The Control Agenda

A History of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks

Matthew J. Ambrose

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501712012
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Control Agenda is a sweeping account of the history of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), their rise in the Nixon and Ford administrations, their downfall under President Carter, and their powerful legacies in the Reagan years and beyond.

Matthew Ambrose pays close attention to the interplay of diplomacy, domestic politics, and technology, and finds that the SALT process was a key point of reference for arguments regarding all forms of Cold War decision making. Ambrose argues elite U.S. decision makers used SALT to better manage their restive domestic populations and to exert greater control over the shape, structure, and direction of their nuclear arsenals.

Ambrose also asserts that prolonged engagement with arms control issues introduced dynamic effects into nuclear policy. Arms control considerations came to influence most areas of defense decision making, while the measure of stability SALT provided allowed the examination of new and potentially dangerous nuclear doctrines. The Control Agenda makes clear that verification and compliance concerns by the United States prompted continuous reassessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions; assessments that later undergirded key U.S. policy changes toward the Soviet Union. Through SALT's many twists and turns, accusations and countercharges, secret backchannels and propaganda campaigns the specter of nuclear conflict loomed large.

1

ARMS CONTROL: CONTEXT AND PRECEDENTS

The first meeting of the SALT talks in 1969 was the culmination of more than a decade of work through one of the most turbulent periods of the postwar era. During this time, the most important features of the nuclear competition came into focus. The leaders of both superpowers became familiar with the implications of this competition and agreed on the need for negotiated measures to curb its worst excesses. These events took place in the context of geopolitical turmoil. Beginning with the Berlin Crisis of 1961, through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and ending with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the repression of the Prague Spring, this decade exhausted any appetite for brinksmanship among policy makers and their domestic populations. The combination of a budding strategic consensus and geopolitical turmoil left policy makers increasingly open to cooperative measures that limited the dangers of competition. By the end of the 1960s, both superpowers were actively seeking a more cooperative superpower relationship through the policy of détente, in which arms control would play a critical role.

International schemes for restricting weapons are not new. For instance, the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 restricted naval tonnage to a set ratio among the major powers. The Geneva Protocol of 1925 banned the use of chemical weapons in war. As policies, these initiatives were of a piece with the disarmament movement, which was strongly influenced by the same Progressive Era discourse that produced the League of Nations and the Kellogg-Briand Pact. These agreements set precedents for the later arms control movement.¹

“Arms control” came to define a specific movement in the 1950s that was formed by an intellectual union of several groups. The first such group was the nuclear disarmament movement, which grew out of criticism of the strategic bombing of cities during World War II. The second group was traditional liberals concerned that the arms race was fueling the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The third group consisted of civilian intellectuals attempting to develop credible strategies for the use of nuclear weapons. Prior to the development and popularization of the arms control concept, these groups were leery of one another. Civilian nuclear theorists responded skeptically to traditional disarmament proposals because they believed that nuclear weapons were now a permanent feature of the international system and could not be “un-invented.” Traditional liberals resisted association with impolitic and radical nuclear disarmament proponents because the United States had built and used the first atomic bombs. The disarmament and liberal schools both felt disgusted by the callousness with which defense intellectuals described nuclear scenarios in “megadeaths,” and both suspected that thinking too seriously about how to use nuclear weapons might cause countries to feel more comfortable using them.²

What nearly all of these groups could agree on, dating back to the disarmament advocates of the Progressive Era, was that arms races were dangerous and that unbridled competition in arms eventually makes war inevitable. This position had some historical basis. Before World War I, Great Britain, previously the dominant naval power in Europe, raced to stay ahead of the rising naval power of Imperial Germany. This race included several metrics, including gross tonnage, the number of ships in the fleet, and which country could build the largest single ship. The competition in naval arms became frightfully expensive over time and was a source of rising international tension. After the war, the naval arms race was commonly held to be a contributing factor in setting off the conflict. As a result, the Washington Naval Conference tried to avoid future conflicts by imposing caps on naval tonnage. The caps shrank fleets significantly and maintained the balance of power by imposing a fixed ratio between the major powers.³

Academics expanded on the dynamics of arms races in the decades that followed. Political scientists held that arms races were an outgrowth of the “security dilemma,” according to which no country, acting alone, can feel secure without accruing enough power to make all other countries insecure. Economists used game theory to illustrate how if one party in an arms race risked losing its superior position, it might be tempted to attack preemptively while it still maintained a measure of dominance. Foreign policy thinkers combined these abstract concepts into a model wherein competition escalates until war becomes inevitable. The idealized nature of this “spiral model” prevented it from being immediately applied to real policy making. Those in government in the 1940s and 1950s, especially anticommunists and defense hawks, found more salient the experience of World War II, in which acting against Nazi Germany sooner may have averted conflict. Nevertheless, the relationship between arms races and inevitable conflict became firmly entrenched in popular culture.⁴

