UNITED STATES OBJECTIVES IN ARMS CONTROL NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE SOVIET UNION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP83M00914R002100110084-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 28
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 1, 2007
• Sequence Number: 84
• Publication Date: October 20, 1981
• Content Type: REPORT

ARMS CONTROL BULLETIN
U S AiRMS CONTROL AND DISAGvIA ENT AGENCY, 'NASHINGZON, D.C., 20 ;'
United States Objectives
in
Arms Control Negotiations
with
The Soviet Union
Eugene V. Rostow
Director
US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
Council on Foreign Relations
New York
October 20, 1981
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United States Objectives in Arms Control Negotiations
with the Soviet Union
Appearing before this learned and august body is always
a challenge. In my case this time, it is a particular chal-
lenge. At least half of you know more about arms control
than I do. Many of you have wound stripes earned in famous
battles of the past. I thought that the only way a novice
like me could make the occasion worth your while would be to
model my talk on "The Education of Henry Adams," and tell you
how my mind has been working as I have grappled with the prob-
lems of SALT, START, TNF, and all that during the tempestuous
months since I was asked to become Director of ACDA. Perhaps
it is excessive to describe what has been going on within me
as "the working of my mind." The nuclear weapon is an emo-
tionally disturbing subject suffused with mystery. It rightly
inspires terror and awe. Logical coherence is not
the dominating feature of the controversy about its role
in our affairs.
I.
The first question-I had to face when the job was
offered was whether I believed that Soviet-American arms
control agreements -- and especially agreements about the
control of nuclear weapons -- are really a Good Thing.
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Would we be better off to rely on security treaties and
military strength alone to protect our interests and keep
the peace until the Soviet Union finally mellowed under
the profound and benign influence of Russian high culture --
an outcome George Kennan once said is inevitable in the
long run?
I know only too well that there is a naive and exag-
gerated public faith in the efficacy of arms control agree-
ments as amulets of peace -- a public faith which politicians
? have exploited in the past and will undoubtedly exploit again
in the future. Peace is a complicated idea, the'supreme
achievement of statesmanship. It is a state of society
characterized not only by the absence of violence, but
by general respect for the necessary and agreed rules of
social cooperation -- in short, a social condition defined
both by order and by law. There is no such thing as peace
without tears. Both in domestic and in international
society, peace is secured not by treaties, constitutions,
and laws alone, but by courts, policemen, and prisons --
and by occasional harsh=.actions to vindicate the formal law,
like the suppression of.domestic riot or what was called the
police action in Korea thirty years ago. Important arms
control agreements -- the Versailles Treaty and the Washing-
ton Naval Agreement, for example -- did not prevent World
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War II. And the SALT I agreements and the process of nego-
tiating SALT II did not prevent the worst decade of the Cold
War or the extraordinary buildup of the Soviet nuclear
arsenal.
Nonetheless, I decided to accept the job. Euphoric
enthusiasm for arms control is indeed a dangerous drug,
an escape from reality. But in the foreboding context of
Soviet-American relations, the arguments for a major arms
control effort outweigh the arguments against. The Soviet
American relationship is now so tense that if we are to
be true to ourselves we must seize every opportunity to
negotiate for peace, however adverse the odds may be.
Under present circumstances, arms control ought to be a'
useful catalyst for a movement towards peace, if we
discipline ourselves to view arms control as an integral
part of our foreign and defense policy but not a magical
substitute for it. The Soviet rush for power-has acceler-
ated rapidly during the last ten years, fuelled by a
fantastic long-term program of arms accumulation. It
has naturally aroused resistance among those who wish to
remain free. The result is a world crisis for which the
only rational and humane solution is Soviet-American
cooperation to establish peace. The rational place
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for such cooperation to begin is in the field of arms
control, arms reduction, and disarmament.
The second set of questions I had to face concerned
the significance of the nuclear weapon.
