WHAT MAKES NITZE RUN?
Lens, Sidney
What makes Nitze run? The Committee on the Present Danger pursues a thirty-year-old dream of Victory' Sidney Lens For sheer chutzpah, nothing beats the performance of General David C. Jones and...
...According to NSC-68, that can be done by means of "a more rapid building up of the political, economic, and military strength of the free world...
...In the confusion of the SALT II debate, the Committee has been highly effective...
...He has held a number of Government positions, including those of Secretary of the Navy and Deputy Secretary of Defense, but his most significant contribution was made as director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff in 1950, when it prepared the super-secret document called National Security Council 68 (NSC-68) — a basic blueprint for the Cold War...
...More than half of the strategic warheads in the U.S...
...Effective control of atomic energy would require such an opening up of the Soviet Union and such evidence in other ways of its good faith and its intent to coexist in peace as to reflect or at least initiate a change in the Soviet system...
...We must talk with the Russians because public opinion demands it, but we must manipulate the talks so that the public believes there is no way to deal with Moscow except by "building strength," more strength, and still more strength...
...What he objects to in SALT II is that the Soviets are allowed too much and the United States too little '. . .military power was of no avail in Vietnam...
...In pursuit of this objective, Nitze and his friends want to prove to Americans that: IThe Soviet Union, unlike the United States, seeks to dominate the world through military superiority...
...There is much sleight of hand in these assertions...
...Unlike our friends in the peace movement who gave their advance blessings to SALT II without winning a single concession, the Joint Chiefs insisted on one concession after another, never resting, always preparing their next set of demands...
...such labor leaders as Lane Kirkland and Albert Shanker...
...The inevitable result is that "by the early 1980s...
...Nuclear "superiority" is a mirage, and a political program built around it is another long step toward doomsday...
...Emphasis added...
...for the disparity to be totally in America's favor...
...military power was of no avail in Vietnam, Cambodia, and especially Iran...
...Similarly, the figures on heavy Soviet land missiles — the 300 SS-18s — distort reality...
...Vance's efforts met the same fate as those of Adrian Fisher, who tried to negotiate a total nuclear test ban with the Russians in 1963, but was forced by the Pentagon to settle for a partial ban — allowing for continuing underground testing — which made the pact virtually worthless...
...mix of weaponry, land-based missiles are only one part of what the military call "the triad...
...Almost three decades after NSC-68 was written, Nitze and his Committee on the Present Danger are still carefully following that script...
...Therefore, we must negotiate only to gain "support for a program of building strength...
...It may be true that the Russian giant missiles will be able to destroy the American land-based silos by 1985 — but in the U.S...
...That edge has slipped away.'' It is to regain — and surpass — that edge that Nitze wants SALT II amended into oblivion...
...military superiority that would persuade the Russians to yield...
...But Nitze's program is sure to lead us toward the final holocaust...
...His hope, and that of the Committee on the Present Danger, is to scuttle or renegotiate the treaty so that the United States can pursue a further military advantage — an absolute one...
...such conservatives as John Connally, Joseph D. Baroody, Dean Rusk, and Eugene Rostow — it exudes "objectivity...
...point a general to head the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, to establish a 100,000-man intervention force, to increase the military budget by more than $10 billion — that all these were bribes to the Joint Chiefs and their friends on Capitol Hill to buy their patronage for ratification of SALT II...
...Washington sold and gave $20 billion of military hardware to the Shah of Iran, armed and trained his secret police, but had to stand by — nuclear weapons and all — while Iran dropped out of the Pax A mericana...
...Sitting stolid and erect in the Senate hearing room, they made their pitch for a third payoff...
...Most of us assume that the purpose of negotiations is to resolve differences...
...The author of the strategy is Paul Nitze, then a Government official, more recently a founder and leading light of the Committee on the Present Danger...
...If the Soviets were to agree to disarmament without simultaneously abandoning their socialist form of government, the United States would probably have to reject the agreement...
...the Soviet Union will be in a position to destroy 90 per cent of our ICBMs" and still have enough warheads left over to threaten America's population centers...
...And in the absence of vigorous opposition to the treaty from the Left, it has set the parameters for the SALT II discussion — either an increase of 50 to 100 per cent in the number of nuclear warheads (the Carter-Vance prescription), or an even greater increase, at least for the United States...
...Otherwise, he said, "we will find that SALT II made little difference and may have been a net loss...
...But it is not pure lust for power (or hardware) that drives the Pentagon's top brass and their right-wing allies, nor is it simple paranoia about Soviet capabilities and intentions...
...It would have been reasonable to expect the Chiefs to repay President Carter's many kindnesses with a hale and hearty endorsement that might put the limping SALT pact over the top...
...The Soviets, by contrast, are spending 14 per cent of their gross national product on the military and vast sums on "a civil defense program twenty times as elaborate and costly as ours...
...The Soviet rulers," Nitze conceded, "do not want nuclear war...
...It was also clear that Carter's decisions to proceed with the MX missile, to produce neutron bomb components, to beef up civil defense, to apSidney Lens, a contributing editor of The Progressive, is the author of "The Day Before Doomsday...
...The argument that Washington seeks only a standoff while Moscow probes for world domination can just as easily be turned around, since the United States has had the military advantage for a third of a century, while the Soviets have been playing catch-up...
...he would prefer to enter your country unopposed...