Limits on Testing

The issue of nuclear testing began the process of unifying these disparate groups. Open-air nuclear testing came under increasing criticism in the late 1950s, particularly due to the consequences of radioactive fallout for public health and the environment. Starting in 1958, the Soviet Union adopted a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing, putting pressure on the other nuclear powers (the United States and United Kingdom) to do the same. The Eisenhower administration reluctantly reciprocated on a temporary basis that was conditioned on Soviet entrance into negotiations on a formal treaty banning nuclear testing.⁵

Up to that point, the Soviet practice on disarmament issues was to endorse the spirit of almost any proposal (conditioned on U.S. agreement) but then dismiss verification or enforcement concerns as narrow-minded and unnecessary. When the United States would insist on adequate measures to ensure that all parties adhered to an agreement, Soviet diplomats would excoriate the U.S. position as standing in the way of progress over picayune concerns. Hoping to avoid this dynamic, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations steered clear of commitments to disarmament in general while vaguely endorsing attempts to “regulate” arms with strategic implications.⁶

The nuclear test ban issue was the first occasion when the United States actually joined such a formal negotiation, despite the fierce opposition of the military establishment (personified by the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and the U.S. nuclear weapons complex (the agencies, bureaucrats, and national laboratories charged with developing and producing nuclear weapons). President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles led the shift to a more accommodating stance. Both expressed concern that the United States would lose too much in the way of international standing if it continued testing in the face of growing public concern. Cold War paranoia ran high in the United States during this time, and the idea of negotiating with Communists (let alone endorsing a deal that required negotiators to “trust” their Soviet counterparts) remained highly controversial. The process would have to be carefully managed lest skeptical forces mobilize to overwhelm the possibility of an agreement.⁷

The talks began but predictably deadlocked over the issue of verification. Detecting nuclear tests in the air, in space, or underwater was relatively easy, but underground testing would be more difficult. International committees of scientists issued papers arguing that earthquake-detecting seismic instruments could detect almost any underground test above a relatively low threshold. Data from the most recent U.S. tests significantly complicated this picture, expanding the minimum detectable yield between four times and (theoretically) three hundred times the international committee’s estimate. U.S. scientists further concluded that underground tests could be confirmed only when inspectors testing for radioactive traces of a nuclear blast could visit the site in person.⁸

Soviet negotiators fiercely disagreed with the U.S. analysis and attacked inspections proposals as an entrée to Western espionage and a violation of their sovereignty. The most that Western negotiators could extract from the Soviets was acceptance of a finite number of veto-proof inspections per year. Soviet delegates said they could determine the exact number later, but disagreements over technical data and how the inspecting agency could be organized made clear that whatever the number was, it would likely not be enough for the United States.⁹

The talks collapsed in 1960 when the Soviet Union downed a U.S. U-2 spy plane over its territory, beginning a wave of crises that spanned the next two years. President Kennedy tried to make some progress when he took office in 1961, but the Soviet Union broke the moratorium with a spate of nuclear tests at the height of the Berlin Crisis, further damaging the prospects for an agreement. Kennedy reluctantly resumed testing in kind, first underground and in limited fashion, then resuming open-air tests under pressure from the Joint Chiefs and the national laboratories.¹⁰

The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 proved to be such a harrowing enough experience that a return to negotiations seemed possible for both sides. Following a series of private overtures, both superpowers dispensed with their attempts to ban underground testing and instead restricted the agreement to underwater, atmospheric, and space-based testing. The nuclear powers met in Moscow to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty in August 1963 and invited other countries to sign on. Dozens of countries eventually ratified the agreement.¹¹

The Limited Test Ban Treaty was a triumph in many ways, but it differed significantly from later attempts at arms control. Its precedential value was clear: it showed that mutually beneficial negotiations between the superpowers were possible and that they could produce substantial results. This type of cooperation contrasted starkly with the brinksmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis less than a year earlier.¹²

The treaty was not a complete sea change for the politics of arms control, however, and it did not lay the foundation for all future arms control efforts. By 1963, the politics of a test ban were more closely aligned with the incipient environmental movement than with the forces calling for an end to the arms race. Much of the popular commentary on a test ban focused on the health and environmental impacts of testing, most notably in the Baby Tooth Survey, which showed that measurable quantities of radioactive fallout had worked their way into children’s baby teeth by way of the global milk supply. Underground testing had virtually no impact on these issues, but it did allow nuclear weapons design work to continue in a slightly more cumbersome fashion. Although the impact of the treaty on public health was significant, its impact on the strategic balance was more circumscribed.¹³