The discovery of nuclear power and the invention of
the nuclear weapon were Promethean events, and we have
only begun to perceive their implications. Nuclear weap-
ons, alas, do not exist in a world apart, completely cut
off from day-to-day diplomacy and conflict. The nuclear
arms experts play complicated games, but those games
are not like bridge, go, or chess. The invisible emana-
tions of the nuclear weapon have already transformed the
art of war, and therefore completely altered the magnetic
field of world politics. For ordinary purposes, interna-
tional society is decidedly pluralistic. But on the ulti-
mate issues of security and defense, it has never been
more bipolar.
From the beginning of the nuclear age, the United
States has been possessed by the conviction that the
nuclear weapon must be_abolished,.or at least brought
under tight and effective control. By a curious historical
accident, we were the first country to make and use
nuclear weapons. The moral concern which is one of the
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finest strands in our being led us to wonder -- as we
wonder still -- whether the use of the bomb by President
Truman was justified, and to view any possible further use
of nuclear weapons with revulsion.
In 1948, driven by these insights and self-doubts, we
proposed the Baruch Plan, which would have placed what was
then an American monopoly into the custody of a United Nations
agency. The rejection of the Baruch Plan by the Soviet
Union was surely one of the decisive turning points of
modern history. The American effort to put the nuclear
genie back into the bottle continued despite that rebuff,
and continues today. A number of useful treaties at the
edges of the problem have been achieved -- the Test Ban'
Treaty, for example, and the treaties banning weapons of
mass destruction in outer space and Antarctica. But the
important Non-Proliferation Treaty is in danger because
the recent decline of world public order has'stimulated
tendencies making for the spread of nuclear weapons in
many parts of the world.- And we have so far failed to
achieve agreements with the Soviet Union which could
arrest and then reverse the ominous expansion of
nuclear arsenals.
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Throughout this period -- that is, from the time of
our offer of the Baruch Plan to the collapse of SALT II
in 1979 --the United States based its arms control initi-
atives on the assumption that the Soviet Union and the
United States took the same view of the function of
nuclear weapons in war and politics and therefore had the
same goal in arms control negotiations, namely to prevent
any use of nuclear weapons or threat to use them for pur-
poses of aggression. The reexamination of this major
premise was the third step in my education as an arms
control official.
Our conclusion is that it is no longer possible to
entertain the hypothesis that the Soviet Union and the
United States share the same philosophy of arms control.
This now seems to be a self-evident proposition. But
like many self-evident propositions, it has important con-
sequences. It is, I believe and hope, a liberating axiom,
which is helping us to ,clarify our objectives in the nego-
tiations, and should therefore greatly improve our chances
for reaching a fair and balanced agreement with the Soviet
Union, in the equal interest of both sides. We have
based our approach to the nuclear arms control negotia-
tions now before us -- those concerned with-the reduction
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of intermediate range and intercontinental nuclear
weapons -- on the premise that the United States and the
Soviet Union have fundamentally different objectives
and policies with regard to the military balance and
nuclear weapons, and therefore different objectives
in arms control negotiations.
II.
Since the beginning of the nuclear age, the
objectives of our nuclear forces have been deterrence,
a capability to retaliate, and stability. Our nuclear
arsenal is an integral part of an array of political,
economic, and military programs through which the United
States, its allies, and other friendly nations are seek-
ing to assure -their common defense and to advance-the
welfare of their peoples. To this end, the United States
and its allies and friends have pursued a reasonably con-
certed and coherent foreign policy for the last thirty-
four years, despite fluctuations in its effectiveness since
1947, The goal of that policy, behind the shield of the
Truman Doctrine, the doctrine of containment, has been and
is to restore an open, stable. and progressive world
public order in which change is achieved only by peaceful
means, and there is general and reciprocal respect for the
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rules of the Charter of the United Nations regarding the
international use of force. This is the only possible for-
eign policy which could protect the interests of the United
States and many other nations on our contracting, interde-
pendent, and dangerous planet. It has therefore survived
through good years and bad for the best of reasons: it
corresponds to the nature of things.
