Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981–1988, Volume XI, START I

97. Memorandum From the Deputy Secretary of State (Dam) to Secretary of State Shultz¹

Washington, August 17, 1984

I attach a memorandum by Jim Timbie of my staff on “Arms Control in the Second Term” as well as a short personal note he put on top.

I highly commend this memo for your careful review. Despite its length, it is by far the most refreshing and cogent piece that I have read on the process of arms control negotiations.

Timbie has worked on arms control matters in the U.S. Government since he left Stanford at the beginning of the 1970’s (with a Ph.D. in physics). I found him during the period prior to the Adelman confirmation when I was working with ACDA on a daily basis. He was the ablest fellow I found in ACDA, and so I brought him onto my staff. Not all of his ideas are popular in OSD but I find his views, especially on process questions, refreshing and stimulating.

Kenneth W. Dam²

Attachment

Memorandum From the Advisor for Strategic Policy to the Deputy Secretary of State Dam (Timbie) to the Deputy Secretary of State (Dam)³

Washington, July 2, 1984

SUBJECT

• Arms Control in the Second Term

Permanent Features of the Landscape

—Arms control will continue to be a difficult and complex subject. Major problems include (1) finding a way to define equality despite differences in forces and geography, (2) securing Soviet agreement to significant reductions in modern weapons, (3) devising effective verification measures, and (4) treatment of third-country forces.

—The Soviets will be difficult to negotiate with, will continue to oppose our interests around the world, and will periodically act in a manner contrary to all civilized norms. The Soviets consider relations with the U.S. important, but subordinant to their perceived security needs.

—There will be no consensus in Washington on our objectives in pursuing arms control. There will be articulate opposition to all plausible agreements as contrary to U.S. interests.

—There will be broad public support for arms control, but practical steps will be controversial. Opposition to agreements comes from many quarters—levels too high, not verifiable, unduly constrains U.S. programs, does not end the arms race, etc.

Success in overcoming these obstacles will require substantial measures of hard work, imagination, and good luck. There is considerable room for improvement within the Administration and within the State Department in preparing ourselves substantively and organizationally to deal with this challenge.

Setting Priorities

Fifteen years ago there was only one major arms control forum—SALT—and major agreements were produced in 2½ years of concentrated effort. Today arms control efforts are spread over at least six major subjects, and nothing of consequence has been accomplished over the last five years, and only one significant agreement—SALT II—has been concluded in the last ten years. There are, of course, many reasons for this, but one is a lack of what in business is called strategic planning—setting priorities and focussing effort and resources in areas of highest potential payoff. Agreements are possible only with the direct and personal intervention of the leadership in both countries, a scarce resource that should be concentrated on one or two subjects at any one time.

START (including INF) should obviously be the top priority. It deals with the essential subject of our time, and substantial agreements in other areas are not likely in the absence of accomplishments in START.

The other subjects (MBFR, nuclear testing, space, CW, and CDE) all have rationales and should be nursed along. From time-to-time it may make sense to briefly focus some high-level attention on one of them, and some (e.g. space) might be packaged with START. But START should have top priority, and we should recognize that concrete accomplishments require great concentration of resources to surmount obstacles large and small. If this seems unfair to people with personal stakes in the other subjects, it should be kept in mind that success in START would give a large boost to the other subjects, and conversely without a START agreement prospects for most of the others are poor.

Leadership-to-Leadership Exchanges

Delegations in the field have a role to play, especially in working out the language of formal Treaties. Delegations, however, are extensions of bureaucracies, and the U.S. and Soviet bureaucracies are incapable of significant arms reductions agreements. The basic elements of all significant arms control agreements have without exception been worked out in direct exchanges between the leadership of the United States and the Soviet Union.

Direct exchanges also have potential for overcoming the procedural obstacles which have prevented negotiations for the past six months.

Experiment and Exploration

There is usually more than one way to achieve a given objective. Our ignorance of the Soviet decision-making process is such that it is extremely difficult to predict which approach is the most promising. It is therefore useful to have a mechanism for informal experiments and exploration. Each side could try out ideas, objectives, and tentative proposals on the other. Such informal probing and testing is a common negotiating technique, but has become rare in arms control negotiations. Such exploration would be conducted with the knowledge and approval of the White House, but the President would reserve the right to review any tentative results.