Despite the involvement of antinuclear activists and leading scientific figures in rallying support for a test ban, most scholars still argue that the U.S. transition from opposing disarmament to halting acceptance of arms control was a basically conservative one, driven by the pragmatic concerns of elites. The United States retained a clear quantitative and qualitative edge in nuclear weapons during the 1950s and 1960s. U.S. officials feared that arguments in favor of disarmament targeted unique U.S. advantages and that the concept was premised on the idea that the weapons themselves were intrinsically threatening, rather than those who were wielding them. President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles ultimately agreed to join the test ban negotiations because they were directed less at eliminating nuclear arms than at regulating their uses. This distinction implied that such weapons were a normal part of the international order and were not intrinsically destabilizing but had externalities that could be addressed through negotiation.¹⁴

Despite Dulles and Eisenhower’s tentative pursuit of arms control, a bureaucratic edifice developed to facilitate their efforts that, like many bureaucracies, proved to be more persistent than the issue that brought it into existence. In 1960, the State Department announced the opening of a new Disarmament Administration under its auspices.¹⁵ A year later Congress and President Kennedy passed the Arms Control and Disarmament Act, which converted the Disarmament Administration into an independent agency of the executive branch, renamed the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Proponents of the new agency, which included President Kennedy, envisioned an independent force for arms control within the executive branch that would be able to advocate without being muzzled by diplomatic or military bureaucracies. Whether segregating the agency from the diplomatic apparatus was a help or hindrance is debatable, but as the agency grew over the next decade it became a vehicle for bringing large numbers of scientists and policy thinkers who were sympathetic to arms control into government. Establishing an independent agency also promoted the impression that arms control efforts would be an ongoing feature of foreign policy. This permanence also contributed to the impression that progress on arms control issues should be continuous. This could prove problematic during periods of tension or when negotiators deadlocked on substance.¹⁶

Outside of government, events in the 1960s helped reconcile many test ban proponents to the idea of arms control, such that the term became synonymous with positions held by large swaths of the political spectrum, especially among the liberal, cosmopolitan establishment. The nuclear doctrines of deterrence and its corollary, assured destruction, gained their most prominent articulation during this period. These concepts helped galvanize diffuse groups that had opposed or resisted the arms race but lacked a common platform or plan of action.

Deterrence, Damage Limitation, and Assured Destruction

Beginning in 1960 and continuing through the decade, the economist Thomas Schelling wrote a series of articles and books on the theory of conflict as it applied to nuclear weapons. Schelling’s work built on that of previous nuclear theorists, particularly those associated with the Rand Corporation think tank such as Bernard Brodie. To Schelling, it was obvious that nuclear weapons could not be eliminated altogether, yet any nuclear exchange seemed certain to produce catastrophic results. From these premises, Schelling reasoned that the ideal strategy would be to develop nuclear weapons in a way that would prevent their use. Schelling argued against the use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield and any attempt to make nuclear weapons effective against enemy military targets.¹⁷ In doing so, Schelling placed himself between two extremes of a perceived ideological spectrum. Smaller nuclear weapons experienced a brief heyday in the 1950s among disarmament advocates who hoped they would make a global cataclysm less likely. Conversely, the idea of using nuclear weapons primarily against military targets (a “counterforce” strategy) was long associated with hard-line anti-communists and military hawks.¹⁸

Schelling believed that instead of these strategies, the ideal nuclear posture would consist solely of massive, relatively inaccurate weapons that could only be used against cities and populations. This deliberate inadequacy would convince any opponent that these weapons would only ever be used in a retaliatory strike, since they could serve no useful role in trying to fight or win a war. Opposing nations would therefore not have to worry about the possibility of being militarily defeated in a massive, preemptive attack (a so-called first-strike scenario). Without this concern, opposing states would have less reason to engage in furious arms races in which both sides would require dominance to be assured of their own security and neither side would be able to achieve it.¹⁹

Schelling’s formulation was counterintuitive but compelling. This version of classical nuclear deterrence turned the destructive power of nuclear weapons, once thought to be so great as to be useless, into an advantage. To be applied to the real world, however, the doctrine would also require that most research into improving nuclear weapons’ accuracy, readiness, or ease of use be halted, as these would undercut the impression that nuclear weapons served only a retaliatory role. Organizations in charge of developing and maintaining such weapons might naturally object to the idea that unsophisticated weapons that had not been upgr...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Promise of Control
• 1. Arms Control: Context and Precedents
• 2. Negotiation: A New Dimension in Strategic Competition
• 3. Aftermath and Adaptation: The Origins of SALT II
• 4. “In Good Faith”: Carter’s Gambit
• 5. “Thinking Out Loud”: The Struggle with Sprawl
• 6. “Summary—Bleak”: The Unraveling of Detente
• 7. INF: The Last Gasp of SALT
• Conclusion: The Consequences of Control
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index