New Prospects for Arms Control
Hertzberg, Hendrik
The history of arms control over the past seven years has been an astounding and lurid tale, full of unexpected twists, cynical betrayals, palace maneuverings, popular insurrections, and ironic...
...But for the Democrats...
...He must be willing to fight, and he must be willing to mobilize every available resource...
...Or that wild military spending is the surest path to peace...
...At the beginning the talk was of nuclear war-fighting, of firing "demonstration shots" and surviving nuclear war "with enough shovels...
...One of Reagan's unintended services to his (I hope) Democratic successor was to reestablish that it is possible to attack the Soviet political system and deal with the Soviet government on matters of mutual interest at the same time...
...But recently, in a letter released in connection with a twenty-fifth anniversary reunion of participants in the crisis, then Secretary of State Dean Rusk revealed that the United States was secretly planning to offer to withdraw its missiles stationed in Turkey if the Soviets had not backed down...
...The Republican candidate most responsive to these two constituencies, Jack Kemp, was denouncing the agreement as a "nuclear Munich" as soon as its outlines started to emerge...
...WINTER • 1988 • 79 matic) Republican, is to begin planning for that contingency as carefully as we now plan for war...
...Reagan arms control is all very well for humanity, yes...
...SDI is the biggest bargaining chip ever fashioned, and that is all it is...
...The cold war is still more Gorbachev's to end than ours...
...But for the first time, stockpiles of existing, modern, "state-of-the-art" nuclear weapons will be destroyed, as opposed to merely setting limits on future deployments and phasing out obsolete weapons...
...One very real prospect is that the fear of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, the engine of Western security policy for forty years, will relax its grip on our imaginations...
...But the fight over who gets to represent the Republican right will probably be the nastiest scuffle 78 • DISSENT gets, the super-accurate multi-warhead missiles, to be phased out first...
...They can argue that they, and not the Republicans, are best fitted to finish what Reagan has begun...
...The history between the bookends has brought about the destruction of all the old arms control paradigms...
...And even as it vindicates Reagan's arms buildup, it relegitimizes the path of negotiation and diplomacy...
...Indeed, the entire performance at Reykjavik underscored the continuing validity of the diplomatic adage that leaders should go to summits not to negotiate, but to ratify what has already been agreed to...
...Much depends on what the Republicans do to each other, but for the Democrats the overall political advantages of a Reagan-Gorbachev treaty are at least equal to the disadvantages and may even outweigh them...
...To them should be added a total and verifiable ban on nuclear testing...
...H.H...
...He grew more cautious in the immediate wake of Reagan's September 18 announcement that "agreement in principle" had been reached with the Soviet Union...
...the official endorsement of the "window of vulnerability," the wobbly theory that because the Russians have enough land-based missiles to blow up our land-based missiles and still have some left over, they might be tempted to go ahead and do so even though we could still blow them to hell a thousand times over with our submarines and bombers...
...But this should not prevent them from pointing out that SDI, while fraudulent as a defense for the populations of the West, is quite plausible as a device to ward off the blows of an enemy arsenal already crippled by prior attack...
...A kind of implicit linkage is inevitable and perhaps not wholly undesirable...
...It will defuse the "peace" issue, at least in its global Soviet-American aspect...
...the attack on the morality of deterrence by the American Catholic bishops, by popular writers such as Jonathan Schell, and finally by the president himself...
...But all this is still only a hope, the fulfillment of which depends on events outside the control of any American president...
...Better simply to acknowledge humbly, without giving way to cynicism, that history moves in mysterious ways...
...Such a ban has been resisted on the grounds that without testing, the two sides would grow gradually less confident in the reliability of the weapons...
...The others will probably join George Bush in supporting Reagan in the end, but not before engaging in a lot of hawkish posturing for the benefit of the conservative activists of Iowa and New Hampshire...
...That this is so may not be immediately apparent...
...A look at that crisis, by the way, puts in WINTER • 1988 • 75 perspective more than just the numbers...
...It is both an instrument and a tempting target of "preemptive" nuclear war...
...That connection goes well beyond Gorbachev's needs for a foreign policy success and for diverting resources to domestic use...
...but policy must be based on observed reality...
...What lessons should we draw from all this...
...the estrangement of the British Labour party and the West German Social Democrats from a generation of consensus on nuclear policy...
...agreements, therefore, can be more ambitious...
...He calls for (1) "reduction of intercontinental-range forces to an equal level in the range of 3,000-6,000 warheads," with those weapons that are at once the most threatening and the most tempting tarSoon after this is written—probably before it is read, assuming nobody shoots down any more Korean airliners or invades any more neighboring countries—Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev will sign a treaty banning intermediate-range and shorter-range ballistic and cruise missiles from the arsenals of the two superpowers...
