“11. The Strategic Concept” in “America’s Cold Warrior”
CHAPTER 11 The Strategic Concept
The second Ronald Reagan administration was the most significant period of Nitze’s government service since his time in the Truman administration. While he authored no strategy statement equivalent to NSC-68, he did report directly to Secretary of State George Shultz and used that proximity to a “man of action” to press for a grand package on offensive and defensive arms. His ideas and actions were vital in turning President Ronald Reagan’s dream of a nuclear-free world into a concrete plan of action.
Nitze’s personality and professional traits served to his advantage. As with the walk in the woods episode in 1982, he seized the initiative to set forth policy. Nitze persevered in the chaotic scenes of the second Reagan administration—where the president nearly faced impeachment over the Iran-Contra scandal. NSC staffers and subordinates of Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger—including Nitze’s one-time protégé, Richard Perle—now regarded Nitze with skepticism; they thought he was out to trade away the SDI for an arms agreement. Nitze was indeed seeking a deal, yet his objective was to connect Reagan’s romantic vision of a world without nuclear weapons to a more achievable—no less ambitious—transition from strategic offenses to strategic defenses. This helped usher in the remarkable advances in nuclear arms control that occurred from 1985 to 1988: the heady days of Reagan’s interactions with the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Even then, Nitze, who found Gorbachev underwhelming, was disappointed.
Preparing for Geneva (Again)
On October 12, 1984, less than a month before a presidential election in which Reagan was expected to prevail, Deputy Secretary of State Kenneth Dam met with Paul Nitze to discuss potential objectives for arms control in a second Reagan administration. Dam found Nitze “in an exceedingly pessimistic mood”; he believed “that the odds were against reaching any arms control agreement that would be in the national security interests of the United States.”1 “[I]t was desirable to engage the Soviets on grand principles,” Dam quoted Nitze, “not so much because he thought there was any chance of agreement, but because he thought it was necessary from the standpoint of public opinion in the United States and of relations with the Allies to be engaged with the Soviets in arms control discussions.”2 Nitze liked the idea of negotiating on a twenty-year perspective. It was necessary to be open to “pragmatic and practical arrangements that might be possible.” However, it was essential to avoid interim agreements and moratoria, which had tended to benefit the Soviets, not the Americans. As he often did, Nitze pointed to the 1972 SALT I agreement, which may have given the appearance to Americans and allies of slowing the nuclear arms race but had not stopped the Soviets’ relentless buildup.
Here and elsewhere, the problem remained constant: “it was unquestionably a fact the Soviets had nuclear superiority over the United States,” Nitze told Dam, pointing to his work for CIA director William Casey in early 1981. The Reagan buildup during the first administration notwithstanding, Nitze told Dam, “nothing had fundamentally changed.”3
Meanwhile, acting upon the Soviets’ proposal for anti-satellite negotiations earlier that summer, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 148 on October 26, instructing his team to begin exploring approaches to commence talks on “the more general topic of militarization of space, and to resuming negotiations on the reduction of offensive nuclear arsenals.” Clearly, Reagan’s national security team anticipated that the Soviets might reach out after the election.
A few weeks before that November election, National Security Advisor Robert “Bud” McFarlane advocated for bringing Nitze into the White House. “Mr. President, I thought you would find this interesting,” he wrote at the top of a memorandum written by NSC staffer Jack Matlock. “It reinforces the value of bringing Paul Nitze into the White House.”4
Following Reagan’s triumphant victory over Walter Mondale on November 6, 1984, the president received a letter from Konstantin Chernenko calling for the resumption of nuclear arms negotiations to “remove the threat of war and radically improve the international situation.”5 This stated objective surely would not have impressed Nitze, who harbored serious doubts about Soviet leaders—especially Chernenko, the most pathetic of all of them. Nevertheless, four more years of Reagan drew the Soviets back to the negotiating table. Here was the scenario that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had forfeited by rushing to obtain an interim agreement before November 1972, when then-president Nixon won his own smashing reelection.
Secretary of State Shultz prepared to meet Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko in early 1985 to relaunch negotiations. Meanwhile, Bud McFarlane advocated for bringing over to the NSC a point person for arms control with sufficient gravitas “to coerce the system into more timely products” and educate President Reagan on the intricacies of nuclear matters.6 Paul Nitze was that person. According to Shultz, recalling a conversation with McFarlane the day before the election, only he could fit the bill. The secretary requested that Nitze serve as his adviser in the forthcoming talks with Gromyko in Geneva.
On November 16, President Reagan wrote Soviet leader Chernenko proposing that each side “designate a representative who is thoroughly familiar with the strategic thinking of his highest political authority and who would meet with his counterpart with a mandate to develop specific proposals for submission to us for consideration.”7 “It was determined that Paul Nitze should be our man and that the chain of command should run from Nitze to me to President Reagan,” Secretary of State Shultz later recounted. “Interagency committees would meet, and NSC members would fight for their views, but ultimately the decisions would be made through the Nitze–Shultz–Reagan lineup.”8
“I believe we gained Cap [Weinberger] and Bill [Casey’s] approval for Paul Nitze to accompany George to the January sessions to be able to handle the technical issues and stay in place should George and Gromyko have to turn to other duties,” McFarlane wrote Reagan in Santa Barbara on November 18, 1984.9 This meant Nitze would be the lead arms negotiator supporting the secretary of state. The “Nitze–Shultz–Reagan lineup” did not appear on the organization chart for the NSC at that time. Yet it would prove vital to establishing the most ambitious nuclear arms proposals since the Acheson–Lilienthal and Baruch Plans of 1946.
Nitze’s suggestion of “forgoing some aspects of SDI” gave certain of Reagan’s advisers—particularly Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger—reason to view him with suspicion. Nitze acknowledged that obtaining a treaty of indefinite duration on nuclear arms might require scaling back ambitions to create a shield in outer space to protect against Soviet nuclear missiles. But, to arms control skeptics within the administration and the lobbying group High Frontier outside it, the Nitze approach repeated the mistake they thought Nixon and Kissinger had made in 1972: to give up the US ability to build a national defense while allowing the Soviets to cheat on their commitments to both SALT I and the ABM Treaty.
Yet, George Shultz—not Caspar Weinberger—had emerged as Reagan’s indispensable adviser by the start of the second administration. Nitze had sufficiently impressed Shultz that the secretary wanted him to be nearby, and his survival after the walk in the woods episode had demonstrated Reagan’s support of him. This did not mean that battles between Shultz and Weinberger were over: it meant, rather, that Shultz had a forceful ally who could draw upon forty years of experience to rebut the assertions of Weinberger and others. Shultz intervened to ensure that Nitze’s office was on the top floor of the State Department. As a result, Nitze received the title special assistant to the president and secretary of state for arms control matters. He no longer worked for ACDA director Kenneth Adelman, who did not share Shultz’s enthusiasm for reaching agreements with the Soviets. As Shultz’s top lieutenant for nuclear arms control matters, Nitze attended meetings of the NSPG, the most critical standing deliberative body of the Reagan presidency.
