard as it is to believe that grown men could quarrel over such trivia, the issue was whether someone should read out the entire text or only the disputed portions and if so who. We favored concentrating on disputed points to avoid introducing new isssues, especially the idea of renouncing the use of nuclear weapons. Finally, it was agreed to read the entire text aloud. Brezhnev took upon himself that dubious honor.
This having consumed well over an hour, it became evident that the passage of time had not affected the underlying motivations. Once our basic approach was accepted, Brezhnev sought to turn it to his purpose. He opened with a long appeal for a clause that would emphasize the bilateral nature of the agreement. The American draft proposed that the United States and the Soviet Union would “act in such a manner as to . . . exclude the outbreak of nuclear war between themselves and between either party and third parties.” Brezhnev wanted to drop the last seven words — leaving a glaring loophole for a nuclear attack on third parties. We finally settled on making the renunciation of nuclear war an objective, not an obligation, applying it to all countries and not simply to the superpowers, and making it dependent on a series of political conditions, especially the avoidance of the threat of war — substantially as Brimelow had suggested.
Immediately another wrangle broke out over the wording of an article saying that the document did not affect “obligations undertaken by the United States and the Soviet Union towards third countries in appropriate treaties and agreements.” I sought to strengthen the clause by adding the phrase “other appropriate instruments” — to take care of countries, such as Israel, with which we had no formal alliance (and to emphasize the unspoken but well-understood implication that it would include China as well). Brezhnev grudgingly acquiesced. Similar haggling went on over each article. In order not to test the reader’s patience further, I have included the entire text of the final agreement in the backnotes.15
To leave no ambiguity, on June 7 we drafted a Nixon letter to Brezhnev making clear that we would interpret the agreement as involving general obligations applicable to all nations; that it did not contain a renunciation of nuclear weapons but of the threat of force in diplomacy; that US–Soviet consultations must not be used to seek to impose any conditions on third countries:
My view is that we have set forth an objective and certain modes of conduct applicable to the policies of each of our countries in the years ahead. In doing this, we have not agreed to ban the use of any particular weapons but have taken a major step toward the creation of conditions in which the danger of war, and especially of nuclear war, between our two countries or between one of our countries and others, will be removed. In short, the obligations we have accepted toward each other we have also accepted as applicable to the policies which each of us conducts toward other countries. In subscribing to the agreement and, in particular, in agreeing to consult with each other in certain circumstances, we have made commitments to each other but have in no sense agreed to impose any particular obligation or solution upon other countries. At the same time we have left the rights of each of our two countries, and obligations undertaken by each of them unimpaired.
In short, in over a year of negotiation we had transformed the original Soviet proposal of an unconditional renunciation of the use of nuclear weapons against each other into a somewhat banal statement that our objective was peace, applying as well to allies and third countries and premised on restrained international conduct, especially the avoidance of the use or the threat of force. Another clause provided for consultation before any party resorted to the threat of force in circumstances endangering international peace and security. In case of a major military move the offender would stand in violation of the agreement. The whole document now constituted a web of conditions entangling the Soviets and making it impossible for them to turn on either NATO or the Middle East without violating the agreement. And it even gave us a kind of legal framework for resisting a Soviet attack on China.
Brezhnev and Nixon signed the agreement in Washington on June 22, 1973. We were sufficiently uneasy about possible misinterpretations that we had prepared a careful press briefing, which I read to Brezhnev before giving it. Its basic point was our by-now familiar one: The purpose of the agreement was not to prohibit the use of any particular weapon in wartime but to preserve the peace by refraining from the threat or use of force:
Each side has now set down in precise form its willingness to practice self restraint not only in relations with each other but with all other countries. . . . In other words, in their general conduct of international affairs, they must accept the constraints and implications that if their actions or policies increase the threat of war, they would be inconsistent with the objective of this Agreement. Thus, there is no condominium here, but rather the reverse. The two strongest nuclear powers explicitly accept a general responsibility to preserve the peace, not through intervention or pressures, but by refraining from the threat or use of force.
The underlying significance of this document, therefore, is that it is a reassurance for all countries.
Brezhnev grumbled that I seemed constantly to stress what the agreement was not, rather than its positive aspects. He had a point. But he had no choice except to go along with the briefing.
Peace between the two superpowers will hardly be ensured by legal documents. And whether we resist attacks on threatened countries depends less on artful interpretations of a complicated agreement than on our perception of the national interest. The Soviets proposed the document for symbolic reasons, and we had rewritten the content to render its symbolism either harmless or to the West’s advantage. What had started out as a Soviet step toward condominium had evolved into an elaboration of the “Basic Principles of US–Soviet Relations” signed at Moscow the previous year. The Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War reflected our belief that control of arms presupposed restraint in international conduct; that coexistence between the superpowers would ultimately depend on adherence to standards of behavior by which they would learn not to threaten each other’s vital interests.
The final agreement was thus in a sense a vindication of our basic approach. Technically, it was one of our better diplomatic performances. It represented ingenious drafting (mostly by Brimelow) and stubborn negotiating. Yet in retrospect I doubt whether the result was worth the effort. We gained a marginally useful text. But the result was too subtle; the negotiation too secret; the effort too protracted; the necessary explanations to allies and China too complex to have the desired impact.
