Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981–1988, Volume XLIV, Part 1, National Security Policy, 1985–1988

5. Notes of a Meeting¹

Washington, undated

Session IV: Policy Implications for Arms Control Negotiations

General Brent Scowcroft:

Scowcroft noted that since 1967 in some ways we have come a long way and in some ways not much had changed. He was inclined to agree with Colin Gray that the Soviets had not very much changed their stripes on the question of the offense-defense relationship. From their point of view the ABM Treaty had been a cosmetic attempt to stop technical developments on the U.S. side, and one could make the same case now. Earlier the U.S. worried primarily about a Soviet ABM breakout. Now this prospect is benign because we were the ones who had this capability. The Soviets are now worried about ABM breakout in much the same way as we did earlier. Thus it would be useful to revisit our own reactions to the prospect of ABM deployments during this earlier period. Our primary reaction was MIRVs which could defeat ABMs. In the arms control negotiations we continued to argue for MIRVs, even when it was clear that we would get an ABM Treaty. We did this both to provide leverage on the Soviets to agree to the ABM limitations we wanted and to police the agreement once it entered into force.

The Soviets did not want to couple offense and defense. We could penetrate ABMs easier than they could since we had MIRVs. Thus it is instructive to look at our original reaction to ABMs.

In looking at SDI in a strategic sense, there are trade-offs that have to be considered. There is no question that SDI adds uncertainty, which can enhance deterrence; but we should also look at what SDI can provoke—i.e., a destabilizing offense-defense competition. We do not look at SDI often enough in this sense.

Johnny Foster has already pointed out that we can use SDI to get what we want. SDI may drive both sides back to assured destruction. SDI can greatly lessen the value of each individual warhead. Therefore, there will be a strong incentive to use warheads against population rather than against ICBMs because of the exchange ratio. Johnny Foster had also pointed out that booster intercept makes a highly MIRVed force relatively useless. Therefore, both sides may want to go the route of Midgetman. Therefore, we ought to look at the possibility of trading de-MIRVing in exchange for boost-phase intercept.

We should not view the ABM Treaty as the Holy Grail. It has served a useful purpose by encouraging us to pursue useful R&D and saved us from spending a lot of money on systems that would not have worked very well. However, if we can enhance stability or gain an edge, the ABM Treaty should not prevent us from doing so. On the other hand we should not throw out the ABM Treaty if we do not know the features of the new regime which would replace it. The ABM Treaty is a good treaty. It has some loopholes, for example ASAT and the ATBM loophole, which we built in to protect SAM–D. The Soviets may be taking advantage of this loophole with their SA–12.

Turning to the question of Allies, Scowcroft said that he had seldom seen greater unity in Europe than was now present regarding the fear of SDI. European fears are traditionally of two types—that they will be entrapped in a U.S.–Soviet conflict or will be abandoned as the superpowers make a bilateral deal. SDI has the peculiar facility of stimulating both of these fears. On the one hand SDI might lead the U.S. to play the role of a cowboy, behaving recklessly around the world; or on the other hand it might lead the U.S. to withdraw and tell Europe to go it alone. Europeans are also concerned about the expense of SDI. They would like the U.S. to spend more for NATO and fear that an offense-defense race would reduce the resources available for NATO. The Europeans view the SDI as the latest crazy American fad, and they have barely gotten used to flexible response.

On the substance of negotiations,² Scowcroft said that the format to be used depends upon our goals. On the one hand, we could use SDI in the negotiations. On the other hand, our goal could be to avoid involving SDI in the negotiations, in which case we would try to separate SDI and pursue a separate agreement on offense. The U.S. and the Soviet Union are approaching the negotiations from diametrically opposite points of view. The Soviets would like to kill SDI with no cost to themselves while the U.S. hopes to keep it off the table. Thus, the sides are far apart.

Even if the Soviets are willing to pay a relatively high price, we have great problems. It is difficult to see how the Soviets would agree to any far-reaching limitations on offense (for example on warheads and throw-weight) if they have to look over their shoulder at SDI and feel the need to be able to penetrate it. One likely outcome of this situation is a cosmetic agreement. This could come about if both sides want an agreement; the Soviets agree to a modest agreement which would amount to a modified SALT II and U.S., in a rush to Detente II, agrees. Scowcroft said he would not be at all surprised if the negotiations take that direction. He regretted having said so publicly, and hoped this would not complicate negotiations.