In December 1984, the State Department’s in-house nuclear physicist, James Timbie, assisted Nitze in drafting a “central concept” for Shultz that he could convey to Gromyko in Geneva. Rather than rely on a formal interagency process, Nitze crafted the US position by drafting a memorandum that the secretary of state would send to the president. The central concept needed to be simple. “We need a clear central concept to guide our planning for the Geneva meetings and subsequent negotiations—and our program for handling Congress, Allies and publics.” Nitze stated four propositions: (1) the US objective over the next decade was a radical reduction in nuclear weapons; (2) that period should begin a transition from offensive nuclear weapons to nonnuclear defensive forces; (3) the transition should set as the long-term objective the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons; (4) a world without nuclear weapons was in the interest of the United States, Soviet Union, and all other nations.10
In submitting this “strategic concept” to Reagan, Shultz included a separate paper Nitze also authored. “The United States has no territorial ambitions,” Nitze contended. “It is inconceivable that the US would initiate military action against the USSR or the Warsaw Pact unless it or its allies were to be directly attacked.” While US leaders could hope that “the USSR comparably has no intention of initiating an attack on the US or its allies,” they needed to assure the American people and the country’s allies “of a high-quality deterrent to an attack by anyone on our vital security interest.” Our leaders could assume that their Soviet counterparts also sought at the very least a high-quality deterrent. The Soviet Union previously emphasized “massive expansion and modernization of its own nuclear forces, both offensive and defensive,” Nitze said. As a result, he could envision a regional crisis leading to the high risk of war between the United States and the Soviet Union, in which leaders on each side felt compelled to take drastic action to deny victory to the other side. “Under today’s conditions and those of the foreseeable future, both sides have certain incentives to act quickly and decisively with their military power, both nuclear and conventional,” Nitze concluded. “This creates an unstable situation which could make crises more difficult to manage and, if conflict breaks out, makes rapid, perhaps immediate, escalation to high levels of destruction more likely.”11
The aims of US policy makers back in the 1960s had been that both sides would agree on a rough equality of offensive forces, and that those forces should be limited with defensive systems. By December 1985, however, “both sides have substantially greater offensive nuclear capabilities than we had in 1972.” Moreover, the Soviets had violated the ABM Treaty by deploying early warning radars and ABMs that could be used in mobile formats. In the short term, Nitze advocated for negotiating a follow-on treaty on strategic offensive arms (START) to accompany the ABM Treaty—even if that meant limiting SDI research. In the long term, Nitze advocated for “bolder and more radical objectives.” Both sides now apparently “agreed that[,] with respect to nuclear weapons as a whole, the objective should be their total elimination … worldwide and agreed to by all nations.”12 Achieving that objective required a period of transition, going from reliance on offensive arms to one on defensive capabilities. New technologies were essential; the ingenuity of the American people would produce them.
Democrats and other proponents of MAD were attacking SDI as destabilizing. Nitze responded: “The approach outlined above positions the Secretary to defuse SDI as an issue by linking it to our concerns regarding Soviet defensive programs and compliance with the ABM Treaty and the absence of a comprehensive agreement limiting offensive arms.” While it was “unlikely the Soviets will be ready to comply with the ABM agreement in this manner,” their reluctance could be “useful in defusing SDI with publics, Allies, and Congress, as well as refocusing their attention on our concerns about Soviet compliance with the ABM agreement.”13
Paul Nitze aimed to redefine the terms of the debate over nuclear weapons and arms control. He exhorted the US side to lead the “transition to a defense-dominant relationship.”14 This would accord with Reagan’s grandest aspiration: to achieve a world without nuclear weapons. By Reagan’s formulation, SDI was an insurance policy for both Washington and Moscow. The president wanted to abolish nuclear weapons and protect the United States against a rogue actor such as Libyan strongman Mu’ammar Gaddhafi. This integration of strategic defenses and strategic offensive arms ran counter to MAD. It was more than just a “fact of life” to presidents who had to ponder the terrible prospect of ordering the launch of nuclear missiles to avenge the deaths of tens of millions of Americans. MAD was meant to assure that no Soviet leader would ever put the US president in that position. Yet neither Reagan nor Jimmy Carter (nor their predecessors) approached the Cold War with such confidence.
“[T]hink more about the theme of elimination of nuclear weapons,” Shultz instructed the large and contentious team that accompanied him to Geneva in January 1985. “Everyone thinks it is rhetoric, but rhetoric said often enough by important people tends to wind up with an operational character to it.”15 In the case of Ronald Reagan and nuclear weapons, his rhetoric and deep conviction about eliminating nuclear weapons based upon a defense against incoming missiles could not be operationalized without critical advisers who could grasp the issues and advocate forcefully for their positions. They had to persevere in a fractious environment with a president who preferred not to intervene in settling personality conflicts. An exhausted McFarlane had nearly resigned at the end of 1984 and finally left the White House in late 1985. George Shultz’s approach was to throw temper tantrums and threaten to resign, but then accept the president’s entreaties to stay on.
Paul Nitze, who was seventy-seven years old, did what he had done for nearly forty years. He pressed the boundaries of what was bureaucratically acceptable yet managed to retain the ears of the top individuals in power. His role in crafting US positions on the eve of the resumption of strategic arms talks stood high among his policy achievements. And it is worth contrasting this work with fellow cold warriors George Kennan, Robert McNamara, and McGeorge Bundy, who published op-eds in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, criticizing SDI as fundamentally destabilizing. Now, the Soviets were returning to the table. Nitze—once skeptical of SDI—now saw it as vital to establishing a strategy to bring about long-term reductions in nuclear arsenals. The predictions of outsiders were mistaken, and their policy prescriptions became irrelevant.
Meanwhile, in London in December 1984, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher met with a young Soviet member of the Politburo named Mikhail Gorbachev. “I like Mr. Gorbachev … we can do business together,” she famously declared, conveying that message to Reagan when she next saw him in person.16 Gorbachev would ascend to power in the Kremlin in March 1985 and launch radical political and economic reforms. Yet, the resumption of nuclear arms negotiations preceded the commencement of perestroika—as his reforms would become known. The United States’ phased approach for reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons came first.
On January 5, 1985, the White House instructed US embassies in NATO countries to brief allies in advance of Shultz’s meeting with Gromyko. The telegram laid out a four-sentence “strategic concept” for how SDI would fit into the president’s objectives for arms control during his second administration. A slight variation of Nitze’s proposal from December, it stated:
During the next ten years, the US objective is a radical reduction in the power of existing and planned offensive nuclear arms, as well as the stabilization of the relationship between offensive and defensive nuclear arms, whether in earth or space. We are even now looking forward to a period of transition to a more stable world with greatly reduced levels of nuclear arms and an enhanced ability to deter war based upon the increasing contribution of non-nuclear defenses against offensive nuclear arms. This period of transition could lead to the eventual elimination of all nuclear arms, both offensive and defensive. A world free of nuclear arms is an ultimate objective to which we, the Soviet Union, and all other nations can agree.17
This was the most ambitious proposal since 1946 when the Acheson–Lilienthal Report and consequent Baruch Plan called for the transfer of atomic weapons to the custody of the UN.