The Europeans were especially sensitive. They had known about the project for months. I had personally briefed Pompidou, Heath, and Brandt several times. But allied unity eluded us despite the intensive consultation. Though Heath, Brandt, and Bahr had given support and the British had been partners in the drafting, Pompidou had always been wary, and for reasons of their own the leaders of Britain and Germany had not kept their bureaucracies informed. When the project finally surfaced in the North Atlantic Council in June 1973, this culminated in the absurdity that Britain’s permanent representative strongly criticized what was to a large extent a British draft and he was supported by his German colleague.
The same difficulty arose with China. According to our interpretation of the agreement, the Soviet Union could not bring pressure on Peking without violating just about every provision of the agreement, including the requirement to consult before engaging in actions threatening international peace and security. Senator Jackson, so critical of other aspects of our Soviet policy, immediately recognized this and supported us. But the cool calculators in Peking did not see it this way. They did not believe their security enhanced by unenforceable obligations; they recognized the potential for a misleading euphoria in a document purportedly devoted to preventing nuclear war.
No wonder the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War disappeared into desuetude, perhaps mercifully. It has been invoked only once in the decade since its signature — when during the Middle East alert of 1973 we warned the Soviets that their unilateral intervention would violate its provisions. But as that occasion demonstrated, the dangers of nuclear war are repelled not by a document but by strength, resolve, and determined diplomacy.
SUMMIT meetings are risky business. Nobody in politics reaches the top without a highly developed ego; the fortunes of political leaders are tied to their ability to achieve their objectives. They find it difficult to compromise — especially when their negotiations are conducted in public; they generally do not have the time to give the detailed attention to nuance that is the essence of successful diplomacy. Deadlocks become difficult to break. Agreement may be achievable only by formulas so vague as to invite later disavowal or disagreement.
Summit meetings between ideological opponents are particularly complex. Following a period of tension, they invite the risk of popular euphoria; during a crisis they may exacerbate tensions. They can generate both excessive expectations and excessive disappointments and indeed swing from one extreme to the other.
But if the risks are properly understood and if preparation is meticulous, there are also opportunities. The Soviet system of government is even less hospitable than bureaucracies in general to ideas that challenge assumptions. Disagreement with orthodoxy tends to be interpreted as lack of ideological vigilance; conformity is the prerequisite of political survival. Soviet leaders need periodic opportunities to form their own judgment of the moral fiber and conceptual apparatus of their Western counterparts or they run the risk of living in a series of Potemkin villages built by subordinates only too eager to flatter their preconceptions.
Precisely because the clash of US–Soviet national interests and ideologies encourages competition and occasionally confrontation, peace may well depend on the ability of the Politburo to form a correct judgment of the likely reaction of our leaders when challenged. A strong, confident American President should be able to use occasional summit meetings to impress the Soviet leaders with his determination, to reduce the risk of miscalculation, to keep open the possibility, however slim, of an ultimately constructive dialogue. Conversely, of course, if the Soviets conclude that their American opposite number is unsophisticated or weak or irresolute it may give them the courage to run additional risks.
From this point of view, Nixon’s 1972 summit in Moscow took place under nearly ideal circumstances. Two weeks before, Nixon had ordered the resumption of bombing of North Vietnam and the mining of its harbors. When Moscow maintained its invitation nevertheless, the Kremlin showed that it would subordinate some of the concerns of its friends to Soviet-American relations. We in turn had demonstrated that we were fully prepared to risk détente for what we considered vital interests.
By the same token, the omens for the 1973 summit were much less propitious. Soviet leaders are extremely sensitive to the balance of forces. At first the Soviets were baffled by Watergate; they interpreted it as a right-wing plot aimed at détente. When I was in Zavidovo they said they hoped it would soon be over; they were not eager to have the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party buffeted by the treacherous currents of American domestic controversy on a visit to Washington. The complex Soviet system craves predictable partners. The capacity of an American President to make good on his threats or to fulfill his promises is the principal currency in which they deal. And precisely this was in question in 1973. Tempting as was the prospect of a weakened American executive, the Soviets seemed for many months restrained by the uncertainties involved. It took them nearly two years before they moved aggressively to exploit our domestic upheavals by supporting proxy forces in Africa.
As the Watergate battle gained momentum, however, in the spring of 1973 there occurred a barely noticeable hedging of bets. At Zavidovo in early May Brezhnev was still bubbling with enthusiasm about the summit. He would bring his wife and family. He wanted to visit several American cities — at least Houston and Los Angeles in addition to Washington. But during the month of May we were told that Brezhnev’s doctors suddenly “forbade” travel by his wife; the visit of the children was dropped without any explanation. At one point the Soviets even proposed to confine Brezhnev’s visit entirely to Washington.VII When we expressed surprise at the curtailment of the schedule, the Soviets reinstated the sojourn at San Clemente, not without Brezhnev’s woundingly explaining in a note that he did so to demonstrate his indifference to the criticisms made of Nixon (see Chapter IV).
At the same time, Senator Sam Ervin’s televised Watergate committee hearings were gathering steam. Not a day passed without damaging revelations. The star witness before the Senate Select Committee, John Dean, the former White House Counsel, was scheduled to testify during the very week of Brezhnev’s visit. The humiliation of spreading the malfeasances of the President on the public record while Brezhnev was in the country — or perhaps the unwillingness to share the television spotlight with the Soviet leader — induced the committee to postpone its hearings, but by only one week. It was not prepared to grant even one additional day of delay. The hearings thus resumed on the very day of Brezhnev’s departure, giving the Soviet leaders an unprecedented personal opportunity to watch the public indictment of the President with whom they had just been negotiating.