On the subject of Congress and the U.S. public, Scowcroft said SDI is popular with the public, and that the fact of negotiations reassures the public by persuading them that people are behaving responsibly and not trying to blow up the world. A sizable portion of the public believes that we already have such defenses and that the idea that we would prohibit defenses is an arms control fantasy. Thus the main problem is Congress, which definitely wants arms control and will use our strategic programs to force the Administration to pursue arms control. If the MX is killed, the Soviets will have enormous incentives to sit back and see if the same thing would happen to SDI.

Both the U.S. and the USSR have problems as far as resources are concerned. This is not a new situation. However, the U.S. SDI program means that a Soviet technician can now say to the Politburo that this confirms the priority which must be devoted to Soviet defense efforts. The Soviets have shown that they can stick to such long term efforts, but can the U.S. persevere for the one, two, three decades required? He was not optimistic on this score.

Dr. Colin Gray

Gray said that the possible dangers of the period of transition to defense dominance have frequently been noted. For example, the Left and the British and French point out that the last time the Soviets faced a situation of great inferiority they precipitated the Cuban missile crisis. Earlier, Germany during the period 1912–14, had perceived that early action was in their interest because the situation would rapidly become worse for them later. Gray said that these examples were not relevant to SDI. The Germans had plans for achieving victory in 40 days. For the Soviets, “today” will never be good enough to take action against a maturing SDI.

Gray agreed with Scowcroft’s point about Midgetman. We are soon facing major engineering decisions in the Midgetman program; before we lock ourselves in, we must think about the non-permissive environment that it could face due to a Soviet SDI.

Gray characterized the ABM Treaty as doing the wrong things badly. The Treaty forbids the establishment of a base for a nationwide defense. The Soviets are already working on such a base and the President has said that a nationwide defense is a good idea. It would be a big mistake to foreclose SDI in exchange for a START or INF agreement. The best we can get on offense will be a marginal tinkering, while at stake in the SDI program is the capability to make a major difference in the strategic situation and in damage to the US in the event of a war. If we foreclose our freedom of action in SDI in exchange for an ASAT agreement made for political convenience, we will have traded something of major significance for something which is either of trivial or harmful significance. If we were to consider negotiating part of SDI in 1984 or 1985, the only thing of proportional value would be the relevance of the entire Soviet missile force. Thus it is absurd to consider negotiating away SDI.

Space arms control beyond some trivial Incidents In Space arrangements cannot be serious because of technical overlap. Gray presumed that the White House understands that nothing could be agreed to on ASAT beyond certain trivial arrangements. It is possible that the Administration will need some arms control agreement for expediency, but what is the likelihood that the Soviets would give us even a trivial framework which General Abrahamson could use in Congress to help support the SDI program? Gray saw no hope that this could happen—that is, that we could negotiate an agreement on offense only.

There does exist a major arms control story to SDI, but the U.S. must earn it. What possible incentive could we give the Soviets to assist us in this? As Abrahamson had pointed out, the Soviets might be made to see a growing obsolescence in their offensive forces by the early 1990s. They might see the U.S. as having a good offense and a pretty good defense, with the situation getting even worse for them in the future. This might provide such an incentive. Relative leaky defenses could favor the Soviets. They care primarily about themselves and have better access to the periphery of Eurasia than we do. On the other hand, the U.S. would have little confidence in leaky defenses, because we would place greater value on our cities than they would. He was not saying that the Soviets would buy such an arrangement, but one could make that case.

Soviet reactions to SDI will include attempting to gain the technology through spying, technological transfer, etc. as well as hints of breakout. In the near term they could put us at a disadvantage. While we might be able to field a great SDI system by 2010, the Soviets could embarrass us in the 1990s. So it is important that we make the Soviets understand that they are going to have more trouble down the road.

Returning to the question of the ABM Treaty, Gray remarked that if the President is serious about SDI, he must face the consequences for the Treaty. If we continually say that we are in compliance with the Treaty, Congress will see us as not serious. He said that he would like to know that the President will do whatever is required whenever he is told that the technology is ready. The President should understand there are no constraints on air defense, ASAT or ATBM. If alibis are needed for U.S. misbehavior, one could invoke Soviet misbehavior under the Treaty. If we are willing to take a broad interpretation of the terms of the Treaty or to piggyback SDI testing, we could do quite a lot under the terms of the Treaty. Of course, such behavior would be considered un-American.