Two days later, in the first session in Geneva, Shultz presented this proposition to Gromyko. Paul Nitze’s ambitious long-term policy proposal had become the official position of the United States. Although Gromyko griped about Nitze’s presence at the meeting, he expressed moderate interest in the proposal. With the shared objective of zero nuclear weapons, Shultz and Gromyko agreed that the two sides would launch “umbrella” Nuclear and Space Arms Talks (NST) in Geneva that coming March. NST consisted of three negotiations—START, INF, and Defense and Space Talks (DST)—with an overall head of the delegation of each side. Nitze found himself in consideration to lead the US delegation. He quickly declined on account of his ailing wife, Phyllis, who was receiving treatments for emphysema. Although they selected Max Kampelman, another seasoned Democrat already serving in the administration, Reagan and Shultz still intended for Nitze to be the conduit between the Geneva delegation and Washington.
The Monday Package
On January 24, 1985, President Reagan signed NSDD 160, “Preparing for Negotiations with the Soviet Union,” appointing the formal leaders of the delegations and specifying the roles of Nitze and Edward Rowny. Rowny and Nitze retained seats at the table in meetings of the NSC, NSPG, and Senior Arms Control Group and kept their direct access to the president and secretary of state.18 Rowny, who was Nitze’s sometime rival, had known Reagan longer; yet he did not command the respect of the indispensable figure in Reagan’s administration: George Shultz.
Nothing was easy about crafting policies that could survive interagency battles and congressional scrutiny in Washington, let alone negotiations with the Soviets. Following a February 27, 1985, meeting with arms control negotiators, Deputy Secretary of State Kenneth Dam acknowledged the apparent inconsistency between strategic defenses and the aspirations for deep reductions—especially to a public used to hearing that MAD kept the peace. “The fact of the matter is that SDI and deep reductions are both articles of faith with the President, and the question of how they are presented in a consistent way is being left to an interagency process which is simply unable to confront basic questions of this nature.” Dam went on: “Fortunately Paul Nitze is with us,” and it was Nitze’s aspiration to “move on both fronts simultaneously.”19
Nitze’s approach followed a familiar pattern: he gathered around him experts, absorbed their knowledge, and constructed his own theory of the case. The existing “paper flow” of the State Department and NSC meant nothing to him. He advocated forcefully for his positions in small meetings and made sure that the president received his input. He educated himself about SDI by consulting with top scientists at the national laboratories—some of whom he had known for decades. He also sought the advice of Franklin Miller, a career civil servant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, whose knowledge of strategic doctrine and targeting was as sophisticated as that of the State Department’s James Timbie, who specialized in matters of nuclear arms control.
Miller’s participation would not have been possible under routine bureaucratic protocol—he worked for Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, a rival of George Shultz. It helped Nitze to formulate the critical elements required for strategic defenses to work. In a February 1985 speech to the Philadelphia World Affairs Council, Nitze described the strategic concept—which the president had not actually announced publicly—and elaborated upon what three potential phases might look like. He also enumerated what became known as the “Nitze Criteria” for strategic defenses: effectiveness, survivability, and “cost-effectiveness at the margins”—meaning it had to cost the Soviets more resources to build new offensive systems than it did for the United States to deploy defense systems.20 The speech drew scorn from fervent SDI supporters, who regarded the threat posed by Soviet missiles as its sufficient justification. “The Nitze criteria were put in to kill—not to enhance—the prospects for SDI,” claimed Daniel Graham, a retired general who had led the High Frontier organization that advocated for ballistic missile defense. General William F. Burns, who had served on Nitze’s delegation during the INF talks, rebutted that charge—it “was a formula for killing an early, imprudent deployment of SDI when we didn’t know what we were deploying or whether it would work.”21
Outside criticism had little impact at that moment. In meetings with the president and his advisers leading up to March 1985, when NST was set to begin, the refrain was how to get to zero nuclear weapons. President Reagan intervened during the discussion to remind his advisers that his objective was zero nuclear weapons. And, in meetings without the president, Secretary of State Shultz reminded his cabinet member peers (and, sometimes, his subordinates) that the president had set this objective and that Reagan had just been reelected in a landslide.22 Whether or not Nitze really believed that the goal of zero nuclear weapons was achievable, he agreed with the president in White House meetings. He cited his plan for a phased transition to mutual defenses as the surest path toward achieving that outcome.
ABM Treaty
The initial rounds of NST, which lasted from March 12 until July 16, yielded few tangible results. “Atmosphere thus far has been businesslike—many veterans of earlier negotiations on Soviet side,” veteran US negotiator Edward Ifft reported back to Washington. “Few surprises so far in Soviet approach—heavy stress on the need to ban ‘space-strike arms,’ and on the linkage between this, an INF solution and possible reductions in strategic offensive arms.”23
Questions about SDI hovered over these negotiations. Did the 1972 ABM Treaty restrict testing of SDI components based on “other physical principles” (i.e., lasers, not intercepting missiles)? More broadly, what exactly did the treaty allow and prohibit? Such questions went unresolved. The third track of the Geneva talks, the DST, was meant to come up with an agreement that would update the treaty or, alternatively, constitute a new one. While it was unlikely that the Soviets would ever agree to replace the ABM Treaty, the fact that DST was happening showed how SDI had become an important bargaining chip. INF and START negotiators aspired to reduce existing missiles; DST conveyed a sense of legitimacy on SDI, an “initiative” that featured no workable system by that point. Another way of putting it is that the first round of NST was successful in that it did not break down over SDI.
A breakthrough on DST was unlikely. Within the Reagan administration, SDI proponents pressed for a “broad interpretation” of the ABM Treaty to allow for research and testing of SDI components. Nitze’s riposte was to figure out how the United States could strengthen its position in Geneva with the soundest legal brief. That meant acknowledging potential instances that would violate the ABM Treaty. It also suggested establishing a consistent US interpretation of that agreement and acknowledging that it was not in the long-term US interest to scrap it.
On Monday, June 10, 1985, Nitze sent Shultz what became known as the “Monday Package.”24 In it, he elaborated on his four-part strategic concept and how it could be applied to the NST. The goal remained to achieve a blockbuster agreement that would initiate a transition from strategic offenses to strategic defenses. SDI hardliners within the administration derided Nitze’s formulas as recipes for giving away SDI. However, to him, they were the best way to preserve strategic modernization, SDI, and alliances—especially if the Soviets once again walked out in Geneva. And, if they stayed, it was potentially a winning formula for achieving that which Nitze had devoted at least the previous decade and a half: reaching an arms reduction agreement with the Soviets that advanced US national security.
