U.S.-Soviet Relations: The Long Road Back

William G. Hyland

From Foreign Affairs, America and the World 1981

Summary:  American presidents have usually inherited poor relations with the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower, of course, was confronted by the tensions of Korea and President Kennedy by the Berlin crisis. Lyndon Johnson was a temporary exception, but Richard Nixon inherited Vietnam and the Czech crisis. Gerald Ford had to deal with a faltering détente, and Jimmy Carter was embroiled in early disputes. In January 1981, Ronald Reagan found himself in much the same position as his predecessors, except that relations were worse than usual. Indeed, relations were frozen. Even the outgoing Administration was pessimistic. The departing American Ambassador to the U.S.S.R., Thomas J. Watson, Jr., summed up the prevailing gloom: "I don't think the West has any conception of how dismal the future looks for East-West relations."

William G. Hyland is currently a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He served in the Department of State in 1974-75 and as Deputy Director of the National Security Council Staff from 1975 to 1977.

Third, there was a recasting of the problem of verification. The new structure of arms control would require more than national technical means, a euphemism for relying on intelligence monitoring, principally by satellites. The old approach was perhaps adequate for simple numerical limits on fixed weapons, but complex reductions would make residual forces highly sensitive to cheating, to circumvention, and to breaking out of an agreement. It followed that broader cooperative measures were necessary.

The Administration had not even embarked on a leisurely review of the fundamentals of strategic arms control when Brezhnev rather unexpectedly relieved some of the political pressures. At the 26th Party Congress in February he engaged in the obligatory attacks on the United States for failing to ratify SALT II, but then he created an escape from confrontations. Rather than insisting on ratification, he called for the preservation of the "positive elements" of SALT II. His main target was the theater nuclear forces rather than the strategic ones.

The Soviets' calculation was to prove a shrewd one. For it was the theater force negotiations that came to take precedence in the new Administration's hierarchy, though not necessarily by design. Pressure from Europe was also in part responsible for a gradual acceptance of the inevitability of the resumption of strategic force negotiations, which were finally confirmed by a presidential offer to begin talks "as soon as possible" in 1982. This intent was confirmed in the President's speech of November 18, which at the same time rechristened the new talks START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks).

Thus an arms control negotiating schedule took shape in 1981, but without linkage or preconditions. The Reagan Administration had initially insisted that a broad improvement in Soviet conduct was mandatory, lest another agreement suffer the fate of its SALT II predecessor. Yet, the program outlined in the President's speech of November 18, putting forward a new four-point arms control plan, ignored any political conditions. It was only accompanied by some informal statements by Administration officials that seemed to suggest that Soviet "restraint" for the first nine months had met some minimum criteria and that movement toward both the TNF negotiations and SALT was thus justified. The Administration avoided confronting the implications of its own policy pronouncements: namely, that arms control agreements were not viable without political restraint; and that arms control for its own sake was bound to fail because of the realities of "linkage."

The substantive outlook was thus hazy. The Administration constantly emphasized that arms control could not be a "centerpiece" in a relationship with the U.S.S.R. But it was vague as to the role arms control could play. Some parts of the Administration still saw arms control as a threat to a sound military rearmament program, rather than a complementary effort. And they continued to believe that arms control served as a test of Soviet good faith: negotiations would demonstrate whether the Soviets would settle for a true balance of strategic forces and genuine stability, or would simply use any negotiations as a means of ratifying or concealing their own buildup.

The Soviet response was equally tactical in its inspiration, i.e., slight variants on the general theme that new agreements had to address America's forward-based systems. But an intriguing question was whether Soviet military policies were undergoing a reconsideration, perhaps stimulated by the increases over Carter's defense budget for fiscal 1982 and Reagan's commitment to continued increases over the next four years. As the European nuclear debate quickened in 1980-81, the Soviets appeared eager to dispel any suspicion that they sought strategic "superiority," that they would strike first, or that they believed in "victory" in nuclear war. Brezhnev took this line, and one widely quoted Soviet pamphlet even resurrected the old Malenkov heresy: that nuclear war would "probably" mean the end of civilization.2 While there were sound tactical reasons for introducing these nuances, nonetheless a serious question remained: were the Soviets grudgingly accepting the implausibility of continuing to justify large expenditures of scarce resources, in pursuing strategic goals that would inevitably prove elusive if they provoked American counterarmament?

Even if Soviet theory was, in fact, evolving, a different aspect of Soviet declaratory policy was disconcerting. In attempting to exploit Reagan's remarks in October about the possibility of limited war in Europe, Brezhnev insisted that if a nuclear weapon were to be used, then "unavoidably" the war would assume a "global character." These remarks, too, could be explained as tactical expedients, but it was possible that the U.S.S.R. was foreshadowing a new deterrent theory for Europe. After fifteen years of emphasizing the roughly equal likelihood of war beginning with a conventional or a tactical nuclear phase, well short of all-out escalation, it was possible that Moscow envisaged using the threat of its new and more accurate SS-20s to neutralize the accepted NATO strategy of threatening the first use of nuclear weapons. It was perhaps a significant confirmation of Soviet strategy that a number of observers, including some members of the Reagan Administration, believed the credibility of the traditional doctrine of flexible response and first use of nuclear weapons was deteriorating. In part, this explained the Defense Department's interest in new "long-war" strategies that might be fought entirely with non-nuclear weapons.3

In any case, the outlook for the Reagan arms control program is not very bright. What is being proposed, in essence, is a massive restructuring of Soviet nuclear forces, including the abandonment of several thousand missile warheads. Even in the best circumstances, when détente was flourishing, the Soviets showed great resistance to such a concessionary course. Moreover, U.S. strategic plans remain vague and tentative. The MX decision of October 2 to proceed with a limited deployment in hardened Titan missile silos was clearly a holding action, a weak alternative with strong opposition, and abandoned in 90 days. (Now the first 40 MX missiles will be installed in Minuteman missile silos.) The "zero option" in Europe obscured the Administration's new commitment to a substantial force of sea-based cruise missiles. Counterforce strategies aimed at attacking hardened military targets were still under serious consideration in both Moscow and Washington. There was a general uncertainty in NATO over the validity of a strategy of first use of nuclear weapons. All in all, the vital strategic relationship between the United States and the U.S.S.R. was in flux.

Moreover, there was no political framework to begin rebuilding a military equilibrium. In 1972 SALT I was supported by a structure of political agreements-the German treaties, the Berlin agreements. In 1979 when SALT II was signed there was no such supporting structure and the treaty was highly vulnerable. In 1981 the gloomy outlook for arms control reflected the pessimistic outlook for political progress. As far as the Reagan Administration was concerned Moscow remained poised on the brink of a new geopolitical advance.

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