The End of Détente
The Moscow summit of May 1972 was, on the surface, a grand display of diplomacy and a great success for the Nixon-Kissinger team. However, behind the scenes, the reality of how Kissinger had weakened the final agreements through his meddling “back channel” diplomacy was well known to those closest to the negotiations that had taken place. One of those most upset by the turn of events was the architect of the ABM treaty and SALT interim agreement, ACDA director Gerard Smith, who believed Kissinger’s interference had undermined his effectiveness as a negotiator. The last-minute agreement between Kissinger and Brezhnev on SLBM numbers was an unpleasant surprise for Smith, who believed the numbers agreed on were far too high and could have easily been negotiated downward.1 Smith had been planning to retire after the SALT agreement was signed but then was considering extending his tenure in order to be involved in the SALT II negotiations, scheduled for the fall of 1972. Though he did stay on as ACDA director for the remainder of the Nixon’s first term, Smith submitted his resignation as arms reduction negotiator after the interim agreement was signed. America had lost an able champion of effective arms control.
Gerard Smith was a true arms control expert who believed that the specifics of an agreement were best left to those who understood the nuances and complexities of the technical realities of the weapons and weapons systems being discussed. As such, he placed high value on the role he and his Soviet counterparts were expected to play in negotiating any arms control agreement. Kissinger was more interested in the art and process of policy formulation, and its role in the grand scheme of national security, than he was in the esoteric, sometimes mundane details that were being mulled over by Smith and his colleagues. Kissinger was also very much one who did not like to relinquish control of anything to others, especially when dealing with such a high-profile topic as arms control. Kissinger repeatedly undercut Smith’s negotiating efforts through his use of the back channel with Dobrynin. It was a mark of Smith’s professionalism that he stayed on as long as he did, given the reality of the working conditions he faced under Kissinger.
The May 1972 Moscow summit, and its resulting ABM treaty and SALT interim agreement, triggered opposition from Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democrat from Washington State, who had a strong record of anticommunism and anti–arms control and who was adamantly against any arms control treaties with communists. Scoop Jackson was also a man of considerable political ambition, especially during the 1972 presidential race. Jackson had announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, and although a long shot (Jackson withdrew early on in the primary campaign), the senator from Washington recognized the importance of seizing the national spotlight, operating as he was with an eye on the 1976 presidential contest. In March 1972, when it had become apparent that Kissinger was leaning toward a separate ABM agreement, Jackson held several informal hearings in which he staked out his position on Safeguard and the need for a viable ABM system. Now, with an ABM treaty signed, linked as it was to the SALT interim agreement, Jackson (heavily influenced by his new staff member, Richard Perle), began leveraging his political clout not so much to oppose the existing agreements but rather to ensure that any future arms control proceedings would be conducted in a manner that he found acceptable. In order to make sure events unfolded to his liking, Jackson set his sights on ACDA, seeking to limit the influence and effectiveness of that agency.2
One of the fatal flaws of the détente that emerged from the Moscow summit was that rather than being based on a solid foundation of negotiated principles mutually agreeable to both parties, it became captured by domestic politics and as such subjected to the vagaries of politicized public opinion. Nixon had instructed Kissinger to have the Moscow summit serve as a stage upon which he, Nixon, would emerge as the star in time to influence the 1972 presidential election. Kissinger had accomplished this task, but in doing so had set up the policy of détente, inclusive of arms control, to be attacked by Nixon’s political opponents, led by the indefatigable Jackson. The last thing Nixon needed was a long, drawn-out congressional battle over ratification. Knowing that the president had invested immense political capital in the ABM treaty and SALT interim agreement, Jackson was able to exploit the numerous fundamental weaknesses in the two agreements to pursue his own objective of limiting the role and functionality of arms control.
The first thing Scoop Jackson did was use the administration’s own arguments in a manner that reinforced the argument in favor of specific weapons programs Jackson supported. In his testimony before Congress on SALT, Secretary of Defense Laird stressed the importance of taking advantage of the SALT agreement to pursue permitted upgrades to the U.S. strategic nuclear deterrent, namely a new SLBM, the Trident, and a new bomber, the B-1.3 In this he had, of course, a strong advocate in Jackson, who not only pushed for the Trident and B-1 programs on behalf of Boeing, the Seattle-based defense contractor heavily involved in both projects, but also was able to parlay his conditional support of the ABM and SALT agreements into a concession from Laird that moved the home base of a future U.S. Navy Trident SLBM force from the East Coast to Washington State.4
There were arguments put forward in the debate defending the SALT agreement’s concepts of “sufficiency,” which focused on qualitative aspects of a nation’s nuclear arsenal (i.e., what was sufficient to meet a national security objective), as opposed to a more quantitative-based approach, which used simple missile counts as a means of expressing “equality.” But these arguments did not satisfy Senator Jackson, who used his position as the chair of the Arms Control Subcommittee of the Armed Forces Committee to drive the debate in the direction he wanted, namely a rejection of sufficiency and an embrace of equality. Jackson slammed Kissinger and others on the ambiguous nature of the SALT agreement, in particular the fact that whereas Kissinger had committed the United States to a specific number of ICBMs, there was no such specific limitation for the Soviets because they could exchange ICBMs and SLBMs and strategic bombers within an overall “cap” that was not system-specific. Jackson rejected the concept of overall ceilings; instead, he wanted a specified Soviet limit that matched the specified U.S. limit. To bring Jackson’s assaults on SALT to an end, Kissinger brokered several deals that would heavily affect the future of U.S.-Soviet arms control.5
The first deal was the “Jackson Amendment” to the Joint Congressional Resolution expressing support for the SALT interim agreement (SALT was not a treaty, and as such did not require formal ratification). The language of the amendment “urge[d] and request[ed] that the President seek a future treaty that, inter alia, would not limit the United States to levels of intercontinental strategic forces inferior to the limits provided by the Soviet Union.” 6 This amendment was incorporated into the ABM ratification process, and on August 3, 1972, the ABM treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate.
The Jackson Amendment may have hobbled future U.S.-Soviet arms control negotiations by placing stringent conditions on force levels in advance of the actual negotiation, but the second deal between Kissinger and Jackson was much more nefarious. Jackson was appalled at the idea of détente with the Soviet Union. He viewed arms control not only as a mechanism of surrendering American military superiority to the Soviets but also as a vehicle that facilitated détente. To Jackson, arms control for arms control’s sake was the enemy, and as such the principal agency responsible for formulating and implementing American arms control policy, the ACDA, became his foremost target.