Accompanying Shultz and McFarlane in a meeting with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin on June 17, 1985, Nitze reiterated: “if we can agree on fewer offensive forces then our defense requirements would be less.” He cited the four-paragraph strategic concept as the way to achieve both. He also agreed with a recent statement by Soviet marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, who averred that the ABM Treaty was “the cornerstone of East/West détente and strategic stability.”25 Confirming the suspicions of Weinberger and his associates—who were not represented in this meeting—Nitze admitted that SDI would need to be scaled down. Also, in that meeting, Shultz proposed to Dobrynin to set up a back channel between the Soviet ambassador and Nitze.26 Shultz also told Dobrynin that while the president had hoped Gorbachev would visit the United States, he would meet him first in Geneva later that year. A few weeks later, Nitze and Shultz benefited from the departure of longtime Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, whom Gorbachev replaced in July. In his first encounter with Gromyko’s successor, Eduard Shevardnadze, on July 31, 1985, in Helsinki, Shultz kidded that “he had to rely on Ambassador Nitze as an historian” on what happened in the strategic arms limitations talks that took place there sixteen years prior.
As it became known that Reagan would meet Gorbachev in Geneva in November, the president’s national security team attempted to reconcile his aspirations for an arms reduction agreement with his support for SDI, which the Soviets opposed and domestic critics claimed was illegal under the terms of an existing treaty. The 1972 ABM Treaty was subject to competing interpretations. Earlier in the year, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger hired former New York assistant district attorney Philip Kunsberg to reassess its terms. Kunsberg concluded that the treaty did not ban the development and testing—and, perhaps, deployment—of systems based on “other physical principles” than those known to both sides in 1972.
At an October 4 meeting with National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane, Under Secretary of Defense Fred Iklé, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Perle, Nitze argued that the United States had a solid case to adopt a “broad interpretation” of the ABM Treaty—yet it may have been an imprudent choice at that moment. The prospects of souring US allies on SDI and handing the Soviets a propaganda victory outweighed any potential research benefits. Nitze admitted that he had reversed course since the start of the year. After reading Charles Fitzgerald and Sidney Graybeal’s classified history of the SALT I and ABM negotiations, he lifted his objections to the “broad interpretation.” This was a rare instance where Nitze ceded ground in an argument. He preserved his status with Reagan as a supporter of SDI and an ambitious arms control reduction agreement.
One month before the Geneva Summit, the internal debate about the ABM Treaty went public. In an October 6, 1985, appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Bud McFarlane suggested that the Reagan administration intended to adopt the “broad interpretation” of the ABM Treaty.27 Amid handwringing from Democrats, Shultz called on the State Department’s legal adviser, Abe Sofaer, to conduct his own review of the ABM Treaty. The upshot of this debate was that on October 11, 1985, President Reagan signed NSDD 192, “The ABM Treaty and the SDI Program,” formally stating Nitze’s position. On the advice of Secretary of State Shultz, the president decided that, under the terms of the ABM Treaty, the United States had every right to interpret the treaty to allow for research, testing, and deployment of some of the technologies that comprised SDI. However, the administration would nevertheless continue to observe the traditional interpretation in the ongoing negotiations in Geneva and the upcoming summit with Gorbachev.28
Nitze had prevailed. As with Edward Teller and the H-bomb in late 1949, he defined the problem—here, the parameters of the ABM Treaty—consulted with experts, mobilized the evidence, and briefed his champion—here, George Shultz (whereas before, Dean Acheson). Nitze’s position became that of the administration. His top priority during the second half of 1985 was to preserve support for SDI and the strategic modernization of US forces so that US negotiators could negotiate from a position of strength in Geneva. After his earlier time leading the INF delegation, in which nuclear targets had been limited to Europe, Nitze returned to the fundamental challenge at the heart of the “Nitze Scenario”: Soviet forces that could strike the American homeland. “Large MIRVed ICBMs—such as the SS-18—threaten stability, particularly in a crisis” and constitute an existential threat, Nitze wrote in a July 8, 1985, letter to a reader of a New York Times profile. “Deployed in high numbers, they offer the means for carrying out a first strike against the other side’s retaliatory forces while, when deployed in fixed locations, are at the same time inviting of such an attack.”29 While the United States had put forth “constructive proposals in Geneva designed to produce equitable and verifiable agreements reducing the levels and power of nuclear arms,” the Soviets had rejected all of them.30
“For the past 15 years he’s played a special role in the Nation’s search for [sound] arms policy,” Reagan said of Nitze, presenting him the Presidential Medal of Freedom a week and a half before the November 1985 Geneva Summit. While in government, Nitze worked to ensure that the US approach was correct, Reagan said. “When he saw things headed in the wrong direction, he worked outside the Government to alert his fellow citizens.” Now he was “playing an indispensable role in our efforts to forge a bold and creative arms control policy.” By Reagan’s measure, Paul Nitze was “consistently shrewd, but never cynical; impressively erudite, yet never pedantic; immensely dignified, yet never stuffy; always hopeful, and yet ever realistic.”31
Both sought the same objective on the eve of the November 19–20 Geneva summit.
Geneva
“The Fireside Summit turned out to be a media triumph for the President,” according to Nitze at the time, yet “on the hard issues of substance on arms control and regional issues the score was zero/zero.”32 Although the two leaders agreed to issue a joint statement that “a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought,” Nitze found little meaning in that. He urged Shultz to go bolder on the specifics. Concerned that Western Europeans were captivated by Mikhail Gorbachev and mindful of his own experience leading the INF talks—where the Soviets had insisted on including the British and French independent nuclear forces in any agreement—Nitze now proposed including these countries in later rounds of the START negotiations. “Britain and France are important countries … [and] are entitled to consider their nuclear systems to be their ultimate guarantee of security, as does the USSR, the US, and China; their nuclear forces today are relatively small in relation to those of the superpowers and smaller as a percentage of US and Soviet totals than they were some years ago,” he wrote Shultz on November 26, 1985. “We must recognize, however, that British and French forces will not only grow in numbers as they catch up in MIRVing but also increase in significance as US and USSR forces decline pursuant to an appropriate 50% reduction agreement.” Once the United States and Soviet Union reached a ceiling of 4,500 strategic offensive arms, Nitze urged including British, French, and Chinese forces in a final agreement. “Each of these countries has expressed such an interest, in one way or the other; and, most importantly, it would be imprudent for us to go below our proposed force level without participation of the other nuclear powers.”33
“I read Paul Nitze’s memo on next steps with great interest and am comfortable with most of his recommendations,” director of the Policy Planning Staff Peter Rodman wrote Shultz on December 3, 1985. “It is not too soon to begin tackling some of the difficult issues. However, I have serious reservations about his proposals for dealing with the issue of French and British forces. As we all know, there is enormous potential for intra-Alliance tension on this issue and we should consider the risks very carefully before proceeding. Specifically my concerns are that Paul’s approach would not work, that even raising it with the French and British at this point would needlessly create suspicion and tension, and that we do not need to propose a solution to this issue now.”34 Rodman prevailed in the short term; START remained limited to the United States and the Soviet Union.
