Strategic Stability and Instability during the Middle Years of the Cold War

A U.S.-Soviet agreement to hold a conference in Geneva on measures to protect against the danger of surprise attack reflected concern on both sides of the Cold War about threats stemming from a bolt from the blue. With both countries developing ICBMs, the danger of attack with no warning was becoming more and more jarring, even though neither had ICBMs. A report that was prepared as background for the conference addressed the dangers of surprise attack and the problem of warning time, along with measures that could be used to reduce risks, such as inspection agreements and arms limitations. While the late 1958 conference proved to be a non-starter, with both sides talking past each other, it produced serious thinking about the surprise attack problem and the problem of strategic stability generally.[10]

One of the key points in this interagency report was that “stability, i.e., freedom from the threat of surprise attack . . . depends not only on an inspection of one’s potential enemy and limitations on his forces, but also very heavily on the vulnerability of one’s own retaliatory forces.” Thus it was extremely important to reduce their vulnerability “to safeguard their effectiveness as retaliatory forces.” This was perhaps the first time the word “stability” was used in the context of reducing risks of surprise attack. Moreover, the idea of reduced vulnerability of strategic force was a key element in the idea of mutual deterrence because each side needed a secure retaliatory capability.[11]

The first written appearance of the phrase “strategic stability” may be in this paper, prepared as background for the upcoming Surprise Attack Conference. All three of the authors were working in operations research for the U.S. Army. One of them, Vincent V. McRae, joined the office of the White House science adviser in the early 1960s, becoming a very early African-American professional on the White House staff.

To help the delegates prepare for a conference in which a key agenda item was the role of inspection systems in reducing the risk of surprise attack, the authors sought to evaluate the stability of strategic postures with or without inspection systems in place. According to the authors, the situation was unstable when either the U.S. or the Soviet Union believed it could launch a surprise attack and destroy the other while limiting its own damage. As the authors put it, “Soft bases, accurate delivery, and larger yields make for instability.”  In other words, accurate, large-yield weapons created first-strike fears and soft bases generated use-it-or-lose-it situations.

The authors defined a stable situation as one that obtained when neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union believed that they could successfully destroy the other in the event of a “very tense” world situation or where the rationality of an opponent was in doubt. Using a model based on two types of damage— “critical” or “catastrophic”—the authors concluded that fewer than 100 Soviet ICBMs armed with 10-megaton warheads could “destroy the United States beyond hope of recovery.” As long as that was possible, a central conclusion was that in a system without inspection “the best stability we could get is a stability based on fear of mutual annihilation in the absence of almost perfect controls or effective anti-ICBM systems.”

That statement may be one of the earliest expressions of what became the commonplace thought that mutual deterrence could provide a foundation for stable strategic relations between the superpowers. The authors did not use explicit language about secure, second-strike forces, but their thinking was getting close to it by positing retaliatory responses to surprise attacks. In some respects, their approach dovetailed with the line of thought that Thomas Schelling and Albert Wohlstetter were concurrently developing. In a follow-up report by the same writers [see Document 3], the parallel is more exact.[12]

After reviewing various stable and unstable situations, the authors found that in a system with inspections and possibly with arms limitation agreements, strategically stable postures could be attained. But if either the U.S. or the Soviet Union developed “even a marginally effective anti-missile missile capability, stability itself disappears.”  In other words, the “side possessing the AICBM can attack with considerable assurance that the covert and hence unknown missile sites of the other will pose no threat.” That statement did not mention the possibility of foiling ABM defenses with decoys and multiple warheads, which was then being recognized in Pentagon-sponsored studies.

In this follow-up report to Document 2, the same analysts went beyond the “ICBM duel” and evaluated combinations of ICBMs, bombers, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles to determine their relationship to stability. They used only “critical damage” criteria in this report. In cases where both sides had invulnerable airborne-alert bomber forces or SLBMs that could cause critical damage to each other, the situation would be stable because neither side could prevent attacks on their cities. Equilibrium or “stability by fear” could obtain when both sides had mixed systems of bombers, SLBMs, and ICBMs because neither side could launch a surprise attack and “prevent effective retaliation by the other.”

If there was a “high order” inspection system that made it possible for the U.S. to identify and attack 80 percent or more of Soviet ICBM bases, the situation would be stable as long as both sides had high-alert forces. “If sufficient retaliatory forces on both sides survive an ICBM attack, the situation is always stable.” But the situation would be unstable if one side could not protect its retaliatory capability and would be highly unstable if neither side could survive. Each would fear that the other could launch a successful surprise attack.

Inspection and controls could contribute to stability by increasing warning. For example, a system of ICBM inspection could provide enough warning time to prepare bombers for a retaliatory strike. ] Also potentially adding to stability would be an agreement by   both sides to keep missile-launching submarines away from their attack stations. If a potential aggressor believed that the defending nation could deploy its submarines rapidly enough to their attack-stations and retaliate without being detected, the aggressor could be deterred.

Unilateral measures, such as hardening and concealment, were important for evaluating their contribution to retaliatory potential and to stability. For example, while the U.S. may have been unable to protect the war industry from a surprise attack, it could deter one by making it “impossible for the Soviet Union to reduce the US retaliatory capability below the critical level.”  Thus, an unstable situation would become stable.

Robert Komer, who had been a CIA analyst since the late 1940s, was on the staff of the Coolidge Committee, a State-Defense committee that was exploring various disarmament proposals. For its deliberations, Komer produced a “think piece” on the merits of “putting a lid on the ‘arms race’ once we have achieved an optimum deterrent posture.” In other words, stability through a further, but not unlimited, buildup. The U.S. goal would be an “adequate military posture” and when that was achieved “to prolong this acceptable situation by arms control.”  What Komer meant by “adequate” was a “strike second” posture that could inflict “unacceptable retaliatory damage” against the Soviet Union. The required combination of “flexibility and invulnerability” needed for a reliable second-strike posture would require the deployment of Minuteman and Polaris missiles.

Komer acknowledged that it would be “some years” before the U.S. and the Soviet Union had each taken the unilateral measures that could produce an “adequate” deterrent posture. Nevertheless, he argued that before then, by 1962 or so, the two sides could begin to discuss the “stabilization of the intercontinental deterrence balance.”

What Komer suggested—a deterrence balance capped off by arms control—was also under consideration by early arms control advocates at universities and think tanks, with some proposing specific quantitative limits, such as 200 missiles.[13] But such concepts became politically unworkable during the course of the decade as Cold War crises and competition induced each side to outdo the other in numbers of ICBMs, SLBMs, and warheads, even as a rough deterrence stability emerged.

The ideas of limits on ballistic missile testing and cut-offs of ICBM production that Robert Komer had in mind were under discussion during the period and were among the subjects of this highly technical report prepared for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1964. Inspired at important points by ideas about strategic stability, the report included a detailed discussion of possible restrictions to, and verification of, technology development, such as maneuvering re-entry vehicles and multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles, although not yet called MIRVs (see pages 90-93).

