CHAPTER 8 Negotiating from Weakness, 1969–1975

Nixon Transition and Safeguard

Richard Nixon and Paul Nitze had maintained cordial relations since the 1940s. Still, when the Democrats went down in defeat in November 1968, Nitze “could think of no personal reason why [he] might be asked to stay on in some capacity.”¹ He nevertheless wrote a paper laying out how the incoming administration should proceed on nuclear arms control. After Nixon’s inauguration on January 20, 1969, Paul retreated to Causein Manor, an hour south of Washington. This was a farm his wife Phyllis had inherited. There the Nitzes enjoyed riding horses and raising pigs. But Paul was soon back in Washington, spending weekdays in his office at SAIS and staying at the Nitzes’ home in Georgetown.

Other members of the Lyndon Johnson administration moved on. Nitze’s most recent boss, Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, and his top deputy, Paul Warnke, established a law firm, Clifford and Warnke. His previous boss, Robert McNamara, remained president of the World Bank for another decade. Sixty-two years old, Nitze had no interest in withdrawing from high policy debates. Instead, he renewed his professional association with yet another former boss, former secretary of state Dean Acheson, this time under the auspices of the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy.

Sharing Nixon’s priorities, Acheson and Nitze lobbied members of Congress over national security initiatives. These included appropriating funds for a new ABM system called Safeguard, which the administration planned to deploy in response to the emerging nuclear threat posed by China and the growing one posed by the Soviet Union. President Nixon rejected the “thin” approach of the Johnson administration—the Sentinel program of Spartan and Sprint nuclear-tipped interceptors totaling less than the sum of Soviet incoming missiles—while also opposing a more comprehensive, or “thick,” defense against a full-blown Soviet attack.²

Safeguard was supposed to proceed in two phases. Phase One would protect only a pair of US missile sites. Phase Two would defend all US cities from potential attacks by the People’s Republic of China, land-based attacks by Soviet forces, and accidental attacks from either country.³ This was the ostensible purpose of Safeguard. However, the primary purpose of Safeguard was to provide US negotiators with leverage at the upcoming SALT that had been postponed following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968.

Each of these rationales made sense to Nitze. Having rejected former secretary of defense Robert McNamara’s concept of MAD, he advocated for missile defense. Using it as a bargaining chip in negotiations was also a fine idea. And Nitze felt that some critics of missile defense were distracted by irrelevant influences. “The more I looked into it, the more I believed that the basis of the anti-ABM campaign was to be found in the country’s disenchantment with the Vietnam War,” he later recounted, “in the widespread alienation from the government of former supporters of the nuclear defense program, and in the desire of many to wish away the problems of national security.”⁴

Nitze recruited as interns three graduate students of the University of Chicago professor of political science Albert Wohlstetter: Peter Wilson, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle. He also coordinated efforts with the Office of Strategic Services veteran William Casey, a New York City investment banker and future director of the CIA under President Ronald Reagan. For his part, Acheson rallied fellow “wise men” from the Truman administration, among them Robert Lovett, to play up the bipartisan consensus of that era and exhort the Democratic Party to return to its first principles on foreign policy. Such were two themes of his Pulitzer-Prize-winning 1969 memoir, Present at the Creation.⁵

These efforts succeeded. After Safeguard passed the US Senate by one vote in August 1969, his protégés spread out across Washington, DC: Wilson joined RAND, Wolfowitz headed to ACDA, and Perle went to work for Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who was one of Nitze’s perennial defenders on the Hill, and whose top foreign policy aide—Dorothy Fosdick—had once worked for him on the Policy Planning Staff.

For his efforts on behalf of Safeguard, Nitze earned the gratitude of Richard Nixon. The president regarded him as knowledgeable, challenging, and—perhaps most importantly—able to deliver congressional support to Richard Nixon. On the advice of Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, he offered Nitze the job of the secretary of defense’s representative on the US delegation to the upcoming SALT in Helsinki. However, that was not all. “Paul,” he purportedly told Nitze, “I very much want you to take this job. I have no confidence in [Secretary of State William] Rogers nor do I have complete confidence in [chief negotiator] Gerry Smith. I don’t think they understand the arms control problem. So I want you to report anything you disapprove of directly to me.”⁶ Nitze accepted the job offer but rebuffed the invitation to be the president’s “inside man” on the delegation.

SALT I

Nitze disapproved of many things during the SALT negotiations. He opposed the president’s fundamental approach to pursue an “interim agreement.” The problem with an interim agreement was that the Nixon administration would not be able to obtain from Congress sufficient spending on strategic forces to preserve whatever leverage (e.g., Safeguard) had led the Soviets to agree to it. Soviet leaders, able to read US politics clearly, had no problem stonewalling. They could hold the administration politically hostage until it conceded on outstanding points of contention. Nitze was certain only a comprehensive and permanent deal could prevent that from happening. Moreover, such a deal had to reduce Soviet advantages and preserve US advantages.

Unfortunately for Nitze, he was not the man of action on SALT. Not even the ostensible lead US negotiator was in charge. Shuttling between the White House and meetings with Soviet counterparts, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger worked out the critical portions of what became the Interim Agreement, casting aside what turned out to be legitimate concerns on the part of Nitze, Smith, and legal and technical experts in ACDA.⁷

In preparation for the initial rounds of SALT, Nitze worked in a windowless office in the Pentagon, the building in which he so recently served in a chief operating role. He surrounded himself with talented younger colleagues such as James Woolsey, T. K. Jones, and James Wade. He was not constrained by any allegiance to the office of the secretary of defense. Nor did demotion in rank diminish his forcefulness. “Nitze was a principal in a way that the other agency representatives were not,” according to one NSC official from the time. “He did not regard his function as simply to faithfully reflect whatever the OSD bureaucracy was saying that week.”⁸

Nitze took the initiative to establish an essential US position on SALT. He had already formulated the basic options in his paper of November 6, 1968—the one he wrote a day after the election. He grouped these options within three categories which he presented to the NSC one year later: “1) those options which provide for no MIRV ban and no reductions (Options I, II, III, III–A); 2) those options which include a MIRV ban (Options IV, V, V–A and VI); and 3) the option which provides for mutual reductions of fixed land-based missiles, and thus reduces the significance of MIRVs as a counterforce threat (Opinion VII).”⁹ Nitze sought, with his plan, to prevent the US side from getting bogged down while establishing its position.