These prospects had caused Senator Jackson to propose publicly a week before Brezhnev’s arrival that the summit be postponed. In the abstract, Jackson was right. In practice a cancellation after so much preparation and on such grounds would have gravely undermined the authority of the United States government. It would have signaled that we had lost the capacity to negotiate — and therefore also to protect our interests — during the unforeseeable course of a prolonged investigation. Once this principle was admitted to the Soviets, it would have to be applied to all other relationships. We would have made ourselves an international basket case long before events imposed that condition upon us.
We had no choice except to pretend that our authority was unimpaired. For that, we had to do business as usual; we could afford no appearance of hesitation; we needed to project self-confidence no matter what we felt. Of course, Nixon also had a more personal motive. For him to concede that his ability to govern had been impaired would accelerate the assault on his Presidency. He could not bring himself to admit the growing disintegration of what he had striven all his life to achieve.
So the second Nixon-Brezhnev summit proceeded inauspiciously. Fortunately, there were no unfinished negotiations. The Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War had been completed at Zavidovo. All that remained to be done on the SALT principles was to agree on a target date for completing the agreement — a secondary issue. Several subsidiary agreements were also ready for signature — on agricultural cooperation, transportation, oceanography, cultural exchanges. The major utility of the summit in those respects was to provide the momentum of a deadline.
The slate being clean, the Washington summit of 1973 provided an unusual opportunity for the two leaders to explore each other’s minds. It is the best use of summit diplomacy, but Nixon’s mind was troubled and distracted. He conducted the discussions ably enough but without the sense of direction and self-assurance of the previous year. As for Brezhnev, his boisterousness never quite managed to obscure his insecurity. A visit to the United States was obviously a big event for him. He desperately wanted to make a good impression. In his public appearances he sought to hide his vulnerability behind heavy-handed clowning. He clearly wanted to be perceived as being more human and outgoing than Khrushchev. In a normal environment it might have been appealing as it was in some respects touching. In the miasma of Watergate it fell flat. Indeed, the press tended to interpret it as a Brezhnev rescue operation for Nixon, which helped neither party. It was also unfair since at that point Brezhnev could not yet have fully grasped the extent of Nixon’s difficulties.
Brezhnev arrived in Washington on June 16. Something of a hypochondriac, he turned the necessity of getting used to the time change into an obsession. He wore two watches, one set at Moscow time, the other for Washington time. He kept forgetting whether Moscow was ahead of or behind Washington. When we reached San Clemente and three more hours were added, he gave up keeping track of the time difference but never ceased his grumbling about it.
Nixon made Camp David available to Brezhnev and his party to rest before the summit began. The cabins in capitalist America were considerably more rustic, smaller, and less elegant than the villas in Zavidovo. Since Nixon and I were in Key Biscayne that weekend, I called Brezhnev to inquire into his comfort. Even through the screen of interpretation, he was bubbling with enthusiasm and anticipation and at the same time worried lest everything not go smoothly. He made it clear that he would be reassured if he could go over the schedule before the official welcome set for the next day. I flew to Camp David on June 17 to greet a buoyant Brezhnev. He kissed me — the only time in our acquaintance — and immediately showed me his new toy: a cigarette case that released its contents one at a time, at preset intervals. Brezhnev had all sorts of ingenious schemes to beat the system; one was to carry two of these pocket safes around at the same time.
There was as well the unquenchable anxiety: Were we looking for a way out of signing the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War? I assured him that there was no such possibility. Would he be confronted with demonstrations? Would Senators treat him respectfully? Would there be attempts to interfere in Soviet domestic affairs? I expressed my confidence in his ability to handle any foreseeable situation. Fretfully, Brezhnev let himself be reassured.
The arrival ceremony for State guests at the White House is simple and impressive. It was set for 10:30 in the morning on the expansive South Lawn. A few minutes before, to the tune of “Hail to the Chief” played by the Marine Band, the President and the First Lady appeared at the entrance of the South Portico from the Diplomatic Reception Room on the ground floor. Nixon greeted the dignitaries waiting on the lawn, who invariably included the Secretary of State, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the dean of the diplomatic corps, the ambassadors to and from the visitor’s country, and other officials. Another blare of trumpets signaled that the limousine carrying Brezhnev had entered the Southwest Gate and was moving slowly past an honor guard toward the President.
All this went well enough. The limousine halted before the South Portico for the President to greet Brezhnev and they jointly mounted a platform to listen to the national anthems. But then things began to go awry. A contingent of troops in ceremonial dress representing each of our military services and exhibiting a colorful array of flags waited for review, but Brezhnev’s ebullience welled over. As he moved toward the soldiers, brought crisply to attention, he was distracted by a crowd waving American and Soviet flags. He rushed over to them and began to shake hands like an American politician on the campaign trail. Nixon managed to preserve the sanity of the escort officer and our Chief of Protocol by gently nudging Brezhnev back in the direction of the troops still standing at attention. Brezhnev returned to the stand while the Marine Band marched by; he and Nixon each made brief statements. The two leaders then walked up the curved stairway to the South Portico itself to wave to the crowd before disappearing into the reception rooms, where the President and his guest formed a receiving line for the assembled dignitaries. Here again Brezhnev sabotaged the schedule. The reception line moved with something less than its traditional briskness because Brezhnev could not forgo extended commentary to several old acquaintances. Brezhnev’s disdain for capitalist planning meant that a reception scheduled to last half an hour, or until eleven o’clock, was delayed by almost as long again and with it the opening of formal talks in the Oval Office. But we were not yet through with the unforeseen.