...Conservative movement activists and elements of the neoconservative policy infrastructure had begun to mobilize against the treaty well before it was agreed to...
...After all, a Reagan arms control treaty will have certain obvious benefits for the Republicans...
...Even when confronting a set of policies as schizoid as those guiding the administration's notions of space-use and weapons-in-space—its increasing reliance on space, on the one hand, particularly for the most favored and blessed SDI-child, and its abject refusal even to consider limits on the weapons that can only make space-based military systems obsolete, on the other—one is not permitted simply to heap scorn on what even a perfect pinhead can see is self-defeating...
...It will give the lie to the proposition, stoutly maintained for seven years by many Democrats (including me), that the Republican right is ideologically incapable of successfully concluding a significant arms control negotiation with the Soviet Union...
...the second helped open up enormous new possibilities for reductions in nuclear arsenals...
...Planning can be based on hope, just as it can be based on fear...
...2) reaffirming the ABM treaty, and supplementing it with a ban on antisatellite weapons...
...the record is confusing), half by 1996 and half later...
...Some experts on nuclear strategy are now arguing, in the impenetrable theological jargon of their priesthood, that "extended deterrence" will be damaged by the elimination of the Euromissiles —that with only 20,000 or so warheads left to deter the Russians, a Soviet nuclear or conventional attack on Western Europe will become more likely...
...Reagan said for years that America should negotiate only from a position of strength...
...A deployed SDI is thus less a "defense" than an auxiliary first-strike weapon...
...Glasnost" counts for something not just as it relates directly to security issues (e.g., allowing U.S...
...congressmen to visit the radar installation at Krasnoyarsk, agreeing to onsite inspection, etc...
...For the first time, a regime of onsite inspection will be established—and not just unmanned sensors, as contemplated in the suspended test-ban talks, but an elaborate system of mutual visits and inspections...
...the biggest peacetime military spendup in history...
...accommodation, "strength" vs...
...the subsequent walling-up of the "window" theory by the Scowcroft Commission...
...the president's decision—under the influence of Edward Teller, without the advice or even the knowledge of many of his senior advisers, and in the face of prohibitions in the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty—to undertake "Star Wars," a vast program of exotic technology aimed at the deployment of a supposedly invulnerable "strategic defense" against Soviet rockets...
...The paradoxes mount: SDI exists as a bargaining chip only because Reagan did not see it as one...
...Toward the end, at Reykjavik and after, the talk was of actual disarmament, of scrapping the entire armory of all U.S...
...No, one must instead cede the terms of the debate, however strained or silly, carefully describing the administration's shopworn canards, meticulously analyzing pure nonsense...
...These numbers have been derided as insignificant, as in a way they are in a world of 50,000 Soviet and American nuclear warheads...
...The first episode helped create an enormous new international antinuclear movement...
...Like a good nuclear strategist, he must know how to deter attack by the threat of massive retaliation...
...An important duty of the next administration, Democratic or (pragthe 1988 campaign, and Kemp has to decide if solidifying his hold on the right is worth opposing Reagan in the process...
...80 • DISSENT...
...had 1,300 strategic bombers, the Soviet Union about 155...
...If you arm to WINTER • 1988 • 77 parley you may not arm...
...For the Democrats these are reasonable trade-offs...
...76 • DISSENT Still, the real engine (and context) of arms control is the political relationship between the superpowers, a relationship heavily colored by the way the Soviet government treats its citizens...
...Reagan's "vision" of a giant space shield that would protect the United States from attack and make nuclear weapons obsolete is an absurdity, as every remotely objective technical study of the matter has shown...
...And as the last reel begins, he is rescued from himself by a deus-ex-Moscow...
...Yet it is worth pointing out that the number of warheads to be scrapped under the Euromissile treaty is almost exactly the number that existed in the total arsenals of both superpowers at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962...
...There is good reason to suppose that all these goals are within reach...
...At both ends of the period, like novelty-store bookends, are two episodes of what responsible moderates in the arms-control priesthood deplored as "loose talk...
...But there is no reason why Democratic advocacy of arms control— and Democratic encouragement of glasnost— should not be accompanied by clear and repeated statements of opposition to such aspects of the Soviet system as the monopoly of power by the Communist party, the oppression of national and individual rights in the Soviet Union's imperial orbit, the suppression of the freedoms of speech, the press, and association, the misuse of psychiatry, and so on...