Nitze misread the power dynamics of the Nixon administration. Unlike meetings of the Acheson group during the Berlin Crisis in 1961, at which Kissinger was junior to Nitze, the positions were now reversed. Kissinger had not yet become a household name.¹⁰ Nor had he fully implemented the NSC system in which he chaired every interagency committee.¹¹ But he was on the ascent. Kissinger flattered Nixon and led him to believe that the president was responsible for establishing the fundamentals of US foreign policy. Neither man shared Nitze’s singular focus on obtaining a deal based on its merits—at least, according to Nitze.

Hovering over the early stages of SALT was the US development of MIRVs. MIRVs held the immediate promise of the United States holding “at risk” Soviet targets by adding two more warheads each to the roughly one thousand Minuteman III missiles. Yet the Soviets were bound to catch up. That inevitability was apparent to Nitze in the NSC meeting of November 10, 1969. The fundamental problem for the United States—looking ten or twenty years down over the horizon—was that Soviet leaders could order bigger missiles on which to load their MIRVs and more of them. Unlike US leaders, Soviet ones faced no domestic political pushback for choosing guns over butter. They could also deploy missiles wherever they wanted inside the Soviet homeland.¹²

Nitze reasoned that, in the upcoming SALT negotiations, it would be in the Soviet self-interest to pursue either a MIRV ban or a moratorium on further testing. They might also go for a freeze on ABM systems. While the United States had just authorized money for Safeguard, it had not yet built anything near the equivalent of the Soviet Galosh system that surrounded Moscow. And, again, for domestic political reasons, it was implausible that the United States would ever construct a nuclear-tipped missile defense system around New York City or Washington, DC.

Nitze attempted to overwhelm Nixon and his advisers with his command of nuclear “theology.” During the 1968 election campaign, Nixon lambasted the Johnson administration for allowing the Soviets to gain the upper hand in the nuclear arms race. Even though Nitze disagreed with McNamara’s decision to set arbitrary limits on US forces, he wanted to convey McNamara’s intent. “[W]hen we talked of freezing the Minuteman force at 1000 and subs at 400, we had planned to MIRV that force,” Nitze told Nixon. “This would give us an extra capability. The submarines are in for conversion, and Minuteman III [each one slated to hold three MIRVs] is about ready.”¹³ Here, and in all subsequent strategic arms negotiations, the riddle for the US side was how to distinguish between capabilities—qualitative or quantitative—that were vital to US national security and those capabilities that Washington could trade away in exchange for reductions in the most destabilizing Soviet systems: their very large land-based ICBMs.

“Since 1966, our effort has been based on the assumption that Minuteman III and the Poseidon would balance their SS-11s and SS-13s,” Nitze said at the November 10 meeting. “The Soviets have much greater throw weight.” Giving up MIRV meant “they may have as much as a 3 to 1 advantage in throw weight.” The United States could build ABMs more extensive than the Soviet Galosh system, which was still rudimentary. “But if [the Soviets] go further, or if they expand their radar, then that would be a major threat to us.”¹⁴

A testing moratorium was not in the US interest, according to Nitze. Both ABM systems and MIRVs required testing to understand “nuclear effects” in order to predict how multiple nuclear explosions in close proximity might affect interceptors or reentry vehicles. Yet, a potential ban on MIRV deployment came down to two considerations: “(1) We must have a high assurance that ABMs and SAMs won’t expand. But how can we get this assurance. (2) If we cannot get clear on how to control the radar networks, then what assurance do we have of launchers?” When President Nixon asked Gerard Smith, the lead negotiator, whether “we have to discuss MIRV or there is no game?” Smith responded, “I think this is about 70% of the issue.” Nitze added, “It doesn’t have to be so.” In front of the president, he also contradicted Smith on whether to inform the North Atlantic Council of US intentions.

Nitze regarded himself as the nexus between defense matters and diplomacy. Yet he needed direct access to the president. He did not play up to Nixon as Kissinger did. The three men shared a cynicism toward Soviet leaders and skepticism toward the US intelligence community. Moreover, as illuminated by John Maurer, Nixon and Kissinger privately regarded their own particular approach to arms controls as favorable to US advantages in the strategic arms competition.¹⁵ Nitze did not believe that to be the case. Simply put, he regarded himself as the more knowledgeable about how nuclear weapons shaped international politics.

In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets constructed the SS-9. This was more devastating than anything in the US arsenal. It had a length of some thirty-two meters with a launch weight of some 180 tons. This compared with the Minuteman III’s length of some eighteen meters and launch weight of some seventy-eight tons. Its increased size meant that the SS-9 could launch a warhead (or warheads) larger than would be necessary to destroy a US city.

Did the Soviets intend to use the SS-9 in a “counterforce” strike to preemptively take out the US Minuteman fleet as they sat in their silos? What were the Soviets seeking to achieve in their buildup? At what point would they stop? Answers to these questions were fiendishly tricky to ascertain. “I recall that as we were preparing our negotiating position in 1969, an intelligence estimate approved by the Joint Chiefs came across my desk setting forth the judgment that once the Soviets attained parity they would cease the buildup of their forces, seeing no useful purpose in going further,” Nitze later recounted.¹⁶ He called the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Major General Daniel Graham, to ask on what evidence this estimate had been based. “It turned out that they had no factual evidence whatever; the estimate merely reflected their own consensus based on guesswork and hope.”¹⁷

The methodology came down to “mirror imaging”—the presumption that Soviet leaders held the same perspectives about war and peace as their US counterparts. Nitze “concluded from this experience [speaking with Daniel Graham] that in the absence of hard information to the contrary, the intelligence community was prone to assume that the Soviets would look at matters [as] Americans would.” Nitze rejected that assumption. The Soviets, as evidenced by their ability to withstand unbelievable losses in World War II and their construction of an extensive shelter system in Moscow—which Nitze had seen with his own eyes in the summer of 1955—were prepared to fight and survive a nuclear war. They would not settle with “parity” after erasing the US margin of nuclear superiority in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Neither on this occasion nor on many others did Nitze consider the prospect that by seeking strategic superiority the Soviets were, in fact, acting the same way as their US counterparts.

Nitze persuaded the leadership of his old office, the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s ISA, to launch a “Red Team” exercise to try to get into the mindsets of the opposing Soviet delegation. He engineered the appointment of his friend Charles Burton Marshall, now a SAIS professor, as head of the team. Nitze expected that the Soviets would approach the negotiations “as being merely one more arena in their ongoing confrontation with the United States.” The Red Team predicted that, rather than a means to establish genuine détente, the Soviets would consider arms control negotiations as essentially another venue for waging the Cold War. Here, again, Nitze did not consider that the US side might be doing the same thing.

