“9. The Nitze Scenario” in “America’s Cold Warrior”
CHAPTER 9 The Nitze Scenario
Sixty-nine years old in 1976, Paul Nitze aspired to return to a high government position. under the next Democratic president. Instead, that summer, he antagonized the Democratic nominee, former governor Jimmy Carter, in a meeting with his top advisers. Shut out of the Carter administration, Nitze managed to remain as relevant as he had been during the Dwight Eisenhower administration. He maintained active security clearances to keep abreast of intelligence and military matters, drawing upon his expertise on nuclear policies to mount never-ending attacks on the president. Part of Nitze’s motivation was spite. Yet, under Carter’s presidency, the Soviets seemed to him to be gaining strength and using their perceived power to take risks and gain geopolitical influence.
Meanwhile, Carter and his aides embraced strategic arms control policies that Nitze regarded as counter-effective. The president acknowledged there were significant problems with the US nuclear deterrent. The difference between Carter and Nitze came down to whether SALT II would buy time to enact a more ambitious agenda to reduce destabilizing Soviet systems finally—or whether it would make that impossible. Carter and his team believed that SALT II would pave the way for Congress to sign off on strategic modernization. Nitze thought the opposite: a modest deal that failed to address the main problem would only lead to less support for strategic modernization and to worse bargains. From his perspective, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 exemplified everything he had been saying about the erosion of US strength and its consequences for Soviet risk-taking. That invasion, which accelerated the collapse of détente, encapsulated the dangers laid out in the “Nitze Scenario.”
“Strategic Stability” and the 1976 Presidential Election
In the Nitze Scenario, the Soviets could launch a “counterforce” first strike that limited US civilian losses while simultaneously sending a message to the US president: surrender or die. The US president could then call on second-strike forces at sea or in the air to retaliate against Soviet cities—which would by then have been evacuated or sheltered—after which the Soviets would still have sufficient forces to take out US cities. Or, the president could surrender, avert a partial genocide of Soviet civilians, and save one hundred million US lives. The chances of that second response happening were extraordinarily slim—but not impossible. Its plausibility, however, emboldened Soviet risk-taking in all contested areas of the Cold War. Nitze felt sure the Soviets knew they could press their advantage because any US president would fear that a crisis like that in Cuba would result in a reversed outcome. At some point, the United States would have to back down, as the Soviets had done in October 1962. From 1975 onward, Nitze worried over the psychological consequences of the Soviets building enough SS-18 missiles to take out the entire US Minuteman fleet.
Perceptions had consequences. For Nitze, few perceptions were as dangerous as the presupposition that Soviet leaders thought about nuclear war in the same way as US leaders. “Americans have thought throughout the last 30 years in terms of deterring nuclear war, with the debate centering on how much effort is necessary to maintain deterrence, to keep nuclear war unthinkable,” he wrote in the January 1976 edition of Foreign Affairs. Yet the Soviets did not regard nuclear war as unthinkable. They had “meticulously planned civil defense”—which Nitze had seen firsthand during his trip in 1955—demonstrating their preparedness for waging such a war. Soviet capabilities now enabled them to take out the US land-based ICBMs while limiting damage from retaliatory strikes from the sea- and air-based legs of the US nuclear triad.
Strategic stability remained achievable. As Nitze laid out in his Foreign Affairs article, that concept meant “minimizing both the possibility of nuclear war and the likelihood that nuclear arms might be used by either side as a means of decisive pressure in key areas of the world.”1 It was not just the prospect of a nuclear war that resulted from strategic instability: confidence in the superiority of one’s side emboldened leaders to become aggressive in areas of the world where there was not necessarily confrontation between the military forces of East and West. Those actions could increase the likelihood of war, drawing more people into the communist orbit.
Nitze described how the United States retained nuclear superiority until 1954 and regained it—through improvements in missile technology—between 1956 and 1962. He touched on his association with former secretary of defense Robert McNamara in the early 1960s. “In essence, the United States opted at that point to stress technological improvement rather than expanded force levels.”2 The US side pursued “crisis stability”—“where neither side could gain from a first strike”—and “mutual assured destruction,” meaning that “each side would have a fully adequate second-strike capability to deter the other.” The objective was “to downgrade nuclear weapons as an element in US–Soviet competition and to prepare the way for systematic reductions in nuclear arms.” As the US side “adjusted its posture,” it gave clear signals to the Soviets to reciprocate “and stop there.” “Unfortunately, however, the Soviet Union chose to pursue a course that was ambiguous: it could be interpreted as being aimed at overtaking the United States but then stopping at parity; it could, however, be interpreted as being aimed at establishing superiority in numbers of launchers and in throw-weight and perhaps ultimately, a nuclear-war winning capability on the Soviet side.”3
SALT I and the prospective SALT II agreement failed to arrest the Soviet buildup. Nitze included two charts of Soviet–US throw-weight ratios—compiled by his former assistant T. K. Jones—that predicted immense Soviet superiority within the next decade. “In sum, the trends in relative military strength are such that, unless we move promptly to reverse them, the United States is moving toward a posture of minimum deterrence in which we would be conceding to the Soviet Union the potential for a military and political victory if deterrence failed.”4 To solve the problem of Minuteman vulnerability he proposed a “proliferation of low-cost shelters for what is called a multiple launch-point system,” based on “a large number of shelter installations so that the smaller number of actual missile launchers could be readily moved and deployed among these installations on a random pattern deliberately varied at adequate intervals of time.”5
Whether or not Nitze grasped the sheer cost of such a plan is unclear. What is undoubtedly clear is that he believed Americans could afford to pay more to defend the American way of life, which he was sure that Soviet gains endangered. Nitze may or may not have realized he was conflating “strategic stability” with “US strategic stability.” For him the world was inevitably more stable when the United States maintained nuclear and conventional superiority, even though he doubted that US leaders would actually launch a first strike against the Soviets; they very likely would not even launch a second strike. For him, the Soviets would not be so constrained.
