“10. A Walk in the Woods, 1981–1984” in “America’s Cold Warrior”
CHAPTER 10 A Walk in the Woods, 1981–1984
Paul Nitze found himself once again at the center of the US debate about nuclear weapons in the first half of the 1980s. On one side of that debate were proponents of a unilateral US freeze on nuclear weapons. Hoping that the Soviets would reciprocate, they advocated a freeze even though Moscow had deployed massive SS-18 “heavy missiles” and SS-20s that could hit all European capitals, while the United States and its allies had fielded no equivalent systems. On the other side were core supporters of President Ronald Reagan’s promises to rebuild strength through a strategic modernization that aspired to match and surpass the Soviets in every category. More nuanced gradations of these positions existed on both sides. Divisions tended to align with partisan politics, yet not always. Nitze held the middle ground in these debates.
From the fall of 1981 to the end of 1983, Nitze headed the US delegation to the INF negotiations in Geneva. Outside that city in the summer of 1982, he went on a “walk in the woods” with his Soviet counterpart, Yuli Kvitsinsky. There Nitze broached the prospect of a deal that would limit US and allied deployment of land-based cruise missiles (and obviate the need for the Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missiles), in exchange for sharp reductions in Soviet SS-20s. Nitze had exceeded his authority. Even without an especially close relationship with President Reagan, however, he kept his job.
Mission Capabilities Study
Nitze had supported Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election but did not receive an appointment to a high position on the new team at the start of the Reagan administration. He nonetheless went to work at its behest. Director of Central Intelligence William Casey tasked Nitze with writing an outside analysis of the crisis in communist Poland, where rampant inflation, as well as strikes led by Solidarity, ground the economy to a halt. Speculation was mounting that the Soviet Union would intervene militarily, as it had done in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Nitze’s assignment was to evaluate the likelihood of that happening.
Casey then asked Nitze for a comprehensive analysis of US and Soviet capabilities. This project generated controversy within the interagency bureaucracy. Since it was a “net assessment” that compared Soviet and US force structures (as opposed to an analysis of just the Soviet side), Pentagon officials insisted that the Defense Intelligence Agency should take the lead. The CIA countered that its analysts had the most accurate and up-to-date information about the Soviet Union. Through the System Planning Corporation, which had sponsored Nitze’s work on Team B and other projects, the CIA insisted Nitze be in charge of leading the study, which integrated analysis from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the RAND Corporation. Nitze’s conclusion cut through the bureaucratic squabbling: the Soviets possessed strategic superiority.
Nitze’s determination that the Soviets were ahead did not mean he embraced President Reagan’s domestic priorities or devotion to conservative shibboleths. In a June 2, 1981, episode of William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, Nitze dismissed supply-side economics, calling it “extremely dangerous” to cut taxes while pursuing a much-needed increase in defense spending. He also did not regard the proposed Reagan defense buildup as sufficient to redress the problem of Soviet strategic superiority “either in the conventional or in the strategic nuclear sphere.”1
Nitze reflected on “whether it was better to be red than dead.” This question was central to the US modern conservative movement of which Buckley and President Reagan were iconic figures. Nitze was “inclined to think it is better to be red than dead if that is the question.” Yet it was not the fundamental question that had animated US policy makers’ response to communism. Nitze told Buckley’s audience: “What we’ve tried to do over the entire period from 1946 to the present is to so conduct affairs that that would not be the question.” And the best way to do that—whether in the late 1940s or early 1980s—was “to be sure that we had such forces that it would not profit the Soviet Union to undertake a course of action likely to lead to a nuclear war.”2 In other words, the purpose of US and allied strength was to disincentivize Soviet aggression—not accept the inevitability of an apocalyptic showdown.
“Now, the situation has not improved in that regard,” by Nitze’s estimate.
It has gotten worse in the last 10 years. It has gotten materially worse. Today it is conceivable that the Russians could gain in initiating a nuclear war in a crisis. I’m not saying I want a nuclear war, but it is today I think conceivable that they could; it could be ever more so unless we cure some of these deficiencies. But at a minimum, I think the situation is one where the Soviets may not feel deterred about, for instance, invading Poland, renewing a blockade of Berlin, bringing pressure upon Europe and even more likely, taking positions in the Persian Gulf which go beyond what they’ve done to date and a position where Europe and Japan are no longer in a position to resist effectively and where we’re faced with really very grave difficulties.3
Nitze’s ongoing work for the CIA must indeed have reaffirmed his prior assumptions. He did not mention that he had access to classified intelligence on the situation in Poland as well as Soviet nuclear capabilities. His bottom line was that the United States needed to restore its strength to prevent the Soviets from invading Poland or instigating another Berlin crisis, spreading its influence in the Middle East, thus neutralizing the abilities of the Europeans and Japanese to resist the Kremlin’s diktats.
Nitze, as so often, painted a grim picture. The trends of the previous quarter century had gone against the United States and its allies. Between 1956 and 1962, the United States cut spending on intercontinental nuclear capability by one-third “to what it has been during the last six years, so we’ve gone down by a factor of 66/23 in the amount of effort we’ve been putting into our defense program.”4 During the same period, the Soviets had been increasing their effort by 5–6 percent annually. The result was that they had spent three times as much per annum on strategic armaments.