Soviet negotiators possessed an inherent advantage in that they could stonewall at the negotiating table and then blame the intransigence of the West when the talks produced no results. Nitze felt the New York Times, Washington Post, and Time would amplify such a narrative, much as they had done in covering Vietnam. He had witnessed this firsthand during his eight years at the Pentagon under Kennedy and Johnson. So, with very modest expectations, Nitze prepared to depart for Helsinki. He expected a zero-sum game in which the Soviets sought “to obtain the best results possible for the USSR and the worst results possible for the United States.”¹⁸

Nitze knew what the United States ought to be seeking: a nuclear arms agreement to be implemented in two phases—limitations and reductions. These could be negotiated simultaneously. His “comprehensive plan” would restrict the ICBM arsenals of each side to five hundred launchers with a maximum volume of fifty cubic meters. There would be an overall cap of 1,300 across the other legs of the (air-, land-, and sea-based) nuclear triad. Nitze calculated that such figures would reduce overall Soviet throw weight by a factor of one-seventh. This would create a more stable relationship between Washington and Moscow. To achieve this objective, however, the US side needed to offer the Soviets incentives to reduce their burgeoning lead in “heavy missiles.” Possibilities could include US flexibility to negotiate restrictions on Safeguard, which Nitze had helped the administration get through the Senate for this express purpose; caps on the number of Minuteman III missiles that were being deployed; and potential restrictions on MIRVs, where the United States held a fleeting technological advantage.¹⁹

Negotiating both phases at once meant for Nitze that the Nixon administration could prevent the evaporation of US political will while maintaining support for the systems that gave the United States leverage. For instance, an agreement to restrict Safeguard might entice the Soviets to limit their production of SS-9s. However, if Congress subsequently cut the funds for the rest of Safeguard following the first phase, the Soviets would have no incentive to reduce SS-9s as part of a second phase. “The President should be aware, that if the agreement expires under circumstances where continuation on the same terms would be disadvantageous to us, we may not then be able to negotiate an adequately improved agreement,” Nitze purportedly told Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard. “Failure to negotiate a new agreement after expiration of the first could result in an arms race substantially more serious than the present one.”²⁰

When the SALT negotiations began in Helsinki on November 17, 1969, Nitze was gloomy. The international press corps that had camped out in the city expected a breakthrough. Yet there were no clear instructions from the White House, nor was there even a consensus position within the Nixon administration. The US delegation professed agreement with Soviet counterparts: there was to be no “linkage” between an arms control deal and Vietnam (or the Middle East). Yet—as Nitze and others would learn from Richard Nixon’s memoir—that was precisely what the president had in mind. And, in his back-channel negotiations with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was pursuing that objective.

Moreover, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee distrusted Nixon. While Democrats wanted to curb the nuclear arms race, they did not want to give the president credit for doing so. “In short, there was a general pressure on us to be flexible,” Nitze later recounted. “As a result, we never did have a solid US position to put forward, one that [had] the full support of Congress as well as of the administration.”²¹ The Soviets, who were keen observers of US politics, “tailored their negotiating tactics accordingly.”²² As a result the United States was not negotiating from a position of strength.

Nitze warned that the US side was falling into a trap. “[T]he Soviets are laying the foundation for a plausible agreement to curb the arms race in a manner inconsistent with approved US positions, the logic of which, however, will be difficult to resist,” as NSC staffer Helmut Sonnenfeldt summarized Nitze’s initial assessment. “The main points will be a zero level of ABMs, a ban on MIRVs, and [a] simple flight test ban, with third country threats met by politico-strategic consultations. They may also have in mind a halt to further construction of offensive launchers, if the above conditions are met.” “This position may be difficult, [Nitze] feels, unless we lay foundation for limiting and reducing offensive launchers, while permitting MIRVs and nationwide ABMs, or by guiding a MIRV test ban in the direction of the [o]ption that provides for limit on number of SS-9 and throw-weight. If, however, we want to move toward a MIRV ban, then there may be advantages in raising moratorium now rather than postponing.”²³ This depiction underscores the extent to which Nitze’s cynicism could get the better of him. The fact that the Soviets aspired to seek a ban on MIRVs meant—to him—that the United States ought to oppose a MIRV ban.

As the Verification Panel reconvened following the first round of SALT, Nitze associated himself with a group believing “that reductions are the most dramatic, yet serious, proposal we could make other than proposing a MIRV ban and that reducing offensive missile potential on both sides would be advantageous for the United States because otherwise, the Soviets will build up an enormous advantage over us in offensive missile payload.”²⁴ This distinction between limitation and reduction lost sight of the main thing that interested President Nixon—obtaining a deal.

On March 25, 1970, the president convened a meeting of the US delegation and Kissinger. Nixon pondered whether the Soviets might one day agree to on-site inspections to verify that they were adhering to a test ban that went beyond the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and set limits on testing yields. To no one’s surprise, Nitze expressed doubt. On MIRVs, Nixon stated: “I want to hear Paul Nitze’s argument.” Nitze reiterated the president’s criteria for “sufficiency,” as he had articulated the previous fall, meaning a second-strike capability, no temptation for a Soviet first-strike, and no “great disparity in damage capability.”²⁵ “The United States is the first nation in the world in strength,” Nixon responded. “In terms of diplomacy, I would not like to see the President of the United States in a situation with a significant Soviet advantage. I don’t want them 2–1 over us, they with ABM and we not, etc., etc.,” the president went on to say. “We can’t let the world know we are #2.”²⁶

All the men in the room wanted the United States to be number one. Nitze saw the means toward that end as a robust, comprehensive arms deal crafted entirely on its own terms. He, however, did not have to deal with any other foreign policy problem, and he did not have to run for reelection. For Nixon and Kissinger, SALT was linked to their efforts to extricate US forces from Vietnam and restore US prestige on the world stage. Their reasoning accorded with Charles Burton Marshall’s Red Team’s analysis of Soviet leaders’ intentions toward SALT: waging the Cold War more effectively.