Kissinger had once noted that “ACDA isn’t an agency, it’s a lobby.” His own clashes with Gerard Smith and the SALT negotiating team left him only too willing to cooperate with the powerful Democratic senator in orchestrating ACDA’s demise. Thus, when Jackson demanded that the ACDA be purged of all those who were active proponents of arms control, its ranks significantly reduced in numbers, and those senior positions that remained be staffed by people personally approved by Jackson, Kissinger was only too willing to oblige. In November 1972, Richard Nixon won his bid for re-election. Immediately afterward, he called for the resignation of all senior staff. Though usually a pro forma procedure conducted for the symbolism of presidential control, in the case of ACDA Kissinger was quick to make these resignations reality.
The earlier resignation of Smith made Kissinger’s actions easier. Although Smith was a Republican, he had retained within ACDA fifteen senior holdovers from the Kennedy-Johnson administration in order to provide continuity in the ongoing arms reduction discussions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Jackson insisted that these personnel be replaced by people to his personal liking, and by the end of the year fourteen of the staff were fired, including Smith’s deputy, Ray Garthoff, and his military adviser, General Royal Allison.7
In their place, Jackson signed off on the appointments of Owen Zurhellen, a State Department officer who specialized in East Asia affairs, as the ACDA deputy (replacing the veteran arms control specialist, Phil Farley), as well as inserting his own protégé, Paul Wolfowitz, onto the ACDA roster.8 Jackson even went so far as to pressure the Pentagon into assigning, as General Allison’s replacement, Lieutenant General Edward Rowney, a decorated combat veteran of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Rowney, a son of Polish immigrants, was very conservative and not surprisingly (given his background) strongly anti-Soviet. Naming Rowney to replace Allison was the price Jackson extracted for his continued support of the ABM treaty. Out of a staff of 230, some 50 positions were cut, and fully one-third of the ACDA budget was eliminated.9
In addition to its shrinking size, ACDA also lost its influence over arms control. Jackson had pressed the White House to reduce the role of ACDA for the second round of SALT negotiations, scheduled to begin again in March 1973. Kissinger got Nixon to agree to remove responsibility for conducting negotiations from the ACDA director. Instead Nixon appointed U. Alexis Johnson, a career diplomat and former undersecretary of state who had previously represented the United States at the ENDC talks in Geneva, to take over responsibility for the SALT II negotiations. The director of ACDA became responsible solely for conducting research and planning arms strategy.10
The downsizing of ACDA occurred at a time when the future of America’s strategic nuclear policy was in the balance. The Scoop Jackson–driven purge of American arms controllers meant that any discussion involving the composition of, and policy framework for, America’s nuclear arsenal would be in an environment unconstrained by meaningful arms reduction pressures. There represented no surer formula for encouraging a massive increase in defense spending, and as a result, unleashing the very sort of arms race the arms controllers had been trying to stem. The genesis of this policy debate is well known; Nixon and Kissinger’s revulsion over the current SIOP, especially the lack of flexibility it provided the commander in chief when it came to employing nuclear weapons in a time of crisis. Ironically, what was meant to bring a sense of sanity to U.S. nuclear strategy achieved the exact opposite.
On January 19, 1972, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird had formed a panel for the purpose of reviewing American policy for employing strategic nuclear weapons, partly in response to Kissinger’s dissatisfaction with the SIOP. The Foster Panel, named after its chair, John Foster (a former nuclear weapons scientist at Livermore and at the time of his appointment the director of defense research and engineering), examined the best ways to give the American national command authority the widest possible choices when it came to controlling the escalation of nuclear war. It took the existing SIOP attack options and categorized them as “major attacks.” Then, to limit the destructiveness of nuclear war, the panel proposed two new categories of targets, known as “selective options” and “limited options.”
Limited option strikes were designed to stop any nuclear war quickly by using limited targeting as a means of getting the Soviets to backdown out of fear of all-out escalation and thus limit the level of destruction. If limited option attacks failed to prevent escalation, then the United States could exercise selective option attacks, which were designed to “to minimize the enemy’s residual military power and recovery capability and not just destroy his population and industry.” These two categories were precisely the kind of “sub-SIOP” plans Kissinger had been looking for. The Foster Panel, however, was simply reviewing nuclear weapons tasking and not the actual selection of targets. That could only occur if the panel’s recommendations were accepted as formal policy guidance, and the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs of Staff were instructed to comply.11
Henry Kissinger had asked the National Security Council to work on issues like those being investigated by the Foster Panel. The Foster Panel had been organized as a Department of Defense–only entity and was doing its work void of any outside input or knowledge of its existence. However, in July 1972, when Henry Kissinger became cognizant of the Foster Panel’s efforts, he immediately transformed the Pentagononly group into an interagency effort headed by NSC staffer Philip Odeen, who melded the work being done by the NSC with the Foster Panel.
Within a few months, Odeen distilled the work of the Foster Panel into a twenty-page document known as the Nuclear Weapons Employment Plan, or NUWEP. It incorporated the three main strike options of the Foster Panel (major nuclear attack, selective nuclear attack, and limited nuclear attack) and added a fourth—regional nuclear attack. Going beyond simply establishing nuclear attack options, Odeen’s NUWEP also set forth the parameters for what was called Damage Expectancy, or DE. Each target would be given a DE percentage (most were set at 90 percent, some even higher), which meant often more than one nuclear weapon was required to be assigned to achieve the DE requirement. This was a departure from the previous targeting guidance associated with the SIOP, which simply dealt with what was known as a Designated Ground Zero, or DGZ, to which a designated allocation of nuclear weapons would be assigned.
The SIOP had been simply a matter of assigning weapon “x” to target “y.” Under NUWEP, however, Odeen was seeking to apply a qualitative aspect to what had previously only been a quantitative task. This represented a paradigm shift in thinking when it came to nuclear targeting. The consequences of this approach from an arms-control perspective were not insignificant because a qualitative approach in targeting meant more targeting options, which required a greater flexibility in terms of the types of U.S. nuclear weapons as well as their means of delivery. As such, NUWEP created pressures to increase the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.12
At the same time the United States was refining its instrument of nuclear war (SIOP), it was dismantling its instrument of nuclear disarmament (ACDA). The termination of ACDA as a meaningful arms control agency was assured when, in April 1973 (three months after Gerard Smith left the directorship), President Nixon appointed Smith’s replacement, Fred Iklé. Iklé was an experienced nuclear strategist who had devised the “permissive action link,” which made it physically impossible to arm a nuclear weapon without proper authority. Iklé rejected the nuclear strategy options calling for pre-emptive or first-strike capability, believing that in order to be able to launch quickly, ICBMs themselves became vulnerable to attack. In his view, any enemy who became concerned about a U.S. first-strike capability would be more inclined to launch its own pre-emptive attack. Instead, Iklé proposed to bury ICBMs into deep, super-hardened silos that all but assured their survival in case of a surprise attack, thereby guaranteeing a retaliatory capacity, and thus ensuring deterrence. Iklé was also ideologically in tune with the direction Scoop Jackson wanted to pursue when it came to U.S. nuclear strategy. In an article published in the January 1973 issue of Foreign Affairs, titled “Can Nuclear Deterrence Last Out the Century?” Iklé rejected the then-current dogma of Assured Destruction or Mutually Assured Destruction and instead embraced a strategy that promoted the concept of Counterforce, where American nuclear weapons targeted the Soviet military but not its cities.13 Such a strategy enabled other concepts, such as MIRVs, increased accuracy for ICBMs and SLBMs, new manned bombers and of course ABMs—everything Jackson wanted for the military and his friends at Boeing.