Nitze hoped his Foreign Affairs article would resonate with the field of Democratic candidates gearing up to challenge President Gerald Ford in the November election. Notwithstanding his time in the Nixon administration, Nitze remained a Democrat, and he initially favored Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson in the 1976 presidential primary.6 However, when Jackson’s candidacy fizzled, Nitze did not know who to support. His children recommended Jimmy Carter.7
The former governor of Georgia, Carter, concentrated his efforts on the early Iowa caucuses. A former naval lieutenant on a nuclear-powered submarine, he took a keen interest in defense matters. Democrats had a thin roster of national security professionals; fallout from the US involvement in the Vietnam War had decimated their ranks. Carter’s closest foreign policy adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had been a relatively junior member of the Policy Planning Staff during the Johnson administration. There he got to know Carter through their work on the Trilateral Commission, which the banker and family scion David Rockefeller sponsored to increase cooperation between the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. Nitze had vastly more experience than Brzezinski. He sent Carter his writings and met with him in Washington. Carter impressed Nitze: “He had read the speeches and the articles that I’d sent him and really understood them.”8
The circumstances of the 1976 matchup were peculiar. Ford ran as the incumbent, having been elected neither vice president nor president. He nearly lost in the Republican primary to the former governor of California, Ronald Reagan. In the general election, Carter reiterated several of Reagan’s criticisms of Ford’s foreign policy while assailing him as weak on human rights. Ford’s advisers saw the former Georgia governor as lacking conviction. “There is the Carter, who has Paul Warnke as a national security advisor and will cut $7 billion from the defense budget and there is the Carter, who has Paul Nitze as his advisor and will add $30 billion to the defense budget,” according to a publication that came across the desk of White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney.9
On July 26, Nitze was the senior member of a delegation of advisers on foreign and defense policy that met with Carter at his mother’s home in Plains, Georgia. On the bus ride from the airport to Plains, Nitze perused a recent study cowritten by Harold Brown, who was also on the bus. Nitze grew irritated with Brown, the physicist and former president of Caltech with whom Nitze had served on the SALT I delegation (and, before that, had been secretary of the air force while Nitze was deputy secretary of defense). He pressed him on the details. “I went through it with him … and pointed out some things in it that were totally incorrect. I said, Harold, I can’t understand this.” Brown claimed that he had not written the portions with which Nitze took umbrage. Nitze responded: “yes, Harold, but you signed the god-dam thing. It’s got your signature on it.”10
The subsequent meeting in Plains did not go well for Nitze. While he knew almost everyone in attendance, relationships with some had frayed. According to Cyrus Vance, the lawyer whom the Kennedys had preferred over Nitze for the position of deputy secretary of defense in 1963, “all of the advisors present at the meeting agreed that there was rough equivalence between US and Soviet strategic forces at present … [and] there was disagreement among the group as to where present trends in strategic deployment programs were leading, and what the United States should do about these trends.”11 Brown spoke next, followed by four others, including Paul Warnke, who had succeeded Nitze as assistant secretary of defense for ISA and worked under him when Nitze was later deputy secretary of defense. As the report for Cheney intimated, he saw things differently from Nitze.
Warnke delivered a sanguine account of the Cold War nuclear balance. He “stressed that the present situation is not too bad from the United States’ perspective.” The overriding objective was to “avoid a deterioration in the present strategic balance,” and the best means to that end was to obtain a permanent SALT agreement (i.e., SALT II); this was preferable to “responding to Soviet strategic programs with step-ups in US strategic programs.” If elected, Carter would have little time to achieve results. Without further agreements, domestic and allied political pressures would probably force the United States to respond with “step-ups,” even though “they would not mean anything in military terms.”12 Although he did not phrase it in such evocative terms, Warnke was recapitulating the gist of his own Foreign Policy article, “Apes on a Treadmill,” in which he called for a halt to the nuclear arms race and characterized the United States and the Soviet Union as primates.13 Dissatisfaction with that article inspired Paul Nitze to write his January 1976 Foreign Affairs article on strategic stability.
Nitze responded negatively to Warnke’s briefing in Plains. When it came his turn, he noted “disagreement with much of what had been said so far.” Nitze “emphasized that he was more pessimistic than most of the other people in the room, that he thought that the existing trends were extremely negative,” and “that if the trends were not reversed quickly, that within ten years the ratios of US and USS.R. [sic] strategic capabilities that would survive a counter-force exchange would be most unfavorable from the US perspective.” Citing a recent study, he pointed to calculations that, by the mid-1980s, US forces retaliating against a Soviet first strike would “be able to kill only 4.5 percent of the Soviet population”—hardly a statistic that would ever deter the Kremlin from striking first.14
“Soviet forces surviving a US counterforce attack, under present plans, would be able to destroy a much larger proportion of the US population,” Nitze said. The salient point was that “the assumptions underlying statements made by the majority of the group were not supportable by the data—that, in fact, the data showed that in the future the Soviet Union would be able to survive a nuclear exchange but that the United States would not; and that, in [Nitze’s] view, if such a situation were to develop, it would have major impact on the two nations’ respective behavior.”15
Nitze did not elaborate on all of the implications of accepting a Soviet first-strike capability. Instead, Vance, Brown, and other group members interjected that his calculations portrayed a worst-case scenario and that Nitze had based his predictions on questionable assumptions about Soviet civil defense and US targeting policies. James Woolsey, who had served under Nitze on the SALT delegation, came to his defense. He and Nitze were outnumbered. Responding to Carter’s questions about Soviet and US attitudes toward limited nuclear war, the other participants responded that the United States had always considered the likelihood that it would be the first to use nuclear weapons in defense of allies in Europe and Asia. It was unclear what the Soviet position was. Nitze had no reason to reject this analysis. But he thought the conversation had strayed from the heart of the matter, with Vance and Brown more interested in flattering Carter than establishing sound policy prescriptions.