The first Oval Office meeting between Brezhnev and Nixon was supposed to include Secretary of State William Rogers, me, and Hal Sonnenfeldt as note-taker on our side; Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, Ambassador Dobrynin, and the splendid interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev for the Soviets. (Sonnenfeldt on our side understood Russian.) First, Nixon and Brezhnev posed alone for photographs. After the preeminence of the principals was established, the rest of the party was supposed to join them. As it happened, we waited over an hour in the Cabinet Room for a call that did not come.
The full record of what was discussed will have to await the relevant Nixon tapes. The President did not tell me what had transpired. It is probable that Brezhnev repeated some of what he had told me in Zavidovo. The talks must have remained general because Dobrynin — who undoubtedly had Sukhodrev’s record available — never referred to them or implied that any conclusions had been reached. (Sukhodrev had promised to give me his record but never got around to providing it.)
Finally, the rest of us came in at 12:35 P.M. Brezhnev, who took literally Nixon’s invitation that he outline his views on US–Soviet relations, launched into an extended discourse on the history of Soviet-American relations that with translation lasted nearly forty-five minutes. In that recital the 1972 Moscow summit was marked as a turning point in East-West contacts. All problems were soluble, Brezhnev insisted, so long as both parties renounced unilateral advantage and were prepared to compromise:
All that was done in Moscow and that we have to do here therefore acquires unusual significance and importance. As you know, we Russians have an adage — life is always the best teacher. I believe that the life of our two great peoples and of our leaders had led us to the conclusion that we must build a new relationship between us now and in the future. Therefore, I am deeply gratified to emphasize that human reason led us both at the same time to recognize this and that is what led us to the successful meeting last year in Moscow. I very firmly believe, and will go on believing, that what was done in Moscow took place in the profound awareness of the importance of our joint ventures for the future and for peace. We met in Moscow last year not to compare our strength or to compete but to adopt important decisions. And I know that they won the unanimous support of our people and of yours.
With John Dean’s testimony one week away, the unanimity of Nixon’s support among the American people was a wistful thought, at least to the Americans present, who were grimly aware of the turmoil ahead. On the other hand, our capacity for serious reflection was progressively impaired by growing hunger pangs as the meeting stretched into the afternoon with no sign of drawing to a conclusion. Indeed, it could not end since the President had not yet responded. Brezhnev, aware of a certain restlessness on the American side, kept checking his two watches. He did this, he said, in order to keep track of his body rhythm and to know when to call his colleagues in Moscow. Gromyko and Dobrynin, for the tenth time in my hearing, set him straight that Moscow was seven hours ahead of Washington, without much conviction that the lesson would stick. Brezhnev interrupted his own monologue repeatedly to ask the President, Rogers, and me whether he was tiring us out. We gamely denied it as a point of national prestige, though we had a sinking feeling that we said it with decreasing conviction as the afternoon wore on.
Nixon proceeded to respond, mercifully more tersely than Brezhnev. He had not been prepared for a prolonged meeting. The briefing memorandum supplied by my office had suggested that he and Brezhnev agree on the agenda of the summit and that he disabuse the General Secretary of any idea of a condominium. Nixon was not about to be bested by Brezhnev in philosophical discourse, however. He drew a contrast between the mood when Eisenhower met Khrushchev in 1959 in the Oval Office and the present one. I suppose he meant that this time there was no threat to Berlin, the challenge that had generated the invitation to Brezhnev’s predecessor. Then Nixon lauded the nuclear parity that had developed since then. This was the only time in my association with him that his usual sure touch deserted him in talking to a Communist leader. Strategic parity, unless the democracies increased their conventional forces, was bound sooner or later to turn into a strategic nightmare for us, freeing the Soviet superiority in conventional forces for intervention in regional conflicts.
Nixon recovered quickly by stressing that we would have no part of any superpower condominium. “While we as practical men know what our strength is we also, as strong nations, can afford and should follow a policy of respect for the rights of other nations.” Nixon thus made sure that Brezhnev did not misunderstand the significance of the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War, which, he said, “recognizes the rights of all countries and at the same time the responsibility of the two of us to develop methods that will avoid nuclear and other confrontations between us.”
Nixon concluded by listing a long agenda of topics for the later sessions: European security, SALT, Vietnam, Cambodia, economic relations. Brezhnev agreed to it in great good spirits. “I hear Vietnam,” he said when Nixon raised the subject. “I did not raise it. But if you want we can have a discussion later. I remember we talked about it at the dacha.”
His reference was to the tongue-lashing administered to Nixon in 1972 by Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Podgorny, who spoke seriatim at Brezhnev’s dacha, forty minutes from the Kremlin.16 The session had been at once brutal and irrelevant because it had been made for a record, not for practical effect — as the next exchange made clear. “Yes,” replied Nixon suavely, “it was a late dinner.” Brezhnev was equal to the occasion: “We had a very good time.” I do not doubt he meant it. What can be jollier than to have threatened without risk an ideological opponent engaged in its private purgatory in a faraway corner of the globe?
The Oval Office meeting ended at 3:30 P.M. with the famished American delegation sprinting for the White House mess. Brezhnev, whether seven hours behind or ahead of us, apparently was in no need of sustenance.