“We can’t let the world know we are #2,” Nitze agreed with the president. “To get assurance of destruction, we need MIRV.” MIRVs were necessary for the same logic that Nitze had urged the pursuit of the hydrogen bomb back in late 1949: “[The Soviets] will go to MIRV.” After which US Minuteman silos and B-52 bomber bases would be vulnerable to a Soviet first strike. US strategic forces would have to be reconfigured to emphasize the sea-based leg of the triad, something that could not be achieved until 1978, after Nixon left office. Only reductions could achieve the criteria that Nixon had laid out. “I am not at all sure it is negotiable,” Nitze told the president and his advisers. In short, “There is certainly no panacea.”²⁷

Nitze was backtracking his stance of the previous year, when he advocated for banning MIRVs. “Two considerations predominated in my changed thinking,” he later recounted—without reflecting on how Soviet aspirations for a MIRV ban might have shaped this change in thinking—“first, our greater reliance on MIRV technology; and second, my waning confidence that on-site inspection would solve the problem of monitoring a MIRV ban.”²⁸ On the latter, Nitze was persuaded by a conversation with his Soviet counterpart, who explained that one side could easily switch out MIRVs for individual warheads just before the arrival of inspectors.

The Problem of Fixed Land-Based Missiles with MIRVs

Fixed land-based MIRVs complicated the nuclear arms race. The United States could leverage its industrial base and superior miniaturization technology to produce MIRVs to place on its fleet of Minutemen III missiles. Yet the Soviets would inevitably catch up. Whether their own MIRVs proved to be more accurate was a second-order problem. Fixed land-based MIRVs on either side were strategically too important not to launch upon warning of an imminent attack from the opposing side. Such a warning could turn out to be a false alarm. Yet the missiles would already be in the air. With the early indications of an attack, US or Soviet leadership would have no choice but to “use them or lose them.”

In a 1969 article, “To Cap the Volcano,” former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy wrote: “In light of the certain prospect of retaliation, there has been literally no chance at all that any sane political authority, in either the United States or the Soviet Union, would consciously choose to start a nuclear war.”²⁹ Bundy’s prospect was “true for the past, the present and the foreseeable future.” Yet he and Nitze had both participated in meetings in 1961 where President Kennedy and his advisers discussed nuclear options over Berlin. In 1950, Nitze weighed in the prospect of atomic use in Korea. There had been at least some chance that the US president would have gone in that direction—especially had Khrushchev not backed down over Berlin and Cuba. And even if there was no chance, it did not hold that the situation remained constant in a world where MIRVs made fixed land-based missile silos exponentially more valuable. In the scenario of “use them or lose them,” the US president or Soviet premier would be operating under the assumption that the other side had already started a nuclear war, and he would be merely retaliating.

There was also the prospect of a “non-sane” Soviet political authority who would take out US land-based forces to preempt what he anticipated to be an impending attack. Such a “counterforce” strike would spare US cities. Would the US president retaliate against Soviet cities, knowing that this action would precipitate a Soviet strike on US cities? Such was Nitze’s premise as he started to flesh out as a scenario for US defeat in a nuclear war. He was certain that, short of starting an actual war, the Soviets—influenced by the proliferation of MIRVs—might be emboldened to take risks everywhere.

When it came to SALT, Kissinger kept the US delegation—including its head Gerard Smith—as well as Secretary of State William Rogers, in the dark. Instead, he negotiated via a back channel with the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin. Kissinger’s exploits notwithstanding, the SALT delegation produced the “Vienna Option” of 1970, which separated weapons that could hit the Soviets—medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and forward-based systems, which included US fighter bombers in Europe—from the counting formulas for strategic arms. Under terms worked out by the delegation, SALT consisted only of land-based missiles, submarine-based missiles, and bombers that the Americans and Soviets had targeted at each other and with a range greater than the closest distance between the Soviet Union and the continental United States. The “Vienna Option” grouped US and allied missiles that could strike the Soviet Union with Soviet missiles that could not reach farther than US allies. “Non-strategic” systems could not reach the American homeland. This was a critical distinction that ultimately redounded to the US advantage.

The Problem of Missile Defense

Following the lackluster first round of SALT, Nitze helped craft a plan to introduce a draft ABM agreement in early 1970. With Congress on the hunt to eliminate Safeguard, Nitze urged the Nixon administration to play the ABM card as quickly as possible. Not only were the Soviets expanding the Galosh system around Moscow, they were constructing another one (Talinn) to protect against missiles breaching their perimeter. Nitze pressed the administration to propose either a ban on ABM altogether or limit them to two sites: one to protect the “national capital region” and a faraway one to protect a missile field—in the US case, one of the Minuteman fields in North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, or Missouri.

Critics of détente played up the fact that the Soviets had installed an ABM defense system around Moscow. Yet they seldom acknowledged that it comprised nuclear-tipped interceptors that would obliterate the outskirts of the city and fail to stop all incoming missiles. There was virtually no chance that Congress would ever approve such a system around a US city—or that suburban residents would allow nuclear-tipped anti-missile batteries in their backyards.³⁰ In other words, placing restrictions on ABM would prevent the Soviets from building something for which a US counterpart was politically impossible.

Integrating ABM restrictions into the SALT negotiations was a challenging task, however. At a June 24, 1970, meeting of the Verification Panel, Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard argued that “NCA [national capital region option] is not a very useful approach for us.” Gerard Smith agreed: “Raising the Zero ABM will confuse negotiations.”³¹ In subsequent meetings in Washington and rounds with the Soviets alternating between Helsinki and Vienna, Nixon’s advisers and negotiators debated whether to pursue a limited or outright ban on ABM defense. From Nitze’s perspective, the Soviets would never dismantle the elaborate system they had constructed around Moscow. As he had seen firsthand in the summer of 1955, the city also had a complicated civil defense system designed to shelter or evacuate millions of its citizens. Galosh was the first line of defense in limiting damage from a nuclear attack. Demanding that the Soviets give it up was not feasible.

Others recognized the vital importance of Galosh to Soviet security. The Soviets needed a defense against China, as Gerard Smith said to President Nixon in an NSC meeting on June 30, 1971. “I think there is another reason the Soviets want the Moscow System,” Nitze interjected. “The Soviet High Command, which meets in Moscow, is the main thing to be protected.” This was a long-standing assumption for which there was no solid evidence to support or disprove it. However, Nitze felt there was no solid evidence to rule out that the Soviets wanted to protect the entire country from nuclear attack. “The Soviets will continue to have a light defense of Moscow while continuing to vigorously pursue R&D for thick defense [of the rest of the country] which they would also like to have.” Nitze concurred with Nixon’s assessment that Soviet leaders held an “emotional attachment” to the defense of Moscow—one that Nixon did not apparently hold for Washington, DC. While the Soviet position in the SALT negotiations was to limit ABM interceptors to one hundred, Nitze was convinced they were bluffing.³²

Nitze spent the next few months crafting the basis for an ABM agreement. The peculiarities of the English and Russian languages made this about more than just a matter of numbers. “Nitze feels good progress is being made on developing common language, on well-defined differences, on the definitions and conditions that go into an ABM agreement,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Gardiner Tucker wrote Deputy Secretary of Defense Packard after speaking with Nitze on September 11, 1971.