The dynamics with the future president resembled those of meetings Nitze had sat through in the Oval Office. At first, Nitze forcefully stated his conclusions. For the rest of the session, which covered SALT II and overall force structure, Nitze bit his tongue. Only twice more did he speak. First, during the discussion of NATO capabilities in a conventional war to say that he “took a more pessimistic view of the situation than did the other members of the group.” Then in a discussion of limiting the transfer of arms to governments in so-called third world countries, to say that he was “generally … less hostile to such arms sales than other members of the group.”
Realizing that the discussion had gone against him, Nitze was surprised when Carter asked him to follow up with a report laying out fundamental arms control objectives.16 By September, he had prepared a paper incorporating his concerns about SALT II. In it he urged Carter to seek—should he prevail in November—a treaty of unlimited duration in which neither side could launch a first strike. Additional strategic offensive arms reductions could be deferred to follow-on SALT III negotiations. Nitze delivered these recommendations to the home of one of Carter’s campaign assistants, Anthony Lake (who would go on to lead the Policy Planning Staff under Carter and serve as national security adviser to President William Clinton). Carter never received it.17
In preparation for one of Carter’s debates with Gerald Ford, where the former governor would go after the sitting president for pursuing an amoral foreign policy that was weak on human rights, a member of the former governor’s campaign reached out to Admiral Elmo Zumwalt for his advice. Associating himself “with the views of Paul Nitze,” according to campaign staffer Nick Macneil, who was reporting to another one, Richard Holbrooke, Zumwalt asserted: “When Carter takes office and has full access to the facts he will see that he faces Soviet superiority in both nuclear and conventional weapons.”18
Team B and the Carter Transition
When Secretary of the Air Force Thomas Reed called on outside experts to revisit the 1974 Joint Strategic Bomber Study, he chose Nitze. Along with the other two members, they recommended in October 1976 that the United States pursue the B-1 bomber, which could allegedly penetrate Soviet defenses.19 Nitze considered his expertise on nuclear matters viable because of his access to classified material. His message to the Carter campaign was: I know the whole story, based on classified material I cannot describe; if and when you see it, you will agree with me.
What became known as the “Team B” exercise, in which Nitze also participated, was more consequential than the bomber study. In 1976, the CIA director George H. W. Bush authorized an alternative national intelligence estimate by which outside experts (Team B) examined the same raw intelligence as a Team A consisting of analysts serving in the CIA and other components of the government. Team B was to independently take on Soviet intentions and capabilities. Going over the same sets of evidence, Team B—which included Nitze’s protégé, Paul Wolfowitz—demolished Team A. Harvard University professor of history Richard Pipes wrote the final report, which painted a dire portrait of a decade of neglect and faulty analytic assumptions on the part of the US intelligence community.20 It was leaked to the press shortly after Carter defeated Ford in November 1976.
Unlike previous studies in which Nitze had participated, Team B was focused on the present—not five to ten years into the future. Its purpose was not to throw the election one way or another but rather to pressure whoever became president in January 1977 to take a harder line concerning the Soviet Union. Subsequently, the vanguard in that effort became the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a bipartisan group of national security veterans that took its name from a group that Harvard president James Conant had established in 1950 to support the policy recommendations of NSC-68 (namely, support for increased defense spending).
Nitze ramped up his involvement with the CPD even as he held out hope for joining the administration at the start. He was not completely out of the running. A January 1977 Carter transition memorandum included Nitze as one of ten possibilities for top jobs on the national security team—the others were James Schlesinger, George Ball, Cyrus Vance, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Harold Brown, Anthony Lake, Ted Sorenson, Richard Holbrooke, and Paul Warnke.21 Nitze and Ball became the only ones not nominated or appointed to a high-level position. In later years, Harold Brown recalled that he had broached with Carter the idea of making Nitze undersecretary of defense for policy—a newly created position between assistant secretary of defense for ISA and the secretary of defense—but that Carter nixed it citing the July 1976 meeting in Plains that had gone so badly.22
Nitze’s retaliation was swift. He bitterly attacked his onetime friend, Paul Warnke, whom Carter had nominated as head of the ACDA and the chief negotiator on SALT II. Nitze spoke neutrally about Warnke’s qualifications in an uneventful first session. According to Nitze’s biographer, Nicholas Thompson, Warnke’s testimony a few days later greatly agitated Nitze; as did murmurings about what Warnke and allies thought of his own.23 When he returned to Capitol Hill for a second testimony, Nitze tore into Warnke, his former subordinate and friend.