One of the concerns brought out in chapter V of the report involved [new weapons systems that “are either provocative or otherwise destabilize the strategic balance.”  In that connection, they saw counterforce strategy—going after the strategic forces of the adversary—as especially problematic because it involved weapons that were highly accurate, could be targeted flexibly, and had effective command-and-control. “These characteristics are exactly those required to implement a first strike capability, especially if coupled with great superiority in numbers of weapons.” (See p. 126.) Because the Soviets could interpret such a course as a U.S. determination to develop a pre-emptive strike capability, they were likely to respond with harder bases to improve survivability of their ICBMs and to deploy more of them, thus increasing the tempo of the arms race.

With such considerations in mind, the authors reviewed strategies and future systems development in terms of their impact on strategic stability. As analysts had done before them, they argued that efforts to improve the survivability of strategic forces should be seen as “defensive and stabilizing” because that would reduce motivations for preemption. By contrast, efforts at a first-strike capability and counterforce, as noted, should be seen as destabilizing “unless supported by a convincing [emphasis in original] national policy of not striking first.”

The authors concluded that accuracy improvements could be seen as destabilizing by virtue of forcing the opponent to deploy more missiles and hardening silos, although that counteraction could eventually produce a more stable situation. Accuracy improvements could also end up “provoking the opponent into an apparently pre-emptive position.” Hiding missiles could be destabilizing and so could ICBMs with very large payloads and improved targeting flexibility. Large payload missiles that carried large warheads or multiple warheads could be destabilizing because they would be vulnerable to a first strike.

On the other hand, orbital bombardment systems, deployed in outer space, were seen as stabilizing because they would be an invulnerable deterrent force (a first strike risk was not mentioned). Moreover, “effective penetration aids,” such as decoys, could be stabilizing because they would weaken ABM defenses. Thus, in their cursory treatment of ABM defenses the authors did not see them as destabilizing in a narrow sense because they could be foiled. (See page 137.)

For easier access to the discussion of stability concerns, this chapter has been excerpted from Document 5 and is presented separately.

During a meeting with top Canadian security officials, Secretary of Defense McNamara reviewed U.S. strategic nuclear policy. Rejecting a first-strike nuclear force, he expected the U.S. nuclear deterrent posture to remain on an “assured destruction” basis that would provide enough forces to destroy the Soviet government and a large percentage of the population in retaliation to a Soviet surprise attack. Given the destructive capabilities held by each side, no rational person would launch a nuclear war, he believed, but precautions had to be taken to offset the risks of “irrationality” and accidental war.

McNamara estimated that the U.S. could stay ahead of the Soviet ICBM posture at a “3-or-4 to 1 advantage” in the years ahead. Yet, with the Soviets determined to catch up from the “inferior” strategic posture they had found themselves in during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the continued U.S. strategic advantage that McNamara was optimistically forecasting was unlikely to continue.  Even if the Soviets caught up, the situation would be relatively stable as long as the U.S. had its “assured destruction” forces.

The prospects for ballistic missile defense created an element of instability, which McNamara did not mention, nor did he mention his own grave doubts about Nike-Zeus (later Nike X), the proposed interceptor for a missile defense force.[14] Instead, he hedged, stating that it would be “highly desirable” to deploy an ABM if it could destroy incoming ICBMs and offset a “saturation attack.”  But even a “feasible” ABM deployment would need to be accompanied by a “greatly expanded” shelter program and Congress had yet to approve any such spending.

McNamara periodically sent the president Draft Presidential Memorandums (DPMs) covering major military program and budget issues that required high-level consideration. The latest one, on strategic forces, had not been formally transmitted to the State Department, but Politico-Military Director Jeffrey Kitchen had gotten a copy through a back-channel and provided Secretary Rusk with an analysis in the event that McNamara sought comments on it.

This lengthy paper provided a detailed summary of the DPM, including the discussion of Soviet weapons system. One item of concern was that Moscow was developing “a low trajectory ICBM or a fractional orbit bombardment system (FOBS) which could attack the US from the south or other ‘unorthodox’ threat corridors.” Such a system “would complicate the problem of ABM defense and would reduce or even eliminate warning from our present BMEWS system.”

An ongoing U.S. program was the MIRVs that would “increase the number of warheads in the missile force from the present (1966) level of 1400 to over 4000 by 1972 without increasing the number of launchers.”  With their greater numbers of warheads, the U.S. would have improved “capability to penetrate Soviet ABM defenses, and increased missile accuracies also will improve US counterforce capabilities.” Those increasing numbers would sustain the strategic “advantage” that McNamara had discussed.

The Department’s report on the DPM recognized strategic stability concerns and issues, for example, by noting that the Soviet ICBM force was acquiring “characteristics of a secure second-strike deterrent force.” With respect to the impact of MIRVs, it noted that “our growing inventory of warheads … may appear to be quite destabilizing” because of its possible impact on Soviet retaliatory capabilities. Further, if the Soviets took steps to improve their second-strike forces, improved U.S. accuracy could “deny them such a capability.”

The analysts recognized that the ongoing arms race had increased interest in arms control to stabilize the situation. Nevertheless, they were not confident in the prospects for negotiations, especially when “the tendency is to try to improve one's own competitive position; to out-think and out-produce the adversary.”

McNamara’s five-year program did not include proposals to deploy the Nike X anti-ballistic missile because he opposed it. This record of a meeting at the Federal Building in Austin, Texas, provides a detailed account of a high-level debate over ABMs, in which JCS Chairman Earle Wheeler and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara made their cases. With the Soviets moving forward in deploying ICBMs, McNamara took strategic stability perspectives to a new level by making points in a classified context along the lines of what Pugwash arms control experts had been arguing with their Soviet counterparts: deploying ABM systems would be destabilizing because it would exacerbate the arms race and not reduce the risks of war.[15]

According to McNamara, the Soviets had made an error by making large investments in ABMs that “are not worth a damn” and that the U.S. should not make the same mistake. Therefore, by going ahead with the ABM, “we would be launching ourselves and the Soviet Union into two decades of escalatory action in the nuclear field.”

Disagreeing with McNamara’s arguments, Wheeler supported an ABM system protecting 25 urban centers. He pointed out that the Soviets had begun an ABM program and were deploying SS-11 ICBMs, a “city buster,” and they might have between 800 and a 1000 of them by 1970. The Soviet program could “reduce our assured destruction capability; complicate our targeting; reduce confidence ln our ability to penetrate; reduce our first strike capability and improve the Soviet capability to pursue aims short of nuclear war.”