In his Firing Line appearance and elsewhere, Nitze acknowledged that he had supported President Kennedy’s cuts to ICBM spending. These were partly to provide for a conventional buildup that Nitze supported. Both types of weapons were now necessary—not because Nitze was a warmonger or even a hawk, but because of what he perceived to be a relentless Soviet buildup. He dismissed the notion of an “arms race” in the 1960s and 1970s; only one side—Moscow—was racing. Regarding the “arms race” and the calls for a mutual commitment to a nuclear freeze, Nitze stated: “I’d love to reverse it and I’d love to get it down to zero.” However, it was incumbent upon the Soviets to take the first step.
“First strike” had become a term commonly associated with Nitze’s fears of the consequences of a Soviet margin of superiority. Yet, he preferred the term “preemptive strike” in his renderings of the Nitze Scenario. “I don’t think they want a first strike,” he explained to Buckley, “but I think the problem is that they will feel that, if necessary, and if they feel that there’s some danger that we might escalate rather than surrender in the Middle East or do this, that or the other—surrender in Europe—that we might engage in such a strike, then they will preempt and it was really a preemptive strike that seemed to me to be more appropriate wording than first strike.” Indeed, the United States retained two other legs of the triad—bombers and submarines—that were in better shape than its land-based missiles. It all boiled down to the fundamental question: “how unequal are you prepared to have the situation and still feel comfortable with it?”5
His solution to these problems remained: rebuild US strength. The Soviets would have no incentive to launch a preemptive strike somewhere in, say, the Middle East if the United States possessed sufficient conventional power to come to the defense of its allies. Nor would they have the incentive to launch a preemptive strike against US land-based missiles if they knew that the land-based leg of the nuclear triad was “hardened” and survivable against a Soviet attack.
Command and Control
Around the time he appeared on Firing Line, Nitze gave a follow-up interview with official air force historians in which he summed up deterrence in the nuclear era.
In first place, I think it is correct to say our fundamental objective is deterrence. We don’t want a nuclear war. Then the question is: How do you assure deterrence? You are not going to get assurance unless you have the capability to deal with the situation in the event deterrence fails. So when you look at the second level, your objectives have to be related to the assumption that deterrence might fail, and that you can deal with the situation where deterrence has failed. There is a preliminary point to that even. That is, it makes a difference, if deterrence fails, what the mode is in which deterrence fails. If deterrence failed because of the fact that there is a significant advantage to be gained from striking first, that both makes it more likely that deterrence will fail and also makes it more likely that you will be behind the eight ball if deterrence does fail. Therefore, there is the strongest possible motive for trying to see to it that the disposition and posture of our forces is such that the enemy cannot gain by striking first in a crisis or by striking first out of the blue. Now that is tough to do. It can be done, but we haven’t in the past addressed ourselves to it with the priority that I think is merited. That is an important objective and one that we certainly ought to work on.
US leaders needed to feel strong enough to take the initiative in a crisis without fearing that the other side would launch a preemptive strike. If leaders were so worried, they would self-deter rather than deter the adversary.
“The second objective is to be sure that there isn’t any doubt that we would have continuing command and control for some extended time period, not just for the moment that it is necessary to retaliate but for an extended period of time,” Nitze went on to say.
Because, if you don’t have that, then the Soviets might look at the situation and say, “It’s a little uncertain as to how things will come out in the initial exchange, but one thing is clear, after the initial exchange, we will have suffered all the damage that we are going to suffer because the US side isn’t going to have any way in which it can manage and control its forces in any intelligent way. So we can go about reconstituting forces, recovering, and they are not going to be able to because we are going to be the only one who can still conduct war in an intelligent way. We are bound to win the war. It is just a question of how much damage we sustain in the initial attack.” It is terribly important to be able to assure endurance of our command and control, survivability, and “reconstitutability” so you have an enduring capability for command and control.6
Command and control was not some problem in the abstract. On March 30, 1981, an assassination attempt against President Ronald Reagan demonstrated a significant problem in Washington’s ability to convey to the Soviets that it had clear command and control in the event of a decapitation attack. Chaos erupted in the White House Situation Room as Vice President George H. W. Bush was flying back to Washington. That experience was encapsulated by Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s appearance in the White House Briefing Room and ill-chosen line, “I am in control here.”
The full extent of the chaos in the White House Situation Room was unknown to Paul Nitze or the US public. Nor did they know that Reagan sent a Hotline message as he was convalescing in George Washington University Hospital. “I wish to make clear to you the seriousness with which the United States would view such an action [i.e., a Soviet invasion of Poland], to which we would be compelled to respond,” Reagan wrote Brezhnev on April 3. “I take this step not to threaten the Soviet Union but to ensure that there is no possibility of your misunderstanding our position or our intentions.”7
Not that the United States and the Soviet Union were anywhere close to war in 1981. Several rounds of destabilizing crises—or externalities, such as the assassination attempt against the president—could rapidly change the trajectory of the Cold War. Soviet leaders might be emboldened to take aggressive action, secure in their knowledge of US weakness and vulnerability; as well as in their conviction that, far down the line, no US president would actually press the button. The Soviet economy was probably weaker than Moscow, or even CIA analysts, let on. Yet it was not too weak to sustain a war. “Look at what they did during World War II when the Germans had occupied most of their industrially productive cities during 1941–42, up to the battle of Stalingrad,” Nitze told air force historians in 1981. “They still sustained a tremendous war economy. They moved all those factories out to Siberia.… So there is an enormous amount that people can do in wartime.”8
Theater Nuclear Forces/INF
What Western European leaders did care about was countering the Soviet threat of SS-20s, a concern that preceded the Reagan administration. In a speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London in October 1977, the Federal Republic of Germany Chancellor Helmut Schmidt declared that SALT negotiations between the United States and Soviet Union had reduced the credibility of the US pledge to use nuclear weapons in defense of NATO allies. Schmidt called for redressing the nuclear balance within the European theater. Initial Soviet deployments of SS-20s the previous year, he warned, required a commensurate response. Two years later, on December 12, 1979, NATO announced its “dual track” decision. West Germany planned to accept US Pershing II ballistic missiles and ground-launched cruise missiles, while other NATO allies would accept cruise missiles on their territories. Deployment was scheduled for no later than 1983. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies would seek to negotiate with the Soviets to reduce its deployment of SS-20s and older SS-4 and SS-5 missiles, which were similarly threatening to the Europeans.