Nitze was more upbeat about ABM than the rest of SALT since he believed there had been a rapid deterioration in the overall strategic balance since 1969. Anticipating that the Department of Defense was about to launch a campaign against Kissinger’s proposed limits on strategic forces, Wayne Smith of the NSC staff wrote Kissinger on October 6, 1971, pointing to “recent remarks by Paul Nitze to the effect that the question of survivability of strategic forces under a SALT agreement had changed radically since last March.” Smith warned Kissinger—who could not have been pleased—that “we need to look again at our entire proposal in light of the numerical growth of Soviet forces and of the developments … disclosed by recent photography.”³³

The Imperfections of SALT I

Gerard Smith, not Nitze, headed the US SALT delegation. Unfortunately for him, Kissinger continually undermined his authority. President Nixon had instructed the national security adviser to emerge with a deal before the November 1972 election. Whatever insight Nixon may have gleaned from Nitze’s knowledge about nuclear weapons during the first year and a half of his administration was overshadowed by that political objective. In a meeting with Smith and Deputy National Security Advisor Alexander Haig on March 21, 1972 (at which Kissinger was not present), Nixon suggested that Nitze’s role should be to generate Democratic support when it came time to secure the Senate’s advice and consent for the Interim Agreement. SALT I was not a treaty requiring the approval of two-thirds of the Senate; the barrier to success was lower. The ABM Treaty, in contrast, required approval by two-thirds of a Senate, in which Democrats held a ten-seat majority.

More important than obtaining an agreement or even holding the upcoming summit—which Nixon professed his willingness to cancel—was to ratchet up pressure against the North Vietnamese in retaliation for the Easter Offensive and force them to accept a deal at negotiations in Paris. Nixon needed this to occur in advance of the November presidential election. Kissinger kept the US SALT delegation sequestered in Helsinki in the leadup to Nixon’s signing of SALT I and the ABM Treaty in Moscow on May 26, 1972. He and Nixon arrived in Moscow before the final agreement on the Interim Agreement’s terms. At the last minute, Kissinger finally relented and told Smith to come to the signing ceremony and bring Nitze along.³⁴

Nitze’s return to Moscow was inglorious. Detained at the airport, initially blocked from getting into the US embassy, he announced himself to a marine as the former secretary of the navy and was placed in a headlock. Nitze arrived at the signing ceremony for SALT just after Nixon and Kissinger had signed the agreements and departed. Nitze regarded the ABM Treaty as incrementally positive. On the other hand, SALT I encapsulated his concerns from the start: an interim deal concocted to meet a political timetable would not achieve the objectives of arresting the Soviet buildup and restoring US strength.

Upon their return from Moscow, Nixon and Kissinger plotted a strategy for shepherding both SALT I and the ABM Treaty through the Senate. The president considered Nitze one of the rare few who could advocate for the administration’s policies in front of skeptics such as Democratic senators, academic elites, and the editorial board of the New York Times. On June 14, 1972, Nixon asked Kissinger whether Nitze was really on board.³⁵ Grudgingly, Nitze agreed to testify before the Senate. In a June 17 meeting of the Verification Panel, he expressed doubts about how the administration presented the Interim Agreement (SALT I) to Congress. Nitze thought it should have been linked to a request for commitments to US strategic modernization. He also bridled at the suggestion that Soviet diesel submarines were not threatening the American homeland, “What do you mean they can’t reach us!” he exclaimed. “These ‘G’ class subs have been on station against the continental US and now they plan to use them against our allies.” He noted that they had also been “on station against us” during the Cuban Missile Crisis and afterward. When he was secretary of the navy, they had been “a matter of great concern to us.” “Sir, that was a long time ago,” CIA analyst Bruce Clarke responded. “They have been carried for at least the last five years as only a peripheral threat.”³⁶

Nitze would not let go of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The danger of SALT—as Nitze had stated at the outset—was that Congress and the US public would consider the strategic arms competition to have ended. He feared that Congress would not appropriate the funds necessary for systems that provided leverage to constrain the Soviet arsenal, which would continue to grow. Only through a reduction in Soviet forces could the two sides reach a point of strategic stability that would actually lessen the chances of nuclear war. That remained his key takeaway from the Cuban Missile Crisis. Chastened by the real prospect of nuclear war, the American people had mistakenly accepted the premise of MAD and let Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara impose an arbitrary limit of one thousand Minutemen.

Moreover, Kissinger’s SALT interventions meant that the United States wound up taking shortcuts. The national security adviser was bound to give up something in the final hours by arriving in Moscow for the summit before the deal was settled. It was only a matter of time before Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson and others demanded to know what Kissinger had conceded.

Ultimately, SALT I was an imperfect agreement that yielded modest results. Its intention was to slow down the arms race, which did not happen. Even with comparative and absolute advantages in MIRV technologies, US negotiators declined to leverage this strength to take off the table the weapons that posed the greatest threat to peace. Adherents to MAD claimed that ABMs were destabilizing. Yet MIRVs were far more destabilizing than ABM systems. And there was no way that the United States would construct a perimeter of nuclear-tipped interceptors to shoot down all Soviet missiles.

If the agreement was imperfect, Kissinger does not deserve all the blame. Never before had leaders from the United States and the Soviet Union (or any other country) signed a pact limiting offensive nuclear weapons. The president had tasked him to obtain one before the election. And he did, even if it was one that failed to stop the main strategic threat to US land-based forces: the Soviet SS-9, which was far larger than anything in the US arsenal (and would evolve into the even-more-menacing SS-18 “Satan”).

Nitze presumed that the Soviets intended for this line of heavy missiles to provide, potentially, a “first strike” capability to destroy US Minuteman silos. No other justification was plausible. The SS-9 was too big to be used merely against US cities. Fixed land-based missiles could not be part of a secure secondary strike reserve force. They only made sense to be used first; or, to deter the US side from launching a first strike against them. The US side could make marginal adjustments, such as improved accuracy of the Minuteman III and its reentry vehicles. As a signatory to the NPT, the United States had pledged only to modernize—not increase—its strategic arsenal and to pursue negotiations to reduce overall stockpiles.