The rest of the summit followed the jagged rhythm characteristic of Soviet negotiations. Meetings would be canceled without explanation; or our Soviet counterparts would simply fail to show up. The meetings would be rescheduled just as suddenly and unpredictably. This happened not only in Moscow, where after all the Soviets controlled everybody’s movements, but also in the United States. At Camp David, to which the whole group repaired on June 20 for two days, Brezhnev’s cabin was diagonally across from the President’s retreat. On one occasion Brezhnev and his colleagues sat on their veranda in boisterous conversation in full view of the President’s quarters for two hours past a scheduled meeting, without so much as sending a messenger to explain their delay. Suddenly, just as if it was Moscow, they indicated they were ready. Whether by design or because of the difficulty of adjusting to Eastern Daylight Time, they chose the luncheon period once again. Nixon was more patient than I felt. He knew the Soviets could see that he was free. He agreed to the meeting, which dealt with the European Security Conference; it was largely a recital by Brezhnev of which Western European leaders had already agreed to the Soviet proposal to conclude the conference at the summit level. (Much of this was news to us and not without its irony, since these same European leaders were dragging their feet about meeting the President at a Western summit.)
The rest of the week passed in discussions between the principals, signing ceremonies, and State dinners. One meeting was devoted to prospects of increasing Soviet-American trade. The mood of that now faraway period is reflected in Brezhnev’s expression of hope that the USSR would purchase twenty billion dollars’ worth of consumer goods from the United States. This, if true, was an extraordinary reflection on how skewed toward military production the Soviet economy is — and how inefficient. At another meeting John Connally, now a part-time Presidential adviser and practicing lawyer, made an appearance to urge on both delegations the importance of proceeding with the natural gas development of Siberia, causing the Secretary of State to mutter to me that he hoped someone would keep him in mind so benevolently when he returned to his law firm.
After an effusive dinner at the Soviet Embassy on June 21, the delegations flew to San Clemente in the President’s plane on June 22. Having been a guest on Brezhnev’s far more lavishly appointed aircraft in 1972, I wondered whether the relative simplicity of Camp David and of Air Force One did not convince our Soviet guests that status conferred greater benefits in a classless society than in a capitalist one. We had left a cowboy hat and a Western belt replete with toy gun and holster for Brezhnev in his cabin on the plane. He eschewed the hat but found the belt irresistible. As we crossed the Grand Canyon, Brezhnev entered into the spirit of the occasion by imitating his allegedly favorite movie star, John Wayne, and drew the six-shooter from the holster.
In San Clemente, Brezhnev insisted on staying in the same compound as the President. As Nixon had the only suitable residence, Brezhnev was lodged in a small cottage usually reserved for Nixon’s daughter Tricia; it had only a medium-sized living room connected to two small bedrooms with floral designs. Gromyko wound up with Julie Eisenhower’s even smaller cottage. San Clemente, of course, immediately brought to the surface again Brezhnev’s mania about time changes, this time driving him to retire as soon as he arrived, around 6:00 P.M.
As it turned out, the two most significant conversations of the summit occurred on that last full day in San Clemente, June 23. They were unscheduled and descended upon us without warning. At a noon meeting between Nixon and Brezhnev, attended only by me and the interpreter Sukhodrev, Brezhnev vented his hatred for the Chinese. It was a replay of Zavidovo. His ire was not free of racial overtones. The Chinese were perfidious and they were sly in concealing their real aims. He considered the Chinese Cultural Revolution an example of moral degeneracy, asking what kind of leaders would oppress their people while making propaganda all around the world — as if the Gulag Archipelago of concentration camps and extermination had never been heard of in his fatherland of socialism. He strongly implied that Soviet doctors believed that Mao suffered from a mental disorder. At any rate, sane or not, “Mao had a treacherous character.”
But Brezhnev was not interested in simply making a theoretical point. His purpose was eminently practical. He proposed a secret exchange of views on China through the Presidential Channel. He warned that in ten years China’s nuclear program might be equal to the Soviet program of 1973. That would not be acceptable to the Soviet Union, though he did not say what the Kremlin would do about it. In the immediate future the USSR would expose China’s bellicosity to the world by offering to sign a nonaggression treaty, which he was certain would be rebuffed by Peking. (He turned out to be correct.) Brezhnev added that he had no objection to state-to-state relations between Washington and Peking. Military arrangements would be another matter: “The peoples of the world would lose trust in us,” he said, with uncharacteristic concern for world opinion. The Soviet Union had no intention of attacking China, but a Chinese military arrangement with the United States would only confuse the issue, asserted Brezhnev with a subtlety that showed Gromyko’s fine drafting hand.
Nixon replied coolly that he was prepared to be in touch through the Channel “on any subject,” but he gave no analysis of his own of Chinese motives or purposes. I added that we had never had any military discussions with China. Neither Nixon nor I offered any reassurance about the future. Brezhnev seemed to imply a quid pro quo when he remarked out of the blue that the Soviet Union had stopped military deliveries to North Vietnam after the signing of the Paris accords. “There may be rifles but nothing of considerable significance. We will urge them to adhere to the Paris Agreement.”
In the afternoon, just before a poolside reception, Gromyko took me aside. He was obviously worried that Brezhnev had been insufficiently explicit — though not even his worst enemy is likely to list vagueness of expression among Brezhnev’s faults. At any rate, the Foreign Minister wanted to reaffirm unambiguously, for the third time in six weeks, that any military agreement between China and the United States would lead to war. I said I understood what he was saying. But I gave him no clue as to our intentions. I saw no sense in giving blanket reassurance in the face of a threat, all the less so as I was convinced, as I have already explained, that while we should be careful not to provoke a Soviet attack on China, we could also not remain indifferent if it occurred. The impact on the global balance of power would be nearly as disastrous as a successful attack on Western Europe.