In early 1981, ACDA director Eugene Rostow recommended that President Reagan appoint Nitze to lead the US delegation to the theater nuclear forces talks in Geneva. Secretary of State Alexander Haig, competing with Rostow for authority over arms control, expressed reservations, but National Security Advisor Richard Allen persuaded Reagan to stick with Nitze.9 Theater nuclear forces had not previously caught Nitze’s attention. “Paul, you really should think seriously about accepting this offer,” ACDA general counsel Tom Graham told Nitze at his summer home on Mount Desert Island, Maine. “It is the only game in town right now because the strategic negotiations haven’t begun again.”10
Nitze may have aspired to lead the US delegation to the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (which replaced SALT II), yet that position went to retired general Edward Rowny. Seventy-four years old, Nitze joined an administration in which one of his former interns, Paul Wolfowitz, held the position of director of the Policy Planning Staff; and another, Richard Perle, was the assistant secretary of defense for international security policy.
As negotiator-designate, Nitze flew to Europe to consult with European leaders. There he encountered objections to the terms “theater nuclear forces” and “Euromissiles,” both suggesting that a nuclear war could somehow be limited to Europe. Returning to Washington, Nitze succeeded in changing the name to the negotiations on INF. Changing the terms of the debate—to an entire class of missiles—also allowed Reagan to make good on his promise to Japanese prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone to prevent the Soviets from moving the SS-20s east of the Ural Mountains to comply with an agreement strictly limited to Europe.11
In their September 23, 1981, meeting in New York City, Secretary of State Haig and Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko agreed that Nitze and Yuli Kvitsinsky would lead delegations in the INF talks.12 On October 13, 1981, Reagan led an NSC meeting in which Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger advocated for a “zero option” on INF.13 In his words: “The Soviets will certainly reject an American ‘zero option’ proposal.” “But whether they reject it or they accept it, they would be set back on their heels. We would be left in good shape and would be shown as the White Hats.” “On the ‘zero option,’ ” ACDA acting director Norman C. Terrell responded, “we believe it requires further study, and that it should be considered principally in terms of its impact on our deployment schedule in 1983.”14
This was a tepid response by Terrell, who had no real clout in the Reagan administration. In the absence of Rostow and Nitze, no one in the meeting had the sufficient background knowledge and willingness to cross Weinberger, who was regarded as especially close with the president. On November 18, 1981, President Reagan delivered a speech to National Press Club members, proposing: “The United States is prepared to cancel its deployment of Pershing II and ground-launch cruise missiles if the Soviets will dismantle their SS-20, SS-4, and SS-5 missiles.”15 Two days later, the president announced that Nitze would serve as head of the United States delegation to the INF negotiations set to begin in Geneva on November 30, 1981.
Nitze did not put much stock in a zero option, but he did regard it as a good opening position. Calling for something that the Soviets might declare a nonstarter was precisely what he had wanted to do to achieve reductions in overall Soviet throw weight during the early rounds of SALT back in 1969–70. Now, in meetings with Soviet officials in the fall of 1981 and spring of 1982, he expressed support for the president’s proposal.
On November 18, 1981, Nitze attended a luncheon hosted by Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. He told Dobrynin privately that he “hoped for an agreement by next February.” That was because “the logic of our case was clear.” And, he understood “Mr. Kvitsinskiy to be a competent and intelligent man” who would acknowledge the logic of the US case and help expedite an early agreement.16 Dobrynin disagreed. “He said he had listened to the President’s speech [on November 18] and could not believe that he was serious,” according to Nitze’s notes. “There was no possibility that the Soviet Union would agree to what [President Reagan] was proposing.” Nitze responded that he had read General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev’s interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel and similarly concluded: “there was no possibility that the US would agree with [Brezhnev’s] proposals.” Distance between the two sides, he felt, only accentuated the need for good-faith negotiations. Turning to substance, Nitze stated that the US side intended for “ ‘intermediate-range’ to cover the entire range intermediate between that of battlefield weapons and intercontinental-strategic weapons.”17 Limiting nuclear weapons “by range class rather than location” was the top priority.