The personal drama coincided with a substantive debate over how to restrain the nuclear arms race. Warnke advocated for pursuing agreements wherein both sides agreed to curb their buildups. However, Nitze insisted that the United States must first restore its strength. Here and elsewhere, Nitze hammered home the themes that past arms control agreements had failed and that the only prospect for future success was to reduce Soviet throw weight. However, his substantive points received less attention than a moment of cross-talk in which Nitze responded to a senator’s question, implying that he considered himself a “better American” than Warnke.24 “At one time or another, [Warnke] had opposed almost every effort to modernize or improve US strategic systems, including the construction of the B-1 bomber, the MIRVing of the Minuteman III force, conversion of the Polaris submarines to Poseidon, and construction of the Trident force,” he reasoned in his memoir. “Had Warnke’s advice in these matters been followed, our strategic forces would have rapidly grown obsolete.”25 In the same memoir, he attributed the “better American” line to a misunderstanding of what he heard. Yet he remained convinced of the severity of his charges. “Well, frankly, I think Warnke was a complete horse’s ass with zero character and no sense,” he said privately.26
President Carter took notice of Nitze’s attack and defended his man in a March 9 press conference. On March 16, Nitze wrote Carter to say that the president had mischaracterized his reservations about Warnke. More critical than mollifying any hurt feelings, Nitze felt, was dispelling Carter’s illusions about the state of the strategic balance. “It is possible that you may actually believe that a mutually agreed reduction in the number of strategic launchers below 2,400 and/or MIRVed launchers below 1,320 will, in fact, ‘reduce the threat of nuclear destruction of the world,’ ” Nitze wrote Carter. However, the reverse was true. The threat of nuclear destruction would increase “unless such a reduction in numbers of launchers is coupled with other provisions which will both substantially reduce Soviet ICBM throw-weight and effectively lower the ratio of Soviet missile throw-weight advantage over the US toward parity.” Not only did US national security depend on reductions in overall Soviet throw weight, those cuts needed to be substantial. So long as the Soviets possessed the upper hand in throw weight, Nitze was convinced, they had a massive advantage in MIRVs that could take out the entirety of the US ground-based nuclear arsenal.
Nitze urged Carter to jettison his campaign pledge to cut the defense budget. Stagnant growth in US defense spending and the lack of upgrades in the nation’s strategic capabilities virtually guaranteed that the Soviets would defer actually reducing the systems they had been building ever since the early 1960s. “It is not conceivable that such radical reductions toward parity are negotiable under current circumstances or those foreseeable in the intermediate range future,” Nitze insisted (while also conveying the point that it was now up to the United States to rearm itself “toward parity”). Instead, the United States needed to ratchet up efforts, starting with the deployment of something Nitze had described in his Foreign Affairs piece in January 1976: semi-mobile US ICBM systems with multiple launch and aim points. “I, and I am sure many others would be much relieved if your advisors were prepared to suggest some practicable alternate approach which would meet the objectives of strategic stability and rough equivalence more promptly, at less cost,” Nitze summed up. “We have been [thus far] unable to find one.”27
Carter read Nitze’s letter and declined to respond.28 He may not have ruminated on Nitze’s critiques at the moment, yet, later on, he did recalibrate his overall approach to the Soviets. Throughout his first year in office the former governor and naval lieutenant was concentrated on a systematic review of US strategic systems with a determination to keep his promise to decrease defense spending. On June 30, 1977, he canceled the B-1 bomber, the supersonic plane that was designed to succeed the B-52 as the air-based leg of the nuclear triad. (The president’s more affordable alternative—and one that proved to be far more effective—was to develop air-launched cruise missiles [ALCMs] to be placed inside refurbished B-52s.) It is important to note that Carter embraced strategic modernization so long as it did not imperil his campaign promises. On July 8, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown wrote Carter that the United States had terminated the line of production for the Minuteman III, which constituted the land-based leg—ensuring that Washington could not build beyond its self-imposed one thousand limit. In his justification, Brown noted, “Even Paul Nitze’s ‘Committee on the Present Danger’ looks ahead to other strategic options, suggesting that the M-X ‘may well be the next important issue’ in strategic arms planning.”29
It might have made more sense to withhold these decisions, using them as bargaining chips in the negotiations. The Soviets had rejected both the grand and modest packages that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had offered them during his visit that March. Unilaterally canceling B-1 did not bring them around. In justifying that decision, President Carter cited the work on cruise missiles, MX, the Trident SLBM, and the ultra-secret stealth bomber program that became the B-2 bomber: these were all systems that he regarded as vital—meaning that he would never put them on the table to trade. By the summer of its first year in office, the Carter administration was no closer to a SALT agreement. And the president’s failure to respond to Nitze’s letter was a slight that he would not forget.
SALT II Signing and Ratification
Nitze refused to be ignored. He was convinced that his diagnosis of the problem was accurate. Only his prescription could solve it. Moreover, his takeaway from the first six of the Eisenhower years—when he had blasted the administration’s spending priorities and nuclear strategy—was that he was not powerless to bring about a shift in high policy. Nitze generated fear inside the White House that he would attack it in op-eds in the top daily newspapers and quarterly editions of Foreign Affairs. Republicans would then cite Nitze’s criticism of Carter as evidence that the president was choosing the softer line and abandoning the first principles of Truman Democrats.
On August 4, 1977, President Carter hosted Nitze and other SALT II critics.30 The meeting went similarly to the unfortunate one earlier in Plains, Georgia. “Met with the Committee on the Present Danger, Paul Nitze, Gene Rostow, and others,” the president wrote in his diary afterward. “It was an unpleasant meeting where they insinuated that we were on the verge of catastrophe, inferior to the Soviets, and I and the previous president had betrayed the nation’s interest.” Carter told them he welcomed “constructive advice, balancing all factors with at least the possibility that the Soviets did want a permanent peace and not suicidal nuclear war.” However, the president was not confident these individuals would help.31
Needless to say, Carter’s depiction of this meeting would have displeased Nitze. Neither he nor other CPD members accepted the framework of “permanent peace” versus “suicidal nuclear war.” Nuclear war was not suicidal if Soviet cities could be spared following a preemptive attack on the US land-based deterrent—that was the apparent danger of the SS-18. Permanent peace was unattainable so long as Soviet leaders believed that they could continue to pursue gains in the third world, confident that a US president would eventually back down in a nuclear crisis.