The second surprise event started undramatically enough that final day with a conventional haggle between Gromyko and me over the Middle East portion of the joint communiqué. Gromyko was very wary. After all, the previous summit and its communiqué had been a major factor in the expulsion of the Soviet advisers from Egypt (see Chapter VI). This time Gromyko refused even to include a reference to Security Council Resolution 242, the different interpretations of which were the heart of the liturgy of Middle East negotiations, because we refused to go along with the Soviets’ pro-Arab interpretation of the resolution. In 1972, Gromyko had sought to avoid any expressions of differences on the Middle East; in 1973, he insisted on it. It was only a brief sentence, but it would prevent the debacle of the preceding year, when a vague anodyne formulation had been interpreted by Sadat as a Soviet sellout of Arab interests. (The agreed-upon paragraphs are in the back-notes.)17
But the conversation with Gromyko was only shadowboxing. Brezhnev was concerned not so much with the status of current negotiations as with the whole trend of events in the Middle East. At Zavidovo in May I had summed up for Brezhnev our assessment in light of Soviet support for the Arab maximum program: “It is hard to convince Israel why they should give up the territory in exchange for something they already have [a cease-fire], in order to avoid a war they can win — only to have to negotiate then with the most intransigent element of the Arabs [that is, the Palestinians].” We were planning a major diplomatic initiative after Israel’s elections in late October and were in the meantime stalling. But at Zavidovo, Brezhnev had invoked the threat of war; he hinted at increasing difficulty in holding back his Arab allies. He growled that we were counting on a state of affairs that might not last: “It is impossible not to take some steps or President Nixon and I might find ourselves in an impossible situation. . . . After all, nothing in the world is eternal — similarly the present military advantage enjoyed by Israel is not eternal either.” Brezhnev had offered me no program. I thought the veiled threat of war was bluff because in our view a war would lead to a defeat for the Arabs from which the Soviets would not be able to extricate their clients. Gromyko had given me a set of principles at Zavidovo, but they were identical to the Arab program. Since Brezhnev in his talk with me had not been prepared to retreat one inch from it, we had deferred discussion until the June summit.
Now that the summit was here, the Soviets had, strangely, indicated no special desire to discuss the Middle East. There was the sparring with Gromyko over the communiqué, but neither in Washington nor on Air Force One nor in San Clemente had there been any sign that Brezhnev wanted to talk to Nixon about the Middle East.
I thought we could relax from serious business at last when, at 4:30 P.M. on June 23, Nixon gave a cocktail party around the swimming pool of his residence for those members of the Hollywood community willing to come to San Clemente in the middle of Watergate. There were not many. Brezhnev seemed to enjoy himself. A family dinner for just ten people in Nixon’s small dining room was to follow at 7:00 P.M. But even before the party had started, Brezhnev suddenly pleaded fatigue — that time change again — and asked that dinner be moved up to six. Nixon obliged, providing thin gruel indeed for those loyal and hardy few who had risked opprobrium to travel for two hours from Los Angeles to attend a reception lasting barely an hour.
The dinner went off jovially enough. Brezhnev felt at ease in the family atmosphere. Nixon gave a sensitive toast about the responsibility of both leaders for the well-being of the children of the world, a responsibility both men had to feel deeply in light of their attachment to their own children. When Nixon concluded, Brezhnev walked around the table and embraced him. At about 7:15 P.M. the Soviet party excused itself. Brezhnev needed all the rest he could get in view of the fact that another of those debilitating time changes was coming up. He was returning to Washington the next morning to rest at Camp David before departing for Paris on June 25. Nixon retired to his bedroom, I to my residence about ten minutes away.
At ten o’clock my phone rang. It was the Secret Service informing me that Brezhnev was up and demanding an immediate meeting with the President, who was asleep. It was a gross breach of protocol. For a foreign guest late at night to ask for an unscheduled meeting with the President on an unspecified subject on the last evening of a State visit was then, and has remained, unparalleled. It was also a transparent ploy to catch Nixon off guard and with luck to separate him from his advisers. It was the sort of maneuver that costs more in confidence than can possibly be gained in substance. Concessions achieved by subterfuge may embarrass; they are never the basis for continuing action between sovereign nations because they will simply not be maintained.
I told the Secret Service to inform the Soviets that nothing could be done until I saw the President. About fifteen minutes later I awakened Nixon. His initial grogginess was replaced by immediate alertness when I told him what was afoot. “What are they up to?” he asked. “Who knows?” I replied, “but I fear we are not going to get through a summit without a dacha session.” Nixon told his valet, Manolo Sanchez, to light a fire in his study in the small tower overlooking the Pacific. Meanwhile, I looked for Gromyko, to find out what this was all about and to make clear that I would be present. It transpired that Brezhnev had been seized with an all-consuming desire to discuss the Middle East. Rather coolly, I said I would inform the President and let the Soviet party know when he was ready.