The “modernized” mainstay of US land-based forces—the “Missile Experimental,” or MX—consisted of miniaturized warheads and a sleeker delivery vehicle. Yet neither the Nixon administration nor its successor could muster the political will to fund it. As subsequent presidents would find, a combustible mix of technical and political considerations stymied policy makers’ attempts to base such an inviting target in the US heartland.

SALT II

The US Senate ratified the permanent ABM Treaty on August 3, 1972. The following month, it voted to approve the Interim Agreement (SALT I). Authorization of that five-year accord came with an amendment sponsored by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (whose staff included Nitze’s former intern, Richard Perle) requiring that any future agreement “would not limit the United States to levels of intercontinental strategic forces inferior to the limits provided for the Soviet Union.”³⁷ The Jackson Amendment hovered over strategic arms control for the remainder of the Cold War.

That fall, with Nixon headed toward a smashing victory over Senator George McGovern, his administration planned for the next phase of negotiations. SALT II meant not only to slow the arms race but to reduce arsenals. Unlike SALT I, it was intended to be a permanent treaty of indefinite duration. An initial round of SALT II took place in Moscow, yet negotiators bided their time, awaiting the outcome of the presidential election.

In a Verification Panel meeting on October 31, 1972, Nitze laid out what he considered the priorities to be after the November 7 election. To get real reductions, US negotiators should consider equal aggregates of forces. They needed to insist on a definition of “strategic forces” that included Soviet Backfire bombers and excluded US forward-based systems. The main objective should be curbing “throw-weight,” or the gross sum of payloads that the Soviet missile fleet could launch into space. “Equal aggregates” were insufficient without equal limits on missile throw-weight, Nitze insisted, as the latter was not comparable to bomber payloads.³⁸

Limiting Soviet throw weight offered a way to reduce Soviet heavy missiles armed with MIRVs. This became Nitze’s obsession. Although he had previously told Nixon there was “no panacea,” restrictions on throw weight solved the problem of MIRV counting (which was impossible through “National Technical Means”—since overhead surveillance cannot discern the number of reentry vehicles atop a ballistic missile). Even with on-site inspections, which the Soviets had always ruled out, technicians could apparently switch the number of reentry vehicles on a missile in only six hours—as Nitze was certain—making it easy to cheat. Throw weight was measurable, and its sum was countable.

Nitze’s pessimism about concluding sequential agreements proved justified. Congress provided no real leverage for US negotiators in 1973. Critics of détente pounced on the fact that the Soviets held a numerical advantage in an arms race that was set to continue. Moreover, arms accords had not curtailed Soviet interventions in the Third World.

Following Nixon’s landslide reelection, the president cleaned house. Gerard Smith departed the ACDA, and a purge of that body ensued.³⁹ Suspicions about General Royal Allison’s “firmness” apparently led the Joint Chiefs of Staff to replace him with General Edward Rowny, a hard-liner. Within the Pentagon, the departure of Melvin Laird—whom Nixon and Kissinger had long distrusted—preceded those of Johnny Foster and Gardiner Tucker, two figures respected, who remained as the Department of Defense representative to SALT II under the new secretary of defense, Elliot Richardson. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger retained the title of national security adviser.

Nitze was skeptical about SALT II from the start. As he saw it, the principal US goal should be to get the Soviets to accept the concept of “essential equivalence,” which the Jackson Amendment had codified.⁴⁰ That would be difficult. “If the problem is a domestic one, we can demonstrate that we have made a serious effort to negotiate a MIRV ban,” Nitze stated at a meeting of the Verification Panel on August 13, 1973—even though such a deal was unlikely to materialize. “We need to make a real try to reduce throw weight or we have to improve the survivability of our own forces.” Yet neither of those things seemed likely to happen either. Kissinger asked, “What would we want to get strategic stability?” Nitze responded, “We would want a provisional MIRV ban, but that’s not negotiable. I don’t see the types of measures that would be negotiable which would reduce our problem of survivability.” The United States should consider building mobile land missiles, which could theoretically survive a Soviet first strike. Yet the administration could not count on Congress to nurture programs that would resolve US vulnerabilities. That meant the Soviets had no incentive to trade away something they knew threatened to exploit US vulnerabilities. “We have one concrete problem,” professed an exasperated Kissinger at one point. “The negotiation opens in September and our negotiator needs instructions.”⁴¹

On October 6, 1973, Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack against Israel during the high holiday of Yom Kippur. Initially caught flat-footed, the Israel Defense Force repelled the attack—despite the Nixon administration’s wavering on its commitment to resupply Israel.⁴² In a moment that has attracted considerable attention among scholars of the role of nuclear weapons in international affairs, Kissinger ordered the defense readiness condition (DEFCON) level lowered (i.e., closer to nuclear war) to signal US resolve in light of Brezhnev’s threat to intervene.⁴³ Nitze played no role in this oft-cited example of successful nuclear signaling, and did not speculate about this moment either then or in later years. It likely would not have mattered to him. His main takeaway was that the Soviets had greenlighted the attack on Israel—just as they must have done with Korea in 1950. In 1973, it revealed to Nitze Moscow’s lack of commitment to détente.⁴⁴

Watergate and US Diplomacy

Meanwhile, President Nixon was busy trying to deflect revelations about the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington. Nitze and State Department representative Alexis Johnson, following a blunt conversation in November 1973 with Soviet negotiator Vladimir Semonov, concluded that the Soviets would stonewall on SALT II so long as the Watergate scandal weighed on the president.⁴⁵ Nitze returned home and wrote a paper he distributed to the new team working on arms control. “As they say in the journalism trade,” he later characterized it, “Henry [Kissinger] ‘spiked’ my paper.”⁴⁶ Nitze confided in the newly appointed secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, that he was about to resign.

