After SALT What?
Stephen Rosen After SALT What? Saying yes to nuclear weapons. It is not often that new world powers arise and assert their right to a place in the sun. It is even less often that their bid for...
...The desire to challenge rather than accept Soviet military expansion, more than the specific provisions of the treaty, is at the core of the present opposition...
...Yet such are the surprising qualities of Mr...
...Only if one is wedded to the idea of mutual destruction will one insist that the Soviets will feel threatened if they can kill "only" 20 million Americans...
...The strongest argument in the hands of the proponents of the new agreement says simply that while the critics of arms control have some valid objections, they have no coherent policy...
...It was more the result of American political trends, against which Kissinger claims to have struggled: "Under the impact of the Vietnam turmoil our defense programs were being cut by the Congress every year...
...That.wa$ the meaning of the Guam doctrine...
...But not in the center...
...They are likely to try to get whatever diplomatic use they can from their nuclear superiority while they still have it...
...If it is unrealistic to ignore the possibility of a clash with the Soviet Union, it is utterly irresponsible to insist that we stand up to Soviet challenges and not back down in a crisis if we have not taken every precaution to make as certain as possible that, if the war goes badly, or unexpectedly.well, we are not faced with the choice of yielding to the Soviet Union or risking a totally destructive nuclear war...
...This was the essence of detente...
...Those striving with unreasonable forces know this feeling well-men battling against the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds...
...But this is the sort of realism whose cynicism is matched only by its short-sightedness...
...But why ? What has SALT done for us...
...Others have argued that the chances of war remain unaltered if the ends and means of states remain the same...
...In recognition of the Soviet bid for world power, President Nixon and his foreign-policy advisor also chose to withdraw from the peripheries...
...And you don't want to fight...
...This sounds odd coming from a man who, while in office, was a declared atheist on the subject of nuclear superiority...
...It is seldom that you meet men whose souls are steeled in the impenetrable armor of resolution...
...There are those who would disagree...
...They are trying, it will be said, to overturn the whole course of American foreign policy, against the will of the President, with at best a shopping list of new weapons to put in its place...
...But a direct clash with the Soviet Union involves a very real chance of escalation to nuclear war...
...He never realized that each withdrawal, no matter how "realistic" or well-executed, took with it a little bit of the willingness of the American people to stand and fight...
...I think not...
...In combination with a serious civil defense, nuclear war will not stop being unprecedentedly destructive, but it will cease resembling national suicide...
...If a civil war in Iran threatens to affect the Moslem regions of the Soviet Union across the border, Soviet troops might be sent into aid the revolutionary government of North Iran...
...Expanded defenses are not incompatible with limits on offensive weapons...
...By the time the British and their allies got what they wanted in 1945, they might have wondered whether it had 'all been worthwhile, but they had solved the German problem...
...We decided to stop running very hard in 1972, and Henry Kissinger is now lamenting the result...
...Indeed, the defeat of SALT II would be the rtiost useful way of drawing attention to the fact that Soviet military and political ambitions are not compatible with our own...
...This is bad history...
...it is quite another to take this superiority back from a power that has spent a lot of time and money winning it away from us...
...Arms control was enormously popular in 1972, and defense spending was not...
...The real question is why Kissinger and Nixon did not resist this opposition with greater energy, despite the fact that, by their own admission, they saw the unmistakable signs of a Soviet drive for strategic superiority...
...Churchill, in his turn, commented on this reasoning: "When I first went into Parliament it was inculcated upon me that the most insulting charge which could.be made against a Minister short of actual malfeasance was that he had endangered the safety of the country and neglected its defenses for electioneering considerations...
...Opposition is part of republican politics, a constant fact of life...
...Graceful diplomatic surrender was more his style...
...If we set about improving our counterforce capabilities, we should proceed very carefully...
...But it was one thing to retain the lead we had enjoyed since 1948...
...We are now unable to enter into a confrontation with the Soviet Union without the fear that the Soviet Union, either by deliberate choice or by miscalculation, will launch a nuclear strike on our IGBM force and destroy nearly all of our missiles in their silos...
...We were, in other words, able to threaten a first strike that would leave the Soviet Union able to inflict much less damage on us than we could on them...
...The Yom Kippur War, Angola, and the Horn of Africa have taught us that this is no longer the case...
...In her decline, Britain chose, for better or for worse, to yield on the peripheries...
...The same ideas behind "smart" weapons, or precision guided munitions, promise to change ballistic missile defense as much as they have revolutionized ground warfare...
...Another Mideast war might be followed by another Soviet threat to send in Soviet troops, as happened in 1973, but this time, unlike 1973, the threat may be carried out...
...Conservatives who insist that we get tough with the Soviet Union much acknowledge the possibility that the Soviets may decide to get tough with us...