When President Johnson asked how McNamara could explain the difference between his position and Wheeler’s, the former responded that “the difference lay less in rational calculation than in the inherently emotional nature of the issue. It was extremely hard to make the call for a policy which appeared to be denying

protection to our people.”  President Johnson  saw  a middle position: a limited ABM deployment that could offer protection against threats from small nuclear powers, principally China’s, but also shield U.S. ICBM silos. On that basis, Johnson suggested, the U.S. could move forward on talks with the Soviets.[16]

On the tricky ABM issue, Johnson wanted to hear from others, especially in light of growing pressure from the JCS for a deployment decision. Thus, he brought in current and former White House science advisers and other experts for their views. After McNamara and Wheeler spelled out the basic choices—do nothing, “thin system,” or a 25 cities defense—previous White House science advisers spoke out, including James Killian, George Kistiakowsky, and Jerome Wiesner, along with the current adviser, Donald Hornig, and Herbert York, a former director of Research and Engineering at the Pentagon. All argued against proposals for a major ABM deployment because it would accelerate the arms race. None were persuaded by the case for a “thin” ABM system with a small number of launchers to protect against lesser nuclear threats such as China. Indeed, Kistiakowsky worried that even that could lead to “great and irresistible” pressure for expansion.  Former Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Alfred Gruenther was the only one who spoke up unreservedly for the “thin” system.

McNamara’s concluding observation focused on the poor returns from the Soviet Union’s massive investments in air defenses. Early in his tenure as secretary of defense, he looked into SAC’s ability to breach Soviet air defenses. “To his surprise he found that the best estimates indicated that 90-95% of the aircraft could get through.” The Soviet’s “irrational” bias toward air defense, he believed, was based on an “almost theological desire to protect Moscow as the center of Russian life.”

The consultations that Johnson had in December 1966 and January 1967 would inform his support for a “thin” ABM system, which he perceived as the only politically and diplomatically acceptable approach unless negotiations with the Soviets became possible. But McNamara was not ready for that yet; as he told Johnson over the telephone later that day, “I’d go down fighting [against the ABM], and I’m damn sure I’d go down. [He laughs.] A lot easier for me to say.”  After Johnson asked, “Do you think that’s wiser for us to do?, McNamara responded, “Well, I don’t know, I don’t know.”  In any event, in a Draft Presidential Memorandum that he sent to the president, McNamara recommended a request for $375 million for Nike-X production, as a fallback if talks with the Soviets did not become possible in the following months.[17]

A few weeks after the second ABM briefing to President Johnson, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin visited London for discussions with British policymakers. The ABM was a central issue in the talks and Kosygin presented his unvarnished support for missile defense and his criticisms of what he understood to be McNamara’s approach. At the request of the State Department, the British Embassy provided the key bits of the conversations.

At this point the Soviet leadership was firmly committed to the Avrora national missile defense program and Kosygin was not about to cast any doubts on the value of the investment even though he acknowledged that ABMs could stimulate the arms race.  Kosygin asked the British what was “more conducive to peace, a country which based itself on offensive or defensive systems? The answer was that a country which gave itself ABM systems but did not develop its offensive weapons was concerning itself with defense.”  He further argued that if “all countries could perfect defensive anti-missile systems mankind could live in peace because nuclear war would have been neutralized.”

Kosygin rebuked McNamara’s critique of ABMs because he saw it as simply an argument about cost effectiveness, not realizing that McNamara was deeply concerned about a spiraling arms race. His striking language is worth quoting at length:

"The attitude of President Johnson and Mr. McNamara seemed to be to ask why they should start making anti-missile systems when it was cheaper to make offensive weapons. He was surprised that the UK should support this attitude. ‘It was obscurantism and misanthropy.’ Any child knew that it was easier to buy offensive rather than defensive weapons. ‘What kind of philosophy was it that concerned itself with killing people in the cheapest possible way?’"

Kosygin’s defense of ABMs notwithstanding, he was interested in broader strategic arms control talks and at the end of February wrote President Johnson to that effect, which the latter announced publicly. But Kosygin was not quite ready for negotiations because he did not fully understand the reasoning for controls over ABMs. Moreover, Moscow wanted to catch up with Washington in the ICBM race.[18]

After the Six Day Arab-Israeli War, Kosygin traveled to New York City to give a speech at the United Nations. This provided an opportunity for Johnson to meet the premier for talks at Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) in New Jersey, which was easily accessible midway between Manhattan and Washington, D.C., thus avoiding prestige issues for either side.[19] Robert McNamara was in LBJ’s party and attended the luncheon that the president hosted for Kosygin on 23 June 1967. Johnson asked him to give a presentation on ABMs and the arms race, for which McNamara was not fully prepared; to try to convince Kosygin of the problem of arms race instability, McNamara had to hastily improvise a talk that was suitable for a non-classified setting.

Presidential secretary Marie Fehmer’s notes (see PDF pages 9-12) were incomplete for reasons explained in the diary, but they capture the flavor and frankness of the discussion, which is well worth remembering, especially McNamara’s statement: “What an insane road we are both following."  That impressed Kosygin, who said “how well you speak.”[20]

During his presentation, McNamara argued that it was not merely “a question of finding offensive weapons cheaper than defensive weapons,” because the basic objective was to find “common ground” to protect the security of both American and Soviet citizens. McNamara further argued that the “main point is [to achieve] limited growth of these two systems [offensive and defensive].”  Deployments of more offensive weapons are a “great danger to each of us,” but the “development of defensive systems will lead to responses by each of us to offset [the] others."

When Kosygin asked, “Was I wrong?,” possibly in reference to his characterization of McNamara’s critique of ABMs, the latter declared he was “very wrong.”  But after McNamara conceded that offensive weapons were in fact cheaper than defensive, Kosygin was not willing to let go of the point. Their discussion concluded with Kosygin declaring that “I guess you’ll understand if and when you become a Marxist,” and McNamara replied, "Perhaps I will—if you'll ever become a capitalist,” leading to laughter by all.

During a conversation with Ambassador Thompson, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin provided his take on the Kosygin-McNamara encounter, explaining that McNamara would have been more effective at the Glassboro summit if the setting had been smaller: “He thought the big audience had inhibited McNamara and said his own private talk with him [in mid-April] had been much more convincing.”[21] Thompson added another point—that McNamara had not concluded his presentation when the luncheon broke up.

On 14 October 1967, Mikhail Millionshchikov, deputy director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, wrote to Paul Doty to invite him and colleagues to Moscow as “guests of the Soviet Pugwash Committee” at the end of December. Doty and Millionshchikov had a close association through Pugwash and the work of the Soviet-American Disarmament Studies (SADS) group that they established in 1964.[22]

The invitees mentioned were Franklin A. Long (Cornell University), Henry A. Kissinger (Harvard University), Jack Ruina (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), George Rathjens (Institute for Defense Analyses, about to join MIT), and Jerome B. Wiesner (MIT), several of whom had Pugwash associations and had done science advisory and other work for the White House and Pentagon. Also invited was the Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, presumably to meet with likeminded academics in Moscow. All but Parsons would be meeting with Millionshchikov and his colleagues at the Academy of Sciences for discussions on the strategic arms race. A note on the letter mentioned that Vladimir Pavlichenko (a KGB officer based in New York) had authorized former White House staffer Carl Kaysen to join the group, but Kaysen did not travel to Moscow.