The risk of such a procedure is that a tentative bargain could be overruled by the White House, which would discredit the U.S. officials involved, would add to the U.S. reputation as an unreliable negotiating partner, and could cause political problems for the White House. This actually happened in January, 1976, when a SALT II deal worked out by Kissinger in Moscow was rejected by President Ford.

The potential benefits, however, outweigh the risks. Reliance on the existing interagency process has three drawbacks: (1) It is extraordinarily time consuming. (When we tabled our draft INF Treaty in February 1982, we told the Soviets the accompanying verification procedures would be tabled shortly. Two and one-half years later, these procedures are still being worked out.) (2) The inevitable result is a compromise between conflicting agency views, which may be justifiable on bureaucratic grounds but which usually lacks substantive rationale and has little value for advancing negotiations. (The recent “move” in MBFR is a typical example.) (3) Once such a position is arrived at and blessed by the President, it becomes very difficult to change. Informal exchanges would allow testing of ideas on the Soviets without the delays and distortions of the interagency process, and without locking us into a position.

One example of a subject that could usefully be explored with the Soviets is the possibility of a new interim restraint regime to replace SALT II after 1985. (This, in fact, is next year’s number one priority.) A second example is the new START framework.

Mutual Benefit

In order to conclude an agreement, both sides must perceive benefits in the bargain. This elementary notion is not reflected in our START approach to date, which calls for dismantling two-thirds of the Soviet ICBM force in return for marginal constraints on U.S. forces. More generally, our arms control approaches tend to be most popular with the least informed, regarded skeptically by the well-informed, and of little interest to the Soviets.

We have, however, been extremely successful in deriving public relations benefits from the fact of START and INF negotiations and from the positions we have taken, notwithstanding their small prospects for success. Both INF deployment and the M-X program have been greatly facilitated by our approach to the negotiations, and the Soviets are not likely to cooperate further in unproductive negotiations which benefit us without corresponding benefits for them. Predictions that the Soviets will return to the negotiations after the election are probably optimistic. More likely, they will return when they perceive that there is some prospect for a result that would be in their interest. They are not likely to be interested in talking for the sake of talking. From this perspective, the Soviet walkouts are not so much a pressure tactic as a refusal to cooperate in a process that is working against their interests, even though this refusal has serious costs, especially in Europe.

If this analysis is correct, introduction of new U.S. ideas is more likely to lead to resumption of START than the passage of time or the occurance of the election.

Substance

Lack of substantive ideas is not a serious problem. The proposed “framework” should be the basis for the next substantive exchanges on START. It would implement the U.S. objectives (reductions, equality, enhancement of stability, and verification), meets the Soviets half-way on the central issue (aggregation of warhead limits), combines the best features of our position with the least objectionable elements of the Soviet position, and represents a vast improvement over SALT II in unit of account, levels, and structure. This approach has the potential to reduce the negotiations on the basic provisions of a START agreement to haggling over numbers.

The most difficult problem in strategic arms negotiations is the treatment of INF and third country systems. This has been the case since 1969, and while the separate INF negotiations have obscured this fact for the last few years, it will be obvious when talks resume. The problem arises from the clash of fundamental goals—the United States needs U.S.-Soviet equality, the Soviets need constraints on all comparable forces facing constrained Soviet forces. The long-term solution is a five-power arrangement. The short-term solution is to isolate strategic force reductions from INF to the maximum extent possible, and create an outcome which permits each side to claim victory.

It will not be easy to isolate a START agreement from INF. In the past this has been done by keeping the levels of strategic forces high (so INF is relatively insignificant) and granting the Soviets an offsetting asymmetry (heavy missiles). Our objective of significant reductions well below SALT II, our continuing deployment of LRINF missiles, and British and French plans to expand their number of missile warheads by about an order of magnitude all ensure that INF will be a very difficult problem for START. The one positive note is the possibility of “tradeoffs”, which the U.S. could consider to be a balancing of U.S. and Soviet strategic advantages, but which the Soviets could consider to include an element of compensation for FBS.