...Kissinger thinks not...
...There is now a large difference with the past...
...In theory, it need not conflict with the new treaty, although it obviously would with the ABM Treaty...
...At issue was nothing less than who would dominate the he art of world politics for the following generations...
...What will we need to be able to enter confrontations with the Soviet Union without risking the end of our civilization...
...So when popular opinion did not back him up in Asia or Africa when He wanted to fight, he was left surprised and embittered...
...Yet we continue to drift, waiting for the crisis that reveals the bankruptcy of our strategy...
...Nevertheless, we seemed paralyzed...
...We did win this race for the first 25 years of the nuclear era, and we profited from that victory...
...Secretary of State Vance has stated that the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union share the same hopes for mankind...
...They have the ability to do so...
...No one could argue that arms control has ended the arms race or reduced the amount of damage that would be done if war should come...
...While the United States enjoyed nuclear and global superiority, this flaw in our...
...strategy did not matter too much...
...Protecting our . population will be expensive, though it is useful to recall that we spent over 50 billion uninflated dollars during the 1950s on bomber defenses...
...The new treaty, if properly constructed, should not prevent us from taking the measures necessary to reduce the vulnerability of our land-based ICBMs...
...War might...
...The critics of SALT II, in particular the Committee on the Present Danger, have recommended various weapons programs which would help safeguard our deterrent...
...Having unified their country and prevailed over wars, the leaders of the Soviet Union wield power all over the world, not merely on their pwn borders...
...Either you can yield gracefully in the face of an expanding power, or else you must be ready to fight...
...There is another way to limit our casualties...
...That is by defending ourselves, actively and passively...
...The emergency we are now in requires the energy which is available in the people of the United States, the energy which Kissinger never understood or trusted...
...Stanley Baldwin was attacked for not building up British forces despite German rearmament, and he defended himself in the following terms: "Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming, and that we must rearm, does anybody think that this pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry at that moment...
...This will also be technically possible and expensive, but much less dangerous...
...Our present nuclear forces and doctrine give absolutely no assurance that war, if it does come, will not mean the extinction of the United States and the Soviet Union...
...If they are worried, moreover, that we can kill more Russians than they can kill Americans, they can increase their defenses, something they have been prpne to do all along...
...Recent developments in ABM technology have made this task less expensive, and so less easy for an attacker to beat simply by increasing the size of his attack...
...Since it would not go away, and could not be challenged without the risk of war, we would negotiate our acceptance of the Soviet war machine...
...But the situation has been reversed...
...If offensive weapons are limited while defensive weapons are permitted, the arms race will been channeled into a contest to see which country can best protect its own citizens, a contest considerably more benign than the one fostered by the strategy of assured destruction...
...Germany was strong and ambitious, and wishing her weak would not make her so...
...Baldwin that what all had been taught to shun has been elevated into a canon of political virtue...
...In particular, their submarine-launched missile force grew at a rate that utilized Soviet building capacity to the full...
...They are entitled to argue that the defeat of SALT II is worth the risks involved because it will make a difference who dominates world politics for the foreseeable future...
...This was the essence of SALT...
...This fear, he argues, will have a restraining effect on the United States, to the advantage of the Soviet Union...
...The United States has been a global power since 1945, but it tended not to bump into the Soviet Union in serious ways because the Soviet Union had little ability and less interest in carrying on military operations away from its borders...
...JLhere will be, no doubt, considerable anxiety caused by the end of our commitment to SALT...
...What will we be able to do if we defeat the treaty that we are not able to do now...
...But is this all we want or need to do...
...Given the accuracy of our missiles, the effectiveness of our antisubmarine warfare techniques against present Soviet submarines, this is likely to be technically feasible, expensive, and dangerous...
...the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines...
...Henry Kissinger, I suspect, failed to resist the popular desires for accommodation with the Soviet Union because the European style of cabinet diplomacy with which he was most familiar had unsuited him for dealing with the terrors of emergencies, or the brutality of popular, democratic politics...
...Defense has the added advantage of not being a direct threat to the Soviet Union...
...The first is to be able to ; launch a nuclear strike that can largely disarm the Soviet Union...
...We will not use our troops, no matter how strong, if there is a chance that conflict may degenerate into mutual suicide...
...Detente, prides itself on its realism...
...The men in the Kremlin are likely to become very nervous if they see us chipping away at their military advantage...
...What will our new strategy require...
...In the North Atlantic, the choice was accommodation with the United States, almost at any price...
...In any case, the incompatibility of this course of action with mutually acceptable, negotiated arms limits is self-evident...
...unexpectedly vigorous response...
...A bet that such a clash will not occur requires us to believe that the Soviet Union will never use its growing power in dangerous ways, that it will never miscalculate and challenge us in a way that draws an...