Nitze’s apprehensions about the allies and Congress were well founded, however. “Gorbymania” took hold in Western Europe while congressional critics of President Reagan’s policies fixated on shrinking budget deficits. Throughout the Cold War, Nitze had consistently advocated for higher defense spending, yet there was Congress to contend with. On December 12, 1985, President Reagan signed the Gramm–Rudman–Hollings Balanced Budget Act, which imposed automatic sequesters on US federal spending based on projected deficits for the upcoming fiscal year. Gramm–Rudman, as it was commonly known, was a potential nightmare for long-term defense spending, the most important component of which was needed to complete the strategic modernization of US forces (above all, the MX missile) and provide for more (but still modest) funding to the SDI. Moreover, by capping overall spending and making it contingent upon quarterly projections, Gramm–Rudman took away the president’s latitude to authorize strategic systems to trade off against Soviet forces at the negotiating table—as the United States had done in 1969, when Nitze had played a key outside role in support of Safeguard, in the lead-up to the establishment of the SALT.
Gramm–Rudman resulted from the Reagan administration’s refusal to make tradeoffs. The president had insisted that his tax cut would pay for itself through economic growth. The combined stimulus of a tax cut, increased defense spending, and deregulation led to economic recovery, yet the national debt skyrocketed. This was precisely what Nitze had warned against in his appearance on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line in the summer of 1981. Since at least 1950, he had been convinced that the country could afford to raise taxes to support sufficient military forces. Yet there was no political will for a Republican administration to raise taxes, even to sustain defense spending in the middle of the 1980s.
From Nitze’s vantage point, the allure of Gorbachev, a self-professed reformer with a sunny disposition, made cuts to defense even more dangerous. Despite the Soviets having fielded two new missile systems—the SS-24 and SS-25—during the first year of the Gorbachev era, the message from the telegenic Soviet leader called for easing Cold War tensions. Nitze thought this a tremendous opportunity to advance his strategic concept dating back to December 1984. However, this could happen only so long as the US side maintained sufficient funding for defense. The MX missile, which Reagan had branded the “Peacekeeper,” remained the closest equivalent system to the gigantic Soviet land-based missiles. Yet the White House fought Congress for every deployment and would fall significantly short of the one hundred missiles it initially sought. Soviet negotiators would never agree to reduce their destabilizing systems in exchange for systems the US Congress was about to cut in the next National Defense Authorization Act.
Experts Group
As Nitze ruminated over the prospect of Gorbachev’s outflanking the Reagan administration, the Soviet leader proposed in January 1986 to eliminate all nuclear weapons by the year 2000. On some of the specifics of that ultimate objective, Gorbachev seemed willing to leave out certain of the demands of his predecessors. For example, he dropped “compensation” for independent British and French forces upon which former Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko had insisted accompany any INF deal. “This was a significant departure from the Soviets’ previous stance,” Nitze later recalled.35 For six months after Gorbachev’s proposal, however, Nitze battled with his counterparts in the Office of the Secretary of Defense over the wording of how the president ought to respond.
Ultimately, Nitze prevailed. “The United States does not possess the numbers of weapons needed to carry out an effective first strike; nor do we have intention of acquiring such a capability,” Reagan wrote Gorbachev in a July 25, 1986, letter that reiterated Nitze’s strategic concept and included elements of the Monday Package. The letter again laid out the three phases by which the United States and Soviet Union could research and deploy strategic defenses while assuring that the other side was not seeking a first-strike capability. During the first five years both sides would limit themselves to research, development, and testing of strategic defenses. While the United States would abide by the ABM Treaty during this first phase, Reagan was prepared to sign a new treaty stipulating that any party that decided to proceed beyond research, development, and testing—in 1991, at the end of the first five years—agreed to “share the benefits of such a system with the other providing there is mutual agreement to eliminate the offensive ballistic missiles of both sides.”36
Should the two sides fail to reach a sharing arrangement within two years after 1991, either side would be free to deploy ABM systems after giving six months’ notice. “I believe you would agree that significant commitments of this type with respect to strategic defenses would make sense only if made in conjunction with the implementation of immediate actions on both sides to begin moving toward our common goal of the total elimination of nuclear weapons,” Reagan reiterated. “Toward this goal, I believe we also share the view that the process must begin with radical and stabilizing reductions in the offensive nuclear arsenals of both the United States and Soviet Union.”37
This was the most ambitious nuclear arms control proposal that the US side had put forward to this point in the Cold War. It harkened back to the Lilienthal–Acheson and Baruch Plans when Nitze had first been in DC. Yet, those earlier plans were less complicated because only one country at the time possessed a handful of atomic weapons. In contrast, the United States and Soviet Union in 1986 kept tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and associated delivery vehicles.
In a July 28, 1986, meeting with Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh and a US delegation led by Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Canadian Affairs Rozanne Ridgway, Nitze stressed that Reagan had attempted to allay Gorbachev’s concerns about SDI and the ABM Treaty. Under the “supreme interest clause,” Nitze reminded Bessmertnykh, the United States retained the right to withdraw from the ABM Treaty. Far short of that approach, Nitze insisted that what Reagan was proposing was for both sides to confine themselves to that which the ABM Treaty permitted: research, testing, and development. “The purpose of this research is to determine the feasibility of advanced defenses against ballistic missiles,” he stated. In response to Bessmertnykh’s contention that SDI lay outside the ABM Treaty, Nitze insisted that the president’s proposal stayed within the parameters of Article V and Agreed Statement D.38
Bessmertnykh acknowledged that negotiations in Geneva needed to go faster. He proposed an “experts meeting” of representatives from both countries, separate from the formal sides, to take place in Moscow and be separate from negotiations in Geneva. Accordingly, on August 11, Nitze led a US delegation to Moscow that included the heads of the arms control teams in Geneva as well as overall head Max Kampelman, Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, and lead NSC staffer for arms control Robert Linhard.39 This “experts group” would endure throughout the rest of INF and START. Nitze was thus the de facto overseer of US nuclear arms control delegations for the remainder of the Reagan administration.
At Reykjavik, Iceland, on the weekend of October 11–12, 1986, President Reagan sought to bring General Secretary Gorbachev around to the positions outlined in his July 25 letter. In between their storied encounters, Nitze led a US team of experts in an all-night session with Soviet counterparts on Saturday, October 11. From 8 p.m. until 2 a.m., Nitze and Soviet delegation head Sergei Akhromeyev haggled over START. They neared an agreement on eliminating INF forces in Europe (leaving outstanding the question of SS-20s in Asia). After conferring with Gorbachev, Akhromeyev returned at 3 a.m. “and announced that he was prepared to agree to the central point [Nitze] had been sticking to … [W]e must have equal final ceilings, not equal reductions from current unequal levels to unequal ceilings still favoring the Soviet Union.” After another three and a half hours of negotiations, Nitze and Akhromeyev agreed that, under the terms of START, they would count gravity bombs and short-range attack missiles on heavy bombers as one warhead.
