US Strategic Arms Policy in the Cold War

Negotiation and Confrontation over SALT, 1969-1979

David Tal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351802642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the negotiations between the USA and the USSR on the limitation of strategic arms during the Cold War, from 1969 to 1979.

The negotiations on the limitation of strategic arms, which were concluded in two agreements SALT I and SALT II (with only the first ratified), marked a major change in the history of arms control negotiations. For the first time, in the relatively short history of nuclear weapons and negotiations over nuclear disarmament, the two major nuclear powers had agreed to put limits on the size of their nuclear strategic arms. However, the negotiations between the US and USSR were the easy part of the process. The more difficult part was the negotiations among the Americans. Through the study of a decade of negotiations on the limitation of strategic arms in the Cold War, this book examines the forces that either allowed US presidents and senior officials to pave a path toward a US arms limitation policy, or prevented them from doing so. Most importantly, the book discusses the meaning of these negotiations and agreements on the limitation of strategic arms, and seeks to identify the intention of the negotiators: Were they aiming at making the world a safer place? What was the purpose of the negotiations and agreements within US strategic thinking, both militarily and diplomatically? Were they aimed at improving relations with the Soviet Union, or only at enhancing the strategic balance as one component of the strategic nuclear deterrence between the two powers?

This book will be of much interest to students of Cold War history, arms control, US foreign policy and international relations in general.

1
SALT – the new era

Nixon’s years

Travelling on Apollo 8 few days before Christmas 1968, Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders were the first humans ever to see the far side of the moon. Inspired by the travel, Richard M. Nixon said in his inauguration address: “Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries. This can be such a moment.” Nixon was talking here not only about the astronauts. He was also looking forward to his presidency. As the astronauts were pioneers, being the first to do what they did, so Nixon intended to be the first to do what had not been done before. It was now the time, declared the new president, to discover new horizons on earth. And he would do it, because for the first time “people of the world want peace, and the leaders of the world are afraid of war.”¹

In making this solemn pledge, Nixon not only promised hope; he intended to pave a new path for his administration. He would go where his predecessors did not go. He would handle matters, including US foreign and arms control policies, differently. And Nixon seemed to be true to his words. He signed arms control agreements that many contemporaries and scholars regarded as great achievements for the cause of peace in the midst of the Cold War. With that, Nixon not only did what his predecessors did not do; he also did something that seemed to be unpredictable. After all, Nixon was an epitome of the Cold War warrior. And it was Nixon who said

If we pursue arms control as an end in itself, we will not achieve our end. The adversaries in the world are not in conflict because they are armed. They are armed because they are in conflict, and have not yet learned peaceful ways to resolve their conflicting national interests.²

So what happened? How come that a president who did not believe in the value of arms control and disarmament ended up signing agreements limiting the number of anti-ballistic missiles and freezing the number of certain offensive strategic arms? The answer is pretty simple. He did not do that as a means to reduce tensions with the Soviet Union or to advance the idea of peace. He did this because the United States was lagging behind the Soviet Union in the buildup of some kinds of strategic arms, mainly nuclear ballistic missiles, and there were two ways to prevent the United States from falling behind the Soviet Union: either to launch an intensive armament program, or to make the Soviet Union stop its strategic arms buildup. Nixon preferred the second path, which was cheaper, signing an agreement that would preserve the strategic balance between the two great powers. He did that with the help of his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger.