The second half of 1972 was noted for more than just a burglary at the Watergate Hotel, Senate debates over arms control, and President Nixon’s re-election. In early October 1972, the North Vietnamese agreed to meet with the United States in Paris, and by January 1973, the two sides had hammered out the framework of a peace accord. Within twenty-four hours of signing the agreement, U.S. prisoners of war began to return home, and the complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces from South Vietnam had begun. “Peace with honor” had been, in the eyes of the Nixon administration, finally achieved. Finally freed of the Vietnam War, Kissinger immediately turned to the task of tying the politics of détente with China and the Soviet Union within the framework of U.S.-European relations.
In April 1973, Kissinger announced that 1973 was to be “the Year of Europe.” He had high hopes. The Moscow summit had opened the door for other arms reduction venues; the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), a priority of the Soviets, and Mutual Bi-Lateral Force Reduction talks (MBFR), something America’s NATO allies were interested in. Nixon, at the time under pressure from Congress to achieve reductions in the defense budget, realized that he couldn’t pursue the drawdown of U.S. troops in Europe without viable MBFR talks, and the Soviets would never agree to such talks unless the United States agreed to CSCE talks. Kissinger’s task was to breathe life into both.14
Under normal circumstances, Kissinger’s ambitious undertaking would have been difficult. But given the circumstances of the time, the Year of Europe was doomed from the very start. Kissinger needed significant support from a strong executive to make the Year of Europe happen, coupled with a broad range of cooperation between the executive and Congress. But the executive Kissinger so depended on was in the midst of the process of self-immolation known as Watergate. By May 1973, some seventeen associates of the president were under investigation in relation to a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters during the 1972 presidential election. Soon many of them began testifying before Congress, breathing life into accusations that the president himself was involved in covering up their actions.
On May 4, 1973, Kissinger traveled to Moscow, where he met with Leonid Brezhnev for the purpose of shaping the agenda for a June summit in the United States. Brezhnev made it quite clear that one of his priorities in such a summit was to sign an agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War (PNW), making sure that SALT II would incorporate talks designed to control or eliminate MIRVs and to improve economic ties between the two countries. The Soviets were pushing for a PNW treaty, in part because they hoped such a sweeping agreement between the world’s two nuclear superpowers would align the United States more closely with Soviet goals in Europe and with China, namely reducing American influence by diminishing the American nuclear umbrella.15
Kissinger, understanding the importance of PNW in terms of a successful U.S. summit (something deemed even more critical by President Nixon, given his need to divert public attention away from the growing Watergate scandal), negotiated a compromise. This compromise extended the PNW treaty’s language to include not only a non-use clause concerning the Soviet Union and the United States but also extending it to third parties as well, a move designed to lessen European and Chinese concerns over any U.S.-Soviet agreement which excluded their respective roles. Kissinger’s goal for a treaty was to assist in creating a web of conditions that prevented the Soviets from turning on either NATO or China. Brezhnev was also anxious to move forward on the matter of U.S.-Soviet trade, driven largely by growing economic difficulties inside the Soviet Union.16
On June 16, 1973, Brezhnev and his Soviet delegation arrived in the United States. The U.S. summit lacked the drama of the Moscow summit the year before, and very little of substance emerged beyond the signing of the PNW treaty. Several other minor agreements were signed between the two leaders, and a broad range of issues discussed, including SALT II, U.S.-China relations, most-favored trading nation status for the Soviet Union, and the ongoing situations in Vietnam and the Middle East. However, there were to be no major breakthroughs when it came to U.S.-Soviet relations. Concerning SALT, the best the two leaders could do was agree upon a basic set of principles, which were so vague as to be useless. They did, however, create a political imperative, transferred to both negotiating teams, that some sort of progress had to be achieved by the end of 1974. Court testimony implicating Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal pushed the U.S.-Soviet summit off the front pages of America’s newspapers, denying the president even that small political boost.17
The only significant result of the U.S. summit was the signing of the PNW treaty. Kissinger had touted the PNW treaty, claiming that had such an agreement existed a decade ago, there never would have been a crisis over Berlin. “The West,” Kissinger had announced in April 1973, “no longer holds the nuclear predominance that permitted it in the ’50s and ’60s to rely almost solely on a strategy of massive nuclear retaliation. Because under conditions of nuclear parity such a strategy invites mutual suicide, the Alliance must have other choices.”18
These other choices involved repackaging total nuclear conflict into smaller, more acceptable conflict options. The NUWEP paper being prepared by Phil Odeen at the NSC had, by the end of the summer of 1973, been reviewed by every involved department and agency. The product of this effort was National Security Decision Memorandum 242 (NSDM 242), “Planning the Employment of Nuclear Weapons.” Kissinger used NSDM 242 to instruct the Pentagon to develop the “different options that the President could absorb before a crisis develops and he is called upon to make a decision.” NSDM 242 was ready for the president’s signature by the end of August 1973. Kissinger had always been concerned that events might transpire that would confront an American president with the need to consider the employment of nuclear weapons, only to be confronted with the horrific reality of there being no option but the worst: all-out nuclear war. NSDM-242 was designed to answer this concern.19
Those in the Nixon administration opposed to détente with the Soviet Union embraced the absolute necessity to revise American nuclear strategy so that meaningful deterrence capability existed to offset any potential Soviet power grab, whether in the Middle East, Europe, or elsewhere. That the Soviets had not demonstrated interest in such a power grab, or better, had demonstrated the exact opposite, was not a factor in the thinking of these hardliners. What they were worried about was the potential for Soviet action and the demonstrated inability of the United States to effectively deter, and if necessary, respond to any such Soviet provocation with anything other than total nuclear Armageddon.