...But Reagan armed to make parleying obsolete...
...There will be a new political fault line on arms control, a philosophical fault line rather than a partisan one—and the only people on the wrong side of it will be the conservative and neoconservative fringe...
...If Gorbachev holds on, and if his program of internal reform and external retrenchment keeps its trajectory, then it will soon become prudent to start thinking in terms of a truce in, perhaps even an end to, the cold war...
...Pat Robertson, who looks forward placidly to Armageddon, has reasons of his own for opposing arms control...
...Simply by saying yes—yes to letting the French and British keep (and expand) their nuclear forces, yes to detaching the Euromissile talks from the strategic arms talks, yes to putting aside the "Star Wars" issue, yes to Reagan's "zero-zero" proposal, yes to eliminating intermediate-range missiles worldwide instead of just in Europe, yes to getting rid of short-range missiles (which have a range of three-hundred to six-hundred miles, and which only the Russians possess), yes to on-site inspection—with all these yeses, Gorbachev dragged a dazed and reluctant Reagan administration into a historic agreement...
...Together, these two make a grand bargain possible...
...When the administration was paralyzed by infighting, the Russians immersed themselves in a series of succession and transition crises...
...In fact, there are two ways in which Reagan's stupidity has opened up vast opportunities for the next Democratic president: "Star Wars" and Reykjavik...
...It's an unreliable guide to wise policy...
...That is good news for the human species...
...If everything had been carefully "staffed out," the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union would never have agreed in principle to cut their strategic arsenals in half...
...If politics is not just dada, these are surely the wrong lessons...
...the rise of the European peace movement and the spontaneous popular outpouring of the American nuclear freeze movement...
...stunning displays of ignorance by the president 74 • DISSENT of the United States, such as his assertion that submarine-launched ballistic missiles can be recalled and his astonishment upon learning that the Soviet Union's nuclear forces are far more concentrated in land-based missiles than our own...
...In the wake of a Reagan-Gorbachev treaty, the issue will not be whether or not to have arms control, but whether to have a lot of it or a little...
...These changes—a diminished U.S...
...And when the Soviet Union finally threw up a leader whose vigor and public relations skills were more than a match for Reagan's, that leader turned out to be a determined, imaginative, and apparently sincere advocate not so much of nuclear arms control as of what Reagan claimed to have been seeking all along: nuclear arms reductions...
...the Reagan offer of a "zero-zero" solution to the European missile problem, an offer cynically designed to be rejected...
...Deterrence is far hardier than the priesthood imagines...
...Or that responsible behavior is pointless...
...It is also good news, politically, for those members of the human species who happen to be liberal Democrats...
...Or that the best way to get arms control is to elect a president who opposes it...
...evil offset by his faith in the redemptive power of his own niceness, his ignorance and rigidity offset by his amazing luck...
...the abandonment by the U.S...
...Whatever his program, a Democratic president must be very tough where the domestic politics of arms control are concerned...
...Nor would SDI have been isolated so starkly as the obstacle to agreement...
...He must make sure that his administration is not hobbled, as President Carter's was, by splits on the Vance-Brzezinski model...
...And it is true that intercontinental missiles and other long-range nuclear systems will remain untouched...
...But the greatest political benefits of a ReaganGorbachev treaty will come after the election—and these would accrue as much to a pragmatic Republican as to a Democrat...
...therefore he, or his successor, may parley...
...It will wipe from the public mind most of whatever traces remain of the Iran-Contra embarrassment...
...he got caught up in utopian fantasies...
...and Pierre du Pont called the treaty a "bad deal" the day it was agreed to...
...The inevitable result will be large-scale changes in the system of Western alliances...
...and (4) a treaty limiting conventional forces in Europe, under which asymmetrical reductions in Soviet numerical superiority (especially tanks) would be traded for restraints on Western technological improvements...
...but also, and far more important, because it erodes the raison d'être of the cold war...
...A Democratic president has to be prepared for cycles in the U.S.-Soviet relationship...
...In that contest, "a lot" has most of the advantages...
...In tribute, perhaps SALT should be renamed the Strategic Arms Loose Talks...
...That history includes the new administration's rejection of SALT II without quite renouncing it...
...Given that Reagan opposed every arms control agreement from the atmospheric test ban to SALT II, and given that he devoted the bulk of his two terms to sabotaging the arms control process, the mind rebels against such an assessment...
...military role in Europe, a lower level of armaments and U.S...
...There is an obvious intuitive connection between Gorbachev's domestic reforms and the current dramatic improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations...
