Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President

Shadow over the Earth: The Nuclear Threat

SHADOW OVER THE EARTH: THE NUCLEAR THREAT I went over the complete inventory of U.S. nuclear warheads, which is really a sobering experience. DIARY, DECEMBER 28, 1977 As President, I was periodically given a total listing of all our nuclear weapons, from the smallest tactical shells to the largest bombs and missile warheads. Even more frequently I received a fairly accurate listing of the Soviet nuclear armaments. It was always obvious that both nations had far more weapons than would ever be needed to destroy every significant military installation and civilian population center in the lands of its potential enemies, and in the process kill tens of millions—perhaps a hundred million—people on each side. Europe, the most likely battleground , was covered by thousands of such explosives—tactical weapons of limited range but great destructive power. Longer-range missiles and airplanes located throughout the seas and land in the northern hemisphere could reach the American and Soviet homelands. All the glib talk about ICBM’s, MIRV’s, SLCM’s, and GLCM’s (the latter two known as Slick-ems and Glick-ems) tended to lull some people into indifference or resignation about the unbelievable destruction they represented. That horror was constantly on my mind. Another responsibility of mine was to approve the testing of atomic explosive devices and the production schedule for additions to our nuclear arsenal, both of existing designs and of new and improved weapons. I realized that the leaders of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China were going through the same procedure, and I wondered if they too thought about future generations and were also sometimes very discouraged. Why could we not control this most ominous of all threats? 217 Our best hope lay in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, known as SALT. If these resulted in an arms control agreement, it would not only benefit the United States and the Soviet Union, but might serve as a model for other nations. Yet there were and continue to be serious obstacles to achieving agreement. First of all, our two countries do not naturally trust one another, and there is a prevailing suspicion that the most innocent proposal might conceal some trick—such as a weapon secretly under development. One complication which follows from this distrust is that every item in a SALT treaty would have to be verifiable, each country using its independent capabilities to assure that all the terms were honored. If compliance could not be confirmed, the item could not be included. In both countries, the military-industrial complex is extremely powerful and constantly pushing for larger defense budgets. New weapon systems are always being conceived; they pass through research, design, and testing, and then perhaps go on to deployment. This process can take as long as ten years, and once it gains momentum, it is almost impossible to stop. Throughout the protracted negotiations, ever more advanced weapons are being born and must somehow be accommodated within the convoluted language of the agreement. Each group of negotiators is, in effect, trying to put its mark on a rapidly moving animal without hogtying it first—and by the time it is finally branded, it may have changed into some new and unrecognizable form, even wilder and more uncontrollable than before. No rational American would want to swap political systems with his or her Russian counterpart, but it is much easier to negotiate a SALT treaty in a totalitarian society with a relatively consistent policy, where the voices of news media and opposition political forces are either stilled or heard only in a closed room. The Politburo, in which military leaders play an important role, can make a decision, and the nation’s propaganda apparatus can then proclaim the “unanimously agreed upon” new policy essential to self-defense. On the other hand, the cacophony coming out of Washington indicates confusion and argument among Americans. It is almost inevitable that the voices heard most loudly are those of the opposition—and the more strident their attacks on the Soviets or on our own negotiators, the bigger the headlines. 218 ON THE SAME EARTH Another serious problem in these negotiations is that it is difficult to compare our nuclear arsenal with that of the Soviet Union, because we have different needs and sharply contrasting histories of evolving these weapons. Quite early, we in the United States opted for a “triad,” with three types...