In that enterprise, American nuclear weapons have
two deterrent roles of critical importance. One is to
make certain that neither the Soviet Union nor any other
country use or brandish nuclear weapons in world politics
for aggressive purposes. The second is that the United
States be capable of responding with nuclear weapons if its
vital interests are imperilled by attack from nuclear or
conventional forces. To achieve these ends, the United
States must at all times maintain a clear and visible
nuclear second strike capability, so that the United
States, its allies, and its other vital interests can be
protected against attack or the threat of attack by what-
ever means may be required across the full spectrum of
possible threats.
This is and must remain the minimal goal of our
nuclear arsenal as the ultimate guarantee of our diplomacy.
The United States will not be separated from its allies
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or other countries whose defense is necessary in order to
prevent an overwhelming concentration of power in the
hands of the Soviet Union -- i.e., Soviet "hegemony,"
to borrow the word the Chinese like to use. It follows
that the minimal goal of our representatives in negotiating
arms control agreements is and must remain the protection
of that military capability.
The McNamara Doctrine -- the doctrine that the people
and the cities of each side should be hostages guarantee-
ing mutual deterrence and the non-use of nuclear. weapons was the most conspicuous symbol of the basic American
policy of nuclear stalemate and the predicate for our pro-
posals of arms control agreements based on the principles
of parity and mutual deterrence. The contention that the
use of nuclear weapons would be unthinkable if each side
refrained from active or passive defenses against nuclear
attack was generally accepted in the United States. To
assure that goal was a major objective of the ABM Treaty
and still dominates American thought and policy on the
subject, despite inevitable qualifications imposed upon
us by the structure of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.
For a long time, we attributed this view to the
Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union has never accepted
the gospel of Mutual Assured Destruction. The Soviet
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10.
Union pursues an active policy of civil defense and defense
against intrusions into Soviet air space. And both the size
and the composition of the Soviet nuclear weapon force, to
say nothing of its accuracy and destructive power, bespeak
altogether different strategic ideas and objectives.
The emphasis in Soviet nuclear force planning is not
only on retaliatory weapons but on superiority, on stra-
tegic counterforce capability, and on damage prevention
or limitation. A clear example of this principle is the
persistent deployment of heavy and accurate ICBMs, capable
of.destroying most of our ICBt1s (and bombers on the
ground, and submarines in port) in a first strike, with
.enough left over to constitute a formidable deterrent#to
American retaliation. The Soviet Union is or will soon
be capable of accomplishing that goal with something
like a third of its heavy ICBM force, leaving the rest
of its arsenal to counter any American response.
Ten years ago American experts and officials assured
our people that the Soviet Union was seeking nuclear
parity, recognition as a_great power, and a place in the
political sun. But the'Soviet Union has gone right on
building up its nuclear arsenal at the rate of some eight
percent a year in real terms, although all students of the
subject agree it has long since passed the point of nuclear
parity.
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it is apparent that the objective of the Soviet
Union in its formidable program of nuclear weapon devel-
opment is altogether different from the strategic
doctrine of the United States. The United States nuclear
arsenal is the fulcrum of a deterrent system for defend-
ing a peaceful and stable world political order, con-
sisting of states; the Soviet arsenal is the ultimate
engine of a comprehensive attack on that order, utilizing
revolutionary movements, terrorism, and conventional
forces backed by nuclear power to attain its goals. The
purpose of Soviet nuclear weapons is therefore intimida-
tion and coercion -- and, if necessary, the capability
to initiate and win a nuclear war. This is clear in
what Soviet writers on strategy say. It is even more
obvious in what the Soviet Union has done and is doing.
The purpose and result of Soviet actions is not only
to equal but to surpass the United States in-the cate-
gories of nuclear power most relevant to their purposes.
Achieving such a positiori, they believe, would permit
them to expand their domain almost at will, using con-
ventional or proxy forces or covert methods of subver-
sion under the protective cover of what they consider
to be superiority in nuclear arms. Soviet writers and
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speakers freely proclaim their view that what they call
"the correlation of military forces" will determine the
future course of world politics.