...Reagan's arms control policy, viewed in isolation from the unpredictable ways it interacted with Soviet turmoil and Western public opinion, has been one of monumental (and purposeful) failure...
...The Democrats can plausibly argue that what is needed now is the will to negotiate, that the time has come to play the cards Reagan has assembled at such huge cost to the budget and the economy...
...That kind of truth-telling is useful both for its own sake and for the sake of keeping arms control from being made hostage to fantasies about the nature of the Soviet regime...
...It will make attacks on President Reagan's arms control record seem peevish...
...It also requires a remarkable degree of restraint, almost a kind of self-censorship, particularly if you intend to criticize government policy...
...If Reagan had left office without concluding a treaty, the anti-arms control forces would have been more confident, united, and powerful than ever...
...Reagan's will to push it came from ignorance—from stupidity...
...The next president should be ready to educate the public about why such changes are to be welcomed rather than feared...
...And he must be prepared to break the power of the military-industrial complex, or rather the militaryindustrial-intellectual complex, which has a powerful material, ideological, and emotional stake in the status quo...
...Now it will not be so easy for them to frame the issue as perseverance vs...
...The fact that it is now to be crowned with a kind of success is due entirely to factors outside the control of the president and his administration—specifically, to the stillunfolding changes Mikhail Gorbachev is bringing to Soviet policy and Soviet life...
...It's tempting to say that the Reagan experience proves that stupidity may accomplish more than intelligence, and that stupidity (Reagan) in command of intelligence (Perle) may accomplish more than either...
...But this is not to say that stupidity does not have its retrospective uses...
...The treaty is bound to be popular, and the Democratic presidential candidates will be united behind it...
...Even as it deprives the Democrats of the "peace" issue, the Euromissile treaty tends to deprive the Republicans of the "strength" issue...
...Reagan's "vision" is almost never discussed in the contemptuous terms it deserves...
...One doesn't have to enshrine haphazardness as a model of future policymaking to recognize that in this case it has created an unparalleled opportunity for Reagan's successor (or for Reagan himself, in the unlikely event he cares to take it...
...An audacious claim, a daring strategy—and a fitting revenge for Reagan's pilfering of FDR and JFK in 1980 and 1984...
...A Democratic program for arms control has begun to emerge...
...But of course it was precisely because of the lack of preparation, the utopian fantasies, and so on that the Reykjavik summit expanded the potential horizons of arms control far beyond what the experts had considered possible...
...The Democratic candidates, unfortunately, are among those who must or at least will speak respectfully of the SDI kookery, lest they be convicted of kookery themselves...
...By politically damaging contrast, because of the peculiar political dynamics of Reagan-era conservatism, the Republicans are likely to be split...
...troop emplacements, perhaps the withdrawal of one or two countries from NATO—are bound to provoke alarm...
...For the first time, the Soviet Union will accept sharply asymmetrical reductions— they will have to get rid of some seven hundred "delivery systems" carrying about 2,000 warheads, while we scrap 373 single-warhead missiles (plus the seventy-two West German Pershing I-As...
...The Soviet Union had 141...
...Stupidity pays" is the wrong lesson because it lacks prescriptive value...
...he didn't know what he was talking about...
...and, finally, the Soviet acceptance of the "zerozero" offer, leading, after some haggling, to an agreement in principle on the first arms control treaty since SALT II...
...The real lesson of the crisis, then, may be that the Soviet Union, with its piddling arsenal, was able to "deter" the United States, with its much larger one...
...government not only of negotiations for a comprehensive nuclear test ban but also of the very goal of a comprehensive ban...
...With ex-President Reagan safely enlisted in the long line of presidents who have signed arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, a new president will have a much broader and firmer domestic political base from which to pursue further agreements...
...When Reagan's proposal for what he had renamed the START talks was crumbling under criticism for gross one-sidedness, the Russians took the onus upon themselves by walking out...
...By the same token, a move back toward domestic Stalinism would undermine the political basis for arms control (though the imperative of avoiding war would, of course, remain...
...It is true that Europe will remain the most heavily nuclearized continent in the world—there will still be thousands of bomber-borne, submarine-borne, and battlefield nuclear weapons, far more than needed to deter any plausible attack...
...Through it all has stumbled the extraordinary figure of Ronald Reagan, as innocent of knowledge as he is of guile, his Manichaean vision of good vs...
...It is as if the paradoxes of nuclear deterrence have soaked through to the politics of nuclear disarmament, like a sponge half-dipped in water...
...At the time of that crisis, the United States had a total of 478 missiles in its arsenal...