Later that morning, Reagan and Gorbachev—joined by Shultz and Shevardnadze—haggled over what to include in the ten-year phases and how to define research and testing of SDI. While they did not resolve vital outstanding differences, their positions fell within the parameters of the July 25 letter. In other words, Nitze’s proposals were now not only the United States’ negotiating positions but the basis of the most dramatic and ambitious conversations on nuclear matters between heads of state during the Cold War. Moreover, his proposals provided specificity for Reagan’s aspirations to achieve a world without nuclear weapons. Adrenaline fueled Nitze that weekend. After staying up the whole night, he accompanied Shultz in each of the Sunday meetings—although he was not in the final, unscheduled meeting between the presidents and the secretary of state and foreign minister.
Nitze was gloomy upon his return to Washington. In a conversation with longtime friend Charles Burton Marshall a few days later, he downplayed progress and professed to be deeply skeptical whether any agreement could be achieved with Gorbachev. At a November 6 meeting between Shultz and Shevardnadze in Vienna, the Soviet delegation—which did not include Akhromeyev, whom Nitze respected—appeared to walk back from Gorbachev’s positions embraced in Iceland.40
Nitze suspected that the Soviet delegation was attempting to spin the outcome at that summit for political gain, aiming at public opinion in Western Europe or peacenik liberals in the United States. “When we arrived at Reykjavik we found the Soviet delegation differed from previous delegations,” Nitze put down on paper while preparing for a talk at SAIS on December 15, 1986. Previously, half the delegation had been KGB (Committee for State Security); at Reykjavik, only a few were KGB. “Their delegation was flooded with people dealing with the media, propaganda, psychological dirty tricks,” however. Nitze speculated that their job was to figure out how to convince observers that it was the fault of the United States for rejecting Gorbachev’s proposals.41 Nitze anticipated a replay of the “walk in the park” episode from late 1983, right before NATO’s INF deployment. “The Soviets have launched a mammoth propaganda offensive asserting the President agreed to things he did not agree to, putting the blame for the failure of Reykjavik on us, and refusing to discuss anything seriously unless we agree to their position.”42
Still, Nitze retained a sliver of optimism. He gauged that the Soviets were not succeeding in their efforts to derail the political fortunes of leaders of the Western alliance. Thatcher and Kohl’s approval numbers had gone up. So had the president’s—that is, until the revelations about Iran-Contra in October 1986. The lesson of all this was the enduring importance of US strength. As happened with Richard Nixon during Watergate, however, a weakened US presidency did not strengthen diplomats’ negotiating hand in Geneva.
The Politics of National Security
In early 1987, Gorbachev announced that he would no longer consider an INF agreement contingent upon restrictions to SDI. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration was hobbled by fallout from the Iran-Contra scandal, which led to several investigations, hundreds of hours of congressional hearings, and the tarnishing of multiple cabinet officials. Newly emboldened by taking the Senate in 1986, Democrats there asserted themselves on SDI and the ABM Treaty. For example, Michigan senator Carl Levin had previously demanded to see documents leading up to Reagan’s decision that a broad interpretation of the ABM Treaty was justified. Now, Georgia’s senator Sam Nunn put himself forward as the defender of the ABM Treaty, couching the interpretation of the treaty in terms of a constitutional matter of Senate prerogative.
From Nitze’s perspective, Democratic senators were seeking to dictate to the president what US foreign policy ought to be. As someone with over three decades of experience in the executive branch, he considered that to be deeply misguided. Nitze was simultaneously under siege within the administration from SDI proponents who wanted to build a missile defense system and could not care less about the ABM Treaty. They advocated for an early phased deployment, even as Nitze “found no persuasive evidence that deployment of a worthwhile system could begin by 1994.”43
On May 11, 1987, director of the Policy Planning Staff Richard Solomon convened a meeting in which all of its former directors—every one of which was still alive—were invited. When it came time to give his own tour d’horizon of US national security, Nitze expressed pessimism. “I believe the strategic nuclear balance is already adverse and that there is little prospect of reversing it, at least within this century,” he stated. “The question of conducting policy from the position of military inadequacy is not a unique problem in history.” He sounded like an old man recalling simpler times. “The most basic longterm problem for the United States is that of a partial erosion of the basic values that have held this country, and the west generally, together.”44
Nitze’s assessment was consistent with the gist of two books that would become unexpected best sellers in 1987: Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind and Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Themes of disunion and decline filled Nitze’s mind—just as they had when he picked up Spengler’s Decline of the West in the 1930s. He continued to press for a nuclear arms agreement with the Soviets while also working on a memoir that he hoped would counter the works of revisionist historians purporting to draw moral equivalence between the United States and the communist world. On a more personal level, the first half of 1987 was a wrenching time for Nitze, as his wife Phyllis’s emphysema worsened. She died on June 29.
Nitze grieved for his wife yet maintained his workload. By the fall of 1987, as the Reagan administration recovered from the lows of Iran-Contra, George Shultz sought to broker an INF accord. Nitze threw himself into the work of resolving outstanding disputes. He again found himself a figure of unwanted media attention. Conservatives pilloried Nitze over SDI, which they accused him of trying to trade away for an arms control deal. They cited meetings with Soviet scientist Evgeny Velikhov at the National Academy of Sciences, a gathering that Nitze hosted on his farm in Maryland in advance of the December 1987 Washington Summit, where Reagan and Gorbachev were slated to sign the INF Treaty.45 Their insinuation was that Nitze was working directly with Soviet counterparts to thwart the intentions of President Reagan.
Unlike the 1972 Moscow Summit, where President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger arrived even before a final agreement was settled (as explained above), the INF Treaty was ready prior to the December 1987 Washington Summit. The real action—and breakthrough—was at the State Department, where the experts group led by Nitze and Akhromeyev hashed out the basic formula for a START agreement. The clock was ticking on the Reagan administration. “The two leaders had agreed to meet in Moscow sometime in first half of 1988 with the hope that a START agreement would then be ready for signature,” as Nitze put it in his memoir.46 Anything less than that would be failure.
A few days after the Washington Summit concluded, Strobe Talbott wrote a profile of Nitze for Time.47 The piece included a phrase that would become associated with the septuagenarian who played tennis against much younger opponents: “My body does what I tell it.” Paul Nitze was unwilling to let someone else tell his story and found the quote unamusing. “I was originally displeased by the text of profile,” which seemed “to be incompetent and unprofessional,” he wrote Talbott on December 17, and one “built around the sharpest available quotes from my well-known critics.” When it came to the quote about his athletic prowess, “Such nonsense could not have crossed my mind.” More substantively, he corrected Talbott, saying that Senator Joseph McCarthy had not denounced him as being an associate of the “Red Dean” Dean Acheson, in 1953; McCarthy had in fact denounced Nitze for being a Wall Street operator. “I did not help Kennedy proclaim the ‘missile gap’ in the [1960] campaign and was not rewarded therefore,” Nitze went on to say.