It cannot be said too often that the greatest risk
we face is not nuclear war but political coercion based
on the credible threat of nuclear war implicit in over-
whelming Soviet nuclear and conventional force superior-
ity. This threat and the fear which it engenders are
the true source of the agitation in Europe today about
modernizing our theatre nuclear forces.
The Soviet policy of indefinite expansion and the mili-
tary forces and doctrines on which it is based are reflected
in Soviet arms control policies. The interests of the United
States and the Soviet Union in non-proliferation are parallel,
and the Non-Proliferation Treaty was not unusually difficult
to negotiate. But this has not been the case in the SALT
process. In SALT I, the Soviet objective was an ABM Treaty
to deny the United States the military advantage of its
lead in ABM research and development; the United States ob-
jective was to set agreed and stabilizing limits on the
growth and improvement of both the Soviet and the American
strategic arsenals, so that each side could maintain a de-
terrent position, assuring the non-use of nuclear weapons.
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The SALT I agreements failed to accomplish the United
States objective, but were accepted with hope as a first
step towards that goal. In 1972, we were greatly concerned
over the possibility of an uncontrolled Soviet nuclear arms
build-up, and formally announced that if the SALT process
failed within five years to produce a more thorough agree-
ment equitably limiting strategic offensive arms, "the
supreme interests of the United States" could be jeopar-
dized, establishing grounds for withdrawal from the SALT
I agreements. Congress later confirmed this position.
The SALT process produced what we most feared in
1972. The American interest in ABM development was ef-
fectively retarded by a number of factors, including the.
ABM treaty. And the terms, the loopholes, and the ambigu-
ities of the 1972 Interim Agreement on the Limitation of
Strategic Offensive Arms permitted the Soviet Union to
forge ahead in its strategic arms build-up while the
United States rested on its oars. The strategic stability
the United States sought through SALT I proved to be a
chimera. The Soviet Union took fulll advantage of a combi-
nation of political and military circumstances which
favored its plans for expansion: the uncertainties of the
American mood in the aftermath of Vietnam; the approach
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of strategic nuclear balance and corresponding changes
in the balance of conventional and theatre nuclear forces;
and above all the American attitudes which flowed from our
assumption that the Soviet Union was'interested only.in
parity, mutual deterrence, and peace. Thus during the
last decade the Soviet Union accelerated its campaigns of
of expansion based on the use of conventional force, terror-
ism, and subversion in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and
the Caribbean. It goes without saying that the indefinite
continuance of such efforts, one after the other, is explo-
sively dangerous. When it passes a certain psychological
boundary, expansion by conventional means can trigger the
panic which leads to war as readily as the threat to use
nuclear weapons.
These trends were accentuated during the long period
while the United States and the Soviet Union negotiated
the SALT II Treaty, and the United States then debated the
merits of the Treaty, and failed to ratify it. While I
have no desire to rake over the entrails of old debates,
we must learn from the mistakes of the past, or we shall
surely repeat them. As one of,my colleagues has remarked,
SALT II solved the problems of the late 1960s, but failed
to take into account the situation we face today. One of
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its most fundamental defects is that it would have frozen
the United States into a position of nuclear inferiority
and thus denied credibility to the nuclear umbrella which
has protected Western Europe, Japan, and other vital
interests of the United States since 1945.
This experience defines the problem we face today,
both in rearmament and in arms control. Between 1972 and
.1981, the Soviet Union introduced many new strategic weap-
0 ons systems as well as additional systems which are generally
considered theatre systems, including, in 1977, the formidable
SS-20. During the same period, the United States introduced
only one new strategic system, the Trident, in 1980. The
Soviet strategic and intermediate range nuclear forces were
increased and improved at a formidable rate, while the
American forces remained nearly stable. As a result, in the
most significant measures of power, the American lead in
nuclear weapons has melted away. We have entered a decade
of uncertainty, to say the least, before we can be confident
that our deterrent second-strike capacity is fully and
visibly restored.
The election last November was in part a referendum
on our foreign and defense policies, including arms control.