Following up later that month, Secretary of Defense Brown and National Security Advisor Brzezinski met with Nitze and Admiral Zumwalt. The four men argued over scenarios that would have confounded the American people. “Paul feels that 100 million Soviet and 70 million US casualties is a distinctly different situation than 70 million Soviet and 100 million US casualties, and that our actions in the face of such estimates would clearly be different in one case than the other,” Brown wrote Carter. “I disagree, not only because of the difficulty in distinguishing between one catastrophe in that range and another, but also because of the immense uncertainties in such estimates in the first place.” An even more obscure and grim discussion followed. “Paul is interested in the relative US and Soviet positions in terms of surviving nuclear forces after a protracted series of exchanges aimed primarily at the opposing nuclear forces,” Brown went on to write the president. “He feels that if the Soviets should end up with any significant advantage over us in these terms, they could prevent our recovery and coerce us at will for many years. We have agreed to make and compare analyses of that case.”32
Although Nitze opposed the Carter administration on SALT II, his views on the scenarios of nuclear warfighting received considerable attention inside it. As with John Foster Dulles, in the mid-1950s, Nitze made life miserable for an incumbent yet remained indispensable on matters of national security. He possessed intimate knowledge about a theoretical subject impossible for others to master: nuclear weapons and the calculus of decisions leading up to a nuclear war between two nuclear powers. Among the surviving ExComm members from the Cuban Missile Crisis, nearly all were either Kennedy loyalists or politically toxic after Vietnam—or both. And, as he had in the 1950s, Nitze retained active security clearances, now to support his contract work for the CIA and Department of Defense. He stayed up to speed and was impossible to ignore.
Moreover, Brown, Brzezinski, and Carter took an intense interest in the macabre details of waging nuclear war, the extent of which probably exceeded that of Nitze himself. His focus was more on how to prevent a further decline in the US–Soviet strategic balance in the years following the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis—not nuclear targeting or the logistics of an actual “nuclear exchange.” In or around September 1977, Brzezinski wrote Carter following up on questions the president had posed to Secretary of Defense Brown about limited nuclear war and the survivability of US command and control systems under nuclear attack.33 Brzezinski recommended that President Carter visit Strategic Air Command Headquarters in Omaha for briefings on limited nuclear options. Over the next two years, Carter and Brzezinski, working in concert with the latter’s military assistant, William Odom, devoted considerable attention to such matters.34
Surprisingly, Nitze did not know that the Carter administration was devoting so much time to coming up with limited nuclear options. Had he known, he probably would have disapproved. He viewed the Soviet fleet of SS-18 missiles—rather than vulnerabilities in US nuclear employment doctrine and connectivity—as the heart of the matter. However, the critical point here is that the Nitze Scenario spurred the Carter administration to take these initiatives. The purpose of coming up with limited nuclear options was to avert the moment in the scenario where the president had to decide whether to launch a nuclear strike against Soviet cities, knowing that this would cause immediate retaliation against US cities.
Carter and Brzezinski figured that SALT II could serve as a bridge to SALT III, hopefully including reductions in Soviet heavy missiles. Yet Nitze fundamentally rejected that prospect. SALT I confirmed to him that an interim agreement would provide Americans a false sense of security, leading to strategic apathy; meanwhile, the Soviets continued to build. And Moscow would continue to probe in areas such as the oil-rich Middle East, looking for resistance and confidence in the knowledge that the United States would eventually back down in a crisis.
SALT II was hardly the abomination that Nitze alleged. US crafters of it attempted to redress the deficiencies of SALT I. Its basic counting formula for SALT II took seriously Senator Jackson’s criticism that SALT I afforded the Soviets higher numbers of ICBMs. And the concepts of “equal aggregates” and “freedom to mix” grew out of the 1975 understanding between President Ford and Premier Brezhnev at the Vladivostok Summit. Sticking points remained. There were intense debates about such obscure matters as whether to count the Soviet Backfire as an intercontinental bomber and permit mobile ICBMs.
The Carter administration probably erred in trying to supplant the 1974 Vladivostok formula of 2,360 ballistic missiles for the Soviet Union and 1,710 for the United States. They attempted to allay critics’ concerns by pursuing a permanent treaty. In a November 4, 1977, memorandum to Carter, Brzezinski rebutted the critique against SALT II. “Mobile ICBMs should be permitted since there is little chance of saving Minuteman,” Brzezinski noted. “Nitze, in particular, is adamant on this issue.” “The ban on mobile ICBMs is only for the period of the Protocol and will have no impact on the US M-X mobile ICBM development program. In the interim, we have halted the Soviet mobile ICBM program,” Brzezinski claimed. “Permitting deployment of mobile ICBMs would open a new avenue in the strategic arms race and cause serious arms control verification problems,” he said. “We have essentially deferred that important decision.” “Permitting” was hardly the appropriate word here. As Nitze reminded the Carter administration at every available opportunity, the Soviets were moving ahead with deploying mobile ICBMs.35
Given concerns about strategic and crisis stability, Carter sought to reach a SALT II accord with the Soviets. This topped his foreign policy agenda throughout 1978. Paul Nitze remained its most high-profile nemesis. As Brzezinski and his military assistant Odom pursued efforts to resolve the deficiencies of following through on National Security Decision Memorandum 242, “Policy for Planning the Employment of Nuclear Weapons,” the January 1974 strategy directive that emphasized counterforce. They self-consciously grappled with “Paul Nitze’s scenario, where we lose our ICBM force to a Soviet first strike and then would not want to retaliate because the Soviets could then attack our cities.”36 That is to say: his criticism haunted the administration on policy, not just political, grounds. The difference was that Brzezinski and Odom chose to focus on upgrading “strategic connectivity” in the event of a nuclear war, as opposed to pursuing capabilities that could be traded away at the negotiating table in Geneva to reach the type of accord that Nitze might endorse.