Cordial though never close, the two men reflected on their long careers in Washington (Dobrynin had served as ambassador to the United States since the start of 1962). Nitze surmised that disputes between Washington and Moscow “had little to do with direct conflicts of interest between the USSR and the US as such.” Instead, the problem was “conflicts of interest with respect to geopolitical situations between our two countries, particularly in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Far East.” On the relationship between INF and strategic arms negotiations, Nitze said, “it was possible to have a useful agreement on INF without necessarily simultaneously having an agreement on SALT [or START].” Dobrynin pressed Nitze on his opposition to the US Senate’s ratification of SALT II, to which Nitze repeated his strained justification that he had not urged senators to vote against it but instead had attempted to make them aware of the substance of the agreement. While it was now outside his immediate jurisdiction, Nitze proposed “a limitation on the number of reentry vehicles with a further limitation on the power of individual reentry vehicles to prevent rabbits from being equated from elephants.”18 In other words, he maintained that the central objective of a strategic arms treaty should be to reduce Soviet aggregate throw weight.
Nitze reiterated his conviction that agreements should be bold and comprehensive. He was “inherently a ‘big’ agreement man.” Reducing the risk of nuclear war could not be achieved through instruments that were merely “cosmetic” and intended to ease public fears; such treaties produced nothing of substance. Instead, the two sides had to address the fundamental causes of strategic instability—“to do so might be more expensive, but that it would be worth the cost.” Dobrynin and Nitze “agreed that both sides have gone to MIRVed weapons primarily because they are more cost-effective per unit of destructiveness than single RV weapons.”19 They also agreed that stabilizing the superpower arms race to minimize the chances of nuclear war was worth spending more money.
“I had been engaged in the subject of US/USSR relations perhaps as long as anyone who was still around,” Nitze said. He recounted his running into William Bullitt on the subway in New York City in 1933, after which he invited Bullitt to dine with him and his roommate Sidney Spivak, an aide to President Franklin Roosevelt. That dinner led Spivak to introduce Bullitt to Roosevelt, who was persuaded to establish relations with the Soviet Union (and appoint Bullitt as ambassador).20
Dobrynin could have thought Nitze was intending now to set up a back channel for INF negotiations. After all, during the SALT negotiations a decade earlier, Dobrynin had served as one-half of such a back channel along with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. That did not happen in this case with Paul Nitze. As with SALT, negotiations did not occur in a geopolitical vacuum. After the Polish government declared martial law in December 1981—a decision that the Reagan administration presumed was greenlit by the Kremlin—Secretary of State Alexander Haig instructed Nitze “to inform the Soviets in private [that] their conduct vis-à-vis Poland could affect the course of [the INF] negotiations.” Unlike Richard Nixon with SALT, President Reagan did not doubt the ultimate objective. “Met with Paul Nitze & Eugene Rostow who are here for a few days before going back to the arms reduction talks in Geneva,” he wrote in his diary on January 7, 1982. “I told them even 1 nuclear missile in Europe was too many and that if anyone walked away from the table it would have to be the Soviets.”21
Independent British and French nuclear forces complicated the INF negotiations. Along with precluding the deployment of any US INF forces in Europe, the Soviets set a ceiling of three hundred medium-range missiles and nuclear-capable aircraft on either side and counted British and French independent forces toward Washington’s sum.22 Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko insisted on this last stipulation. Tasked with holding the line to exclude other countries, Nitze put forward a draft treaty that limited a potential INF agreement to US and Soviet forces. The Soviet delegation responded by grouping together aircraft with missiles and insisting on “compensation” for British and French forces.23 Consequently, the INF negotiations produced little results in 1982.
Meanwhile, the nuclear arms race generated considerable angst. The Spring 1982 edition of Foreign Affairs featured an article cowritten by George Kennan, McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and Gerard Smith, in which the four men (each of whom had worked at administrative levels higher than Nitze but had been out of government for some time) came out in support of the United States renouncing “first-use” of nuclear weapons. They chronicled their participation in nuclear debates going back to the end of World War II and offered self-reflection and even some contrition. “On this issue [of nuclear first use], if you haven’t changed your mind, you haven’t been using your mind,” Bundy told a reporter for the New York Times.24
Nitze’s mind remained firm. Yet, at the same time, he recognized the context of the article: a growing nuclear freeze movement in the United States. Playing on this legitimately grassroots effort, the Soviets attempted to seize the role of champions of peace. At a special UN session on disarmament in June 1982, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko announced that the Soviets were renouncing the first use of nuclear weapons. This pledge was of little military consequence, given the disproportionately large Soviet conventional army and its ability to mobilize rapidly and reinforce its positions in Eastern Europe. Danger lurked in the prospect that the US Congress would accommodate the Russians by responding to public anxieties about nuclear war: they might defund planned US systems that gave US negotiators leverage in Geneva. From Nitze’s perspective, this was precisely the set of circumstances that prevented SALT from stabilizing the nuclear arms race back in the 1970s.
Soviet negotiators did not have to worry about public opinion. Nor did they have to worry about allies given that the Warsaw Pact—unlike NATO—did not consist of democracies. On the other hand, Soviet negotiators and Kremlin leaders had many years of experience as astute observers of Western politics. They had no problem waiting for some government or coalition to fail. Short of that, the KGB did sponsor a campaign to infiltrate the indigenous peace movements in Western Europe that coalesced around stopping INF deployment; these movements did not have sufficient resources to protect against such interventions.25 In the United States, there was no need for the Soviets to meddle. On June 12, 1982, rock stars Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, and others performed at a rally in Central Park to support a nuclear freeze. The New York City Police Department estimated that the concert drew five hundred thousand people.26
From Nitze’s perspective, the rush to a quick “first stage” agreement would reduce and weaken the US leverage to get a more comprehensive deal later. US allies might lose the political will to carry through the INF deployment. While Reagan did not face voters until 1984, in parliamentarian systems in Western Europe, leaders could face votes of “no confidence” at any time. While the Falklands War buoyed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s political standing in the late spring of 1982, she had not been so popular when Nitze led the US delegation’s early rounds of INF negotiations. In West Germany, Helmut Schmidt faced tremendous pressure from his party, the SPD, which would eventually oust him as chancellor.
