Strategy and Survival
Endgame: The Inside Story of SALT II.
by Strobe Talbott.
Harper & Row. 319 pp. $15.00.
A quarter of a century ago, the prospect of nuclear annihilation was a subject of imaginative fiction and gloomy public forums. Though worth taking seriously, it was an issue easily given to the striking of poses, existential and otherwise. But now it is no longer fashionable to worry about this man-made doom. We have, to borrow from the subtitle of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, learned to stop worrying about—if not yet to love—the bomb.
Ironically, the prospect of nuclear destruction was far more remote twenty-five years ago than it is today. Nuclear arsenals were measured then in the hundreds of warheads. At the time of the Cuban crisis, for example, the Soviets had fewer than a hundred missiles that could have struck the United States, and the United States had the capacity to eliminate those in a first strike; today, those arsenals number in the thousands. Even so, what we had then, and earlier, was a remarkable sense of our own vulnerability; there were air-raid drills and civil-defense programs. But in less than a decade, grade-school children who had been trained to duck under their desks to secure even that limited degree of protection from nuclear attack were being instructed in the universities that a defense against incoming enemy airplanes and, especially, missiles, ought not even to be attempted—lest the very effort to defend oneself be construed as a hostile act toward someone who might be contemplating such an attack.
The development of this particular argument is in fact the history of the SALT talks; everything that has happened since is an elaboration of details and an extended commentary—including the trivialization of our old concern that we might well indeed be incinerated in a nuclear war, a trivialization which began when “nuclear anxiety” became the property of those American bureaucrats and “defense intellectuals” who have managed the “SALT process” since the late 1960’s. For the first response to the nuclear era was visceral and instinctive; the SALT response has been abstract, bloodless, wholly at variance with the human instinct for self-preservation. Indeed, to read Strobe Talbott’s book, an excellent book in many respects, is to marvel at how the twin concerns of strategy and survival have fared among custodians absorbed in bureaucratic processes calculated in a bizarre nuclear arithmetic.
Talbott’s subject is the SALT negotiations under the Carter administration. Endgame is not a “diplomatic history,” for it rests not upon the examination of documents but upon the interviewing of “sources” and “players.” Talbott takes us into closed meetings, summarizes the contents of various position papers and proposals, recounts the telephone conversations of important “principals,” and thereby creates an account more dramatic than analytical. For SALT is public theater or, better, a political soap opera played out in installments, wherein various heroes “clinch” an agreement even as it appears to have been lost. In this, Talbott in no way seems to misrepresent the situation. A skilled diplomatic reporter for Time, well-educated in Soviet affairs, he describes in this book what is obviously the American “players’” own self-image. (Given the nature of Soviet society, he can have no Soviet counterpart; the Soviet view of this now well-established “process” remains unknown.)
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What, then, is SALT about? It is principally about an idea, one of the most powerful and significant to appear in our culture in the past thirty years, but one almost wholly unknown. It is the idea of “nuclear deterrence,” or “assured destruction,” or “mutual assured destruction” (MAD), as the notion is described by its detractors. According to this theory, nuclear war can be avoided if the possible participants in it, presumed to be rational, can be convinced of its futility. And if they wish to avoid such a war, though they are yet unwilling to do away with their nuclear weapons altogether, they should at least be persuaded to limit themselves to forces which, by their very use, would make a nuclear war “unwinnable.” These ideas, originated by Americans, surely represent a form of self-denial; they are the ideas of a country which seeks to avoid a nuclear war, not to advance its aims through one.
American deterrence theory suggests two requirements for the achievement of nuclear “stability.” The first is that the populations of each adversary country remain undefended, that they be given as hostages against the good behavior of their government in striking at the enemy. The second requirement is that the nuclear forces themselves be made invulnerable to attack. If one country is unable to “preempt” the nuclear forces of the enemy, it becomes pointless to initiate hostilities—especially when one’s own people are wholly vulnerable to a counterblow.
The SALT I negotiations began in 1969 to make this paradigm a permanent feature of Soviet-American relations. In 1972, the bargaining produced a two-part agreement—a permanent treaty that effectively eliminated anti-missile defenses, and a five-year interim agreement on offensive weapons de-sighed to expire in 1977, the substance of which would form the basis for the next round of the negotiations. When Talbott’s account begins, three years of negotiation had not yet produced a new agreement on offensive arms. The new pact would not be signed until June of 1979, and by then it had become a second interim agreement designed to expire in 1985, not the long-term agreement for offensive weapons that had been promised in 1972.
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That it took almost seven years to produce SALT II is, according to the conventional wisdom, a sign that the issues are many and complex. And yet, in 1972, it was argued that the issue had been settled. Soviet assent to the treaty precluding defense, it was suggested at the time, meant that the Soviets had finally accepted our paradigm. But if this were so, an agreement on offensive forces would surely have been easy to achieve. Instead, the Russians continued their build-up of nuclear forces, and the United States, having made its maximum effort in the mid-1960’s while hoping that SALT would foreclose another “round” in the “arms race,” did little—then finally felt obliged to announce plans of its own.
Shortly after the SALT II treaty was presented to the Senate for ratification last summer, President Carter announced that we would build and deploy the most costly missile system in our history. It is to be a system with the ability to destroy the land-based missiles of the Soviet Union—just the sort of weapon the United States had long judged “threatening” and “destabilizing.” It represents, in short, a denial of our own paradigm of SALT. Indeed, the administration now argues that a virtue of the agreement it has negotiated is precisely that it allows the deployment of such a missile. But as with the Trident and B-l that were promised as a consequence of SALT I—the Trident was delayed and the B-l cancelled—it has come to seem increasingly unlikely that the political environment will tolerate the construction of the new MX missile system.
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Was this outcome inevitable? The central event Talbott describes is Secretary Vance’s mission to Moscow in March 1977. He carried with him a far-reaching American proposal which would have mandated reductions of some 30 per cent in strategic striking power, together with various restraints on the improvement of missiles. The Soviets rejected the proposal out of hand, then bitterly denounced it. The Vance mission returned dejected, and the “players” in Washington set about blaming each other for the “debacle.” In two months, the United States had a new proposal to offer which accepted the “fact” that the Soviets were not interested in reducing strategic arms. The remaining two years of the negotiations were then absorbed in detail.
Thus, instead of persisting in its proposals of March 1977, the United States first capitulated to the Soviet definition of “arms control” and then was compelled to accept as well the Soviet definition of what strategic missiles are for, namely, attacking the nuclear forces of the opponent. It therefore became necessary for the United States to acquire such a missile for itself. Our elegant strategic thinking—whether “correct” or not-had been overpowered. Abandoned by the government which purported to live by it, it is now an orphan wandering about in the arms-control seminars of our better universities.
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All this is really a mission for American cultural historians, obviously different from the task undertaken by Talbott in his well-written account. In hindsight, it may be that we are well rid of the notion that we ought to rely for our defense on not defending ourselves. Surely, students of this era will remark upon the wholesale addiction of academic strategists, intellectuals, poets, and clergymen to a national strategic policy which relied for its “credibility” on a threat to incinerate millions of people, a threat whose execution made no strategic, political, military, or moral sense.
To read the names in Talbott’s book is to be reminded that the SALT “process” these past ten years, even more than Vietnam, is above all the work of the “best and the brightest.” Indeed, those responsible for the “process” may well have hoped that SALT would, in the 1970’s, erase the memory of what they had wrought in the 1960’s. One can hope only that future historians will not be compelled to pursue this analogy in greater, more unpleasant, detail.