...At junctions of high contention short of war," Nitze has written, "the side better able to cope with the consequences of raising the stakes has the advantage...
...If Moscow has expanded its influence into those areas, however, it has not done so by "military superiority...
...But the Nitze formula is based on the flawed assumption that military power assures victory in the Cold War...
...With a membership that seems to encompass much of the political spectrum — such former radicals as James T. Farrell, Saul Bellow, Bayard Rustin, Seymour Martin Lipset, Jay Lovestone...
...SALT II, said General Jones, is "a modest but useful contribution to the national interest...
...But — and it was an important but — SALT II would be useful only if the Pentagon were assured of "improved military capabilities...
...In each case, the Soviets aligned themselves — or tried to — with a national revolution (in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mozambique) , and usually with a revolution in which the United States was aligned with the status quo (as in Iraq, Yemen, Ethiopia, Mozambique...
...After all, they had already been twice rewarded for their support — first in the negotiations within the Administration on what proposals to lay before the Soviets, and second in the negotiations with the Soviets, when Carter made at least nine concessions to the hawks, hoping to win their approval for the treaty...
...Since American power, formidable as it is, does not suffice to compel Moscow to jettison its political system, negotiations can only play the subsidiary role of "building strength," until we acquire that overwhelming U.S...
...SALT II, says Nitze, confirms the Soviet advantage, for while they are allowed 300 large ICBMs (SS-18s), each with ten warheads, the United States will have none...
...Nitze, once a Wall Street investment banker, is now a dignified, seventy-two-year-old "elder statesman...
...with the purpose of reaching, if possible, a tolerable state of order among nations without war____" The aim is to win a Soviet surrender without firing a shot...
...The Soviet Union, he claims, seeks to dominate the Middle East to outflank Europe, and to "outflank the Middle East by achieving controlling positions in Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq on one side, South and North Yemen, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Mozambique on the other, and by achieving the neutrality of Turkey to the north...
...arsenal are on invulnerable submarines — 5,000 of them...
...Negotiations, as General Jones showed in his testimony before the Senate, are merely a means of intensifying the arms race...
...Whatever shortcomings the military may have, they are certainly superb bargainers...
...In the Korean war, the Berlin blockades, and the Cuban missile crisis the United States had the ultimate edge because of our superiority at the strategic nuclear level...
...it would be upwards of $14 billion...
...Like the aggressor in von Clausewitz's example, Nitze does not want war, but believes that a nation that can raise the military stakes more than its adversary can dictate political terms...
...In fact, Nitze observed in NSC-68, "If, contrary to our expectations, the Soviet Union should accept agreements promising effective control of atomic energy and conventional armaments, without any other changes in Soviet policies, we would have to consider very carefully whether we could accept such agreements...
...The other side is the one under greater pressure to scramble for a peaceful way out...
...The cost of "improved capabilities," Jones added, would exceed Defense Secretary Harold Brown's estimate of $10 billion to $12 billion a year...
...Presumably, that is what the Russians are planning...
...As Nitze saw it then (and sees it now), "Under present circumstances we will not be able to negotiate a settlement which calls for a change in the Soviet system...
...The negotiator's goal, in other words, is not to achieve an understanding but to force the Soviet Union to change its political system...
...such old-time liberals as Leon Keyserling, Max Kampelman, and John P. Roche...
...But they "believe the best way to avoid a nuclear war and still achieve their objectives is to have overwhelming superiority...
...But in Nitze's view, as set out in NSC-68 (which was declassified by Henry Kissinger in 1975), the purpose of negotiations is "to achieve agreement which is somewhat better than the realities of [the negotiator's] fundamental position would justify----" So far as the Soviet Union is concerned, that means "to create such political and economic conditions in the free world, backed by force sufficient to inhibit Soviet attack, that the Kremlin will accommodate itself to these conditions, gradually withdraw, and eventually change its policies drastically...
...Nitze knows all this, of course...
...The United States, says Nitze, is seeking only "to arrange a standoff' with the Soviets, and has been reducing its military expenditures accordingly...
...Ratification of SALT II will not diminish the arms race by a single bomb, nor will it do much to strengthen detente...
...Conversely, enormous U.S...
...There is a strategy, developed first in 1950 and still pursued today, which holds that negotiations with the Soviet Union should not be regarded as a means of settling disputes or achieving detente, but as a stepping stone toward "victory...
...The other segments, bombers and submarine-launched missiles, could not be knocked out by a Soviet first strike...
...negotiator, Paul Warnke, hoped to provide a set of proposals that would lead to a measure of genuine arms control, but was ground down by the fierce resistance of the Pentagon...
...It was an open secret in Washington that the chief U.S...
...But the Joint Chiefs would not stay bribed...
...tThe Soviet Union is in the process of acquiring the military ascendancy needed for world domination because America is "soft" — both in its general policy and in the "concessions" it made to Moscow while negotiating SALT II...
...To have the advantage at the utmost level of violence helps at every lesser level...
...The Committee on the Present Danger pursues a thirty-year-old dream of Victory' Sidney Lens For sheer chutzpah, nothing beats the performance of General David C. Jones and his fellow Joint Chiefs of Staff before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the recent hearings on the SALT II treaty...
...As von Clausewitz, the famous military strategist, put it, the aggressor never wants war...
Vol. 43 • September 1979 • No. 9