Walk in the Woods (Summer 1982)
With INF deployments scheduled to commence by the end of 1983, Nitze anticipated the prospect that the barrage of Soviet propaganda would sap US and allied political will to counter the Soviet SS-20s. Back when Jupiter missiles in Turkey complicated the Cuban Missile Crisis, he feared (unjustifiability, as it turned out) nothing less than the collapse of NATO. Now, with a combination of accumulated knowledge about nuclear policies, confidence in his judgments, impatience with bureaucracy, and a willingness to exceed his instructions, Nitze set out to make a deal with his Soviet counterpart. “We did not see how we were going to achieve agreement involving substantial movement on the Soviet side unless we were prepared for substantial movement on our side,” he later recounted. After all, the president had given him authority to “explore with my opposite number any possibility of significant movement on issues of interest to us.”27
Nitze seized the initiative. Setting up a private meeting with Soviet negotiator Kvitsinsky, he prepared four papers filled with “logic chains” explaining why the US and Soviet sides each needed to make concessions to enhance their security. Finally, a potential compromise package emerged. The Soviets would reduce Soviet SS-20s while NATO would deploy only cruise missiles. Pershing IIs could be scrapped and replaced with a limited number of conversions from existing P1a to P1b. This was certainly not what the president had in mind when he told Nitze and Rostow that even one Soviet SS-20 was too many.
On July 17, Nitze met up with Kvitsinsky a brief distance from Geneva, and the two men walked in the woods. After discussing their need to make progress, Nitze took out paper A, which laid out the reasoning for “a package solution containing all the necessary and sufficient elements of an agreement.”28 Then, sitting atop a pile of felled trees on the side of the road, Nitze showed Kvitsinsky the three additional papers. Paper B laid out six presumptions, starting with the assumption that the Soviets would not accept “zero/zero,” and the United States would consider the inclusion or compensation for British and French forces. Paper C laid out possible concessions to previously stated Soviet concerns. Finally, paper D stated fifteen elements of a possible compromise. Kvitsinsky apparently read the papers carefully and offered his comments before his driver reappeared.29
The following day, July 18, a Sunday, Nitze called Eugene Rostow in Washington to tell him about the encounter. He briefed the US delegation on Monday and flew to Washington on Tuesday. In a meeting on July 27 with National Security Advisor William Clark and the NSC’s senior director for arms control Richard Boverie, Nitze described his conversation with Kvitsinsky. He went through the papers he had shown the Soviet negotiator—none of which he had cleared with the White House or State Department—and went through potential next steps.30
“The Rostow/Nitze approach has uncertainties, but could form a basis for early movement if there was a political judgment to discard the currently existing President guidance and push for an early agreement,” Boverie wrote Clark on July 29, 1982. While the ideas were intriguing, there were “potentially very severe bureaucratic and substantive problems,” Boverie went on to say. “Mr. Nitze has strayed way off the reservation—he has gone far beyond his instructions,” and his actions could potentially set a precedent for others to take end runs around established policies. “Moreover, Mr. Nitze may have undercut the future of the Administration’s ‘zero option’ with the Soviets by dealing informally with the Soviets on a ‘non-zero’ approach.” Proponents of the zero option within the administration, as well as US allies, could accuse the Reagan administration of double-dealing—much to the delight of a hostile press corps. “I have the greatest admiration and respect for Mr. Nitze,” Boverie said, “and I would hate to see him thrown into a potential meat-grinder; however, the President’s interests clearly and unequivocally come first.”31 In other words, Nitze’s proposal should be dismissed.