The invitation, which elicited considerable interest at the CIA, may be best understood in the new context for Soviet decision-making on strategic affairs. In September, the Soviet Military Industrial Commission and top Soviet officials concluded that the Avrora ABM program could not work against a “massed” ICBM attack; the next month the Military Industrial Commission scrapped the project.[23] These decisions were entirely secret. Also in September, Robert McNamara announced in a major speech that despite the U.S.’s reservations about ABMs and concerns about the arms race, the U.S. was going ahead with a limited missile defense program to address potential threats from China and Nth countries.

In the new circumstances, Soviet scientists, who had been seeking permission to bring to Moscow their U.S. counterparts for discussions of ABMs and the arms race, had their chance. Top Soviet leaders were more interested in communications with the U.S. on arms control issues and apparently decided it would be useful first to hold private talks with well-connected U.S. scientists. Thus, the leadership granted Millionschikov permission to invite Doty and other U.S. scientists and experts to Moscow.

According to a CIA report assessing the invitation (attached to the cover note from Davis to Rostow), Millionshchikov had previously tried and failed to get approval for talks with  American scientists – the problem was evidently Vietnam – but now the idea had been sanctioned “from the top.”  Vietnam remained an issue, though.  According to the report, the Soviet Academy of Sciences did not want to cover expenses for the meeting because with the Vietnam war raging the Chinese could make political hay out of such funding if they found out. Pugwash was identified as the funder, but as it turned out, the Ford Foundation covered the expenses for the U.S. participants (including honoria) through the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Pugwash USSR, however, paid for the local expenses of the U.S. participants.

Soon after receiving Millionshchikov’s invitation, Doty wrote to McNamara (who probably saw the CIA report at some point). Doty had been in touch with McNamara about previous discussions with the Soviets and reviewed the reasons that they had not resumed, mainly Vietnam War concerns, although informal contacts, including a Kissinger-Doty-Millionshchikov discussion in June 1967, helped lay the way for the December meeting. Doty may have included Kissinger at least in part so that the latter could continue his secret discussions with North Vietnam—the Pennsylvania initiative—which Kissinger had been pursuing at the behest of the White House, and of which Doty was fully cognizant.[24] Doty also told McNamara that “we have been told that this idea has been cleared with Kosygin.” Doty could not be “sure of the connection of our channel to the decision-making group in the USSR. [But], it seems to us that our discussions with Soviet scientists could be a useful preliminary” to government-to-government arms control negotiations.

Doty wrote that his group had kept the U.S. government “closely informed” of the discussions and had “benefitted from Washington briefings on the background of the topics we have discussed with our Soviet colleagues.”  Previously, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton had been Doty’s main connection at the Pentagon, but in light of McNaughton’s recent death Doty needed a new contact to ensure that our “future contacts with the Soviets can be useful and free of any features that would be contrary to US interests.”

Before leaving for Moscow, Doty and his associates received the latest information and intelligence on U.S. and Soviet policy and strategic developments. Making that possible were briefings to Doty, Jerome B. Wiesner, George Rathjens, and Jack Ruina by White House, CIA, Pentagon, and State Department officials on 5 and 6 December 1967, (see also Document 15B), including a meeting with Robert McNamara.[25] Among the briefers were National Security Adviser Walt Rostow, Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Foy Kohler, Herbert Scoville (ACDA), Raymond Garthoff (State), and Morton Halperin (Defense). Wiesner, then MIT’s Provost, prepared records of the discussions, except for the meeting with McNamara, which he could not attend.

The meeting records provide a sense of what U.S. government officials hoped the Doty group might achieve, especially to “get the Soviets to come to official conversations.” U.S. experts such as Scoville and Garthoff also hoped that the Doty group could learn something about the purposes of Soviet ICBM deployments, “FOBS” (Fractional orbital bombardment systems], mobile missiles, and ABMs, including whether facilities at Tallinn were an ABM or not, a contentious item in the intelligence establishment. Moreover, “A great point of interest is the destabilizing moves being taken on each side,” with U.S. MIRVs being one example, and Soviet mobile missiles another. The Soviet FOBS was especially concerning because of its possible first-strike potential.

Foy Kohler observed that Soviet military spending had been going up because closing the “missile gap” with the U.S. was a high priority goal. He believed that Kosygin was concerned about costs and it “does seem clear that some internal talks between the civilians and military groups have been going on at a very high level.”  That was correct but U.S. intelligence had not learned that the Soviets had ruled against a national ABM system.

December 6 was the second day of intelligence briefings for Doty and his colleagues prior to their Moscow visit.  (See the description for Document 15A, above.)  In the morning, they met with Walt Rostow and Nathaniel Davis.  Rostow told the group that the U.S. and the Soviets could “find it possible to work together when our mutual State interests are involved.”  The recent Middle East “agreement” was an example of that, although the “Soviets continue to be recalcitrant on helping in Vietnam” and elsewhere.  Believing that it was especially important for Moscow and Washington to “show restraint” on strategic arms, Rostow estimated that the Soviets were “not yet so deeply committed to ABM, or for that matter to ICBM build-up, that they cannot withdraw before a catastrophic arms race is in motion.” He thought that the U.S. was in a similar position.

Later, the group went to the Pentagon where they met with Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (Policy Planning and Arms Control) Morton Halperin and his boss, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Warnke. Halperin suggested several principles for guiding discussions of arms control, such as the possibility of unilateral verification, that restrictions involve both offensive and defensive weapons, and the role of informal agreements. One point that Warnke emphasized was one that McNamara had made in his September 1967 speech: “nuclear weapons really have no significance as instruments of foreign policy and that their sole utility now is that of deterring their use by others.”

With this letter to Millionshchikov, Doty sent a memo and a list of issues that he hoped could be discussed in Moscow. In these papers stability was a major theme. Bernard Feld, active in Pugwash and who would see Millionshchikov in London, was the message bearer.

Doty also enclosed a recent article on “The Mad Momentum” by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatrick in the 3 December 1967 issue of the New York Times Sunday magazine: “The Atomic Arms Race: A ‘Mad Momentum’ May Be Under Way.”  He believed that it spoke to the Doty group’s “growing sense of urgency.”

On one of the lists of topics, Doty penciled beside them the initials of the presenters he had in mind (thus, G.R./George Rathjens, J.W./Jerome Wiesner, etc.). He put Henry Kissinger’s initials beside several topics, but during the discussions of the strategic arms race and arms control Kissinger was conspicuous in his silence, participating only in the dialogue on Vietnam, the Nonproliferation Treaty, and U.S.-Soviet relations. It is likely that Kissinger’s views on arms control were hawkish compared to the others and he may not have wanted to dissent in front of the Soviets. It is probable that he went to Moscow mainly for the Vietnam discussions.