Nixon and Kissinger’s paths crossed throughout the years prior to Nixon’s invitation to Kissinger to join his administration. Nixon read Kissinger’s book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, and appreciated his thinking on nuclear weapons and foreign policy. Consequently, he decided that Kissinger would be his national security adviser.³ Kissinger, who under Nixon was the articulator of ideas and facilitator of the NSC’s mechanism, as well as an active participant in the formulation and implementation of US foreign policy, profoundly believed, as Nixon did, that armaments were the reflection of conflict, and not its cause. The major causes of war from the days of the Congress of Vienna (1815) – Kissinger’s area of expertise – and in the aftermath of the Second World War were political differences, not the accumulation of arms.⁴

And, indeed, the prime motive behind Nixon and Kissinger’s arms control policy was the Soviet Union’s closing the strategic gap with the United States. From the beginning of the nuclear race, the United States had been strategically superior to the Soviet Union. For years it had possessed more nuclear warheads and nuclear launching devices. That was no longer true in 1969. With the support of Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Soviet communist party, during the years 1965–1966 the Soviet military doubled the size of its strategic arsenal, which included intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM), and strategic bombers, thereby catching up with the American strategic forces. After that the Soviet ICBM force grew by about 300 new launchers every year.⁵

However, the impression that the United States had frozen its strategic arms’ development, leaving the Soviet Union to act without hindrance, is deceiving. In fact, it was the Johnson administration that made a calculated strategic decision not to continue building more strategic ballistic missiles. Instead, the United States invested in new types of strategic arms. At this point in time, when Nixon and Kissinger were planning their approach to the strategic arms limitation talks with the Soviet Union, the most advanced arms system the Pentagon was exploring was a new kind of a missile – the Multiple Independently-targeted Reentry Vehicle (MIRV), a “force multiplier.” It is a missile that carries several warheads in one container. It makes the journey to space, and back to earth, and at a certain altitude the container opens up, launching the multiple warheads at different targets, each warhead guided to a specific target. Thus, one single missile became much more effective, capable of hitting several targets simultaneously. Its role would be to swamp the enemy defense systems and to increase the destructive capabilities of US strategic missiles.⁶ With the MIRV, the meaning of nuclear balance had changed. Counting ICBMs, the Soviet Union was closing the strategic gap with the United States, and even took the lead. Counting warheads, with the MIRV, the United States was safely leading – and that is before counting the SLBMs and strategic bombers, where the United States was leading numerically.

In any case, Nixon and Kissinger were not bothered by the Soviet attainment of strategic parity with the United States. Kissinger was an enthusiastic apostle of the balance of power idea. He thought that in the nuclear age additional power would not necessarily provide additional security, as “a country might be strong enough to destroy an adversary, and yet no longer be able to protect its own population against attack.”⁷ A logical conclusion from this state of affairs was the need for arms control arrangements that would lead to a strategic balance. Thus, Kissinger’s goal was achieving sufficiency rather than superiority.⁸ An agreement on the limitation of strategic arms seemed to be the best and less costly way to retain the strategic equilibrium. It would stop the Soviet buildup of strategic arms, at almost no cost to the United States, as the United States would sign an agreement on the limitation of weapon systems that it did not intend to develop in the first place. “We are giving up nothing,” stated Kissinger during the final phase of negotiations on the limitation of strategic weapons.⁹ It did not hurt that SALT could also help Nixon domestically, creating for the president the image of a peace-seeker. And there was one more thing. Nixon considered the arms control negotiations not only as an end; it became also a means, in the service of Nixon’s foreign policy in general and détente in particular. Nixon intended to bring to the arms control negotiations a new construct, linking the negotiations on strategic arms limitations to other outstanding political problems. “This concept became known as linkage.”¹⁰