Even though proponents of the zero option were furious at Nitze for attempting to broker a deal—the ostensible purpose of a lead negotiator—the Reagan administration took the prospect of at least an interim agreement on INF systems seriously. At the very least, Nitze faced no disciplinary action. And, in advance of a September 13, 1982, NSC meeting, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Lawrence Eagleburger wrote Secretary of State George Shultz that something had to give on the US side.32
Even Reagan’s closest advisers saw support for the zero option as challenging to sustain. “Our arms control negotiators in START and INF see the Soviet delegations as stonewalling with Moscow likely, at sometime soon in INF, to put out an unacceptable but publicly appealing offer and then launch a propaganda barrage to blame American inflexibility for the failure of the negotiations,” Director of Central Intelligence William Casey wrote President Reagan on November 22, 1982. “Nitze speculates that the new Soviet proposal would likely call for 200 intermediate range missiles on each side, including UK and French systems, and 100 bombers. The Soviets now have 200 SS-20s west of the crest of the Urals, thus they could dismantle their obsolete SS-4s and 5s and not have to destroy a single SS-20. Obsolete badgers and blinders could be moved or destroyed, and excess Backfires could be moved east of the Urals. We should be prepared for a leak or other announcement of this proposal.”33
Having failed to secure a deal in his walk in the woods with Kvitsinsky, Nitze feared what he regarded as the collapse of US and allied will. In interviews with his memoir coauthors Steve Reardon and Ann Smith, Nitze expressed concern that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev intended to place nuclear weapons in Cuba without a deal on INF—in other words, to repeat the circumstances that triggered the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not only were the Soviets on the “political offensive,” as he put it in December 1982, but a potential crisis with Moscow at any point in the coming decade would force Washington to back down. Nothing about the Reagan arms buildup would alter the fundamental premises of the Nitze Scenario. “Demonstrably so—that’s right,” was Nitze’s response to the question of whether the United States was in an inferior position concerning the Soviet Union.34 Especially aggravating to him were McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara, who disavowed the primary role that US strength had played in bringing the Cuban Missile Crisis to a successful conclusion. Their ulterior motive, he presumed, was to cast aspersions on the Reagan administration’s efforts to restore the United States’ strength.35
In NSC meetings throughout the summer and fall of 1982, Nitze played the good soldier. His immediate boss, ACDA director Eugene Rostow, apparently did not. Claiming that Rostow weighed in on topics outside his purview, National Security Advisor William Clark fired him.36 Subsequently, a January 16, 1983, New York Times article released details of Nitze and Kvitsinsky’s walk in the woods the previous summer and cited it as one reason behind Rostow’s dismissal. “There is considerable speculation about Mr. Nitze’s future,” the article said. “Some Rostow aides predicted that Mr. Nitze would resign in a few months if there is no accord.”37 State Department officials, however, “described him as a veteran who believes strongly in the importance of an agreement and is willing to stick with his instructions, perhaps in the expectation that with Mr. Shultz in charge of arms control affairs, the Reagan Administration will authorize a compromise by the summer.”38 In sum, Nitze paid no price for his role in crafting the walk in the woods proposal in the summer of 1982.
The Strategic Defense Initiative
President Reagan regarded Nitze as a link to President Harry Truman, whom he had supported. He would never fire Nitze. “Met with Nitze and Rowny who are headed back to Geneva for the arms negotiations,” the president wrote in his diary on January 21, 1983. “The Soviets are pulling out all the propaganda stops trying to turn off the allies. I think I can top them.”39 That same month, Reagan had announced the “President’s Commission on Strategic Forces,” comprising a bipartisan group of former secretaries of defense along with technical experts led by retired air force general and national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. “An almost 2 hr. lunch with Joint Chiefs of staff. Most of time spent on MX & the commission etc.,” Reagan wrote in his diary on February 11, 1983. “Out of it came a super idea. So far the only policy worldwide on nuclear weapons is to have a deterrent. What if we tell the world we want to protect our people not avenge them; that we [a]re going to embark on a program of research to come up with a defensive weapon that could make nuclear weapons obsolete? I would call upon the scientific community to volunteer in bringing such a thing about.”40
“We can’t afford to believe that we will never be threatened,” Reagan stated in a nationally televised address on March 23, 1983. “There have been two world wars in my lifetime. We didn’t start them and, indeed, did everything we could to avoid being drawn into them. But we were ill-prepared for both. Had we been better prepared, peace might have been preserved.”41 Preparedness, which had been a hallmark of Nitze’s career going back to the Strategic Bombing Survey, was central to Reagan’s message that evening. The president closed by stating that strategic modernization was not enough to reduce the prospects of nuclear war. “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant US retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” the president asked. He signed off by challenging the scientific community to devise a way to defend US lives rather than, as he said, avenge them.42
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—or “Star Wars,” as it was colloquially known—surprised Nitze and nearly everyone else in the Reagan administration. It needed to be made clear how the president expected to integrate his proposal into the ongoing negotiations in Geneva. It could have been clearer what exactly SDI was. The president was now contemplating the prospect of doing the thing that had landed Nitze in hot water—pursuing a deal short of zero INF. “I’m of the mind we should tell Nitze to offer an interim missile reduction plan to the Soviets while still claiming zero is our ultimate goal,” he wrote in his diary after an NSC meeting on March 18. Two weeks later, Reagan proposed an interim Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Reduction Agreement. “To this end,” the president announced at the White House, “Paul Nitze has informed his Soviet counterpart that we are prepared to negotiate an interim agreement in which the United States would substantially reduce its planned deployment of Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles, provided the Soviet Union reduce the number of its warheads on longer range INF missiles to an equal level on a global basis.”43 In other words, Nitze’s longtime approach—if not necessarily in all its precise details—had now become the US negotiating position.
Reagan was acknowledging reality. His modulation on INF came just before the Scowcroft Commission’s April report recommending a compromise: a portion of the MX missiles could be deployed in fortified—or “hardened”—Minuteman silos, while the United States would pursue research on a single-warhead rocket on a mobile launcher.44 This portable system, now called Midgetman, was the type of system Nitze had called for in his January 1976 Foreign Affairs article.45 President Reagan immediately accepted the Scowcroft Commission’s recommendations. The president rechristened the MX missile, which was set to be deployed in 1985, “the Peacekeeper” and authorized research and development for the Midgetman.