However, Nitze stayed on. He exhorted the Verification Panel in November and December to focus on reducing Soviet throw weight, scoffing at any proposal that did not do so. “In addition to the advantage in number of missiles MIRVed,” another interim agreement with the Soviets “would also give them a substantial advantage in throw-weight,” he wrote on November 23.⁴⁷ Nor should counting be limited solely to the throw weight of MIRV missiles. “We’re only talking about MIRVed throw-weight. They would sacrifice some excess throw-weight,” Nitze chided the group on December 28. Soviet single warheads—which had much higher yields than US equivalents—contributed to the importance of using throw weight as the metric. “Trying to get throw-weight equality is more important than MIRVed throw-weight.”⁴⁸

There was one other consideration. In a substantive session on January 30, 1974, Nitze seized on the other problem with MIRV negotiations: the United States had in development the Undersea Long-Range Missile System (ULMS) and its planned follow-on system, ULMS II. This would evolve into the Trident II SLBM, a highly secure counterforce weapon. There was no way that Congress would support the SLBM program, which was considerably more expensive than land-based missile launchers, if it were equipped only with a missile carrying only a single reentry vehicle (RV). Nitze stated in his consistently logical approach: “We need 3.5 million pounds of throw-weight for our SLBM program. We want 1.3 million for ICBMs. That’s an aggregate of 4.8.” To which Kissinger responded: “We can’t sell [to Congress] 1.3 land-based and 3.5 SLBMs.”⁴⁹

Almost twenty years after their initial encounter in the Council on Foreign Relations study group, Nitze and Kissinger were still arguing over the details of what the Soviets would or would not accept—and what Congress would or would not accept. At issue here were the fine details of a nuclear agreement the basic premise of which most Americans thought was a good thing. Few congressmen understand, or cared, about “MIRVd throw-weight” versus “aggregate throw-weight.” The headline issue for critics of détente was that SALT I had failed to stop the nuclear arms race and that Soviet risk-taking abroad had only increased.

Nitze attempted to extricate himself from SALT. In January 1974, amid the haggling between him and Kissinger, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger offered Nitze the position of assistant secretary of defense for ISA, the job that he had once held and been offered on two other occasions. Yet Senator Barry Goldwater apparently blamed him for Lyndon Johnson’s notorious 1964 Daisy Ad, in which a young girl plucking flowers was interrupted by a nuclear blast. At Goldwater’s request, the White House rescinded the nomination.

On April 23, 1974, Kissinger joked to Schlesinger and Deputy National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft that “Brezhnev’s obsession on warheads was like Nitze’s on throw-weight.”⁵⁰ This comparison was not without merit. A few minutes later, in a meeting of the Verification Committee, Nitze continued to point out flaws in the US positions on SALT II. The conversation went nowhere. “Reductions coupled with MIRV restrictions would be useful, but reductions as a substitute for MIRV restrictions would be useless,” Kissinger stated. “I’m not sure,” Nitze responded. “It depends whether you look just at the survivability of Minuteman or at the whole strategic situation. It helps the latter.” The two men continued a fruitless dialog:

SECRETARY KISSINGER: Why?

MR. NITZE: It reduces their throw-weight and targets. We come out better on the difference between a first and second strike.

SECRETARY KISSINGER: They won’t reduce land-based missiles.

MR. NITZE: I admit there is a question of negotiability.⁵¹

“It’s hard to foresee what we might want in five or ten years,” Nitze said later on in the Verification Meeting, which would be his last. “We might not want a defense of Washington in the next five years, but we might in the future.”⁵² On May 28, 1974, Nitze submitted his letter of resignation. Failing to elicit a response, he wrote again on June 14, unilaterally terminating his appointment. He also released a public statement citing the ongoing Watergate scandal: “Until the Office of the Presidency has been restored to its principal function of upholding the Constitution and taking care of the fair execution of the laws, and thus be able to function effectively at home and abroad, I see no real prospect for reversing certain unfortunate trends in the evolving situation.”⁵³

The explanation in Nitze’s letter was not altogether true. He had worked for the Nixon administration long after the Watergate scandal broke and had no problem accepting Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger’s offer to become assistant secretary of defense for ISA prior to Goldwater’s nixing it. His frustration mounted when the US side did not take his advice on SALT II. The ABM Treaty was worthwhile, yet it was also premised on the search for a permanent agreement to follow. There could be no permanent agreement that Congress could ratify under the terms of the Jackson Amendment so long as the Nixon administration disregarded Nitze’s concerns. At the same time, Congress was not willing to sign off on the funding needed to give US negotiators leverage in the negotiations.

Still, Nitze’s point about the damage of Watergate was valid. Nixon complained that his critics were weakening the executive branch and, by extension, US SALT negotiators in Geneva. The president, however, bore responsibility for those circumstances through his actions. Nitze surmised that the Soviets were taking advantage of Kissinger, in the summer of 1974, by accepting his proposal to reorient SALT II as a ten-year agreement rather than a treaty of unlimited duration. During those years, Moscow could continue its buildup while Washington slashed military budgets. He was probably correct in that assessment.

Weakness

Upon his inauguration on August 1974, President Gerald Ford said that the United States’ “long national nightmare is over.”⁵⁴ That did not change Paul Nitze’s sense of how the Soviets perceived the United States. “With our three-hundred-million-dollar budget ceiling, our chronic balance of payments problems, and the approaching onset of double-digit inflation adding further to our economic woes, they had to see some prospect of our not adding to our strategic programs sufficient additional real resources to change the relative trends.”⁵⁵ Here—as opposed to the debate over strategic parity—Nitze presumed that Soviet leaders thought the same way that US leaders would in their place.

After meeting with Soviet general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, in Vladivostok in November 1974, Ford and Kissinger came away with a draft formula placing equal ceilings on the aggregate mix of ballistic missiles and long-range bombers, as well as an agreement to exclude forward-based systems from a potential SALT II. Outside of government, Nitze did not share the optimistic tenor following Vladivostok. Those agreements placed no restrictions on Soviet throw weight, his favorite metric.

Nevertheless, Nitze afforded Kissinger the benefit of his opinion at lunch with him alone in January 1975. From Kissinger’s perspective, the Vladivostok formula was the best that the administration could have expected. He shared with Nitze an account of a recent meeting with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, who had told him that leaders in the Kremlin did not regard the Ford administration as reliable. Now the problem was no longer Watergate but rather the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House of Representatives. Both were holding extensive hearings looking into the executive branch—the White House and the CIA. “Any government that can’t protect its intelligence and security agencies is not to be taken seriously,” Dobrynin told Kissinger.

Nitze and Kissinger believed that a weakened presidency was bad for the United States. While Nitze did not find himself under fire during the Church and Pike hearings, he, by his later admission, participated in surveillance and subterfuge against US citizens in the anti-war movement during his time as deputy secretary of defense. Nitze’s allegiance to Nixon personally was limited. What got to him was the glee with which members of his own Democratic Party continued to go after the institution of the presidency even after President Lyndon Johnson declined to run again in 1968 and Richard Nixon stepped down in 1974. Supporters of 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern felt vindicated when Nixon resigned in advance of impeachment. Still, from Nitze’s perspective, to revive the call “Come Home, America” was to betray the party’s noble tradition of applying US power toward noble ends. And to destroy the power of the US presidency was to neuter the country’s ability to compete with the Soviet Union.

