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Keywords: Arms Negotiations
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: From 1969 to 1973, Paul Nitze served as a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT). In this video segment, Nitze describes the useful role that 'back channel' negotiations can play and discusses the particular problems with national security adviser Henry Kissinger's negotiations in the final days of SALT I. The second part of the segment addresses Watergate's impact on Nitze's participation in SALT II.Nitze's interview conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age: 'One Step Forward' focuses on SALT I and SALT II. He recounts how he became part of the SALT I delegation, the key issues within the negotiating process, and the initial position statements he drafted for the Soviet delegation. Increasingly critical of U.S. arms policy, Nitze re-formed the Committee on Present Danger, which argued for a massive military buildup of U.S. forces in the post-Vietnam period. He spends considerable time in his interview going over the then-persistent threat of Soviet expansionism. Nitze explains his objection to President Jimmy Carter's nomination of Paul Warnke as his chief arms negotiator. He also explains his opposition to the SALT II Treaty, which he saw as codifying Soviet superiority in missile megatonnage and throw-weight.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Edward L. Rowny was the Joint Chiefs of Staff representative to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) from 1972 to 1979. From 1981 to 1984, during U.S. president Ronald Reagan's administration, he was chief negotiator for the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START). In this video segment, Rowny explores Soviet and American negotiating tactics and proposals. He also shares his frustration with U.S. concessions, process, and misconceptions of Soviet thinking, all of which ultimately led to his resignation after the SALT II Treaty was signed. In his interview conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age: 'One Step Forward,' Rowny describes why the Joint Chiefs of Staff selected him to join the SALT II delegation. He also discusses his misgivings about Paul Warnke, chief negotiator during President Jimmy Carter's administration. Rowny supported the initial proposal that the United States presented in Moscow in March 1977, which would have reduced Soviet heavy missiles by half. Had the U.S. team persevered, he maintains, it would have secured the agreement and successfully closed the 'window of vulnerability' facing U.S. land-based missiles. Although he was not alone in his objections to the SALT II Treaty, others endorsed it as a modest but useful step to a further agreement. The tipping point for Rowny came in the 1978 Christmas negotiations, during which the Soviets retained the right to encrypt signals for their missile tests. In the end, Rowny viewed the treaty as a 'chasm' and an 'impediment' for three reasons. First, it granted the Soviets the unilateral right to heavy missiles. Second, it discounted the intercontinental capabilities of the Soviet Backfire bomber, which was the focus of a hotly contested arms-control debate that Rowny explores in his interview. Third, permitting the missile-test encryption created a loophole in U.S. verification of Soviet compliance. Rowny also criticizes the timing of opening relations with China, and he maintains the inevitability of some degree of linkage between arms control and other areas of U.S.-Soviet relations. He concludes his interview with his take on how to conduct successful negotiations with the Soviet Union.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Andrei Gromyko served as Soviet foreign minister from 1957 to 1985. Beginning in 1943, when Soviet premier Joseph Stalin appointed the 34-year-old ambassador to Washington, Gromyko was an indispensable formulator of Kremlin policy toward the United States. Ultimately, he dealt with nine U.S. presidents. In this video segment, Gromyko chronicles the arms race, beginning in the 1950s under General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev. At the time, each superpower had the ability to inflict "unacceptable damage" on the other. Still, neither side acted to stop the arms race until General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev opened the new era in the mid eighties. Under the leadership of Gorbachev, Gromyko concludes, Soviets have embraced the "principle of rational sufficiency" and initiated unilateral steps to stop the arms race. The interview Gromyko conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age is a wide-ranging reflection on nuclear strategy, foreign policy, and superpower diplomacy during the four-and-a-half decades since the dawn of the nuclear age. Gromyko begins the interview with a look at the Potsdam Conference, at which U.S. president Harry S. Truman informed Soviet premier Joseph Stalin that an atomic bomb had successfully detonated. Truman was perplexed by the non-reaction of the Soviet leader, who then submitted a private order to accelerate the Russian bomb project. Gromyko remembers how, following the war, it felt, at age 37, to challenge the experienced architects of the Cold War and the policies they conceived: the Baruch Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and the Marshall Plan. He recalls that Soviet proposals to ban all nuclear weapons and to place strict controls on facilities pursuing nuclear energy were "categorically rejected." Western powers, Gromyko asserts, missed the opportunity to stop the arms race before it began. He points to "a drastic hardening" of foreign policy, citing former Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill's 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech as an "open declaration of the Cold War." Gromyko reserves his strongest criticism for the "doctrine of intimidation," the United States' classified National Security Memorandum 68, which marked a dramatic shift in U.S.-Soviet relations. His description of the 1962 Caribbean crisis stands in stark contrast to U.S. officials' accounts of the same episode, known as the Cuban missile crisis. He provides detailed recollections of his conversation with President John F. Kennedy during this period, concluding that it was "probably the most difficult meeting I experienced in all my 48 years of meeting presidents of the United States." Gromyko moves ahead to the period of detente. His retelling of last-minute changes prior to the signing of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) I differs from that of national security adviser Henry Kissinger. Gromyko discusses the key Soviet objection to U.S. proposals during SALT II negotiations: the United States, which targeted the Soviet Union with forward bases around the world, demanded drastic reductions in the Soviet Union's principal deterrent-the heavy intercontinental ballistic missile. At Vladivostok in 1974, the two sides agreed on a basic framework for the SALT II Treaty, which was signed five years later. Reflecting on the trends he has observed during his long career as Soviet foreign minister, Gromyko sees more continuity than difference: each administration has tried to achieve military superiority, and the Soviet Union, always one step behind, has pressed to maintain "virtual parity" to safeguard its national interests. Much was achieved during detente, he recalls. While that term is no longer used, Gromyko sees parallels with-and holds out hope for-the current process of "deepening mutual understand and trust."
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