After the U.S. group arrived in Moscow, they held two-and-a-half days of meetings with their Soviet counterparts. Besides Millionshchikov, Soviet attendees and observers included a number of well-placed officials in the Soviet national security bureaucracy (see Appendix for list of attendees and their roles). Of particular interest is that Georgi Arbatov, the recently appointed director of the Institute of the USA (later renamed the Institute of the USA and Canada), made an appearance.  The discussions were supposed to be private, with no publicity, but word leaked and after speaking with Doty the New York Times briefly reported on the talks.[26]

Apparently, there was no possibility for simultaneous translation, so the participants listened to laborious renditions of all of the English and Russian language discussion.[27] One of the U.S. participants, Benjamin H. Brown, the secretary to the U.S. SADS group, probably prepared the detailed record of the meeting. The statements by Russian participants are likely based on the translations so how accurate they were in conveying the meaning can someday be determined by comparing with a Russian transcript. Inaccuracies aside, the meeting record likely provides the full flavor and basic content of the discussions.

While the meeting was convened mainly to discuss strategic nuclear matters, the Vietnam War had created much angst among the Soviet scholars (as it did elsewhere), who wanted to vent their concerns and hear out U.S. views. The U.S. scientists took a moderate stance, avoiding critical statements about government policy, while Kissinger, who had been advising the White House and government agencies on Vietnam, took the lead in responding to Soviet criticisms. Kissinger explained the U.S. government’s perspective and his own ideas for a settlement-- including an early version of what later became known as the “decent interval”-- and the need for diplomatic assistance by a “third party,” namely, the Soviet Union (whose clout with Hanoi he and his colleagues overrated).[28] The participants also discussed the Nonproliferation Treaty (mainly Article III concerns) and U.S.-Soviet relations generally.

The absorbing discussions of strategic issues touched on a variety of concerns. Leading the U.S. presentation by reviewing the dynamics of the arms race, Doty hoped that U.S. and Soviet scientists could develop a “common view” of the strategic problem. To keep the arms competition from getting out of hand, he suggested that the “key to stable mutual deterrence lay in both sides having a secure second strike, but not a first-strike capability.” Doty later pointed out that the U.S. had 2,200 delivery vehicles, leading him to ask the Soviets: if the U.S. stayed at that level, when would they “level off” their buildup?

Doty saw potential for instability in light ABM deployments and destabilizing potential in other developments, such as the Soviet strategic buildup, new technologies such as MIRVs, and the Chinese nuclear threat, which “had developed faster than expected.” Institute for Defense Analyses analyst George Rathjens raised concerns about specific Soviet developments, whose purpose was not evident to the U.S. side, such as the Tallinn system (whether ABM or air defense), Soviet objectives in the strategic buildup (equivalence or first strike), and the fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS), which looked like a system for striking U.S. air bases. In his comments, Jack Ruina observed that MIRVs could be perceived as “first-strike weapons.”

Some of the Soviets, such as Millionshchikov, were interested in reductions to a “minimum deterrent” or “minimum umbrella” force of several hundred missiles, which had been a basic position in Soviet disarmament policy since earlier in the decade (and which paralleled some U.S. ideas).[29] But as Wiesner pointed out, and Doty agreed, if ABMs co-existed with small strategic forces they would be “extremely unsettling.”

The Soviet participants did not, and probably could not, respond to U.S. specific concerns, much less discuss decisions about force levels. They did, however, raise questions about the impact of missile defenses on the offense, how to bring about reductions, and the role of inspections and mutual confidence. In the course of the discussions, some of the Soviets accepted aspects of U.S. thinking. While Alexander N. Shchukin disagreed with the idea that the ABM had triggered MIRVs, he and space expert Anatoli Blagonravov tacitly took the McNamara approach when they acknowledged that defensive measures such as ABMs could contribute, “in terms of quantity,” to efforts on the offensive side, for example, building more weapons to saturate defenses. One Soviet scientist, the physicist Lev Andreyevich Artsimovich, who was strongly critical of ABMs and receptive to strategic stability concepts, was silent during the discussions, although he was forthcoming during personal interactions. [see Document 18].[30]

Many of the Soviets expressed appreciation that the U.S. side took it for granted that any arms control negotiations would have to include both strategic missiles and defensive systems. In a sense, that was a Soviet concession; previously it had been difficult to give credence to ABM limitations as long as top officials like Kosygin were wedded to the idea that only defensive measures were moral. Now it was politically feasible for Soviet scientists to admit that ABMs contributed to the arms race and needed to be curbed like offensive forces.

Many questions remained: for example, what it would mean to have a “thin” or “limited” ABM system. The close of the discussion focused on that and other topics for future conversation, such as the correlation between ABMs and offensive missiles, the possibility of an agreement enabling both countries to “[possess] only a second-strike capability,” and the “forms and scope” of an agreement. While the participants discussed a follow-up meeting for 1968, it was not held.

Cornell University chemistry professor Franklin A. Long, who had served on the President’s Science Advisory Committee from Eisenhower to Johnson, prepared a short account of the conference proceedings. It effectively captured the main points of the discussions throughout.

This listing of participants at the 1967 Moscow conference is not a U.S. government document.  The posting editors compiled it from various official and secondary sources as an aid to researchers.

Franklin A. Long chronicled some of his informal interactions with the Soviets, including some who did not attend the conference, at parties, dinners, and receptions. A luncheon was hosted by Mstislav Keldysh, the president of the Academy of Sciences and a luminary in the Soviet space program and a key figure in strategic policy. The shadow of Vietnam hung over the events, with a “flareup” occurring at the New Year’s Eve party.

One of the interactions that Long mentioned was with the nuclear physicist Lev Artsimovich, who acknowledged the first strike potential of FOBS. Such frank exchanges were more feasible on a one-on-one basis than in a larger conference setting with generals and KGB officers in the audience. Long also noted that the Soviets had told him that they had been in closer touch with Kosygin than with Khrushchev. They had met with Kosgyin before the conference and “expected to see him again in the next week or so.

According to Raymond Garthoff, the interactions with U.S. scientists led to a “conceptual breakthrough” in Soviet thinking about the importance of ABM limitations, so in that context it would be interesting to see accounts of the meetings with Kosgyin.[31] All the same it would take months before each side was ready to agree to strategic arms control talks—on the U.S. side, the Joint Chiefs were particularly insistent that military interests be protected and probably the same dynamic obtained on the Soviet side [see Document 20].

The timing of Pentagon decisions to begin testing MIRVs—the summer of 1968—just as the U.S. and the Soviets were initiating arms control talks with Moscow [see Document 20], was less than propitious and some, in and out of government, wanted to halt testing and discuss proposals to ban MIRVs altogether. Morton Halperin made the first such attempt by writing up a proposal to Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford to halt full flight testing, As Halperin, with Thomas Schelling, had written the book on arms control, he may have seen accurate MIRVs as a destabilizing weapons technology that should be curtailed.[32] Not making any such point in his memo, he allowed that “there should be some advantages to us in banning MIRVs, and some problems as well.”  The momentum in support of MIRVs was hard to stop, however, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed any limitations on testing.