On May 11, 1983, Nitze sat for an interview with Gregg Herken, who was writing a book on US Cold War nuclear policy. Nitze praised the Midgetman and expressed his long-standing support for a small ICBM with a single RV to solve the problem of strategic instability. He contended that switching from large land-based MIRVed ICBMs to small, mobile non-MIRVed ICBMs would eliminate the issue of “use them or lose them”—in other words, the pressure to launch one missile with numerous warheads upon warning of an impending attack against it. In addition, the size of such a missile fleet would also ensure that bad actors such as Libyan strongman Mu’ammar Gaddhafi “wouldn’t be a threat.” Nitze told Herken that he had explained all this previously to Jimmy Carter, who had refused to take his advice.46
The Soviets were unlikely to accept such a fundamental shift. However, that would not be sufficient grounds to reject such a proposal. The steeper obstacle was that the Midgetman cost more money than MX, and Congress had been reluctant to fund that for nearly a decade. The logic of the new weapon, according to Nitze, “rests upon the wholly solid premise that the avoidance of nuclear war is much more important than increasing welfare payments.”47 The tradeoff—for both Democrats and Republicans—was between long-term security and short-term political gain. Nitze concluded US leaders were just unwilling to ask Americans to pay what they could afford to bolster defenses to deter nuclear war.
Midgetman never sparked Reagan’s imagination. The SDI did. NSSD 6-83, which the president signed on April 18, called for a “Future Security Strategy” and “Defense Technology Plan.” Throughout 1983, however, the top priority remained to shepherd the INF deployment slated for that fall. “Met with Dr. Nitze who leaves Sat. for Geneva to resume the Nuc. Reduction talks we call I.N.F.,” Reagan wrote in his diary after he signed NSSD 6-83. “Like me he believes the Soviets wont [sic] move until & unless we display our Intermediate missiles in Europe.”48
Nitze was not so sure of that. He hoped to broker a last-minute INF deal in Geneva prior to NATO’s deployment. Over dinner on October 26, 1983, Kvitsinsky told Nitze that Soviet general secretary Yuri Andropov (who had taken over when Leonid Brezhnev died on November 12, 1982) remained prepared to reduce SS-20 deployments so long as the US side consider “equal reductions.”49 What transpired next made Nitze lose all respect for his Soviet counterpart. The Soviets leaked word that Nitze had put forward another proposal limiting US and allied deployments. US officials presumed the intention was to sow discord among the Western allies and damage Nitze’s standing within the Reagan administration. Secretary of State George Shultz stood by Paul Nitze.
On November 22, the West German Bundestag approved the Pershing II deployments. The next day, Soviet negotiators walked out of the INF negotiations. “The United States profoundly regrets the unilateral decision of the Soviet Union to suspend the INF negotiations,” Nitze announced in a prepared statement. However, it was unreasonable for them to point blame at the United States and its NATO allies, which had decided in 1979 to pursue deployment and negotiations at a time when the Soviets had deployed 140 SS-20s, a figure that had reached 360 by November 1983. “The schedule for US deployments has never been a secret,” Nitze stated. “Nor has the reason for them.”50
Soviet Walkout (December 1983 to December 1984)
Nitze returned to Washington. Even though there was no longer a delegation for him to lead, ACDA still employed him. And he saw no reason to quit. “No one can ever relax in this business,” he told Robin MacNeil in a December 8 appearance on the PBS Newshour.51 “Met with Paul Nitze,” President Reagan wrote in his diary on January 17, 1984. “He too believes we must not yield to Soviet pressure to make a new offer to get the Soviets to resume the I.N.F. talks. That would be rewarding them for walking out.”52 “Yielding” was not the word anyone in the Reagan administration wanted to use, so Nitze, Shultz, and others spent the year trying to mold a new framework of negotiations by which the United States and Soviets could resume talks on INF and START. This period tested Reagan’s commitment to arms reductions: deployment of the Pershing IIs and ground-launched cruise missiles bestowed strength on the United States and its allies. Would they now “trade” them for the SS-20s? Moreover, it was not at all clear that the Europeans would agree to the SS-20s stationed west of the Urals and might balk at risking an agreement for a global ban. The Japanese had to be taken into account. And, never before in the Cold War had the two sides agreed to eliminate an entire class of nuclear missiles.
“An initiative should make no substantive concessions to the Soviet side,” Nitze wrote Reagan on March 23, 1984. The United States should indicate a willingness to bargain, yet “the reactions in Europe, the Congress and US public opinion would all be negative if there were any indication that we were rewarding the Soviets for having broken off the negotiations.” The Soviets “would look upon it as weakness on our part.”53 Nitze recollected from his SALT experience that it was especially risky to conduct arms control negotiations during a presidential election year—the Soviets would seize the opportunity to pin down the incumbent. Unlike in 1972, “the initiative [in 1984] should be in the form of spelling out in more specific terms past policy formulated in such a way that it could be advanced unilaterally.” One option would be to halt deployments at the end of 1985—at 236 warheads—if the Soviets agreed to reduce their long-range intermediate nuclear force missiles in Europe to match that figure and make “collateral reductions in Asia.”54
Nitze’s ideas gained traction. In preparation for a March 27, 1984, meeting of the National Security Planning Group (NSPG), National Security Advisor Robert “Bud” McFarlane proposed to President Reagan that he send Ed Rowny and Paul Nitze to engage in private talks with the Soviets.55 “It is not impossible to get an agreement, but 90% chance you won’t,” Nitze stated at the NSPG meeting that day. “It is wholly unlikely that Moscow will negotiate seriously in an election year.” Reagan floated McFarlane’s suggestion of offering up Rowny and Nitze, though did not express much urgency. “I think the Senior Arms Control Policy Group should accelerate their work and present me with options for new START/INF positions within a few weeks,” the president stated.56
That summer, the Soviets proposed negotiations aimed to prevent the “militarization of space.” US officials regarded this phrase as targeting the SDI. Secretary of State Shultz devised a plan to broaden the scope. “Our approach is to include the subject matter of START and INF … whereas the Soviets are claiming that our desire to talk about ballistic missiles means that we are imposing preconditions to any negotiation on what they call the ‘militarization of outer space,’ ” according to Deputy Secretary of State Kenneth Dam. “This is a rather delicate war of words, because we are saying that we have accepted the Soviet proposal to talk about the militarization of outer space and that all we want to do is to talk about the whole picture, which includes ballistic missiles passing through space, and in any event the overall subject matter cannot be limited simply to weapons originating in space or used against space objects.”57 This meant the Shultz plan was to turn negotiations on the “militarization of space” into negotiations on ballistic missiles, which traveled through outer space.