Kissinger thought he had a solution ready and waiting in the NSDM 242 document. Kissinger (who had been selected to receive, along with Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam, the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize) was now preparing to present to Nixon a document that would guide the development within the U.S. military of a “broad range of limited options aimed at terminating [nuclear] war on terms acceptable to the U.S. at the lowest levels of conflict feasible.” The United States retained the capability to launch massive nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union and Communist China, if escalation of any nuclear conflict could not be controlled. However, Kissinger told the president that the goals of U.S. nuclear strategy had changed, and rather than seeking to achieve the “wholesale destruction of Soviet military forces, people, and industry,” the United States now possessed the option for “inhibiting the early return of the Soviet Union to major power status by systematic attacks on Soviet military, economic, and political structures.” Kissinger presented the NSDM 294 document to President Nixon in early January 1974.20
Nixon was, by this time, fighting a rearguard action for his own political survival. The dramatic revelation that the White House had secret voice recording capability led to the subpoena of all private conversations the president had conducted in the oval office. Nixon refused to surrender the tapes of these conversations, citing executive privilege. Under pressure from a special prosecutor he himself had directed to be appointed, Nixon ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire that same special prosecutor. He refused, and Nixon promptly fired Richardson, leading off a series of firings and threatened firings that became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” Nixon was reduced to pathetically commenting to the press, unprompted, that “I am not a crook.” By January 1974, the fight for access to the Nixon tapes had taken on constitutional proportions, with the involvement of the United States Supreme Court. Thus distracted, Nixon signed NSDM 294, one of the most far-reaching and important documents in the history of U.S. nuclear strategy.21
Only a few months after the dissemination of NSDM 242, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, who took over the job from Elliot Richardson, who had been appointed by Nixon as Attorney General in August 1973, signed off on guidelines that came to be known as NUWEP, borrowing liberally from Phil Odeen’s paper of the same name. The advent of NDSM 242 and the new NUWEP doctrine gave the Defense Department great latitude with the technological means to implement the new strategic nuclear targeting guidelines. The Pentagon turned its attention to the U.S. Navy’s new SLBM program, intent on creating an SLBM that possessed the accuracy of a Minuteman III ICBM.22
Back in September 1971, the Defense Department had approved a long-term modernization plan that called for a new, larger submarine and a new, longer-range missile while preserving a nearer-term option to develop an extended-range Poseidon missile. The Navy had become increasingly concerned over the vulnerability of its SLBM submarines to improved Soviet antisubmarine warfare capabilities, which became more lethal the closer a U.S. submarine came to the Soviet coastline. The greater the range of an SLBM, the greater the safety would be for the U.S. submarine launching it. The Poseidon missile had a range of 2,000 miles. The goal for the new Navy missile, named Trident, was to have a missile possessing the same accuracy and MIRV capability of the Poseidon, but possessing a range of 4,000 miles. The Trident missile was designed to be retrofitted into the existing Poseidon-class SLBM submarine fleet and was designed to carry up to eight MIRV 100-kiloton warheads possessing an accuracy of 1,250 feet. An even newer missile, the Trident II, having a greater range, payload, and accuracy than the Trident, was also to be developed for service in a new class of Trident SLBM submarines. The Pentagon wanted to convert the Trident II missile from a weapon of retaliation into a weapon of pre-emption that possessed hard-kill, first-strike capability.23
NSDM 242 also directed the CIA to prepare a report assessing the Soviet and Chinese reactions to the new nuclear policies of the United States. This tasking led the CIA to speculate that the Soviet Union might seek to develop its own range of limited nuclear strike options for Europe or the Middle East, or in a regional conflict with China. The CIA noted that the current trend for Soviet nuclear planning appeared to emphasize “massive strikes” for both regional and intercontinental nuclear conflict. But the CIA conjectured that the Soviets might very well be influenced by the new U.S. nuclear policy to enhance their own version of limited nuclear attack, whether or not the Soviets viewed such moves as feasible. Rather than adopt similar flexibility for intercontinental nuclear strikes, the CIA believed that the Soviets would instead seek ways to avoid nuclear escalation. The CIA noted that it possessed little information about Chinese nuclear strategy but speculated that the Chinese might also develop a limited nuclear strike option to counter the new American strategy.24
The one hope the Soviets had in averting this rush toward nuclear insanity was through the ongoing SALT II negotiations. In the fall of 1973, the Soviets presented the U.S. delegation with a draft SALT II treaty text that maintained the unequal limits on missile launchers set forth in the interim agreement and that provided for an unspecified limit on MIRVs. The Soviet proposal was based upon the sufficiency model of qualitative factors that had been vehemently rejected by opponents of arms control, such as Scoop Jackson, who insisted on strict quantitative equality formulas. U. Alexis Johnson, hobbled by the constraints of the Jackson Amendment, was only able to respond with the standard U.S. position insisting on numerical equality, which would require the Soviets to cut the numbers of their missiles while securing for the United States a qualitative advantage.
It wasn’t until February 1974 that the United States began to get serious about the SALT II negotiations. On February 19, 1974, Kissinger issued a formal SALT II negotiating position that set 2,350 as the overall aggregate number of ICBMs, SLBMs, and strategic bombers each side could possess. The position also established that both sides would be limited to an equal number of ICBM MIRVs determined by throw weight, as opposed to capping the total number of MIRVs that could be deployed.25
This was a ploy to limit the number of missiles on which the Soviet Union could deploy MIRVs, while giving the United States the option to deploy as many MIRVs as it wanted on its own ICBM force. The Soviets rejected this, but by March, again through extensive use of the back channel with Soviet Ambassador Anatoliy Dobrynin, Kissinger had crafted a compromise, acceptable to the National Security Council, that had the United States accepting unequal aggregate numbers of launchers and bombers on the part of the Soviet Union in exchange for the Soviets accepting an unequal number of MIRVs on the part of the United States.26
The U.S. position on MIRVs, based as it was on the issue of throw weight, placed the Soviets at a significant disadvantage, minimizing the one major advantage they enjoyed over the United States. The Soviet counterproposal was to insist on maintaining the unequal aggregate of launchers through 1980 but to provide the United States with a 1,100:1,000 edge over missiles armed with MIRVs, using numbers instead of throw weight as the limiting feature. The Soviets also proposed limiting the ABM deployment on both sides to one site each, instead of the two agreed upon in the ABM treaty. Kissinger met with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko twice in April 1974 to try to break the impasse. Kissinger proposed accepting the unequal aggregate numbers through 1980 but limiting the MIRV-equipped missiles to 1,100 for the United States and just 850 for the Soviet Union. This proposal was rejected by the Soviets.27