“During the late 1940s and early 1950s, it had been a Democratic administration that had led the way toward the economic and political recovery of those great areas of the Eurasian landmass which had either been devasted by World War II or had to face the difficult transition from colonialism to independence,” Nitze later wrote. In leading such efforts, the Democratic Party had called for solid defense and alliances to oppose aggression. “But by the mid-1970s, this consensus had largely broken down under the divisive effects of Vietnam and the unsettling political atmosphere generated by the Watergate affair.”⁵⁶ Nitze remained a Democrat, yet he regarded Harry Truman—not George McGovern—as the embodiment of first principles. Beyond a consistent preference for raising taxes—to support defense spending—he did not have much to say about domestic politics. His creed of bringing harmony from the “tension between opposites” mattered more than political partisanship. No other national security figure of his stature served in government during the entirety of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and the entirety of the Nixon administration.

Accepting former New York governor Averell Harriman’s invitation to participate in a foreign policy study group for the Democratic Advisory Council shortly after his resignation from the SALT II delegation in 1974, Nitze was dismayed by his younger colleagues, whose views were forged by watching the disintegration of the US polity over Vietnam. Not surprisingly, given every one of his previous stances since World War II, Nitze emphasized to younger (and some older) colleagues the necessity of increasing the defense budget. He allowed that second-generation national security practitioners recognized nuclear proliferation to be a serious problem. But such proliferation, he insisted, was really the consequence of a growing strategic imbalance that favored the Soviet Union.⁵⁷ Others spoke about human rights and the importance of the Helsinki Accords which President Gerald Ford, General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, and the heads of thirty-three other nations signed in 1975. To Nitze, the US promotion of human rights was hypocritical and pointless.

From outside the government, during the Ford administration, Nitze involved himself in waging a personal Cold War against Kissinger (even though they took time out to lunch together). Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt, who had worked for Nitze when the latter was assistant secretary of defense ISA and the secretary of the navy, took up the mantle of opposing Kissinger on arms control and pretty much everything else. This intra-agency spat was picked up in the press and made its way into international negotiations, including Kissinger’s July 15, 1974, meeting with the People’s Republic of China ambassador, Huang Chen. When Chen mentioned reading press reports about Zumwalt’s criticism, Kissinger responded. “When I read them I get scared myself! We don’t have the practice in our country of sending our military leaders off to the provinces.”⁵⁸ Nor was there any way to stop Paul Nitze, who spent the rest of the decade as a thorn in the side of incumbent national security teams.

The Soviet deployment of the SS-18 missile in 1975 reinforced every one of Nitze’s critiques about US nuclear strategy over the previous decade. Ten MIRVs on fixed land-based missiles created a scenario of “use them or lose them” that invited a first strike in a crisis such as the one that Washington and Moscow had experienced with Berlin and Cuba. Worse, the Soviets were building them without limits, while the US side had arbitrarily capped its own production of its Minuteman forces. Paul Nitze saw the ABM Treaty as incrementally positive, yet otherwise saw arms control agreements with the Soviets as unhelpful.

“Neither side need acquire more than a second-strike capability and, if either does, the other need not respond since its security is not threatened,” as the eminent political scientist Robert Jervis once put it.⁵⁹ “Need not” did not capture what both sides in the Cold War actually did. There was simply no way that US policy makers could say that Soviet SS-18 did not threaten US security. The United States was pursuing a new generation of SLBMs—the Trident I—yet the destabilizing effects of heavy land-based ICBMs outweighed the advantages of a secure second-strike capability.

During the initial rounds of SALT, the US delegation had the opportunity to leverage its short-term advantage on MIRV deployment yet failed to do so. “I would say in retrospect,” Kissinger stated in a background briefing in December 1974, “that I wish I had thought through the implications of a MIRVed world more thoughtfully in 1969 and 1970 than I did.”⁶⁰

During those earlier years, Nitze initially supported a MIRV ban but then reversed course for three main reasons: first, he and Kissinger simply did not want to give them up. The second was that the US side thought the Soviets would not negotiate over them. The third was that he became entranced by the technicalities of verification.

Nitze, Kissinger, and Nixon shared a desire to regain strategic superiority. All three men concurred that the United States had prevailed in the Cuban Missile Crisis—at least, in the short term—because of overwhelming US strength. All three agreed that they could not muster enough political support to build up the number of US missiles. Their views differed over what exactly regaining strategic superiority would look like. Nixon and Kissinger made a virtue out of necessity by attempting to play up US technological advantages. Yet they did not share Nitze’s sense that an arms control accord needed to be crafted on its terms, independently from the other Cold War political flashpoints. The circularity of Nitze’s approach was that he regarded overwhelming US strength as a prerequisite for achieving a strategic arms accord, which itself was meant to restore US preponderance. None of the principals—Nixon, Kissinger, or Nitze—realized that the Soviets did not regard the SS-18 to be an element destabilizing US national security.

Political expediency, which had influenced Nixon’s and Kissinger’s approach to SALT, had negative consequences when it came to constraining the nuclear arms race. They had wanted a deal in advance of the 1972 presidential election in order to hit a political trifecta—China, Vietnam, and SALT—and succeeded.⁶¹ This trifecta came at a price. The Jackson Amendment stated that the Senate could never again sign off on a deal unless there was strict equality in numbers. Kissinger attempted to sell any disparity in numbers by reiterating that the United States had advanced technology and held a MIRV advantage. Both sides were led to invent categories of nuclear weapons, coming up with creative definitions of what constituted a nuclear warhead.

Nitze could do such things. In the spring of 1974, Director of the Office of Net Assessment Andrew Marshall, who had served on Kissinger’s NSC staff, tasked the Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense with preparing a comprehensive analysis of the strategic arms competition. The substance of the resulting study contained little beyond what Paul Nitze knew—or presumed to know—having participated in nearly all of the nuclear debates since the inception of the atomic era. “Both at the beginning and the end of the [1970s],” as his biographer Nicholas Thompson correctly states, “he knew more about nuclear weapons than almost any other man alive.”⁶² That did not mean his policy prescriptions were the right ones or that he was in a position to implement them. It meant he could offer the most authoritative and withering criticism of those who believed they had the right answers and were in places to put their ideas into motion.