Another major problem will be future ballistic missile defenses. While development and deployment decisions will not be made for many years, if ever, the Soviets will not be interested in constraints on offenses if there is a serious prospect of large-scale defenses. It is possible that a simple provision making a START agreement contingent on continuation of the ABM Treaty would suffice. But it is also possible that the future of defenses will need to be addressed and resolved again before a START agreement can be concluded. Properly handled, there is leverage here; the Soviets respect our defensive technology.

Once a basic framework for a START agreement begins to take shape, a large number of other problems will come to the fore—verification measures, Backfire, definitions, counting rules, and many more. This is the way the negotiating process proceeds—as central issues are resolved, new layers of problems previously perceived as too obscure and technical for senior-level attention present themselves for senior-level decision and negotiation. These need to be considered problems to be resolved rather than reasons why agreements are impossible.

Form

Most of our efforts are directed toward formal Treaties. Treaties are, however, only one part of a spectrum of possibilities, and we should consider other, less formal concepts as well. One possibility would be a new interim restraint arrangement to replace SALT II when it expires next year. Such an agreement could, for example, cap certain parameters near current levels. A follow on could lower these levels. Such a simple arrangement would produce substantively and politically useful results long before negotiations on a complete Treaty were concluded.

When we attempt to breathe life into START next year, our immediate objective should be to work out a new interim restraint regime to replace SALT II in 1985. The expiration of SALT II is an action-forcing event, and the best solution would be to have in place by December 31, 1985 a replacement regime based on our preferred unit of account—warheads and ALCMs. Absent this, we would face a tough choice—continue to abide by SALT II, which would require dismantling of large numbers of Poseidon and MM–III as Trident boats are deployed, or be the first nation to breech the central provisions of the Treaty (which we have criticized as setting levels that are too high).

Since a new interim restraint regime would set a precedent for the follow-on agreement, and since the interim restraint arrangement would be most defensible as a temporary measure pending a more comprehensive agreement, our proposal for temporary, informal restraints should be consistent with and advanced together with a more comprehensive proposal (e.g. the framework). Once direct exchanges have produced a replacement interim restraint formula and an agreed framework analogous to the one produced for SALT II at Vladivostok, the stage would be set for useful work by the delegations.

Proposals and Objectives

When we make proposals, we should adopt the practice of advancing both our position and the objectives we seek to achieve. Giving our objectives equal weight with our position has advantages:

—Sometimes the Soviets agree with the objective but not the position, and can propose an alternative way to achieve it.

—Keeping our objectives clear can help avoid inflexible adherence to a particular means rather than the intended end result. (For example, our single-minded emphasis on a ban on encryption of telemetry, which is not plausible, is impeding our ability to pursue other ways to verify missile characteristics.)

Organization

Serious negotiations would require the State Department to carry out the following tasks, all more-or-less simultaneously:

—Conduct of informal exchanges with the Soviets, including formulation of ideas and tactics, coordination with the White House, etc.

—Management of the interagency process for analysis of ideas, problems, options, etc. Most of the groups formerly chaired by NSC are now chaired by State or co-chaired by State and OSD.

—Support of the Delegation in Geneva. ACDA plays a big role here, but needs State’s help where there are interagency differences.

—Take the lead in dealing with compliance problems and interim restraint.

—Consult with the Allies and Congress, engage in public diplomacy, etc.

PM. The PM bureau has over the last few years put together a small group of people highly skilled in arms control analysis. They spend the great majority of their time writing interagency papers and attending and presiding over interagency meetings. They think of themselves primarily as members of the interagency community, and when they do think about State’s interests, it is usually in terms of which option in an interagency paper State should support.

This deep involvement in the interagency process has advantages: PM has taken over much of the management function once carried out by NSC, and much of the technical analysis function once carried out by ACDA. PM, and Admiral Howe in particular, have earned the respect of the other agencies. The down side is that after devoting 60 plus hours a week to their interagency work, PM analysts have little additional time or energy for supporting the Secretary. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that a PM analyst considers his job is finished when he has successfully negotiated interagency clearance on a paper hundreds of pages long analysing a dozen or more options.

General Chain should be encouraged to reorient PM to play a larger role in State’s internal efforts to find solutions to problems, explore possibilities with the Soviets, etc. General Chain needs a few more people, especially at the working level, in order to devote more resources to this task while continuing to discharge State’s interagency obligations.