Simultaneously with the SALT II talks, the Soviets were pursuing the issue of a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. The Soviets wanted the two major powers to conclude a comprehensive ban at the summit and then pressure the other nuclear powers (Great Britain, France and China) into accepting it. This would put the United States in the position of alienating both China and France, something it was unwilling to do. In March 1974, Brezhnev brought up the possibility of a limited threshold ban, which would limit a nuclear test to a specified size. Advances in seismic detection capability had made a threshold ban viable, and because the Soviets did not insist on other nuclear powers’ participation, Kissinger responded optimistically, and the issue began to be discussed in earnest at the ongoing test ban talks in Geneva. An acceptable agreement was made that set the threshold for nuclear tests at 150 kilotons.28
But the United States and the world soon had a new nuclear test–based crisis, this one stemming from the Indian subcontinent. On May 14, 1974, India successfully tested a nuclear device, the so-called Smiling Buddha event. The test had been planned since 1972, when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi gave her approval for the Indian Atomic Energy Agency to undertake activities specifically intended for the manufacture of a nuclear device. The Indians were quick to declare that their test was not that of a nuclear weapon but rather a “peaceful nuclear explosion.” The “N-th” factor, so long anticipated concerning nuclear proliferation, had just emerged. The implications of the Indian test were considerable, especially regarding Pakistan, but also concerning the viability of the NPT. With a nonproliferation treaty review conference coming up in 1975, the Indian test made it difficult for the United States to argue about the credibility of the NPT. However, at a time when events screamed for American leadership, Henry Kissinger, overwhelmed with Watergate and Moscow, noted that the official U.S. reaction to the test was to be “limited,” stressing only America’s continued commitment to nonproliferation.29
Kissinger continued to struggle to shape a coherent and unified SALT policy but was set back by a high-profile resignation. Paul Nitze, the veteran diplomat and one of the senior Department of Defense representatives serving on the SALT II delegation, resigned from his position on June 14, 1974. Nitze was growing increasingly concerned that Kissinger was under pressure from the White House to come up with a dramatic foreign policy breakthrough at the Moscow summit involving SALT in order to divert attention away from the President’s growing Watergate problems. His concerns were shared by the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, and Secretary of Defense Schlesinger. Nitze resigned largely because of the Kissinger back channel, concerned that it provoked a lack of confidence between the negotiating team and the executive branch of government. “Excessive suspicion of people down the line,” Nitze testified before Jackson’s subcommittee on June 23, 1974, destroyed the “relationship of trust” that needed to exist for a negotiation to be successful.30 It should also be noted that Nitze, like Zumwalt and Schlesinger, was no fan of détente and was fundamentally opposed to strategic arms reductions of any sort that put limits on the American military.
A major problem that confronted the SALT delegation was how to convert the SALT interim agreement into a permanent agreement, per the Gerard Smith provision that limited the interim agreement to just five years’ duration. Two years closer to this deadline, both sides were deadlocked over some very fundamental issues. Perhaps the biggest issue dealt with the difference in definitions between Soviet requirements for “equal security and no unilateral advantage” and American needs for “essential equivalence” in strategic weapons. The Soviets alleged that certain “asymmetries” existed in technological, geographic, and strategic factors that warranted their side being permitted greater aggregate numbers. Of particular concern to Secretary of Defense Schlesinger (and Jackson as well because his military industrial constituent Boeing would be affected) was the Soviet demand that the B-1 bomber and the Trident missile programs be terminated so that these asymmetries would not be further exacerbated.31
There were also issues over how to apply both quantitative and qualitative controls for MIRVs on an equitable basis, as well as how do deal with U.S. forward-based systems (i.e., tactical nuclear weapons and aircraft stationed in Europe). As a way of demonstrating the rather esoteric nature of the debate taking place, the Soviets were said to have 6.5 million pounds of missile throw weight, compared to 3.8 for the United States. However, U.S. bombers had 16.7 million pounds of weapons deliverable weight (adding up missile and bomber capabilities), whereas Soviets had 5.6 million. These were the sort of asymmetries the Soviets were concerned about. The Standing Consultative Committee (SCC), composed of both U.S. and Soviet negotiators, had finalized agreed procedures for implementation of the SALT interim agreement prior to Nixon’s visit to Moscow in late June 1974, and there was concern that Nixon might agree to similar rushed procedures in order to secure a last-minute compromise on SALT that did not meet with the approval of either the JCS or the secretary of defense.32
The Soviets were developing two new missiles, the SS-19 (a twostage, storable liquid–fueled missile designed to be the Soviet Union’s first MIRV-capable missile, able to carry six warheads) and the SS-17 (likewise a two-stage, storable liquid–fueled missile designed to carry four MIRVs). The Soviets were also working on a giant follow-up to the SS-9 missile (which had proven inadaptable to MIRV configuration), the SS-18, a mammoth, two-stage, storable liquid–fueled missile capable of carrying up to ten MIRVs (although only planned to carry eight). The SS-18 was to be deployed in completely retrofitted SS-9 silos, super-hardened to resist all but a direct hit from a nuclear weapon.
These three missiles were to become the bane of the U.S. strategic nuclear forces. They were the living manifestation of the myopic vision of those in the United States, like Scoop Jackson, who had argued strenuously for a continuation of U.S. MIRV testing and fielding back in 1968 and 1970. The American insistence on preserving a short-term MIRV superiority had created the conditions for not only Soviet sufficiency in MIRV capability, but even the potential for Soviet supremacy.33
Nixon’s visit to Moscow, which took place from June 25 to July 3, 1974, did not produce the career-saving diplomatic breakthrough he had wished for. Kissinger and Nixon were hoping that they would be able to obtain Soviet agreement on basic guidelines for the negotiation of MIRV limits, as well as a temporary extension of the five-year deadline imposed on the SALT interim agreement. Nixon was unable to gain any concessions from the Soviets and was likewise unable to present any new initiatives of his own. As a result, neither a permanent SALT agreement nor a temporary extension to the interim agreement could be achieved. The one agreement of substance that was signed concerned the ABM treaty, in which both sides agreed to limit the total number of ABM sites to one per country, meaning the Soviets would keep their Moscow ABM site, and the United States would keep the one under construction at Grand Forks (the Maelstrom ABM site was abandoned).34
Richard Nixon returned to the United States from Moscow on July 3, 1974. By July 8, 1974, the Supreme Court heard arguments on the United States of America v. Richard M. Nixon concerning the release of the secret tapes. On July 24, the Supreme Court, in a unanimous judgment (there was one abstention) ruled against President Nixon. Soon thereafter, the House Judiciary Committee voted to pursue three articles of impeachment against Nixon. Faced with the reality of being convicted, on August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned the office of the presidency. (Earlier, on October 10, 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew, who had been accused of tax evasion and money laundering, had resigned his office. Gerald Ford, a Republican representative from Michigan, was nominated by Congress, under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, to serve as vice president and had been sworn in on December 6, 1973.) On August 9, 1974, Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as the president of the United States. On September 8, President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, declaring that the Watergate scandal “is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.”35