The Soviets had become more interested in strategic arms control negotiations, but they had to go through their own internal bureaucratic processes to reach a consensus. Certainly, Soviet military officials were interested in limiting MIRVs, which they saw as a new U.S. “offensive escalation.” [See page 2.] In late June 1968, Foreign Minister Gromyko announced that his government was “ready for an exchange of opinion” with the United States. On 20 August 1968, Kosygin wrote to President Johnson that the Soviets were ready to begin talks in Geneva on 30 September 1968. A U.S-Soviet summit meeting was also in the works. How the Soviets reached those decisions is a story yet to be told.

As this declassified ACDA history indicates, the Johnson administration had its own internal disagreements over the contents of a strategic arms proposal—for example, the Joint Chiefs of Staff stipulated hardline views: for example, no limitations on force modernization (implicitly MIRVs). By the end of July 1968, the agencies had developed an agreed position for eventual negotiations. The positions included freezes on construction of ICBMs, medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles, and missile-launching submarines, bans on mobile missiles, and agreed limits on ABMs. The two sides would rely on “national means of verification” (such as satellite photography). While MIRVs were not on the U.S. agenda, the Soviets could bring them up.

In general, the proposed U.S. “freeze” would have left the Soviets in an inferior strategic position, which would have been nonnegotiable.[33] Nevertheless, U.S. officials were optimistic that an agreement would create a new “climate” in relations between the superpowers and “would enhance strategic stability for each side” by enabling them to “maintain a secure deterrent which would not be threatened by a spiraling arms race.”  All the same, if the U.S. tested and then deployed MIRVs that could prove to be an element of instability.

The planned summit and talks did not transpire, however, because on the evening of 20 August, right after the arrival of the Kosygin letter to Johnson, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, squashing political liberalization there. In response to the Soviet move, the United States postponed the talks; nothing substantive happened during the remaining months of the Johnson administration.

Before the Nixon administration approved any negotiating positions on strategic arms control, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger briefed President Nixon on the options that the agencies were developing. He indicated his bottom-line views on ABMs and MIRVs in a paper that Nixon, if he read it, may have found confusing and difficult to absorb because of its less than straightforward prose, but he would have been receptive to Kissinger’s message: most of the proposals were against U.S. military interests.

Some of the SALT proposals included MIRV and ABM bans, but Kissinger believed that “Agreements which ban MIRVs may mean a significant decline in our second strike capability or increases in Soviet second strike capability or both.” In other words, without more nuclear warheads, the U.S. would have fewer means to destroy the growing number of Soviet ICBMs in retaliation to an attack. Conversely, if the U.S. struck first, without as many warheads it would destroy fewer of the Soviet Union’s retaliatory forces. These were not Kissinger’s only interest in MIRVs; he believed it important for the U.S. to have a strategic edge for diplomatic reasons, but that would have been the subject of another paper.[34]

Kissinger also pointed out that a review of most of the options indicated when ABMs were banned that Soviet second-strike capabilities increased—that is, a U.S. ABM could weaken Soviet retaliation. Thus, an ABM ban was more to the Soviet interests and it “is probably not in our interest.”

The analysis was informed by stability concerns that included a definition of strategic instability that was grimly specific: “The strategic relationship is considered to be unstable if one side could save significant numbers of its own people (more than 20-30 million) by striking first in a crisis instead of second” [Footnote A, PDF page 10].

Smith’s opening statement in the talks with the Soviets had to receive clearances from all of the interested agencies. The statement did not use the term “strategic stability” or “crisis stability” but danced around those concepts through references to the “uncertainties” created by each other’s deployments. Moreover, the U.S. hoped that both sides would “endeavor ... to avoid the development and deployment of strategic weapons systems that might increase the likelihood of resort to nuclear war in a crisis situation.”  An important benefit of limitations would be the avoidance of “further costly and possibly dangerous missile deployments”

The Nixon administration did not rush into SALT talks—Nixon and Kissinger wanted time to apply their ideas of linking arms control to issues such as Vietnam, which did not work, and the Soviet leadership did not quickly achieve a consensus on holding talks. By mid-November 1969, the two sides began meeting in Helsinki. As the talks were about to begin, the State Department sent a telegram to the delegation, endorsed by all the relevant agencies and offices, including the White House (through Kissinger aide Helmut Sonnenfeldt). It consisted of talking points for use in the discussions, including references to both crisis and strategic stability concerns.

Both types of stability were interrelated because of the central importance of survivable strategic forces: “the greater the survivability of strategic weapons systems on both sides the less the incentive for either side to strike first in a crisis situation or to undertake new arms programs in an attempt to gain a strategic advantage.”  An essential feature of the deterrence that could keep a crisis from getting out of hand was survivability, which also contributed to a “stable strategic relationship.”  This was the idea of mutual deterrence.

Strategic stability was defined as a situation where “neither side perceives the necessity for undertaking major new arms programs to avoid being placed at a strategic disadvantage.” This was a highly indirect reference to the first-strike concern. Also of concern was maintaining “crisis stability,” defined as a strategic force relationship where “neither side has an incentive to preempt.” In other words, the danger was that strategic forces that were “perceived to have a significant capability for effective attack on the other side's strategic deterrence force will erode crisis stability, since the threatened side will have an incentive to preempt in a crisis before its deterrent forces can be destroyed.”

As important as the problem of stability was to State Department officials and the negotiators in Helsinki, the White House and the Pentagon had priorities, such as the ongoing MIRV testing and deployments, that were not necessarily complementary.

This telegram from the U.S. SALT delegation on the opening session of the talks summarizes the statement made by Soviet delegation chief Vladimir Semenov, a senior Foreign Ministry official. It included language, reminiscent of Paul Doty’s “unpleasant code,” that recognized the reality of mutual deterrence based on the possibility of second-strike retaliation. According to the message, Semenov declared that:

It is known that both the US and the USSR possess more than enough weapons to bring catastrophe to mankind. Even if one country attacks first, it would be the victim of a crushing retaliatory blow. It would be suicide to the country who began a war.

The delegation’s message noted that the statement was of “particular interest,” with Ambassador Raymond Garthoff recalling, many years later, that it was an “eye-opener for many on the U.S. side”—perhaps for those who believed that the Soviets had a nonchalant view of nuclear war. Later Semenov told some of the U.S. delegates that the wording “had been cleared by the highest political and military leaders in Moscow.”[35]

While agreed thinking about mutual deterrence was highly conducive to negotiations, the Soviet interpretation of what deterrence required was one that would eventually produce tensions and “sharp debates” in United States. Only months before this meeting, the Soviet leadership had decided that deterrence required a secure retaliatory force with a MIRV capability that could cause heavy levels of destruction.  With the U.S. having flight tested its own MIRVs and about to field them on ICBMs and SLBMs, the Soviets planned the eventual deployment of three new heavy ICBMs, each with their own MIRVed capability.[36]

During a presentation of defensive systems, which was undoubtedly approved at the highest levels of the Kremlin, Semenov showed how much the Soviets had assimilated McNamara’s critique of ABMs. Earlier thinking that had favored ABM deployments had plainly been abandoned.[37] As Semenov put it, the “new offensive systems gave rise to defensive arms which in their turn stimulated the quantitative growth and improvement of offensive arms.” Putting it slightly differently, he added that the “deployment by one side of defensive systems can drive the other side to compensating increases or improvements of its offensive forces.” Adding to the instability was that “defensive weapons could to a certain degree become offensive as they could put in doubt the inevitability of retaliation.” In other words, a nation with strong ABM defenses could deflect a retaliatory strike from the one that it attacked.