So it happened that around 10:45 P.M. on Brezhnev’s last night with Nixon, the Soviet leader made his most important proposition of the entire trip: that the United States and the Soviet Union agree then and there on a Middle East settlement, based on total Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders in return for not peace but an end to the state of belligerency. Final peace would depend on a subsequent negotiation with the Palestinians; the arrangement would be guaranteed by the great powers. This was, of course, the standard Arab position. Brezhnev must have understood — and if he did not, Gromyko was much too experienced not to know — that there was no chance whatever of implementing such a proposal or of reaching any such agreement in the remaining few hours. It did not stop Brezhnev. He wanted no public declaration, he said. It could be a secret deal, known only to the people in the room. He did not vouchsafe to us how so revolutionary a scheme as a peace imposed by the United States and the Soviet Union on the Middle East could be kept secret if it were to be implemented.
Nixon, as always calm under pressure, replied that there was nothing to be done that night. Nor could we accept the “general working principles” given to me at Zavidovo. I would try my hand at revising them and get the text to Brezhnev before he left Camp David on June 25. This idea found no favor with the General Secretary. As at the dacha, he went back to bullying:
If there is no clarity about the principles we will have difficulty keeping the military situation from flaring up. . . . Without an agreement on general principles we don’t see how we can act. . . . I am categorically opposed to a resumption of the war. But without agreed principles . . . we cannot do this.
In other words, twenty-four hours after renouncing the threat of force in the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War, Brezhnev was in effect menacing us with a Middle East war unless we accepted his terms.
And he was vehement as he did so. Dobrynin told me afterward that he had told Sukhodrev to refrain from translating some of Brezhnev’s more pointed remarks. But what got through was clear enough. Brezhnev wanted to settle the Middle East conflict that summer and the terms he proposed were the Arabs’ demands. The facts were that there was no chance even of launching a serious peace process before the Israeli election four months away, and there was no possibility at any time of achieving the terms Brezhnev was proposing. For Nixon to force the issue at the height of Watergate hearings would have added the allegation of engaging in a diversionary maneuver to the charge of betraying an ally. In any event, the program put forward by Brezhnev was unacceptable to us on its merits.
To be sure, Brezhnev was probably threatening as much from frustration as from conviction. He must have heard the same Egyptian threats as we had and may have shared our own estimate that such an attempt was bound to end in Arab defeat. He knew that our ally was militarily stronger and that we held the diplomatic keys to a settlement. He wanted to bulldoze us into solving his dilemmas without paying any price. At a minimum he sought to build a record for shifting the onus of a deadlock onto us and to prevent a further erosion of the Soviet position in the Arab world.
These explanations do not detract from the egregiousness of Brezhnev’s performance. It was a blatant attempt to exploit Nixon’s presumed embarrassment over Watergate — to the visible discomfiture of Dobrynin, who knew that what was being asked was as impossible domestically for us as it was senseless diplomatically. This also must have accounted for the icy aloofness of Gromyko. We were prepared to discuss overall principles with Moscow in consultation with our ally Israel and, for that matter, with Egypt, with which preliminary talks had already started. We were not willing to pay for détente in the coin of our geopolitical position. After an hour and a half of Brezhnev’s monologue, Nixon brought matters to a conclusion firmly and with great dignity by stating that he would look over the record of the discussions in the morning; the problem was not as simple as Brezhnev had presented it; the best he could do was to ask me to present a counterdraft to the principles submitted at Zavidovo by Gromyko:
I will take it into account tomorrow. We won’t say anything in terms of a gentlemen’s agreement. I hope you won’t go back empty-handed. But we have to break up now. It would be very easy for me to say that Israel should withdraw from all the occupied territories and call it an agreed principle. But that’s what the argument is about; I will agree to principles which will bring a settlement. That will be our project this year. The Middle East is a most urgent place.
That was the end of it. As at the dacha in 1972, Brezhnev subsided. He gave us a synopsis of what he proposed to discuss with Pompidou when he stopped in Paris on the way home. But the bad taste remained, and we could not forget the conversation in Nixon’s study when the Middle East exploded a little more than three months afterward.
On the final day, June 24, as is always the case in meetings with Soviet leaders, the squalls had lifted. Brezhnev and Nixon said goodbye on the lawn in front of the residence in San Clemente. Brezhnev thanked Nixon profusely and stressed that he was leaving with “a good feeling.” He looked forward to welcoming Nixon to the Soviet Union the following year and expected that further progress would be made then. Nixon asserted that the improvement of US–Soviet relations served the cause “not only of peace between our two great countries but of building an era in which there can be peace for all the peoples of the world.”
Nixon accompanied Brezhnev on the short helicopter ride to El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. Brezhnev took the occasion to suggest that the talks on mutual force reductions in Europe might be given impetus if the Soviet Union and the United States began them with a symbolic reduction of perhaps ten thousand men.
Nothing came of the idea. When Nixon bade Brezhnev farewell, it was the last time they met as equals. The next summit a year later in Moscow took place little more than a month before Nixon’s resignation.
THE 1973 summit laid bare the ambiguities of East-West relations in the nuclear age. Both sides were painfully aware of the risks of war. I continue to believe that Brezhnev was sincerely prepared for a prolonged period of stability. But no Soviet leader can step out of his philosophical skin and abandon the Leninist postulate that a country’s influence is ultimately determined by the correlation of forces. The physical energy of the aging Soviet leadership may have had its limits; its willingness to run risks may have been reduced after a lifetime of struggle. But Soviet leaders literally have no framework for exercising restraint when faced with a propitious balance of power. An opportunity for strategic gain would not be left unexploited indefinitely because of bourgeois scruples or personal relations with Western leaders.