President Ford did his best to restore credibility and viability to a presidency shaken to its core by the criminal actions of Richard Nixon. He was, however, fighting an uphill battle. The American economy was being ravaged by a recession largely brought on by the collapse of the dollar and an oil embargo imposed by Arab oil-producing nations against the United States for its support of Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Détente was not the priority of anyone in Congress, and Gerald Ford was being urged by many to keep as his priorities the pressing problems of the domestic scene and not get diverted by any foreign policy adventure, least of all détente with the Soviet Union.36
President Ford first met with Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko in Washington on September 20, 1974. Gromyko informed the new president that he was optimistic that the Soviets could work with the Ford administration to achieve the kinds of concessions required to build a new arms limitation agreement. Based upon Gromyko’s optimism, Ford decided to dispatch Kissinger to Moscow in October 1974 to settle on the terms of a new SALT II accord, the negotiations of which had been reconvened in Geneva on September 18, 1974. However, given the fact that the United States did not have a unified position, the delegation was instructed not to make any new proposals or to receive any new proposals from the Soviets. If there was to be any breakthrough, it would be done via the back channel. Kissinger continued to articulate in favor of unequal aggregates of delivery vehicles, accepting the Soviet position that asymmetries in American technological superiority, especially concerning MIRVs, could only be offset by increased Soviet numbers.37
This position was opposed by Secretary of Defense Schlesinger, who argued for equal arms caps. Schlesinger prevailed, and in mid-October 1974 Kissinger met with Ambassador Dobrynin, and proposed a new American position that entailed equal overall numbers of missile launchers at 2,200 per side, of which 1,320 could have MIRVs (a number picked by the United States based upon Navy concerns that they be given some leeway when it came to developing the Trident missile). There would be a further limit of 250 set for heavy missiles (SS-9) and bombers. Furthermore, the SS-9s could not be armed with MIRVs, and each side could not modernize its missile force at a rate greater than 175 per year. To Kissinger’s surprise, the Soviets did not reject the American proposal and instead indicated that they would be willing to use it as the basis of a meaningful negotiation. Kissinger called Ford, who instructed the secretary of state to agree to a summit with the Soviets in late November 1974 to solidify a SALT agreement. This summit was to be held in the Soviet far eastern city of Vladivostok.38
On November 23, 1974, President Ford traveled to Vladivostok where, over two days, he and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev met to discuss a range of issues, the most pressing of which was the SALT II accords. Both leaders were looking for a successful summit, and, in the end, they were able to craft a SALT II agreement that provided for equal aggregates of 2,400 launchers, of which 1,320 could be armed with MIRVs. Ford and Brezhnev issued a joint communiqué, which framed the agreement in general terms. The technical details were left to be hammered out by the military experts. This was anticipated to take but a few days, but it wasn’t until December 10, 1974, that a text could be agreed upon, and by this time a new controversy had emerged over air-launched cruise missiles. The Soviets insisted that any strategic bomber, if equipped with missiles having a range of 600 kilometers of more, would have to count each missile individually as part of the 2,400 aggregate. The United States instead said that only ballistic missiles should be counted, and since the U.S. missiles were cruise missiles, they should not be counted. In order to gain an agreed-upon text, the United States dropped the term ballistic from the text, although insisting on their intent when interpreting the passage. The United States had also raised a new issue, that being whether or not the new Soviet TU-22M “Backfire” bomber should be counted as a medium heavy bomber. Kissinger (in Moscow and Vladivostok) and Ford (in Vladivostok) had left the impression with the Soviets that they agreed with Leonid Brezhnev that the “Backfire” was a medium bomber and not to be counted. However, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense believed that it must be counted as a strategic system.39
The failure of President Ford and Leonid Brezhnev to depart Vladivostok with a solid, mutually agreed-upon understanding of what constituted the new SALT II accord proved to be a fatal flaw. Kissinger, upon his return to the United States, warned Congress that a failure to support SALT II could significantly damage U.S.-Soviet relations, as the Soviets would have no choice but to conclude that “a political détente with us faces domestic difficulties of an insuperable nature in the United States.”40 In January and February of 1975, both houses of Congress passed resolutions supporting the Vladivostok accord. However, there was still no formal agreement for the Senate to ratify.
In Geneva, during this same time, the U.S. and Soviet delegations squared off to hammer out their differences, but it soon became clear that not only were the existing gaps proving impossible to close, but new ones kept springing up. The United States delegation, under pressure from the Pentagon and the JCS, stressed the need for verification procedures regarding the MIRV limits, whereas the Soviets believed there was no such need. Not only did the two sides continue to disagree on the definition of air-launched missile, as well as how to categorize the “Backfire” bomber, but the Soviets raised a new issue, arguing that sealaunched cruise missiles with a range greater than 600 kilometers should be counted in the same manner as those launched from the air. Rather than moving forward, the SALT II negotiations were backing up. This failure to close the deal created a window of opportunity for opponents of the SALT II negotiations to intervene.41
One of these opponents was Albert Wohlstetter, the esteemed nuclear strategist. Wohlstetter had been alarmed by Nitze’s resignation and subsequent disclosures about what he viewed to be serious shortcomings in American arms control policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Like Nitze, Wohlstetter was concerned about the quality of the threat assessment being produced by the CIA on the Soviet Union, an assessment that Wohlstetter and others believed to be much too benign in nature. Wohlstetter articulated his concerns in a writing campaign that saw his views prominently featured in the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy magazine, and Strategic Review. Wohlstetter’s criticism caught the attention of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, or PFIAB, a panel of outside experts created by President Eisenhower for the purpose of providing an independent review of U.S. intelligence estimates. The PFIAB during the Ford administration was chaired by retired Admiral George Anderson and was staffed by a number of conservative thinkers affiliated with RAND, including John Foster (of the Foster Panel), Edward Teller, and George Shultz. Anderson and his fellow members of PFIAB had for some time rejected what it viewed as the CIA’s overly soft approach toward the Soviet Union, rejecting the CIA’s assessment that the Soviets were only seeking rough parity with the United States, and instead put forward a counter assessment that found the Soviets on the path toward nuclear superiority.42
The specific point of contention was National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 11–3/8–74, “Soviet Forces for Intercontinental Conflict Through 1985.” Of all the NIEs produced by the CIA during the Cold War, NIE 11–3/8, which dealt with Soviet strategic nuclear capability, was by far the most important, and most influential, in the formulation of U.S. national security policy. NIE 11–3/8 was produced on an annual basis (the final numerical sequence was the year the NIE was published.) Given its overall importance, it came as no surprise that the findings contained within would become highly politicized.43