Strategic Stability Revisited
On March 24, 1978, Nitze responded to a letter from a Korean scholar who had written him about his January 1976 Foreign Affairs article on strategic stability. The vulnerability of US Minuteman fields was worth considering alongside the outbreak of World War I, Nitze wrote. “In 1914, each of the major powers in Europe depended upon the speed of their mobilization for relative advantage in the event of war. As a result, when the Austrians began to mobilize, the Russians felt they also had to mobilize. That, in turn, caused the Germans to mobilize, which caused the French to mobilize. A set of forces was thus created which made it almost impossible for statesmen to avoid the outbreak of World War I.” He applied the same (overly simplistic) model to the fundamental problem of the nuclear era. “In the strategic nuclear field, a situation in which the nuclear forces of one side are vulnerable to destruction by an initial strike by less than all of the nuclear forces of the other side is inherently unstable in a comparable manner.”37 Such was the situation in 1978: US nuclear forces remained vulnerable to destruction by an initial strike by less than all of the nuclear forces of the Soviet Union. Just as the mutual dependence on speedy mobilization made 1914 fundamentally unstable; so would Soviet first-strike capability increase the likelihood of a crisis turning into war.
At the Yale Political Union that fall, Nitze elaborated on instability in an era of détente. On September 19, 1978, he joined Firing Line host William F. Buckley to debate Senator George McGovern and retired admiral Eugene Larocque on whether SALT II advanced US interests. Nitze estimated the amount of money that the United States spent on strategic systems at around $10 billion and declared that this was a small price to pay for ensuring the safety of the nation in light of the continued buildup of the Soviet Union, which had introduced four new missiles since the signing of SALT I in 1972, and whose own military budget was expanding at a rate of between 4 and 5 percent a year.38
“At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I know of no one who did not believe that the US had strategic superiority over the USSR,” Nitze said.39 He saw it as “highly unlikely that one will achieve through these negotiations a SALT Two agreement which will be in the strategic interest of the United States.”40 This was because the Carter administration was negotiating from a position of weakness. And, by telegraphing its unwillingness to devote resources to rebuilding its strength—by canceling the B-1 bomber and promising to cut defense spending even further—it gave the Soviets no incentive to make concessions on anything, least of all their first-strike capability. “How does one reduce the likelihood of nuclear war?” That was ever the most pertinent question to Nitze. US strength would prevent crises that could devolve into a nuclear exchange.
This fundamental point was more significant than a set of particular numbers: Nitze blamed the dismal state of the Cold War on the long-term loss of US strategic superiority. In his view, so much of the trauma of the previous decade and a half—the fiasco in Vietnam and the inability of successive US administrations to reach lasting stability with the Soviets through détente—stemmed from the same cause. Under the Nixon administration, Kissinger’s opening to China and his shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East may have produced short-term political advantages; they had not changed for the better the overall Cold War situation.
Everything boiled down to the Nitze Scenario—to which Brzezinski and Odom referred privately. Were the Soviets to take out US land-based missiles, Washington would retain a secure second-strike force to retaliate against Soviet cities. Nitze acknowledged this before the audience at Yale. Yet if the Soviets had purposely struck first and avoided US cities, the consequence of a US president’s attacking Soviet cities—an act of “genocide” in itself—would be immediate retaliation against every US city. Soviet leaders knew that a US president would not take such action. That meant they also knew that a US president would eventually back down.
“The problem of Minuteman vulnerability is unpleasantly real,” former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy wrote Brzezinski on September 19, 1978, the same day as Nitze’s Yale debate. “The Nitze scenarios [of a Soviet first strike] are highly implausible, but the increasing exposure of the Minuteman system is simply not what was aimed at when it was built. It is not about to become worthless, but in less than five years it will no longer be the secure second-strike system it was designed to be.”41 By Nitze’s view of things, five years was nothing. Even this optimistic estimate would render it useless almost immediately. The Soviets could quickly draw out SALT II for another five years, confident that the Carter administration was committed to cutting defense spending and making glacial progress on the complicated matter of MX basing.
His public criticism notwithstanding, members of the administration hoped that Nitze could still be coaxed aboard. On November 20, 1978, Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner gathered outside experts to discuss matters of arms control verification. He included Nitze. “[I]n order that we may be unfettered by problems of security,” Turner wrote Nitze, “all the guests invited for the occasion will have SI (code-word) clearances. Nevertheless, I trust that our discussion will not become entangled in the pros and cons of a SALT II agreement but rather will rove widely over the subject of arms control verification, emphasizing the conceptual, even philosophical, aspects of the problems of verification.” Nitze also met with Turner on December 7 to discuss the distinction between “violation” and “non-compliance.”42 As he had done during the Eisenhower years and at the tail end of Nixon–Ford, when Kissinger provided him special intelligence briefings, Nitze participated in closed-door, classified debates over national security—even as he pilloried the administration outside of those settings.
Turner did not change Nitze’s mind on SALT II. Two days before, on December 5, 1978, at the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Nitze laid out his objections to the deal, which Secretary of State Vance had recently declared would be ready to sign before the end of 1979. As Nitze reminded the audience, the potential treaty was far less ambitious than the agreement of unlimited duration that US and Soviet negotiators had pursued after the 1972 Interim Agreement (SALT I), only to abandon it in 1974. SALT II was designed to last only until 1985, a “time when the strategic relationship between two sides is likely to be least favorable to the United States.”43 Another concession from the original objectives for SALT II—which Nitze knew plenty about because he served on the delegation—was equality: while the numbers of launchers were the same, the Soviets would be permitted to have three hundred very large ICBMs of the latest type; the United States, again, was not expecting to deploy MX before 1985. The timing of MX deployment would also make it impossible to have more than 550 of the 820 MIRVed ICBM launchers permitted under the treaty—so the breakdown was effectively 820 to 550.