...would install its own intermediate-range missiles in Europe to offset the Soviet Union's SS-20s, and at the same time would conduct arms control talks aimed at getting the Russians to take their missiles out—while the other half of the deal, the negotiation "track," was left to languish...
...When the deployment of the American Pershing II rockets and cruise missiles was in trouble with the European public, the Russians obliged by forcing the suppression of Solidarity in Poland, by putting heavy-handed pressure on West Germany, and by shooting down the Korean airliner...
...The U.S., then, had what looks like overwhelming superiority, to which the fact that the crisis ended in an American "victory" has generally been attributed...
...That is why "Star Wars," with its suggestion of gee-whiz fantasy, is a more honest name for the program than its sober-sounding official title, the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI...
...the enthusiastic pursuit of the deployment "track" of NATO's famous "dual-track" decision of 1979—according to which the U.S...
...Reagan's performance at the Reykjavik summit has been almost universally deplored...
...This is why one must presume, in the words of John D. Steinbruner, "that the Soviet Union is both sincere and unshakable in its declared resolve to preserve the ABM treaty under its restrictive interpretation as a condition for strategic force reductions...
...To be taken seriously in the defense community," the defense analyst Barry M. Blechman recently wrote in the New Republic, requires a marked conformity to certain lines of debate...
...There are, of course, valid lessons to be drawn...
...He must make it clear to important Democratic figures on Capitol Hill, such as Les Aspin and Sam Nunn, that there are limits to posturing and gameplaying beyond which he will not permit them to go without retribution...
...This has the consequence of conferring a certain legitimacy on what is obviously illegitimate...
...In fact they will be signs of the withering away of the conflict's underlying causes...
...Neoconservatives here and abroad will mistake them for symptoms of the decline of the West, the collapse of the will to resist, the triumph of American isolationism and European pusillanimity, and so on...
...One of them is that it's all right to be beastly to the Russians...
...appeasement...
...To say that the summit was ill prepared is to indulge in classic understatement," goes a typical comment, this one by James Schlesinger in Foreign Affairs...
...And of course the treaty, with its accompanying summit theatrics, will give Reagan's popularity a large and lasting boost, presumably making his party's nomination and his own endorsement of the nominee that much more valuable...
...Almost in spite of himself he has convinced the public that America is in just that position—that America has "rearmed...
...3) following up the Euromissile treaty with a plan to disengage the remaining nuclear weapons from conventional force operations...
...Yet the 1962 crisis—the only example we have of deterrence working in a real crisis in the real world, as opposed to the imaginary world of the war-garners—teaches a different lesson...
...The history of arms control over the past seven years has been an astounding and lurid tale, full of unexpected twists, cynical betrayals, palace maneuverings, popular insurrections, and ironic turns of the dialectic...
...extraordinary infighting on arms control within the administration, allowing policy to be hamstrung by persons hostile to arms control on principle, such as Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle...
...Steinbruner has persuasively outlined such a program in an article entitled "The Principles of Defensive Deterrence" in the Summer 1987 Brookings Review...
...No one who understood what SDI really is could have pushed it as Reagan has—no one but a monster...
...Through it all, Reagan has been repeatedly rescued by luck—the luck of the Russians, not the Irish...
...The rise of Gorbachev is by far the most important arms control development of the Reagan years...
...Reagan's view of the Soviet Union as "the focus of evil in the modern world" is a childish theological formulation that ignores the real sources and causes of Soviet tyranny (though it is certainly closer to the truth than saying the Soviet Union is the focus of good...
...Reagan an arms controller...
...In both cases the loose talkers were high officials of the Reagan administration, including the president himself...
...In addition, the U.S...
...In the American domestic political arena, Reagan's delinking of arms control from the forswearance of opposition to Soviet tyranny was made possible by Gorbachev's softening of that tyranny...
...If Kemp doesn't jump ship, one or more of the other five Republican contenders may beat him to it...
...Ratification will be easier...
...And it would be a historic agreement, despite the sour-grapes efforts of many arms-control experts to picture it as militarily insignificant and politically marginal...
...However, this is the main argument on a test ban's behalf, since a slightly degraded arsenal retains its deterrent value, while becoming unreliable only for a coordinated first strike...
...He was unprepared...
...It's not always the right time for arms control...
...If they hadn't blinked, in other words, we would have...
...and Soviet ballistic missiles (or was it all nuclear weapons...
...It will force the Democrats into something like a "me, too" posture on the nuclear question...
...In light of the Euromissile agreement, Reagan must perforce be considered a successful arms control president, almost on a par with Kennedy and Nixon...
Vol. 35 • January 1988 • No. 1