Dash for an Agreement
On January 4, 1988, Nitze met NSC staffer Robert Linhard for lunch at the Metropolitan Club to plot an arms control strategy in the final year of the Reagan administration. Both agreed that most of the outstanding START issues involved verification—although there were also unresolved points related to ALCM and ballistic missile counting, as well as a throw-weight protocol and resolution of whether the Soviet Backfire bomber ought to be included in the treaty. Yet it was also not entirely clear, even by this point in the Reagan administration, what strategic systems Congress was going to fund. “We would need to compare the strategic stability of realistically foreseeable deployments under the assumption that a START agreement along the lines we seek is achieved,” Nitze told Linhard, “it could then be compared with what we could anticipate in the event of no agreement.”48
According to Linhard, Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci was “determined to kill the Midgetman,” the single-RV missile that came closest to Nitze’s ideal for strategic stability. He thought if both sides possessed low-value mobile targets, neither one would be tempted to strike first.49 The other mobile basing concept, the so-called Garrison Rail Mobile, was one Nitze considered to be “an invitation to a surprise attack”; he “could convert the improbability of such an attack into a probability.”50 Nitze lamented Linhard’s assertion that the air force and navy remained “irreconcilably opposed” to the US land-based deterrent, that the Office of Secretary of Defense was unable to resolve this interservice conflict, and that the State Department was essentially cut out of the deliberative process.
Nitze was not giving up. Three days after meeting with Linhard, he dictated a draft letter to his publisher asking to delay the completion of his memoir, citing the recent summit and his role in attempting “to nurse the INF Treaty through the Senate, with the hope it will emerge relatively unscathed.” That prospect, he wrote, was hardly a “foregone conclusion.” “Further than that, the far more difficult job of coming to an agreement on strategic offensive nuclear weapons looms ahead.” That prospect was within grasp, and both sides were in a better position than ever before. “Another summit meeting in May or June in which the President and the General Secretary sign an agreement governing strategic offensive weapons will be a fitting cap to my career and to the memoir.” That objective, Nitze went on to say, “has been my single-minded pursuit since 1969, not to mention the goal that first took root for me in 1945 when I visited the devasted cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”51
Nitze assisted Secretary of State Shultz in a series of extraordinary meetings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in which the secretary attempted to persuade them as well as Secretary of Defense Carlucci of the merits of achieving a START agreement by the end of President Reagan’s term. On January 14, 1988, Shultz convened the Joint Chiefs in their conference room, known as “The Tank.” According to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs William Crowe, the chiefs were “working frantically, especially on counting rules” as well as sea-launched cruise missiles (SLCMs), yet he doubted they could “make it by May,” when Reagan was tentatively scheduled to go to Moscow to meet Gorbachev. Crowe also objected—repeatedly and strongly, according to Linhard, who took notes—to the draft of a defense and space treaty, citing objections from congressional leaders about its ambiguity pertaining to interpretations of the ABM Treaty. Carlucci stated that “he wanted to put long lead money in the budget for a 1990 test that would violate the narrow interpretation.” Shultz responded: “we should do what we need to do but should not schedule a test just to challenge the narrow interpretation.”52
A key point of contention was the matter of SLCM. Nuclear SLCMs were indistinguishable from non-SCLMs unless inspectors were allowed on site, yet the US Navy would never allow Soviets to board US ships or submarines. Although Nitze had been secretary of the navy and was proud of his days there in the 1960s, he had no allegiance to the organization. Contention over SLCMs hardly seemed worthy of standing in the way of the deal he had sought for at least two decades.
Shultz implored the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of Defense Carlucci “to use the deadline of the summit to get the treaty we want and force the bureaucracy to do the necessary work.” He bristled at the idea that the US side would “cave into the pressure of a deadline”—especially since “we have not done so in the past.” The fact was that “we need to sign something in Moscow,” whether that was START or the nuclear testing treaties that were being negotiated in Geneva separately from NST and were perhaps better candidates. Referring to the 1975 verbal agreement between Ford and Brezhnev, Shultz acknowledged the pitfalls in “Vladivostok-type agreements,” yet stated, apparently referring to START, that both sides had “gone two-thirds of the way to the top, and we shouldn’t have to start over from the bottom.”53
With a nod to the Winter Olympics set to begin in Calgary, Canada, that February, President Reagan instructed his national security team to reach a START agreement by the end of his second term in office: “we need to go for the gold.”54 Nitze expressed to memoir coauthor Steve Reardon his sense of opportunity. “We’ve gotten much done with respect to the START treaty; we’ve gotten no more than 6,000 warheads; that cuts numbers by about 50 percent on both sides; we’ve gotten them to agree to cut their heavy RVs by fifty percent down to 1540 from 3080; we’ve gotten an agreement with them [on] how you count bombers carrying long-range cruise missiles; we’ve gotten an agreement now with how you count the RVs on ballistic missiles having more than ten RV; we’ve gotten partially there on getting counting rule on how you count cruise missiles.”55 Most importantly, the agreement promised to cut the throw weight of Soviet missiles by 50 percent and the United States would not have to cut it at all. In other words, the Soviets had put on the table the thing that Nitze had been hoping to get for a decade and a half: a radical reduction in Soviet throw weight.
A key outstanding problem, at least from Nitze’s perspective, was how to verify mobile missiles. The US side had proposed banning mobile missiles, yet the Soviets had introduced the SS-24s and SS-25s. Mobile missiles could provide stability—as Nitze had laid out in his January 1976 Foreign Affairs article—yet only if both sides had confidence in the numbers that the other side possessed. A second problem, as Nitze explained to Reardon, was SLCMs. A third problem was the challenge of reconciling START with the existing ABM Treaty.
To solve the third problem, Nitze proposed to create a list of permitted and unpermitted definitions of systems that would clarify the ambiguities of the contested portions of the ABM Treaty. Doing so made eminent sense to Nitze, who had enlisted scientist (and future secretary of defense) Ashton Carter to assist him with the technical specifications. “So that’s the direction I think we ought to go,” he told Reardon, “but the President doesn’t want to go down that direction.”56 As to Soviet concerns, he thought they were “less worried about SDI than they used to be. They just want to be sure we don’t have anything to deploy within ten years.”57 However, it ought to be possible to allay those concerns, since, according to Nitze, the US side was ten years away from deploying them anyway.
“No, they don’t want to cooperate with us, that’s one thing that they consider unthinkable,” was Nitze’s candid opinion of President Reagan’s offer to share the benefits of SDI technologies with the Soviets. “They think the President is mad on this idea of a cooperative approach.” “But I believe that Mr. Gorbachev really does want a START agreement, and, as I said, he wants to downplay the difficulties of the connection between space-defense, in other words, SDI, and START,” Nitze told Reardon on March 1.58 He could not see how a presidential candidate in 1988 would come out against ratifying an agreement should Reagan and Gorbachev sign one.