The implications for “crisis stability” were worrying. During the previous fifteen years “it would not have profited either side to attack first. It would have required more ICBMs by the attacking side than it could have destroyed.” However, that situation was set to change as the 1980s approached. “By that time, the Soviet Union may be in a position to destroy 90 percent of our ICBMs with an expenditure of only a third of its MIRVed ICBMs. Even if one assumes the survival of most of our bombers on alert and our submarines at-sea, the residue at our command would be strategically out-matched by the Soviet Union’s retained war-making capability.”44 A final casualty of SALT, according to Nitze in his Chicago Council speech, was the ambition to achieve “true reductions” of the most destabilizing forces. As with the Interim Agreement, SALT II was intended to limit numerical growth—not reduce existing weapons.
Despite his public invectives against the Carter administration, its senior officials did not shun Nitze. On June 5, 1979, a little less than two weeks before President Carter and General Secretary Brezhnev were scheduled to sign SALT II, Nitze met with Secretary of State Vance and recounted the litany of US strategic deficiencies and negative trends over the previous decade. “Secretary Vance said that nevertheless was it not true that there were useful provisions in the treaty?” according to Nitze’s notes. “Wasn’t the limitation of 10 RVs per SS-18 launcher a useful limit?” Nitze thought it was not. Treaty or no treaty, the Soviets probably would not load that many RVs onto their giant SS-18 “Satan” missiles before the expiration of the agreement on December 31, 1985. The salient point was that SS-18s had a launch weight of over two hundred tons and a length of some thirty-three meters, while the Minuteman IIIs had a launch weight of some seventy-eight tons and a length of some eighteen meters. The SALT II treaty failed to bring about meaningful reductions. The public perception that it would slow the arms race redounded to the Soviets, from Nitze’s perspective, because it meant that Congress would not fund the necessary strategic modernization.
“I could understand why the Executive Branch had closed ranks in a coordinated and full-scale effort to support ratification of the treaty,” Nitze told Vance. “If they had not done so, the outside critics would have commented on their tactical ineptness in not having done so. But, to be frank, it was my view that most of the things that the President was saying about SALT II were simply untrue and that much of what Harold Brown was saying was misleading.”45 At the end of their meeting, Vance told Nitze that he “was one of the few opponents of the treaty who understood the treaty and what it was about.”46 Such words from Vance hardly constituted a full-throated defense of the agreement.
“The Executive Branch has now done an Alice in Wonderland on us,” Nitze wrote in a memorandum to himself on June 11. “The word ‘verify’ no longer means what it used to mean. The CIA can no longer be asked any question about ‘verification.’ What they do is not now verification; it is now covered by a different word—the word ‘monitor.’ ” Even apart from the linguistics of “verification” versus “monitoring,” Nitze again seized on the critical deficiency in the treaty. It did not limit such a thing as Soviet throw weight.47
In a July 20, 1979, speech to the Commonwealth Club of California, Nitze came out forcefully against the Senate’s ratification of SALT II.48 He warned that NATO’s conventional forces could last only a few weeks against a Soviet assault on Western Europe and that “essential equivalence” was a sham. Under a SALT II regime, Soviets would be able to destroy 90 percent of US ICBMS with only a fraction of their forces, while the United States’ remaining forces following counterforce attack would be useless. By 1985, when SALT II was set to expire, the United States would find itself outmatched.
Nitze singled out potential swing votes in the Senate. In a September 24, 1979, letter to Senator Frank Church, Nitze criticized the recent testimony of Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, who reiterated confidence in the “essential equivalence” of both sides in the grizzly event of an all-out nuclear war—meaning neither side had any incentive to strike first. Nitze retorted, “As a result of [a Soviet initial attack] we could expect to lose approximately 90 percent of our ICBMs, 35 percent of our SLBMs, 50 percent of our bombers, and a higher percentage of our tankers.” Nitze argued: “Our C3+I [command, control, communications, and intelligence] capabilities would be severely degraded.” In achieving that outcome, the Soviets “would have used up about 35 percent of its ICBM RVs, less than 20 percent of its SLBMs, and none of its bombers.”49 In addition to Senator Church, Nitze sent the letter to Republican Senator Jacob Javits, noting that he had gone over it with Admiral Elmo Zumwalt and General Edward Rowny, who had assured him that “it is consistent with the insights they have gained as a result of reviewing SIOP/RISOP [Red Integrated Strategic Offensive Plan] and SAGA [Studies, Analysis, and Gaming Agency] calculations over a number of years.” It was impossible to rebut this last point. Members of Congress were not allowed to see the ultra-secret SIOP and the Red Team version of it—the RISOP. They had to take Nitze’s word for it and, even though he had not seen the most recent SIOP and RISOP, his word carried significant weight.
In sum, Nitze was a formidable political force regarding the fate of SALT II in the Senate. No one could prove or disprove his ideas about what would or would not happen in the early hours and days of a nuclear war. He spoke with commanding authority and deployed arguments supported by evidence focused on worst-case scenarios. The targets of his criticisms responded—as Brown and Vance had in the summer of 1976—that the situation was not quite bad. However, as they acknowledged in Presidential Directive 18, there were significant problems with the US deterrent.
20th Century Fox, NSC-68, and the 1980 Election
Amid his contestations with the Carter administration, Nitze made a brief reentry into the world of private sector dealmaking. Flush with cash from the release of the movie Star Wars on May 25, 1977, 20th Century Fox acquired the Aspen Skiing Company, of which Nitze was a significant shareholder. Star Wars may not have been his choice of entertainment, but a certain Ronald Reagan enjoyed it. Former governor of California and member of the CPD, the erstwhile screen star had very nearly defeated Gerald Ford in the 1976 Republican primary and was planning to run again in 1980. He frequently cited Nitze in his radio addresses. Considering Reagan an attractive candidate, Nitze lent him credibility. He seemed to embody the US Cold War first principles of Harry Truman, for whom Reagan had voted.