DISCUSSION

Ambassador Rowny pointed out that the Soviets had never said that we must go back to SALT II. Early in START the Soviets had recognized that limiting launchers was not sufficient. Thus, Moscow propaganda was not supported by Soviet experts who have not pushed SALT II in the START negotiations. He also said that his guarded optimism should not be interpreted as a belief that we must give up SDI in these negotiations. On the contrary, sufficient leverage now exists to achieve an agreement independent of SDI. For example, the Soviets have over-invested in certain types of systems and are paranoid about U.S ALCMs. Thus, the leverage provided by our offensive programs should be sufficient and we do not need SDI as trading material.

Gray asked whether this would still be the case if MX were lost.

Rowny replied that the loss of MX would not be helpful. The Soviets know the capabilities of the MX and take it seriously; so should we. The loss of MX would be important, but not fatal to our negotiating efforts.

Scowcroft, in response to Rowny’s earlier comment, said that he had in mind that the Soviets would continue to advocate something which could be called “SALT II plus.” He was not saying that the Soviets would insist upon a return to the SALT II Treaty itself.

Carnesale noted that both Gray and Scowcroft had found it unlikely that the Soviets would be interested in significant reductions in the near-term, and asked if there was general agreement on this point. There was no disagreement with this among the participants. However, Spahr said he could think of a scenario that might cause us problems. The Soviets might offer us something better than their previous START position, but would make it contingent upon no SDI just as they had made their earlier position contingent upon no U.S. INF deployments.

Mobbs observed that if we are the least bit interested in negotiating on SDI, we would probably be forced to use most of our leverage merely to ensure that the defensive constraints were binding on the Soviets. We would need to stop R&D and this would raise very difficult problems in terms of Soviet compliance.

Sloss said that he heartily agreed with this but did not think the Soviets wanted to shut off R&D. What they would like, of course, is to stop our R&D but not theirs. In any case, one could do a lot of R&D within the terms of the ABM Treaty. Our problem now and for the past 12 years is doing what is allowed. Thus, the problem is not Soviet violations of constraints but the asymmetry with which the two sides pursue what is allowed. The U.S. simply will not do what it is allowed to do.

Mobbs remarked that his point had been that since the U.S. would not do everything that is allowed, such R&D should be banned.

Stansbury noted that we are trying to work out some of the rough edges of the ABM Treaty. The ideal situation would be if our testing activities come up against the Treaty constraints about the same time that we make a decision to deploy. Sloss and Gardner observed that one could proceed for a time within these constraints, but there is obviously a tension between the Treaty and SDI.

Scowcroft observed that it was not true that we would have no problems if there were no limits on defense. We had pursued ABM programs because of the ABM Treaty. Safeguard was not built to protect U.S. citizens, but as a bargaining chip in the SALT negotiations.

Foster noted that the SDI bug is out of the bottle. It could either stop or it could go ahead. If it stopped, we would be worse off than if we had not started down this road in the first place. On the other hand, if SDI goes ahead, we might end up with a defensive capability against missiles and this technology might also help with air defense. It could also force offensive levels downward. However, this all depends on getting the program, and we will have no leverage if there is no program.³ This should be explained clearly to Congress at an early date. Rowny recalled that he had talked about this to certain Democratic senators last summer, and they had replied that they would like to return to this subject after the election. We ought to get back to the goal of building greater bipartisan support.

Woolsey said he was concerned that we may be defining our strategy and systems around the OSD organization chart. Boost-phase intercept may be interesting, but it is difficult to move the country on this issue as long as defenses are focused on this part of SDI. Much of the country is at odds with the concept of total defense. Perhaps we could build a coalition by unpacking SDI and looking at its components.⁴

We might make more progress in building political support by moving incrementally from the low end of SDI rather than talking in terms of perfection based upon boost-phase interception in space.⁵ We might be able to get more support over the longer term for boost-phase intercept if we can avoid clashes over the Treaty. Woolsey said he was skeptical of getting Soviet limitations in exchange for giving up boost-phase intercepts in space.⁶ But one could hypothesize that the Soviets might over the long-term agree to move away from large, liquid-fueled, MIRVed ICBMs in exchange for a ban on boost-phase intercepts in space. We could have an area/terminal or terminal/area system, some hard-site defenses or some defense against accidental launches even in the context of arms control.