Linkage

It is almost natural for a new president to strive to break new paths, to come with new ideas and courses of action. Nixon was no exception, and one place he wanted to have his mark was in the making of US foreign policy. He was critical of the attitude of the Johnson and Kennedy administrations toward foreign policy. His predecessors were “held hostage” by their preoccupation with a single issue – John F. Kennedy with the Cold War and Lyndon B. Johnson with Vietnam – which, in turn, led “to the deterioration of policy on all fronts.” The United States needed a comprehensive approach to foreign policy, dealing with several issues concurrently and tying them up all together. Nixon would do just that; that at least was his intention.¹¹ The issue around which everything revolved was the relationship with the Soviet Union. Nixon argued that the Soviet Union had become “too powerful to ignore,” and thus, the United States must communicate and negotiate with it. He assumed that since the Communists’ foreign policy was influenced not only by ideology but also by pragmatism, the leaders of the two powers could work together to find ways to co-exist peacefully. Nixon also believed that the improvement of the relations with the Soviet Union would help him domestically. Kissinger told Anatoly Dobrynin that “the main concept of Nixon’s foreign policy is to seek ways to improve relations with the Soviet Union,” and that the president believed that such improvement – which would, of course, include agreement on the limitation of strategic arms – would ensure his “winning the next elections, since at least 80% of the electorate will then vote for him.”¹²

This was essentially the logic of détente, and this was the context for Nixon’s decision to endorse a comprehensive approach, which would prevent a situation where the United States would negotiate an agreement on the limitation of strategic arms with the Soviet Union, while the Soviets would use the talks “as a safety valve on intransigence elsewhere.” It would be illogical to assume that while there were tensions in one area, true cooperation would be possible somewhere else.¹³

The result was linkage – a comprehensive approach that would tie the talks on the limitation of strategic arms to outstanding Cold War political issues, and would enable the United States to use as leverage what was important to the Soviet Union to attain in return what was important to the United States.¹⁴ What mattered most to the United States was, of course, Vietnam, which Nixon described as “the most pressing problem I would have to deal with.” It was an open wound that tore apart the American society and politics, a wound that Nixon was determined to heal.¹⁵ Nixon and Kissinger believed that the road to peace in Vietnam did not in fact go through Hanoi, but rather through Moscow. They accused Moscow for supplying massive amounts of weapons to North Vietnam, thereby enabling Hanoi to continue the war and forestalling negotiations on a peace settlement, and believed that had the Soviets wished so, Hanoi would be ready to make peace with the United States.¹⁶ The other front was the Middle East, where the Soviet Union supported Egypt and Syria and the United States stood by Israel. The situation in the Middle East was volatile enough to make the Americans want to see the conflict resolved. The assumption at the National Security Council (NSC) was that the Soviet’s influence over Egypt made a re-eruption of a war in the Middle East imminent, and that the Soviet Union could advance a peace agreement if it wished so.¹⁷ As against these points of American interests, Nixon and Kissinger assumed that the Soviets were mostly interested in an agreement on the limitation of strategic arms and a trade agreement.¹⁸ That is, Nixon and Kissinger assumed that the Soviets wanted SALT so much, that they would be ready to pay a price for it. The result was creating a linkage between the negotiations on strategic arms limitations to other outstanding political problems.

Both Nixon and Kissinger were convinced of this linkage that they introduced a new approach to US foreign policy in general, and to its arms control policy in particular.¹⁹ Nixon was proud of the usefulness and innovation of the linkage, but for no real reason. To start with, the assumption that the Soviets were so eager to have an arms control agreement that they would pay the price the United States was planning to exact from them turned out to be completely wrong. The way Nixon and Kissinger reached conclusions regarding the Soviet attitude to SALT and the arms race was a demonstration of an acute problem that emerged time and again when Nixon and his team discussed the Soviet’s intentions and thinking. Simply put, they had no idea what the Soviet leaders were thinking, and they based American policy on assumptions that had no empirical basis whatsoever. A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report argued that, indeed, this was the case, without really providing any tangible evid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 SALT – the new era: Nixon’s years
• 2 SALT begins
• 3 From stalemate to breakthrough
• 4 Negotiating ABM limitations
• 5 The road to Moscow
• 6 Nixon in Moscow, May 1972
• 7 SALT resumes
• 8 From summit to summit
• 9 “From the glamorous times of détente into a time of testing” – Gerald Ford in power
• 10 The demise of SALT II
• 11 Carter’s SALT
• 12 The fall, rise and fall of SALT II
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index