Declassified only in 1975, NSC-68, “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” which Nitze had drafted in 1950, soon became a centerpiece of former governor Reagan’s outreach to Truman Democrats. In a radio address on May 4, 1977, Reagan quoted passages from it, including: “no nation ever saved its freedom by disarming itself in the hope of placating an enemy.”50 Twenty-seven years after Truman signed off on a basic Cold War strategy, Reagan cited the efforts of Nitze, former secretary of state Dean Rusk, former deputy secretary of defense David Packard, and others, who, through the reconstituted CPD, warned of a “Soviet drive for dominance based upon an unprecedented [military] buildup.” The summation of the CPD’s message was that “if the present drift continues, the US could find itself isolated in a hostile world with a succession of bitter choices between war & surrender.”51 In other radio addresses, Reagan cited former undersecretary of state Eugene Rostow’s opinion—which Nitze shared—that during the Cuban Missile Crisis the Soviets backed down because the United States so vastly outmatched them in overall numbers of nuclear weapons.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, the Carter administration withdrew from Senate consideration SALT II. Nitze felt temporarily victorious since it was clear that SALT II was off the table for the foreseeable future—even though the United States still adhered to the unratified treaty until it would have expired anyway. Nevertheless, Nitze was unwilling to retire from the practice of national security.
Nitze went all-in against Jimmy Carter ahead of the 1980 presidential election. He would later describe this period with little self-awareness or self-reflection. He had somehow convinced himself that his “political involvement” in 1980 was considerably less than in 1976—but that was delusional. This came after he convinced himself that he had not told Senators to vote against ratification of SALT II—that he had merely wanted them to understand what the treaty meant—while he, in actuality, railed against SALT II publicly both in print and person.
“I believe we already know enough about the strategic nuclear situation and the Soviets to see that we have no real choice but to commit a major portion of our GNP [gross national product] to rearmament and improvement of ICBM survivability,” Nitze wrote novelist Douglas Terman on February 20, 1980. In the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter asked Congress to raise the defense budget. From Nitze’s perspective, this was precisely what he had advocated back in the summer of 1976 and again in early 1977.
As he had done in the 1950s, Nitze blended academic writings, government commissions that included classified information, and partisan politics—though he was loath to acknowledge the last. He was not a political person—even though he made sure people knew that he remained a registered Democrat. He supported Reagan, and the former governor supported him.52 In his speech on August 18, 1980, Reagan, criticizing Carter’s national security policies, quoted Nitze as saying, “The Kremlin leaders do not want the war; they want the world,” “For that reason, they have put much of their military effort into strategic nuclear programs,” Reagan went on to say. “Here the balance has been moving against us and will continue to do so if we follow the course set by this administration.”53 On November 4, 1980, Reagan defeated Carter in a landslide.
Out of government, Nitze’s impact on US national security matched or exceeded that of previous phases when in government. President Carter and his advisers wanted to sign SALT II because they figured it would slow down the nuclear arms race. Nitze and his associates at the CPD predicted the opposite. Members of the Carter administration had hardly rejected Nitze. They listened to his concerns and attempted to win his support. In this, they failed.
A distinguished academic with expertise in nuclear weaponry, Robert Jervis, did not believe as Nitze did. In a June 1980 article titled, “Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn’t Matter,” he wrote, “The healthy fear of devastation, which cannot be exorcised short of the attainment of a first-strike capability, makes deterrence relatively easy.” He continued, “The military advantages of striking first can only be translated into political gains if the war remains counterforce and the state with the most missiles left after a series of exchanges prevails without losing its population centers.” Jervis noted that Nitze himself had overlooked that point in his January 1976 Foreign Affairs article, “Assuring Strategic Stability in an Era of Détente.”54
Nitze felt that the Jervis argument was premised on the Soviets regarding nuclear war—both launching and enduring it—in the same way that Americans did. To them, perception of an imminent first-strike capability meant that they could blackmail US leaders and take tremendous risks. Invading Afghanistan in December 1979—Moscow’s first deployment of military forces outside the Warsaw Pact since World War II—was just such a risk.
Four decades later, the most compelling explanation for that aggression was that Brezhnev feared the rise of a US-friendly regime on Soviet borders and regarded NATO’s December 1979 Dual Track decision to deploy intermediate-range nuclear forces in Western Europe as evidence that détente was dead. This interpretation says that the Soviets acted out of a sense of desperation. By Nitze’s logic, were Brezhnev to have considered Afghanistan in the summer of 1961 and fall of 1962 (as Nikita Khrushchev had pondered Berlin and Cuba), he would not have dared to invade. That assertion is, of course, impossible to prove or disprove.
The United States did not possess preponderant power in 1979. The strategic balance by the 1970s was at best “essential equivalence” in which Soviets held advantages neutralized by US advantages. And as to the “worst-case scenario” about which Nitze warned: the SS-18s indeed provided the Soviets a first-strike capability that they could leverage in geopolitical crises. While US economic capacity continued to surpass that of the communist world, stagflation and oil shocks sapped the confidence of its citizens. By the end of the 1970s, few Americans believed the United States was winning the Cold War—Paul Nitze least of all. He was about to embark on a final government assignment in which he could play a critical role in crafting and negotiating the Cold War’s most ambitious nuclear arms agreements. Doing so, he would fret about Moscow’s nuclear superiority right up until the Soviet Union’s collapse.
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