During the contentious debates over MIRVs and ABMs, the findings of NIE 11–3/8 were attacked over and over again by those who advocated for programs and systems threatened by the analysis contained therein. For example, when NIE 11–3/8–69 published its finding that the Soviet SS-9 missile was not armed with MIRVs, it contradicted the public pronouncements of Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, who had stated that an MIRV-equipped SS-9 missile threatened survivability of the Minuteman force, reinforcing the need for a viable ABM system. Many prominent defense officials, including John Foster, attacked that NIE, going on record with their strong pronouncements of Soviet capability that flew in the face of the U.S. intelligence community. Even when they were proven wrong (and they almost always were; by 1974 it was clear the SS-9 was not MIRV-capable, just as the CIA had said), these critics remained unapologetic, noting they had a responsibility to look for the “worst case” that they believed the CIA too often ignored. (This tendency on the part of the anti–arms controllers to second-guess the CIA by providing manufactured intelligence as a replacement for professional assessments derived from a systematic approach toward intelligence analysis would be repeated again in 2002. Then, some of the same personalities involved in opposing NIE 11–3/8 would be involved in manufacturing their own case for war with Iraq, using flawed data concluding that the Iraqi government continued to possess viable weapons of mass destruction at a time when the United Nations and the CIA was far more guarded on the subject.)44
With Anderson’s approval, Edward Teller drafted an alternative estimate, dated June 18, 1975, which he presented to the NSC and Henry Kissinger. The NSC rejected Teller’s effort, noting that “Teller’s technique is to take propositions that can neither be proved nor disproved at this time. Nevertheless, his consistent suggestion that every proposition will unfold in a worse case situation for the U.S. undermines the overall credibility of his ‘alternative’ National Intelligence Estimate.” Teller, together with Foster, then held a meeting with the CIA on August 8, 1975, when they expressed their fundamental disagreement with the CIA’s “net assessment” of Soviet capabilities. Foster recommended that the PFIAB set up an adversarial assessment team, which would review the CIA’s body of work when it came to assessing Soviet strategic power. The CIA was opposed to this concept.45
The argument between Wohlstetter and CIA Director William Colby had caught the attention of Anderson, who subsequently supported Teller’s alternative estimate. Anderson waited two days and then wrote a letter to President Ford that questioned the validity of the CIA’s estimates and recommended that the president appoint a so-called Team B. This team would be composed purely of outside experts who would review the same classified information as the CIA and come up with their own estimates. CIA Director Colby responded to Anderson’s letter with a scathing rebuttal that debunked almost every claim Anderson had made. However, President Ford was not in a position to reject out of hand the suggestions put forward by such a high-powered body as PFIAB and directed Kissinger to respond to the PFIAB’s concerns.46
On September 8, 1975, Kissinger oversaw the preparation of a draft presidential directive instructing the CIA to undertake a new, threephased process for preparing estimates on Soviet air defense and Soviet missile accuracy, which included the preparation of an estimate void of any net assessment, a separate net assessment document, and then an adversarial estimate prepared by an independent group of experts. On September 11, 1975, Kissinger convened a meeting between the CIA and PFIAB, in which this directive was discussed. In a rather heated session, the CIA let it be known that it was opposed to this new approach. The CIA also noted that PFIAB was sabotaging the CIA’s efforts by trying to create a separate team that would promote the conclusions sought by PFIAB. Kissinger nonetheless directed the CIA to respond to the PFIAB concern.47
On November 21, 1975, CIA Director Colby delivered a five-page letter to President Ford, noting that NIEs were the most important documents prepared by the intelligence community. Colby was satisfied that the estimate in question, NIE 11–3/8–74, was the product of the best information, and best analysis, America had to offer. The entire intelligence community supported Colby’s contention that a Team-B assessment was not only unnecessary but also would be counterproductive and even damaging to U.S. intelligence analytical efforts. There the matter should have rested. Unfortunately for Colby and the CIA, Colby was forced to resign as the CIA director in November 1975. He was singled out in particular due to the ongoing U.S. Senate investigations, known as the “Church Commission,” into CIA activities and abuses, during which Colby honestly and openly answered the commission’s questions, often to the detriment of the CIA and the embarrassment of the U.S. government. Ford picked George H. W. Bush, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and at the time of his appointment the chief U.S. diplomat in China, to head the CIA. This was more of a political appointment than a practical one. Bush was not an intelligence professional and was not in a position to effectively dismiss the efforts of Anderson, Teller, Foster, and PFIAB to elbow their way into the production of U.S. intelligence analysis.48
Bureaucratic obstruction from both the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff ground the SALT II negotiation process to a near halt because, absent an agreed-upon negotiating position, there could be nothing to negotiate. Frustrated by the lack of progress in Geneva, Henry Kissinger reactivated the back channel communications with Dobrynin in May 1975, beginning an exchange of positions that led to Kissinger meeting with Soviet foreign minister Gromyko in Geneva on July 10–11, 1975. Kissinger was trying to sell a concept to the Soviets which involved “class counting,” which counted as a MIRV-capable missile any system that had been previously flight tested with a MIRV. However, the two sides struggled with how to define what a heavy missile was, as well as what constituted an allowable silo modification.49
The issue of the “Backfire” bomber, and whether it should be classified as a strategic or medium bomber, was likewise a source of ongoing friction. To bring the matter to a close, President Ford and Henry Kissinger met with Leonid Brezhnev and Andrei Gromyko in Helsinki on July 30 and August 2, 1975. In their first meeting, Ford confronted Brezhnev with U.S. intelligence about the capabilities of the “Backfire,” which had led the United States to conclude it was a strategic system. After asking for a break to gather his own information, Brezhnev came back with a briefing of his own, in which he presented detailed technical information about the “Backfire” bomber to Ford that upheld the Soviet contention that the “Backfire” was only a medium bomber. This unprecedented openness between U.S. and Soviet leaders, with each side sharing a previously unheard of level of intelligence and technical military information, created an atmosphere of mutual trust and with it, hopes of a breakthrough in the stalled SALT II talks. Andrei Gromyko met again with President Ford and Henry Kissinger in Washington on September 18, 1975, and it was agreed that the United States would soon propose a major new policy position for the Soviets to consider.50
However, the secretary of defense, together with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would not permit any radical departure from their previously held stance. When Kissinger met with Gromyko in New York on September 21, 1975, all he did was submit a new proposal, based upon Schlesinger’s demands. This proposal created a new category of limits (300) in addition to the 2,400 aggregate already agreed to that covered FB-111 bombers (a U.S. equivalent to the “Backfire”) and sea-launched cruise missiles (SLCMs) having a range of 600–2,000 kilometer range for the United States, and the “Backfire” bomber and SLCMs with a range the same range for the Soviets. This was very much a one-sided proposition that would have given the United States an ability to deploy up to 270 SLCMs with no cost to any other forces (because the United States only deployed 70 FB-111 aircraft), while either forcing the Soviets to cut back on “Backfire” bombers or not to deploy any SLCMs because the Soviets already had 300 “Backfire” bombers scheduled for deployment. In addition to a verbal presentation of the proposal, Kissinger gave Gromyko a letter from President Ford, urging Brezhnev to accept the new proposal. Brezhnev rejected the American proposal in his own letter to Ford on October 27, 1975.51