There is a solid public consensus for rebuilding our de-
fenses, a healthy skepticism about what,the'Soviets are..up
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to, and a new realism about what can be achieved in arms
control negotiations. There should therefore be sustained
public support for arms control agreements which permit
both the Soviet Union and the United States to enjoy the
security of equal deterrence at much lower levels of force,
but deny to either side the possibility of using nuclear
weapons as a tool for nuclear blackmail in the interest of
aggression. We will not accept agreements which fail to
meet this standard.
III.
Let me turn now to the application of this standard
to-some of the more concrete problems we face in the two
principal negotiations which are now approaching, the
negotiations about Long Range Theatre Nuclear Weapons,
which open in Geneva on November 30, 1981, and the
SALT, or, as we prefer to say, the START negotiations on
intercontinental weapons, for which we expect to be
ready early in 1982.
First, I should say a word on the relationship be-
tween the two sets of negotiations.
It is important to recall the background of the
Theatre Nuclear Force talks.
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For more than thirty years now, the security. of
Western Europe, like the security of Japan and certain
other vital American security interests, has been as-
sured ultimately by the United States strategic arsenal --
the intercontinental weapons located within the United
States, on the high seas, or elsewhere. At all times
during this period, the Soviet Union has had superior
conventional forces on the central front in Europe; in
recent years it has had superior conventional forces on
the flanks of Europe as well. But until recently those
superior Soviet forces have been balanced by the strategic
superiority of the United States and by the Soviet con-
viction that the United States would protect its vital
security interest in the independence of Western-Europe
by the use of nuclear weapons if necessary.
As a result of the Soviet build-up of intercontinental,
intermediate, and middle-range nuclear weapons, however,
doubt has arisen in the West as to whether the American
nuclear guaranty is still firm -- and that doubt has been
stated publicly by distinguished Western personalities.
We can assume that the leaders'of the Soviet Union have
asked themselves the same question. Some four or five
years ago, therefore, West European leaders became parti-
cularly concerned about the development of Soviet
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intermediate range nuclear weapons -- the so-called grey
area weapons --which were not on the SALT agenda. Could
those weapons coerce Europe into neutrality or worse while
the United States was paralyzed by the size and power of
the Soviet intercontinental arsenal? These nightmare fears
led European spokesmen to suggest that the United States
take appropriate action to deter the use of Soviet Euro-
missiles. The result of the European proposal was the
NATO decision of 1979 that the United States station inter-
mediate range, ground based missiles in Europe and at the
same time negotiate with the Soviet Union about removing
the threat to Europe implicit in the existence of the
Soviet missiles.
The reasoning behind the NATO decision paralleled
the argument which has persuaded the United States to
keep large American conventional forces in or near
Europe. There has been periodic political agitation in
the United States for a'reduction of-our conventional
forces in Europe, and for exclusive reliance on the
intercontinental nuclear-weapons to protect Europe
against Soviet pressures. But,proposals of this kind
have been firmly and repeatedly rejected. The United
States wishes not only to make the nuclear guaranty
clear and credible, but to be in a position to respond
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appropriately to threats across the entire spectrum of
threat or attack. To remove American forces from Europe
would escalate every conflict instantly to the nuclear
level. With American long range theatre nuclear weapons
deployed on European soil, there would be less doubt
about the credibility of the American nuclear guaranty
to Europe both in Europe and in the Soviet Union. As a
result, the risk of war by miscalculation would be reduced,
and the nuclear threshold correspondingly raised.
The United States fully understands the concern which
led our European allies to call attention to the special
dangers inherent in the Soviet arsenal of Euromissiles,
and above all to the danger of "decoupling" Europe from
the United States. And it fully agrees with the double
track decision of the North Atlantic Council -- to deploy
Long Range Theatre Nuclear Weapons on European soil and
at the same time to pursue arms control negotiations
about the theatre nuclear balance with the Soviet Union.