...The opponents of SALT II must come to terms with the rationale behind the treaty if they are to beat it...
...Now we are weaker, and cannot afford the luxury of poor military planning...
...Until quite recently, local Soviet military superiority was held in check by American strategic superiority, which Kissinger defined as the "ability by the United States to pose a risk, or at least a perceived risk, to the Soviet Union that it might lose most of its strategic retaliatory force if it pushed a crisis beyond a certain point...
...In the face of Soviet expansion, the United States, unless it is willing to retreat indefinitely, will have to face the possibility of a conventional war with the Soviet Union sometime in the next ten or 15 years...
...One answer to that question has been provided by the architect of detente, Henry Kissinger...
...Every new weapons program we put forward was systematically attacked or dismantled...
...What relation does this course bear to SALT II...
...The German challenge, supported by the brute facts of German industrial, military, and demographic strength, had to be met...
...At the beginning of the twentieth century, Great Britain was confronted by the growth of American, Japanese, and German industrial and military strength, and was forced to respond...
...We will need, quite clearly, the ability to limit the damage done to the United States in a nuclear war...
...Other plausible scenarios can be generated with depressing ease...
...Relations with the Soviet Union have reached a critical stage, not only because of Soviet nuclear strength, but also because the Soviet Union is becoming a truly global military power capable of projecting its forces, or those of its allies, into Asia, Africa, and the Middle East...
...One day it will happen that American and Soviet forces will confront each other, directly and militarily, in an area which does not clearly belong to either side, but which both sides consider vital to their interests...
...if war comes, it will be as cataclysmic as possible...
...Faced with his stricken ship, the hero cannot move: "He was not afraid of death, perhaps, but I'll tell you what, he was afraid of the emergency, all the horrors of panic...
...Soviet nuclear superiority, Kissinger now says, "is bound to have geopolitical consequences," particularly since the Soviet Union has increased the degree to which it can outgun us on the ground around the world...
...The Soviet strategic program was not frozen...
...The Soviet Union would, of course, try to do everything it could to nullify our efforts, but given our technological and economic superiority, it is likely that we could win this arms race...
...Finally, we would learn to live with the basis of the new Soviet status, her military strength...
...They will dramatically increase tensions with the Soviet Union, weaken the hand of the President, and for what...
...Once the Vietnam war was liquidated, we would leave Third World nations to fight their own battles, with very little help from us...
...Our doctrine, in fact, guarantees that...
...Although the treaty language is not yet final, it appears that all the recommendations are compatible with the terms of the agreement...
...They will not launch a first strike while they still have the ability to do so...
...In practice, it would be unreasonable to expect that the political mobilization that would be necessary to pass military budgets proportionate to those passed during the 1950s would leave SALT II untouched...
...For the rest, was Kissinger so naive as to expect his weapons programs to go through without systematic opposition...
...There are two ways to do this...
...Like Wilhelmine Germany, the Soviet Union is strong and.ambitious, and like Germany, she will not be wished away...
...In the wake of the treaty's defeat, it will be politically possible to finance military programs that are now unacceptable because of the hope that detente and arms control can solve our problems...
...None of the problems or solutions I have mentioned is new...
...It has been argued that formalizing the Soviet-American competition within a treaty framework has made war less likely...
...If they lost, and Soviet influence expanded, well, that could not be helped, In the more central regions, we would satisfy Soviet desires for prestige and security by acknowledging and legitimizing her dominance in Eastern Europe We would peacefully accept the status of the Soviet Union asa world power, and try to moderate her ambitions by trading with her...
...The defeat of SALT II is the means by which the American people can be shaken out of their torpor, and would be the first step towards the renewal of American foreign policy...
...The United States now has to decide what it is going to do about the Soviet problem...
...Mutual assured destruction means just that...
...It is not enough to increase the strength of our regional conventional forces...
...No one would-no one could-deny that the Soviet Union has increased its nuclear and conventional military superiority despite arms control...
...In the Western Pacific, a naval alliance with the Japanese, it was hoped, would satisfy their desires for privileges suitable to their new station, while safeguarding the British Empire...
...It is even less often that their bid for power and status is peacefully resolved...
...Joseph Conrad, of all people, suggests an answer...
...The motivations of Nixon and Kissinger are not clear, yet the fact remains that they chose arms control rather than rearmament,, despite the evidence that arms control would not halt Soviet progress towards military superiority...
...If these programs are carried out, one problem will have been solved...
...Was the decision to negotiate limits on strategic arms responsible in any way for this loss of American power...
...World War I was nauseatingly destructive, but it did have a point...
...To ignore this possibility would be unrealistic...
...Our defense department was pleading with us to negotiate a freeze on the Soviets, lest the disparity in numbers continue to grow...
Vol. 12 • April 1979 • No. 4
