Office of the Historian

62. Paper Prepared in the Central Intelligence Agency1

Washington, undated

JOINT OPERATION OF DEFENSES

Strategy

The President’s repeated offer to share SDI with the Soviet Union represents an important opportunity for the upcoming Geneva Summit. Sharing technology is complex, difficult to codify and likely to lead to differences of interpretation. But sharing control, through joint operations of global defenses, exposes both today’s strategic dilemma and the solution—the SDI. A proposal to share control would:

1)
Directly negate the Soviet propaganda slogan of SDI driving an “arms race in space”;
2)
Make crystal clear the difference between offense and defense—that defense is not a weapon—and by doing so restore the true essence of SDI to the international political debate;
3)
Focus the arms-control debate on managing the transition from offense-based deterrence to a deterrence based upon mixed offense and defense; and
4)
Above all, enhance both crisis instability and deterrence by removing the possibility of a preemptive advantage.

The President would propose that we and the Soviets form a special negotiating group to develop the mechanics of exactly how to achieve joint operations of future defenses. Such a team could include other NATO or Warsaw-Pact countries, as well as other non-aligned nations.

Proposing at Geneva the joint control of global defenses would serve to further establish the SDI. Having survived both the assaults of Soviet propaganda and political diatribe surrounding the Summit, the SDI will no longer be a fragile fledgling. And with establishment of an SDI negotiating group, the arms control process would begin to serve U.S. national interests.

We believe that a proposal along these lines would achieve two additional Presidential goals:

—
It would build on an idea the President launched during the 1984 campaign; and
—
It would satisfy the President’s repeated intention to assure the Soviet Union that they have nothing to fear from the U.S.

  1. Source: Reagan Library, George Keyworth Files, Subject File, Graef File, [Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)] Star Wars (03/24/1983–07/05/1983)]. No classification marking. Meyer sent the paper to Casey under cover of an October 3 memorandum: “Here’s the paper that Jay and I worked up. We thought about inserting a paragraph on the technology of joint control, but decided not to do so on the grounds that it would confuse and divert the reader. Our basic point is that this is a political proposal.” (Ibid.)↩