Our problem is like trying to get through a set of slalom gates, some of which are set at 90 degrees to others. There might be a path through these if we can keep the ABM Treaty and build our case around terminal defense. If we allow the issue to be joined over whether one is for or against defense, when both sides understand defense to mean primarily boost-phase intercepts, we will never get anywhere.

Sloss felt that Woolsey was on the right track. Most people favor defense and favor spending money on defensive technologies. In fact we were investigating most of these technologies before SDI. One mistake we may have made is that we have attempted to describe the ultimate system before carrying out the necessary scientific exploration.⁷ People run into trouble when they try to describe a space-based, boost-phase intercept system. The other major problem is the price tag. We say that we need $26 billion over the next three to five years to reach a conclusion. It is absolutely essential that the Administration be able to describe some intermediate goals for our efforts over the next decade.

Gray said that he also was attracted to Woolsey’s ideas, but that the problem as far as OSD is concerned is that an intermediate system is a solution looking for a problem. No one is asking for this sort of intermediate help from SDI.

Garthoff said that we could not roll back the situation to the pre-SDI era. There are three alternatives for SDI—pursue it, re-define it, or abandon it. If we are going to abandon it eventually, we should negotiate some restraints on the Soviets in this area. The problem of how to formulate limitations involves much more than verification. We could ban flight testing and deployment of space weapons and ASAT and we could tighten up the restrictions in the ABM Treaty as far as testing in an ASAT mode is concerned. There would, of course, be questions as to what to do about ATBMs. Garthoff said he would not exclude the idea of opening up the Treaty in the area of terminal defenses. This would be difficult and the Soviets would probably resist it initially, but one could not rule out reaching some agreement here. Separating the two phases of SDI would open up a range of possibilities for arms control.

General Rankine remarked that he saw considerable risk in decoupling the two phases of SDI. The President had talked about a total defense and this depends upon boost-phase intercepts. If we only deploy a defense of MX in order to get more survivable RVs, the Soviets will also have this defense and these additional RVs will not get through. Thus it is perilous to give up part of SDI.

Linhard said that the Soviets are pragmatists. They do not talk about SDI but about the militarization of space. If one looks at what the Soviets have done in the defensive area over the past 15 years, there are few gaps. If we are worried about Soviet breakout from the ABM Treaty, we should not attempt to compete in traditional technologies. If one considers the offense, the Soviets are moving ahead with both rail and land-based mobile ICBMs, and the U.S. could probably not do the same. Thus in both offense and defense, the U.S. can compete but is not prepared to do so. However, we do have the technology to change the rules and leapfrog the Soviets. The Soviets, on the other hand, want to keep the rules as they are.

Foster remarked that he did not think that the Soviets have boost-phase intercepts in mind in their programs. They want to keep weapons out of space in order to have their own C3I.⁸

Rankine did not agree with this point, observing that the U.S. is far more dependent on space than the Soviets. Thus the Soviets have a high incentive to take out our eyes and ears in space.

Courtney observed that it is not clear whether arms control is the enemy of SDI or whether it can help SDI. If one postulates a future move to deploy an SDI system, it would be useful to begin through arms control to reduce warheads in order to get momentum for the transition period. The fact that MX is being viewed as bargaining leverage is not good, but perhaps it is necessary. Because of Congressional considerations, perhaps the same could be said for SDI.

1. Source: Reagan Library, Jack Matlock Files, Chronological File, 1980–1986, “Signals” [October–December, 1984]. Secret. No drafting information appears in the notes. For more information about this meeting, see Document 6 and footnote 1 thereto.
2. Reference is to forthcoming Nuclear and Space Arms Talks in Geneva.
3. An unknown hand underlined much of this sentence.
4. An unknown hand underlined this sentence and drew a vertical line in the left-hand margin beside this paragraph.
5. An unknown hand underlined “political support” and “moving incrementally from the low end of SDI rather than talking in terms of perfection based upon boost-phase interception in space.”
6. An unknown hand underlined this sentence.
7. An unknown hand underlined this sentence.
8. An unknown hand underlined “remarked that he did not think that the Soviets have boost-phase intercepts in mind in their programs,” and “weapons out of space in order to have their own C3I.”