The problem of Long Range Theatre Nuclear-Forces
must be examined in the"SALT context, as the North
Atlantic Council declared, because the line between
Theatre Nuclear Forces and intercontinental forces is
not clear cut. Intercontinental weapons can also be
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aimed at theatre targets. And some weapons normally
classified as theatre. weapons can be used under certain
circimstances on intercontinental missions. While much
can be acco^plished by successful TNF talks, both in
reducing weapons and contributing to crisis stability,
the ultimate security of the NATO allies will neces-
sarily continue to rest on the reliability of the United
States strategic guaranty.
IV.
Secondly, I should comment on the basic problem of the
unit of measurement in future nuclear arms agreements. The
goal of such agreements, most Americans agree, is "equality"
or "parity" or "equal deterrence" or some such phrase.
"Equality" in what? What is the relevant standard of
"equality"?
The 1972 Interim Agreement and SALT II used "deployed
launchers" as the unit of account. We knew then that the
number of "deployed launchers" was not an accurate measure of
the destructive power of nuclear weapons. But in the early
70s, at'any rate, the shortcomings of the unit of measure-
ment did not do much harm. The deterrent power of the
United States was not in doubt. And "deployed launchers"
were comparatively easy to measure by national technical
means.
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It is difficult to see how the problem of'measurement
can be solve satisfactorily by relying on "deployed launch-
ers" as the only unit of account. The balance has become too
close. Soviet systems have become more complex and more
diversified. Factors which were safely ignored in earlier
years have now become more significant. I cannot tell
you now what measure or measures will finally be chosen
for the purpose, save to point out that the problem now
? is altogether different from the problem we faced in
1971 and 1972.
Third, the probable demise of "deployed launchers"
as the unit of account and the size and sophistication
of the Soviet nuclear armory highlight the increased
importance of verification. Verification has been a
more and more troublesome aspect of arms control in
recent years, both in the area of nuclear weapons and
elsewhere: -- in the field of chemical and biological
weapons, for example, and the limitation on-nuclear
testing. During the last ten years we have had many
shocks and surprises.in'attempting to follow and anti-
cipate the growth of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, and to
monitor Soviet compliance with existing arms control
agreements. Officials deeply sympathetic to the cause
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of arms control have come away from their tours of
duty in Washington troubled about the effectiveness of
verification and of our procedures for ensuring the
enforcement of arms control treaties and disturbed
about the implications of their experience. Their
concern is easy to understand.
We have concluded, therefore, -- and this is perhaps
a fourth aspect to my education -- that we are at, or near
the limit of what can be accomplished in this area by
national technical means alone. We have informed-the
Soviet Union that we believe cooperative measures to supple-
ment.-national technical means will be necessary both in
START and in TNF, and invited the Soviet Government to discuss
the matter with us in any way it prefers -- through diplo-
matic channels, through meetings of experts, or through the
actual TNF and START negotiations themselves. Thus far, we
have had no response to our invitation, which is the first
substantive step in the new round of arms control talks
between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the
same talk, we told the Soviet Union that there will have
to be a radical improvement in'their willingness to pro-
vide data. The day when arms control negotiations are
conducted on the basis of data supplied.by the-United
States is over. In short, we have made'it clear that
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in our view cooperation between the Soviet Union and
the United States is the only way out of the dilemma
which the events of the last decade have brought to
a point of climax. It is time in our view to end the
old cat-and-mouse game which has resulted in nothing
but grief for both sides and to initiate procedures of
sustained cooperation which could lead to better
things.
Fourth, it might be useful at this early stage to
call attention to an issue which is bound to be of spe-
cial importance in the negotiations -- crisis stability.
As we all know, the Soviet Union has chosen to put most
of its nuclear power into ICBMs, including some extremely
large ones. Because of their number and power, the
Soviet ICBMs constitute a threat to the stability of
deterrence. Potentially at least they are the
most vulnerable-and the most threatening of weapons. A
large part of our effort to persuade the Soviet Union
to accept mutual deterrence as the only possible objec-
tive for the new round of TNF and START talks will
necessarily focus on this problem. It is in our inter-
est, in the interest of the Soviet Union, and in every-
body else's interest, too, that we achieve provisions
in the TNF and START agreements -- and in our defense
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plans -- which enhance confidence in the survivability
of second strike forces, and therefore reduce pressures
to adopt first strike or launch-on-warning policies. It
would be helpful, consonant with that principle,
achieve reductions in the Soviet heavy ICBMs which
constitute a special threat to the survivability of our
land-based ICBMs and other strategic forces, and in the
Soviet mobile SS-20s and other Euromissiles which con-
stitute a complementary threat to targets in Europe,
Japan, China, and the Middle East.