EUR. EUR has also put together a small group of highly skilled people, and they have been the source of most of the innovative ideas in START, INF, and other subjects over the last few years. EUR has a flare for initiative and action, and many of their suggestions which were controversial at the time are now widely considered to have been successful (e.g., the INF moves in 1983, the CW Treaty draft, and the Dublin offer on NUF). EUR is well positioned to support serious negotiations conducted on several levels.

The Seventh Floor. The Seventh Floor has played a small role in START and other arms control negotiations to date. A serious negotiation conducted on several levels will require much more participation by the Seventh Floor principals. The Secretary himself would have major responsibilities as the principal point of contact with the Soviets and with the President. He could use substantial support, however, in such tasks as management of the process (planning, analysis, tactics, etc.) supporting the private exchanges, liaison with the White House, coordination of the positions State representatives take in interagency meetings and papers, and senior-level discussions with other agencies. These functions are best carried out at a level between the bureaus and the Secretary. Such a role would (if the negotiations go anywhere) require a major commitment of time and energy, and would involve engagement in this issue on a day-to-day basis. I, of course, think D would be a good place for this responsibility, but other possibilities are P or a new Seventh Floor principal.

The traditional entree for the Deputy Secretary into this subject was the SIG. There would be no point in resuming meetings of the SIG, however, since there is no need for a group between the IG and the SACPG. While the interagency analysis is necessary, and in some cases even useful, it will never resolve the major problems and is not the place where additional effort should be expended.

ACDA. The ideal ACDA would consider itself to be de facto, if not de jure, a branch of the State Department. ACDA retains significant capability for technical analysis, and would be a useful ally. In the past ACDA has at times worked closely with State, and at other times opposed State. Today it is somewhere in between. ACDA’s problems include uneven staffing, a mandate that overlaps State’s, and a subject matter that is too important and too bureaucratically difficult to be left to a tiny and bureaucratically weak agency. Once serious negotiations began, ACDA would want very much to be involved. State could benefit from access to ACDA’s technical analysis capability. If handled carefully, there is therefore the basis for closer cooperation than in the recent past.

Conclusion

The combination of smart but largely procedural U.S. moves and dumb Soviet moves has worked well to date in gaining support in Congress and elsewhere for our arms control approach. The build-down episode illustrates that a surprising amount of short-term political gain can be extracted from an initiative with no substantive content whatever. But as time goes by, more will be demanded of our arms control policy than statements that arms control is difficult, the Soviets are hard to deal with, and everything is under study. Without either tangible results or evidence of innovative efforts, the perception will grow that while our stated goals are laudable, little is being done to achieve them. This will have an increasingly negative effect on support for the defense program, on the Alliance, and on overall support for the President.

It is possible that even with our best efforts nothing worthwhile can be accomplished. The Soviets may or may not be prepared to make the major changes in their approach that will be necessary. The only way to determine how the Soviets would respond to a more equitable proposal is to suggest one and see what happens.

1. Source: Department of State, Bureau of Arms Control and Disarmament, Lot 01D127, 1969–1990 Subject Records of James P. Timbie, Box 2, Papers for DepSec Ken Dam, 1983–1985. Secret. Not for the System.
2. Dam initialed the memorandum “KWD” above his typed signature. Shultz wrote below this line: “KD for discussion next week G.”
3. Secret. Not for the System. Timbie sent the memorandum to Dam under cover of an August 17 note, attached but not printed: “KWD: I wrote the attached while you were in Mexico. I put it aside when the Vienna excitement broke, because no one concentrates on long-term issues when there is a hot subject to work instead. Now that Vienna has receded over the horizon, I offer it as a thought for approaching the next term. You will notice right away the big role for GPS. I am skeptical of the notions I see in the looking ahead exercise of turning this all over to a band of outsiders. The few months after November 7 offer a rare opportunity for an experienced Secretary to make a fresh effort with the Soviet leadership. It would be a waste to use that time educating a set of loose cannons so they could set out to discuss a common strategic policy with the Soviet Union. That is clearly impossible. What may be possible are practical steps. The only way to find out if they are possible is to propose some and see what happens. JT.” November 7 was the day after the presidential election.