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Keywords: Weapons Systems
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- Abstract: Helmut Schmidt became the head of Germany's Social Democratic Party in 1967 and deputy chairman of the party in 1968. Between 1969 and 1972, he served as defense minister, minister for economics and finance, and minister of finance. From 1974 to 1982, he was the chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. In this video segment, Schmidt describes what he terms 'Euro-strategic' SS-20 missiles, which the Soviet Union began deploying along its western and southeastern borders in 1977. He viewed this deployment as destabilizing the nuclear balance in Europe, and he vigorously but unsuccessfully pressed President Jimmy Carter to include these missiles in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) II negotiations. In the interview he conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age: 'Carter's New World,' Schmidt recalls his anger and the political damage he suffered in 1978 when President Carter suddenly delayed his decision to produce the neutron bomb. He analyzes why the Soviet-U.S. relations deteriorated as the 1970s wore on, goes over Carter successor Ronald Reagan's initial receptivity to a 'zero-zero' option, relays the subsequent internal dissension and ascendancy of hardliners within the Reagan administration, and sheds light on the shift within the administration toward arms reductions. He recounts his conviction that the threat of deploying U.S. Pershing II and cruise missiles in response to the threat of the Soviet SS-20s brought the Soviet Union to the negotiating table. The Guadeloupe meeting that Schmidt helped organize produced the 'double-track decision' that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) council adopted at the end of 1979: to deploy the U.S. intermediate-range missiles while simultaneously bargaining them away in Geneva. Unlike some of his counterparts, Schmidt never feared the 'de-coupling' of the U.S. strategic deterrent from the defense of NATO Europe. He remained, though, keenly sensitive to the concentration of nuclear weapons deployed by other countries in the Federal Republic. In his interview, Schmidt explains the need for European collaboration in building up conventional forces to achieve both nuclear and non-nuclear parity between the Warsaw and NATO blocs.
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- Abstract: Earl Ubell is a pioneer among science and health writers in America. After a long, distinguished career at The New York Herald Tribune from 1943 to 1966, he went on to work at both CBS and NBC News. Prominent in the emerging scientific writing community in the 1950s and early 1960s, he was a recipient of the Lasker Medical Journalism Award 1957. Milton Stanley Livingston was a leading physicist in the field of magnetic resonance accelerators. Working first with professor Ernest O. Lawrence at the University of California, Livingston was instrumental in the development of the Berkeley cyclotron. Moving to Cornell in 1938, Livingston was part of the core group who established nuclear physics as a field of study. Choosing to stay with the Cornell cyclotron rather than follow colleagues onto the Manhattan Project, Livingston was involved in the production of radioisotopes for medical purposes. At the time of this interview, Livingston was director of the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, a joint project of Harvard University and MIT.In this program segment Louis Lyons quizzes Earl Ubell about the lack of public knowledge and the perception of the nuclear bomb, while pressing Professor Livingston to explain exactly what nuclear fallout is, and the danger it presents.
- Subject:
Humanities, Social Sciences, Science and Technology
- Collection:
WGBH Open Vault
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- Abstract: Henry Kissinger, U.S. national security adviser from 1969 to 1973 and then secretary of state until 1977, was the dominant figure in creating the foreign policy of the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations. This video segment deals with the concept of "linkage": interlocking U.S. arms-control negotiations with leveraging Soviet behavior and policy.
Kissinger's interview conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age: "One Step Forward" touches on points contained in his blueprint for de: a relaxing of tensions between the superpowers. Detente was designed to "contain" Soviet influence and power, based on a combination of pressures and inducements. Kissinger speaks to issues of nuclear parity, its influence on negotiations, and the breakthrough in Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT) once the Soviet Union agreed to link offensive and defensive weapons. He also addresses the significance of opening relations with China; his "back channel" diplomacy with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin independent of the SALT delegation; the controversy surrounding multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs); and the significance of the SALT I Treaty as a frame of reference for future negotiations. What followed, Kissinger recalls, was a general antagonism toward SALT II, the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to link trade with improving human rights within the Soviet Union, and the problems for arms control created by MIRVs-all of which coincided with the fall of Nixon.
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- Abstract: Dr. Randall Forsberg is executive director of the think tank she founded in 1980, the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies. In this video segment, she recalls the moment during arms negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union when she determined that the arms race is not driven by basic deterrence but by the imperative to gain superiority in threatening to win-without actually waging-nuclear war.In her wide-ranging interview for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age: 'Visions of War and Peace,' Forsberg explores war-and-peace issues, military doctrine, the history and economics of nuclear-weapons development and policy, war-fighting capability and force structure, scenarios and resistance to arms reduction, the history of relations between the superpowers, and their interactions with developing nations. Seven countries, she asserts, account for 99 percent of nuclear weapons. The dispersal of weapons-in the form of the Rapid Deployment Force, tactical weapons, and missiles fitted with multiple warheads-heightens the risk of war in a world moving toward becoming what she calls 'a global nuclear porcupine.' Forsberg asserts that 'threatening to commit genocide as a way of conducting politics' is one of the most 'deeply immoral and subversive acts of government in the modern world.' Moreover, she maintains, a conventional military crisis could easily cross that nuclear threshold. Forsberg advocates the three Rs: 'reduce, restructure, and restrain' conventional forces-the other side of the military coin-that consume 75 percent of the U.S. military budget. She compares disarmament with abolitionism: most people understood that slavery was evil and didn't know when it would end, but they realized that they had to work until it was eliminated. Forsberg's analysis of the country's 'defense dependency' and of the shortcomings of the nuclear-freeze movement she spearheaded is laced with her optimism about Soviet Union general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms. She has never abandoned her vision of an educated public that will prevail in 'demilitarizing international relations" to achieve a "secure, stable permanent peace.'
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