From this perspective, the impact of the 1973 summit was almost certainly unfortunate — not for foreign policy reasons but because of the dramatic demonstration of America’s internal disarray. By the end of the visit the Soviet party understood that the summit had been overshadowed by Watergate, as Dobrynin told me needlingly two weeks later. More gravely, the summit began to convince the Soviet leaders that Nixon’s problems might turn out to be terminal. This did not yet tempt them to adventures staking Soviet assets. But it undoubtedly made them less willing to expend capital on preventing adventures by friendly nations — and thus it surely contributed to the Middle East war.
Almost immediately the perception of Watergate slowed the pace of diplomacy. Brezhnev took himself out of the direct line of fire in US–Soviet negotiations. There was no sense involving the prestige of the General Secretary with the possible collapse of the Nixon Presidency. As in negotiations on the Year of Europe, diplomacy became more bureaucratic, less bold. The 1974 Moscow summit between Brezhnev and Nixon turned into a pale imitation of the first two without thrust or underlying purpose.
The strategy of the Nixon Administration presupposed a decisive President willing to stake American power to resist Soviet expansionism and ready to negotiate seriously if the Soviets would accept coexistence on this basis. But both of these courses of action were being destroyed by our domestic passion play. Therefore many of our critics missed the fundamental point. Liberals accused us of being too Machiavellian; conservatives, of being too accommodating. Neither fully understood that we had no real choice. Watergate did not permit us the luxury of a confrontational foreign policy, and it deprived conciliatory policies of their significance. Moderation, after all, is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative. In the nuclear age there is no substitute, I am convinced, for a long-range policy that avoids either confrontation for its own sake or acquiescence in Soviet expansion. We must resist marginal accretions of Soviet power even when the issues seem ambiguous. And we must be ready for real coexistence should the opportunity appear. That is a challenge of unprecedented complexity, requiring acute judgment, resolution, and faith. In the early Seventies it was engulfed by our domestic crises. But the challenge remains, and the way America responds will determine whether a free society can preserve its security and advance its values.
I. The distinguished, now neoconservative, journal Commentary, for example, in 1970 criticized Nixon for his ABM program, MIRV testing, and laxity in pursuing SALT. It bitterly opposed Nixon’s Vietnam policy and once came close to welcoming an American defeat.1
II. In 1965, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara defined the “assured destruction” requirement as the capacity to destroy one-fourth to one-third of the Soviet population and two-thirds of Soviet industry. Three years later, the requirement was lowered; in 1968 it was defined as one-fifth to one-fourth of the Soviet population and one-half of Soviet industry.13
III. Nixon’s Foreign Policy Reports of 1970–1973, written by me and my staff, called repeatedly for a change in targeting, but little was done until the stewardship of James R. Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense. Paradoxically, however, the decline of our capability for a counterforce strategy turned even the more sophisticated targeting into a risky tit-for-tat option with no logical stopping place once it was embarked upon.
IV. The strategic significance of equal aggregates would depend on the level at which the numbers were equalized. For example, one favorite proposal was to equalize missile throwweight. As a result of unilateral procurement decisions made by each side in the Sixties, Soviet throwweight was about four times our own. On the other hand, the weight of warheads on our airplanes more than made up the difference. Advocates of a throwweight limitation, looking for the most advantageous definition for us, therefore urged that it be confined to ICBMs. Their argument was not unreasonable; bomber throwweight was not, in fact, suitable for surprise attacks because of the long time it took for airplanes to reach their targets. What was never explained was why the Soviets would accept our definition or how we would convince them to do so given known building programs. But assuming there were equal ICBM throwweight limitations, if the ceiling was set at the Soviet level and there were no limitations on MIRVS, both sides would develop a first-strike capability. This violated every precept of arms control because in a crisis it would give each side an incentive to strike first. But if we did not build up to the Soviet level - and there were neither programs nor proposals to do so — the “equality” would remain theoretical; only the Soviets would gain a first-strike capability. This was even more dangerous; it would compound conventional inferiority by strategic instability. A joint ceiling at the Soviet level was no doubt easy to negotiate, if we lost our sanity, since it was meaningless; it constrained no Soviet program and gave us a freedom we were unlikely to use. Pursuing the idea of equality in the other direction — getting the Soviets to come down to our levels — was chasing illusions. They would want us to give them something in return, such as accepting continued inequality in launchers. This was precluded by the Defense Department’s near-religious dedication to equal aggregates. Or else we would have to threaten a massive buildup of our forces. In the fevered Congressional climate of the closing stages of the Vietnam war and the beginning of Watergate, there was no possibility of this either. We would be lucky to keep what we had.
V. The Verification Panel was an interagency subcommittee of the National Security Council with responsibility for SALT planning. It included representatives of the Departments of State and Defense, CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, ACDA, and NSC staff, under my chairmanship.
VI. Having saved long-range cruise missiles in 1973 did not keep me from being attacked two years later for allegedly slighting them in SALT negotiations.
VII. American officials in charge of the planning may have contributed to Brezhnev’s reluctance to take side trips. They proposed to a Soviet advance team a visit to Pittsburgh, where Brezhnev could meet American steelworkers — mostly of Polish, Czech, or Serbian ancestry — and could walk along a catwalk overlooking the blast furnaces. The Soviets quickly ruled this out, testifying either to the rapid communications with Moscow or the prudence of Brezhnev’s trip planners. A Soviet politician who has survived to reach the Politburo probably has learned not to get too close to blast furnaces, particularly if run by East Europeans.