With Nitze by his side, Shultz pressed his case to the NSPG: that START was achievable and that neither he nor anyone else in the administration, had gone soft—they were advocating for the president’s agenda. “I wouldn’t be the negotiator for Jimmy Carter, because he would want agreement for agreement’s sake,” Shultz asserted. “But I have no fear that we will go bananas and grab a bad deal off the table under your leadership.” With “Ronald Reagan as President,” he summed up, “the fact that we are working with a deadline is an advantage, not a problem.”59
“I don’t think we made the right impression at the NSPG, although we tried,” Crowe lamented to Shultz at a subsequent meeting between the secretary and the Joint Chiefs on February 17.60 “There are a host of issues that stand between us and a START Treaty. They’re very difficult issues; and we’re going to have a very difficult time reaching answers.” The objective of the chiefs was “a good Treaty, not a fast Treaty.”61 An arcane discussion followed: on INF, range of ACLMs, and Germany. Nitze, Kampelman, and even Rowny joined Shultz in opposition to the chiefs. Air Force Chief of Staff Larry Welch argued strenuously against the Soviet proposals. The main objection on the part of US military leaders was that the Reagan administration had failed to procure sufficient funding for its strategic modernization program.
Other practicalities of finishing up START crept into the deliberations. “We ought to need to know what facilities of ours need to be monitored,” as Carlucci put it. “And we can’t wait until the end, because I’m getting beat up by a whole bunch of Congressman who think that plants in their [d]istrict[s] are going to get monitored.” “Now no one of us is suggesting we do away with the ABM Treaty,” according to Carlucci. “We are prepared to live with it for some time. It’s just a matter of what’s the time.” The mood grew increasingly testy. “I feel like I’m hanging you out on mobiles,” Crowe said to Shultz at one point. Shultz responded: “Well, you’re hanging me out on mobiles and ALCMs.”62
Shultz reiterated his stance: “Look, Washington is losing its taste for arms control because it’s too damn hard. But they also have no taste for spending more money for defense, and no taste for spending money on ICBMs for us. So we have a chance for getting something we need.” He referred back to a conversation with President Nixon—“His idea was to get an INF Treaty out of the way and get a START Treaty and have it negotiated and in-place by September or October, and then make it an issue in the campaign. In that way the guy who gets elected will be for it and have the ratification in the bag.”63 In Geneva in 1988, however, the nuclear and space talks were mired in drawn-out debates over matters of second-order consequences.
Nitze attempted to break the logjam. On March 23, he led the US side in an experts group meeting on verifiability, a topic of considerable complexity. The INF Treaty had eliminated an entire class of weapons. Potential violations of that provision were relatively straightforward to identify—one such missile was too many. It was much harder to verify whether one side had reduced its quantity of a particular type of weapon to some number greater than zero.
In a March 28 interview with Steve Rearden, Nitze outlined the three outstanding obstacles to a START agreement: (1) finalizing terms that were verifiable and supported the US national interest; (2) establishing consensus within the executive branch; and (3) overcoming the Soviets’ fundamentally different approach to arms control. “They’ve got all their problems,” he told Rearden, and “they’re not interested in the same things we’re interested in, such as the stabilizing nature of the agreement.” The Soviet interest, according to Nitze, was “in maintaining as much of their current advantage as is possible.”64 That disparity of intentions notwithstanding, Nitze still pressed for a deal.
On April 11, Crowe got to the heart of the matter. There were still 1,200 brackets (or, passages to which both sides had not yet agreed) in the joint draft text of the treaty. Nitze intervened by citing the breakthrough at Reykjavik on the bomber counting rule. He also questioned the Joint Chiefs’ math. “I do not understand the sentence in your memorandum wherein you say that to accept the ALCMs plus one counting rule would cost us 1400 weapons,” Nitze stated. “If we had 80 ALCM carriers they would count at 11 which equal 880. This would leave us room for 220 bombers not carrying ALCMs. Each one of those could carry a large number of SRAMs [Short-Range Attack Missiles]and gravity bombs.”65 Neither Nitze nor Shultz made headway. In a meeting a few days later, Crowe said there was no way for a deal by May. Encouraged to poll the rest of the chiefs, Shultz received the same answer from them.
Nitze accompanied Reagan and Shultz to the summit in Moscow that commenced the following month. He again led the US experts group in meetings with the Soviets led by Marshal Akhromeyev. They made incremental progress but fell short of a breakthrough along the lines of the counting formula in December 1987.66 Even after the Moscow Summit, Nitze held out hope for a dash to the finish line. “During the next seven months, we intend to build on the momentum that has been generated for stabilizing strategic arms reductions over the past seven years,” he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed on June 21. “I believe it is possible to complete a worthwhile START agreement before President Reagan leaves office in January 1989. The task is immensely difficult, but if there is a real opportunity we should not miss it.”67
The following month Nitze attended a dinner at Admiral Crowe’s house in honor of Akhromeyev. Nitze buttonholed Akhromeyev and pressed him for details about his meeting with the US Joint Chiefs, and whether they had made any headway on START. “I asked him whether he still thought we could reach agreement on all major issues by the end of this administration,” Nitze recounted. “He said he thought it possible, but not likely; both sides would have to make major concessions.” Nitze relayed this message to Crowe, who responded (skeptically): “what kind of pot are you smoking, Paul?”68
Nitze continued working toward a deal as the presidential election neared. On September 23, he led a combined session of the START and DST delegations in Geneva, the result of which was “no basic change in either side’s position.”69 On November 15, 1988, a few days after Vice President George Bush defeated Democratic presidential nominee Governor Michael Dukakis, Nitze submitted his letter of resignation to President Reagan. He received no response. “I am told that that portion of the White House staff which in the past has dealt with arms control has been told that none of them will have a job in the new Administration,” Nitze wrote Shultz on December 21.70 He was gloomy and clearly hurt by the inattention he had received from the incoming Bush administration. Yet he still laid out the approach the new team ought to take to preserve the chances for a START agreement.
Paul Nitze never stopped trying to get a strategic arms agreement. He sensed opportunity but feared that Gorbachev and the US bureaucracy would conspire to take it away. He saw within his grasp the goal of his great pursuit from 1969 onward: an arms agreement to reduce the most destabilizing missiles. Nitze could not have asked for a better role. He was the de facto head of the delegations in Geneva and reported directly to the secretary of state and the president, both of whom shared his commitment to getting a deal. Moreover, President Reagan had the most ambition of any US president when it came to reducing nuclear weapons, and he had the most credibility with conservative politicians who were the least disposed to ratify such an agreement.
Part of the problem in finishing START was the failure of the Reagan administration’s strategic modernization program. For all its talk about restoring US defenses, the administration had not solved the riddle of upgrading its land-based nuclear deterrent to match those of the Soviet Union. Basing MX remained unsolved by the end of the Reagan administration, and there was zero support for the Midgetman missile—Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci opposed it, and none of the military services wanted it. In his final letter to Shultz, Nitze also questioned whether the estimated $200 billion the United States was estimated to spend on the B-2 “stealth bomber” was worth it. In sum, by December 1988, Nitze’s efforts to achieve “strategic stability,” as laid out in 1976, seemed to have reached a dead end.
Nitze’s disappointment notwithstanding, his strategic concept gave substance to Reagan’s grand aspirations for a world without nuclear weapons—an objective that Gorbachev shared. Ultimately, the START I agreement that Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush would sign in 1991 was based on the framework that Nitze and the so-called experts group had hammered out in December 1987.
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