V.
The Reagan Administration is approaching the problem
of arms control as a vital factor in an overall foreign.
policy of preventing war by restoring order. The United
States has set no preconditions for the beginning of the
talks. We have been waiting only until we have solved the
intellectual problems of reappraisal and careful preparation
after our disappointing experience with SALT I and SALT
II, and we have been working on those problems with
great urgency. We are not waiting until-we have rearmed,
in order to negotiate from "a position of strength."
The will and the capacity of the United States and its
Allies are enough, we believe, to attract the earnest
attention of the Soviet Union. Nor have we'asked the
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Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan, or require Nortlz
Vietnam to withdraw from Cambodia, before we negotiate.
Some forms of political linkage between the course of
events and arms control negotiations are inevitable,
as was the case in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded
Czechoslovakia just before President Johnson was sche-
duled to go to Moscow for SALT talks. The linkage
President Reagan seeks is of a different order. The
goal of nuclear stalemate may be all we can achieve
through negotiations -- an agreement which permits us
to maintain our policy of deterrence, retaliation, and
crisis stability so far as the use of nuclear weapons
is-.concerned. That, surely, is our minimum goal in
negotiation. But it is not a very appetizing goal, if
the Soviet Union continues to treat nuclear agreements
as a license for aggression in some of the most sensi-
tive regions of the globe by conventional means, terror-
ism and subversion. Indeed, the United States is con-
vinced that the Soviet program of expansion has gone
too far, and has begun'to present possibilities whose
outcome can no longer be predicted or controlled.
President Reagan has therefore instructed us to approach
arms control as part of a much larger effort through
which we and the Soviet Union might jointly stabilize
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our relations and contribute to the restoration of world
public order. The linkage we seek between Soviet behav-
ior and arms control is not merely a transitory or an
isolated Soviet action, the sight of a dove on the
troubled waters or the visits of Russian ballet companies
to American cities, but Soviet cooperation in enforcing
the rules of the Charter of the United Nations with re-
gard to the international use of force. The process of
seeking arms control agreements could and should play a
positive part in that effort. As Secretary of State Haig
said recently:
-"What do we want of the Soviet Union? We want
greater Soviet restraint on the use of force. We
want greater Soviet respect for the independence
of others. And, we want the Soviets to abide by
their reciprocal obligations, such as those under-
taken in the Helsinki Accords. These are no more
.than we demand of any state, and these are no less
than required by the U.N. Charter and interna-
tional law. The rules of the Charter governing
the international use of force will lose all of
their influence on the behavior of nations if the
Soviet Union continues its aggressive course."
On my recent trip to Europe, I was told of an epi-
sode which sums up all I-have to offer you toiight.
In the early years of the nuclear age, Hugh Gaitskell
asked R. H. Tawney, the great social philosopher and
patron saint of the Labor Party, to write him a memo-
randum about what British policy towards. nuclear weapons
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 Approved For Release 2007/03/02 : CIA-RDP83M00914R002100110084-9
,ff. I
the secret was out of the laboratory, and could never
be returned. Any industrial country would have the
technology to make the weapons. Secondly, it followed
that Great Britain, France, and the United States
could not give up nuclear weapons. Third, nuclear war
was unthinkably destructive, and the West must find
ways to protect its freedom and security and at the
same time prevent nuclear war. Finally, Tawney
drew from these three propositions a conclusion he
regarded as inescapable, that the goal of policy must
be-not simply the avoidance of nuclear war, but the
elimination of all international war.
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should be. Tawney's paper said four things: First,