Nitze agreed with this approach. On July 17, 1984, he sent McFarlane a memorandum concurring that the Soviet objective was to block the SDI and recommending that the Reagan administration respond by recasting the initiative as a comprehensive set of negotiations that would include START and INF. “I also proposed that the United States should examine the relationship between offensive and defensive system and the linkage we might draw between them once the Vienna talks were under way,” he later recounted.58
The following month, Deputy Secretary of State Dam sent Secretary Shultz a paper written by his arms control adviser, James Timbie, on the history of strategic nuclear arms control. Timbie stressed the importance of “leader-to-leader” exchanges in achieving any potential deals with the Soviets. “Delegations in the field have a role to play, especially in working out the language of formal Treaties,” said Timbie. “Delegations, however, are extensions of bureaucracies, and the US and Soviet bureaucracies are incapable of significant arms reductions agreements,” he said. “The basic elements of all significant arms control agreements have without exception been worked out in direct exchanges between the leadership of the United States and the Soviet Union.”59 Leaders had to make choices, in other words.
Nitze had participated in each of the negotiations that Timbie cited. But, given the upcoming election in November, he cautioned against the temptation to strike a quick deal for short-term political advantage. “I’m a skeptic on interim agreements,” Nitze declared at an NSPG meeting on September 18, 1984. “They are all poison. If you want a useful agreement, don’t go down the interim agreement path.”60 Such was the lesson of SALT I, where Kissinger had sidelined the delegation and jettisoned legitimate US concerns to obtain an agreement before the 1972 presidential election.
The role of domestic politics in arms control could not simply be wished away. The publication of Strobe Talbott’s book, Deadly Gambits in September 1984, inserted both that topic and Nitze himself into the presidential campaign.61 In Talbott’s depiction of INF and START, the Reagan administration had put forward positions that it knew the Soviets would never accept. According to Talbott, the purpose of that cynical approach was to obtain congressional support for strategic modernization and INF deployment. He thought the administration never actually wanted a deal.62 In this account Nitze was a constant presence, as he had been in Talbott’s previous book, Endgame, which chronicled Nitze’s attacks on SALT II.
Nitze thought that neither Talbott, nor his employer Time, wanted to modify the Reagan administration’s efforts to seek a genuine deal; rather, they wanted “to get Reagan out.”63 To Reagan’s critics in Congress—among them Senator Paul Tsongas, who complained about Reagan’s rhetoric—Nitze suggested that they pose the question to their constituents: “Well, the only thought that crosses my mind is that you might suggest to them first that they ask themselves whether a proposition is true or false. Is [the USSR] an evil empire and do they lie?”64 Nitze believed the answer was yes on both counts.
Senator Tsongas, an avowed liberal, believed Reagan’s rhetoric was dangerous. McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara, who remained Democrats, considered his nuclear weapons politics also dangerous. A grassroots nuclear freeze movement galvanized activists on the left, and some evangelical Christian circles on the right, to apply pressure on elected officials to stop the rearmament of US forces during the early 1980s. Within the Reagan administration, however, long-standing associates of the president such as Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger encouraged him to get tough on the Soviets. Achieving a deal with them did not matter because the Soviets could cheat anyway. In Congress and conservative intellectual circles, various of the president’s champions lamented that he was not sticking to his guns regarding the Soviets. Very importantly, as November 1984 approached, the Reagan administration had not realized its strategic modernization aspirations, as it had put forth in a National Security Study Directive (NSDD-12) back in 1981.
Throughout 1981–84, Nitze pursued the middle way in the nuclear debate. He wanted a deal on INF to preserve the Western alliance. The nuclear freeze movement did not lead him to question his assumptions about the utility of modernizing US forces; he was concerned that political headwinds would stop the strategic modernization program that the Reagan administration launched in 1981 as well as the US commitment to NATO that President Carter had approved in the dual-track decision of 1979. Nitze may have been skeptical that the Soviets would ever agree to US proposals such as cutting aggregate throw weight. However, he pursued them in earnest.
The walk in the woods did not prove a threat to Nitze’s job. While the president and he were not personally close, Reagan did not want to lose this direct link to Harry Truman—a Democrat (as Reagan had been through the 1940s) who stood by Cold War first principles and never apologized for the United States. And Nitze neither flattered the president nor bad-mouthed him behind his back.
The bond Nitze developed with George Shultz, who was confirmed as secretary of state during the initial fallout from the walk in the woods, sustained the next phase of Nitze’s enduring career. In December 1984, President Reagan appointed Nitze as special assistant to the president and secretary of state for arms control. Shultz’s intervention meant he would set up shop on the seventh floor of the State Department—not at the Old Executive Office Building. At age seventy-seven, he was about to begin his most important assignment.
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