Gerald Ford was growing extremely frustrated by the inability of his administration to effectively deal with a growing list of problems, including arms control. Acting on the advice of his inner circle of advisers and friends, the so-called Kitchen Cabinet, and with an eye on the 1976 presidential elections, Ford ordered a top-to-bottom purging of his administration on October 25, 1975, in what became known as the Halloween Massacre. Among the major changes were the removal of Henry Kissinger as national security adviser (he did stay on as secretary of state), to be replaced by his deputy, Brent Scowcroft. Ford also fired Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and appointed in his stead White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld (who was in turn replaced by Richard Cheney, a former Congressman from Wyoming).52
Henry Kissinger tried to take advantage of the Halloween Massacre to get movement on SALT II. Kissinger convinced President Ford to allow him to travel to Moscow for another round of talks with the Soviets concerning SALT II. With Schlesinger gone, Kissinger redrafted a U.S. proposal to make it more acceptable to the Soviets. Back in Washington, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld became aware of Kissinger’s plan. Rumsfeld conferred with Scoop Jackson, who then instructed his aide, Richard Perle, to leak classified information to the noted and influential columnists, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. On December 6, 1975, Evans and Novak wrote that several Ford administration officials were “outraged” at Kissinger’s “drafting top secret proposals for major concessions to Moscow” without the consultation with Rumsfeld and others.53 Rumsfeld then waited until Kissinger’s arrival in Moscow, at which time, on January 21, 1976, he requested, together with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the National Security Council be convened. In a two-hour meeting described by National Security Adviser Scowcroft as “surreal,” the Pentagon withdrew its support for the proposals Kissinger was preparing to make in Moscow concerning SALT II. President Ford was furious at the Pentagon’s “total inconsistency with previous defense positions.” However, Ford would not overrule the Pentagon and JCS in an election year, and Kissinger was left stranded in Moscow with no instructions on how to proceed.54
This intervention by Donald Rumsfeld effectively killed SALT II, at least until after the elections in November 1976. But it did far more than that. Ford and Brezhnev had announced in Vladivostok that there would be a follow-up summit meeting between the two leaders in the United States. As the delay in closing the deal on SALT II dragged on, the summit was pushed off, first from the fall of 1974 to the spring of 1975, then to June, and later September 1975, then to 1976. Finally, following Kissinger’s embarrassment in Moscow, the summit was canceled altogether. Détente had become a bad word and with it the policies of arms control and constraint that it represented. With presidential elections looming, détente as a policy and concept was dead. Ford refused even to utter the word, whereas his political opponents, Republican and Democratic alike, did so only in a derogatory fashion as part of their attacks on the president and his policies. At a time when the world was joining the United States in celebration of its bicentennial, and American leadership was so vital in creating the conditions for peace, once again domestic American political discord, coupled with ideologically driven malfeasance, had conspired to shut the door on any hope of progress in this direction.55
The age of détente was, for all sense and purpose, effectively over.
ENDNOTES
1 Gerard Smith, Doubletalk: The Story of the First Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (New York: Doubleday, 1980), 228.
2 Robert Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 213–214.
3 United States Congress, Senate Armed Services Committee, Hearings and Reports (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), 186.
4 April Carter, Success and Failure in Arms Control Negotiations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 131.
5 Kaufmann, 255–258.
6 Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994), 911.
7 Smith, 443.
8 Strobe Talbott and Paul Nitze, The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace (New York: Knopf, 1988), 136.
9 Robert Schulzinger, American Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 329.
10 Ronald Powaski, March to Armageddon: The United States and the Nuclear Arms Race, 1939 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 146.
11 William Burr, “The Nixon Administration, the ‘Horror Strategy,’ and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969–1972: Prelude to the Schlesinger Doctrine,” Cold War Studies 7, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 40–45.
12 Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991) 369–370.
13 Fred Iklé, “Can Nuclear Deterrence Last Out the Century?” Foreign Affairs 51, no. 2 (January 1973), 267-285.
14 Raymond Garthoff, A Journey Through the Cold War: A Memoir of Containment and Coexistence (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2001), 288.
15 Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, 377.
16 Raymond Garthoff, Deterrence and the Revolution in Soviet Military Doctrine (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1990), 86.
17 Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, 424.
18 Robert Kleiman, “The Real Question…Europe’s Security, VII. Preventing Nuclear War,” Allicia Patterson Foundation, 1973.
19 Kaplan, 342.
20 Burr, 46–48.
21 Elizabeth Drew, Richard M. Nixon (New York: Times Books, 2007), , 3.
22 Terry Terrif, The Nixon Administration and the Making of U.S. Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 204–205.
23 Graham Spinardi, From Polaris to Trident: The Development of U.S. Fleet Ballistic Missile Technology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 152.
24 Rob de Wijk, Flexibility in Response? Attempts to Construct a Plausible Strategy for NATO, 1959–1989 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 189.
25 Edward Rowney, It Takes One to Tango (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 1992), 268.
26 William Vogele, Stepping Back: Nuclear Arms Control and the End of the Cold War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), 78.
27 Thomas Wolfe, The SALT Experience (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1979), 327.
28 Vogele, 40.
29 Powaski, 159.
30 Wolfe, 88.
31 Talbott and Nitze, 138.
32 Powaski, 147.
33 Richard Burt, Arms Control and Defense Postures in the 1980’s (Boulder: Westview Press, 1982) 167.
34 Jussi Hanhimaki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 352.
35 Bob Woodward, Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 23.
36 Yanek Mieczkowski, Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970’s (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 283.
37 Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, 494.
38 Carter, 146.
39 Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, 496–497.
40 Ibid., 501.
41 Ibid., 502.
42 John Prados, Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 281–282.
43 Gerald Haines and Robert Leggit, Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA Analysis of the Soviet Threat (Alexandria, VA: Central Intelligence Agency, 2003), 158.
44 Anne Cahn, Killing Détente: The Right Attacks the CIA (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1998), 107.
45 Ibid., 113.
46 Ibid., 117.
47 Ibid., 118.
48 Ibid., 118–119.
49 Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, 502.
50 John Newhouse, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 261.
51 Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, 502.
52 Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 669.
53 Newhouse, 260.
54 Andrew Crain, The Ford Presidency: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 200.
55 Mieczkowski, 288.