Semenov’s critique of ABMs brought him to “several hypothetical examples” of how the problem could be negotiated: zero ABM, a strictly limited ABM systems, or a “thick” nation-wide system. The Soviets were plainly unenthusiastic about the latter because it could facilitate the “carrying out of a first strike.” A zero outcome suggested a willingness to dismantle the Moscow ABM defenses, an option that would have been consistent with strategic stability. It had support in the SALT delegation, ACDA, and the State Department, but Nixon and Kissinger rejected zero. Having fought a hard battle in Congress for ABM funding, they saw the Safeguard program as a “bargaining counter” in the SALT talks.

Paul Doty’s association with his former Harvard colleague Henry Kissinger had staying power because when the latter was at the White House he periodically met with the “Doty Group” (Ruina, Panofsky, and Garwin, among others, including Sidney Drell) to discuss the SALT negotiations. On MIRVs these advisers had tried to persuade Kissinger to “hold back,” but on ABMs, what they proposed in a paper sent to Kissinger dovetailed with the eventual outcome, even though Nixon would disparage proposals for “zero ABM.”  Their analysis looked at ABM options that had been under consideration, such as National Command Authority (NCA) defense of Washington and Safeguard defense of Minuteman sites. The NCA option was expensive and could even lead to an ABM race by itself because the Washington, D.C. and the Moscow areas were so different. As for Safeguard, the Soviets could easily overwhelm U.S. missile defense sites.

For Doty and his colleagues, a zero ABM would be the best outcome by reducing costs, eliminating retargeting problems, and avoiding a “technological arms race.”  Moreover, zero ABM was consistent with stability by “confirm[ing] a mutual commitment to deterrence strategy” and offering a precedent for “dismantling and suspending” large strategic systems. Nixon’s disparagement of zero notwithstanding, under a 1974 agreement the outcome was close to that with only one site allowed for each side (the Moscow system for the Soviets and a Safeguard Minuteman defense site for the U.S.).

Note: References in the document to MSR concern Missile Site Radars used for tracking and attacking ICBM reentry vehicles. PAR refers to Perimeter Acquisition Radars used for monitoring the reentry vehicles as they approached their targets from outer space.

An Air Force tactic that could be supremely destructive of stability was the possibility of launching ICBMs on warning of attack. This matter came up in the SALT talks. During an April 1970 discussion of a possible ban on multiple reentry vehicles, chief Soviet negotiator Semenov noted that new warning systems would enable governments to launch missiles before "the enemy [strikes] a blow at them." A few weeks later, Gerard Smith, the head of the U.S. SALT delegation, showed concern about launch-on-warning when he asked whether governments should plan to fire missiles "solely on the possibly fallible reading of signals from ... early-warning systems." Such a posture would be "very dangerous and would increase the risks of unwanted war."

The discussion did not go much further, although it became evident that General Nikolai Ogarkov, the top military official on the Soviet SALT delegation, was indignant [WB1] that Smith had brought up the matter. He told U.S. General Royal Allison that "as a military man, [he] should know the answer" to Smith's question. Further, Ogarkov said that the Soviets were simply following U.S. “operational training doctrine” that could be found in U.S. military manuals.

Smith wanted to take the matter further. While acknowledging that Soviet uncertainty as to whether the United States had a launch-on-warning posture could "some deterrent value" and even some provide some "bargaining leverage" in the SALT talks, on balance he believed there would be more "risk and danger" if the Soviets had a "mistaken view" of U.S. policy. Thus, on 19 May, Smith cited a slightly equivocal statement of "hope" by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird that "that kind of strategy would never be adopted by any Administration or by any Congress."

Launch-on-warning as a topic soon dropped from the SALT discussions; nevertheless, it remained a live issue and became a procedure that SAC missile launch control officers learned in their day-to-day training, as Bruce Blair recalled years later. And the Soviets were already interested in it, as General Ogarkov had suggested, although they were far behind the U.S. in developing warning systems that could detect plumes from missile launches.

By the time the SALT talks were underway, the U.S. Air Force and the Navy were already deploying MIRVs on Minuteman III ICBMs and Poseidon SLBMs. Proposals for MIRV bans in SALT had been broached by the State Department earlier in 1970 and they had gone nowhere. The White House refused to allow the SALT delegation to include a production ban in its MIRV proposal, which could have been a useful way to reach an agreement with Moscow.[38]

John J. McCloy, chairman of the General Arms Control and Disarmament Advisory Committee to ACDA, made a last ditch try at re-opening the issue by taking the problem to President Nixon. McCloy was a prestigious figure in the Northeastern internationalist “Establishment,” and his committee had considerable standing, although limited influence with the White House. Its members, including MIT’s Jack Ruina, believed that it was necessary to seek a MIRV ban before it was altogether too late.

The first part of the Committee’s letter to Nixon concerned U.S.-European relations, in which McCloy was a leading figure. The second part focused on MIRVs, where McCloy argued that it was important to stop the Soviets from testing MIRVs before they actually could deploy them. What the Soviets were testing in 1970 was not MIRVs but multiple re-entry vehicles (MRVs) that could not be separately targeted, but that was a matter that the intelligence agencies were still debating (true MIRV testing was not detected until 1972-1973). Taking the kind of hard-nosed approach designed to appeal to Nixon, McCloy argued that if the Soviets deployed MIRVs anytime soon, “Our entire Minuteman system would be put at risk and neutralized more rapidly by such a development than would otherwise be the case.” It was in the U.S. interest to try to halt the Soviet MIRV program before the “point of no return.”

McCloy further argued that a ban on MIRV deployments was both verifiable and negotiable. Further, Soviet interest in a production ban should be addressed. But Henry Kissinger, in a letter sent a few weeks after McCloy wrote to Nixon, did not agree, especially on negotiations. Very politely, Kissinger did not accept that the Soviets were interested in a MIRV ban. In the meantime, the U.S. government was conducting studies of Soviet warhead development that “will provide an early opportunity to assess once more the feasibility and effect of possible MIRV limitations or bans and to consider whether and what kind of new US negotiating approaches are desirable.” Pointing to the need for more studies was just a way of keeping MIRV limitations out of the current SALT talks.

