10. Memorandum From Secretary of State Haig to President Reagan1
SUBJECT
- START: The Global Political Context
The decisions you will make in the next few days on our position for strategic arms negotiations may be the most important defense and foreign policy steps of your Administration. Succeed or fail, the START negotiations will affect America’s defenses into the next century. START will also profoundly influence our foreign relations, not just with the Soviets, but with all those nations who depend upon America’s strength and wisdom for their security.
The preeminent criterion for selecting a position for START must be whether, if successfully negotiated, the resultant agreement would enhance our security. All the alternative positions which have been developed by the interagency group meet this criterion. They all involve significant reductions, particularly in the most dangerous and destabilizing systems, down to equal levels.
In selecting among these alternatives, we also need to consider the impact of each upon American public and Allied opinion, both when announced, and as negotiations progress. We need to secure firm Allied and public support for our arms control policies, not only to reinforce our START negotiating position, but also to ensure Congressional approval of our defense budget, and maintain support for the firm foreign policy line we have taken with the Soviet Union across the board.
In its approach to START the Soviet Union will seek to capitalize upon our unwillingness to ratify SALT II. The Soviets will be quick to note to Allied and American publics that their opening position in this negotiation, which will be SALT II or something close to it, has been accepted in its essentials by two successive American Administrations, and endorsed by every European leader from Helmut Schmidt to Margaret Thatcher. This must not deter us from putting forward a position very different and very much better than SALT II. We do need to ensure, however, that the alternative we propose is widely viewed not [Page 37] just as more advantageous to the United States, but as a fair and reasonable basis for a better agreement.
Our Allies are looking forward to the opening of START negotiations as a demonstration that the United States is serious about arms control. They very much hope that we will come forward with a proposal which they can endorse at the June Summit. Their reaction to our START proposal will also in large measure depend upon their appreciation of its likely effect on the INF talks now under way in Geneva. Although START and INF are separate negotiations, they are linked technically and politically. If European leaders believe our START approach retards prospects for INF, they will render, at best, lukewarm public support, and are likely to undercut us in private. This will quickly play back into the American debate.
Following the European Summits, you will visit the UN Special Session in New York. Here too the reaction to our START proposal will strongly affect the quality of your reception, and the broader world response to US arms control policies.
Back home we face a situation where an increasing number of Americans are proving anxious to halt the growth in nuclear arms even by means of agreements they recognize to be inequitable, such as a freeze at current levels. If we are to reverse this trend, we will need to persuade the American people that a truly equitable agreement is also realistically attainable.
As we did before your November 18 speech,2 we will want to move rapidly, once you have made your decisions on START to brief Allied leaders. This will help ensure a uniformly supportive reaction when our proposal becomes public, and before the predictable Soviet criticism can begin to take hold.
We will also want to consider selective Congressional briefings, once your decisions have been made. Again, this can help secure an early and, to the extent possible, bipartisan endorsement of our approach, when it becomes public.
To achieve and sustain such public and Allied support for our START proposals we will need to choose an approach which the public will find comprehensible, fair, and reasonable. We need a proposal which is sustainable, which will stand up to prolonged Soviet critique, and which will continue to receive public support even in the face of predictable Soviet counter-proposals. We will need, above all, to set objectives which the American and European peoples will find both attractive and attainable.
[Page 38]If we fail in this task, if we lose the support of our public and our Allies in this endeavor, then the Soviets will have won a major victory, whether we abandon our position or maintain it.
- Source: Reagan Library, Executive Secretariat, National Security Council: Subject File: Records, 1981–1985, Nuclear-Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) (05/01/1982–05/07/1982). Secret.↩
- See footnote 6, Document 8.↩