This briefing paper prepared by Kissinger’s aides at the time of the 1972 Moscow summit suggested that the ABM Treaty provided for some stability but also indicated the extent to which “Interim Agreement” on strategic forces incorporated elements of instability (action-reaction). Prepared in part to answer hardline criticisms of the agreement—that it “ratified” a superior position for the Soviet Union—the author(s) of this paper argued that it prevented a new ABM race and “interrupted the momentum of Soviet programs” by freezing their numbers of ICBMs. Moreover, in “important characteristics” of the U.S. strategic system, it left the U.S. in a “superior position” in terms of numbers of warheads and “EMT,” presumably a reference to the use of electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) created by nuclear weapons to disrupt electrical and electronic systems, including radars. Moreover, the U.S. could continue to do what it was already doing, e.g., equip Minuteman III with 2100 MIRVs as well as go ahead with the B-1 strategic bomber and ULMS (Undersea Long-Range Missile System), which became the Trident SLBM.

As the report indicated, the ABM Treaty left each side with options for a National Command Authority site and a missile defense site, two sites each. It really meant less than that because the U.S. could keep a Safeguard site and also establish an NCA site for Washington while the Soviets could keep their Moscow NCA site with the option of building a missile defense site. This paper treated the U.S.’s NCA option as if it was still a possibility, but President Nixon was vehemently opposed to it; this was in part because he knew that Congress would never fund it and perhaps because of the poor optics of defending Washington, D.C., but not other cities.  Using blue language, he told Kissinger: “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want Washington. I don’t like the deal with Washington. I don’t like that goddamn command airplane, or any of this shit. I don’t believe in all that crap.”

While the ABM Treaty contributed to stability by preventing competition in ABM systems, it could not prevent what many feared: a sharper competition in offensive systems. According to Michael Krepon, “the revolution of counterforce capabilities proceeded apace, with no regard whatsoever for the ABM Treaty.”  With the Navy and the Air Force deploying thousands of MIRVed warheads on Poseidon and Minuteman missiles, the Defense Department had plans in the works to make them even more lethal.[39]

The counterforce problem surfaced in a sharp form when Senator Edward Brooke (R-MA) wrote to President Nixon about a New York Times story reporting that the Pentagon had programs to provide U.S. ICBMs with technology to strike hard targets that could provide a first-strike capability. Brooke, an influential Republican moderate who had been concerned about counterforce for some time, sparked debate and discussion in the White House by seeking Nixon’s assurance that the U.S. would not undertake a “provocative” course.[40]

According to Kissinger aide Philip Odeen [see PDF pages 13-17], what the Pentagon had in mind was to increase the yields of Minuteman and Poseidon warheads and to improve their accuracy (through changes in software and hardware). For example, for Minuteman RVs, the accuracy would improve from a Circular Error Probable (CEP) of .16 nautical miles to .075 nautical mile (450 feet). Such changes would increase the lethality and destructiveness of the warheads. As Odeen put it, “the JCS want hard target forces for warfighting purposes—to fulfill the SIOP which gives first priority under all circumstances to attacking Soviet missile silos.”

All of this Odeen found troubling. For example, by increasing the vulnerability of the Soviet ICBM force, the U.S. “could undermine stability in a severe crisis.”  If the U.S. was worried about the survivability of its ICBM forces, it should make them more survivable instead of going for “more counterforce.”

In a memo to Kissinger, Alexander Haig took a “middle of the road” perspective, as he put it. Noting Odeen’s concern about first-strike implications, Haig argued that he had “slanted [his] argumentation strongly in the direction of assured destruction.”  The implication was that it was better to have a counterforce option than to rely simply on deterring the Soviets with a second-strike capability.

Haig enclosed various drafts of proposed responses to Brooke, advising Kissinger to use a draft reply prepared by Helmut Sonnenfeldt [see PDF pages 8 and 9], for use by Secretary of Defense Laird. Believing that the matter “should be fuzzed up enough to deprive [Brooke] of an issue while not committing us to a strategy which thus far has not been national policy,” Haig recommended that the letter “[d]isclaim a first strike strategy in a delicate way.”  The draft did so with this: “I would like to assure you that there will be no decisions by this Administration in regard to our strategic forces that would involve either superfluous or provocative programs and, in particular, none of a first strike character.”  Secretary of Defense Laird would sign the letter to give Nixon more flexibility in any subsequent discussion with Brooke.

Kissinger approved the Sonnenfeldt draft that Haig sent him but wrote “With slight change” [see Document 30, page 2]. The letter text that went to the Defense Department for signature by Secretary Laird was the same, except this language was removed from the sentence quoted above: “and, in particular, none of a first strike character.”  Apparently, Kissinger wanted to “fuzz up” the issue even more by not making a disclaimer of first strike, thus leaving open the White House’s options. How and when Laird’s office followed up this White House request remains unclear; a search of relevant files in the Edward Brooke papers at the Library of Congress turned up nothing. In any event, Pentagon planning to improve hard target capabilities continued under Laird and reached fruition when Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger treated counterforce openly, as declaratory policy.[41]

Strategic instability intensified in the years following the SALT I agreement, although mutual deterrence remained solid enough. By mid-1973, if not earlier, U.S. intelligence was collecting evidence that the Soviets were testing MIRVs on several new ICBMs, whose development Moscow had set in motion with decisions made during 1969. Several of the ICBMs had MIRV capabilities, with one, the heavy SS-18 (R-20), providing a hard-target kill capacity (although it was not deployed until 1988). With these developments, the Soviets could erode the U.S. advantage in numbers of nuclear warheads.[42] At this meeting of the NSC Verification Panel, Henry Kissinger (on his first day on the job as Secretary of State-designate) and advisers discussed the new reality and its implications for the U.S. strategic position and SALT negotiations. Kissinger had already discussed Soviet MIRVs with Dobrynin, who said that U.S. strategic programs had been “driving” their program, while Kissinger claimed it was the “opposite.”

Because the Soviets were seeking to MIRV their SALT-imposed numbers of ballistic missiles, just like the U.S. had, the meeting participants wanted to “put pressure on the Soviets to slow down” and “dissuade them from seeking an advantage.” All agreed with SALT negotiator Alexis Johnson that the Soviets should realize that the U.S. “would not accept inferiority.”

To get the Soviets to accept what Washington saw as an “equitable” SALT agreement, DCI William Colby believed that the U.S. would have to apply “pressure.” One form of “leverage” suggested—and which was certainly the view of Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger—was the U.S.’s “superior technology” and “especially our ability to develop a hard target capability.”

Deputy Secretary of Defense William Clements suggested that the U.S. could “exert pressure” through “larger warheads, greater accuracy, and cruise missiles,” all of which were in the works. Deputy Secretary of State Kenneth Rush added that it would be difficult to get the Soviets “to give up anything” unless the U.S. “confronted them with programs which they will find uncomfortable and will wish to stop.” While U.S. officials were worrying about what came to be known as a “window of vulnerability” for the U.S. ICBM force, the Soviets were not seeking a first-strike capability, but a more secure and comprehensive second-strike, retaliatory force, a goal that was consistent with strategic stability.[43]