The United States and Strategic Arms - Specialized Research AI at MIT

The United States and Strategic Arms
Limitation during the Nixon-Kissinger
Period

Building a Stable International System?

✣ Marc Trachtenberg

In 1969, the United States and the Soviet Union embarked on a series of
negotiations aimed at limiting the size of both countries’ arsenals of strategic
nuclear weapons. Those negotiations—the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks,
or SALT, as they were called—led to the signing in 1972 by President Richard
Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev of the SALT I accords: a treaty
sharply limiting the deployment of anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems and
an interim agreement freezing for ﬁve years the number of strategic ballistic
missile launchers at the existing level. SALT I was followed by a new series
of talks aimed at producing a more permanent arrangement. To that end, an
agreement outlining the framework for a SALT II treaty was reached between
Brezhnev and Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, at Vladivostok in November
1974. After further lengthy and complex negotiations, a SALT II treaty was
signed by Brezhnev and President Jimmy Carter in June 1979. Although that
treaty was never ratiﬁed by either country, both sides complied with its terms
until 1986.

Given the importance of SALT, the process was bound to attract a good
deal of attention at the time. Indeed, several major works on the subject ap-
peared even in the 1970s, most notably John Newhouse’s book Cold Dawn
(on the process leading to the SALT I agreements), Strobe Talbott’s Endgame
(about the subsequent negotiations culminating in the SALT II treaty), and
the RAND analyst Thomas Wolfe’s book The SALT Experience.1 The ﬁrst vol-
ume of an extraordinary memoir by Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry

1. John Newhouse, Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973);
Strobe Talbott, Endgame: The Inside Story of SALT II (New York: Harper & Row, 1979); and Thomas
Wolfe, The SALT Experience (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1979).

Journal of Cold War Studies
Vol. 24, No. 4, Fall 2022, pp. 157–197, https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_a_01104
© 2022 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology

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Kissinger, which contained a good deal of information on SALT and related
matters, came out in 1979.2 Gerard Smith, who had headed the U.S. SALT
delegation during Nixon’s ﬁrst term as president, published a book dealing
directly with SALT in 1980.3 Raymond Garthoff’s Détente and Confrontation,
which dealt with U.S.-Soviet relations as a whole from Nixon to Reagan, ap-
peared just a few years later. Garthoff had been one of the SALT negotiators
during Nixon’s ﬁrst term, and in that book (and in numerous articles as well)
he devoted a good deal of attention to the SALT process.4

Although these books provided a fair amount of information on SALT,
the early literature was never entirely satisfactory for the historian. The au-
thors did not really indicate what the two sides were trying to do in the nego-
tiations or what impact the SALT experience had on U.S.-Soviet relations at
the time. This was partly because the arguments put forward in the literature
were framed with an eye to political circumstances at the time they came out.
But perhaps a more fundamental problem had to do with sources. Writers like
Newhouse, Talbott, and Wolfe had to rely exclusively on the public record and
on what they could learn from interviews, and such sources are rarely enough
to convey a full sense of what was going on. Certainly most historians believe
you cannot understand a subject like this until you see the documents that
were secret at the time and not released until many years later.

But today the situation is very different. Some truly extraordinary col-
lections of primary sources relating to SALT have become available in recent
years, and scholars interested in making sense of the whole SALT experience
now have a huge amount of material to work with. A plethora of scholarly
works drawing on that material have already begun to come out.5 As for the

2. Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1979).

3. Gerard Smith, Doubletalk: The Story of the First Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1980).

4. Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1985). A revised edition, taking account of the end of
the Cold War, came out in 1994. See also Raymond Garthoff, “Negotiating with the Russians: Some
Lessons from SALT,” International Security, Vol. 1, No. 4 (1977), pp. 3–24; Raymond Garthoff, “Mu-
tual Deterrence and Strategic Arms Limitation in Soviet Policy, International Security, Vol. 3, No. 1
(1978), pp. 112–147; and Raymond Garthoff, “SALT I: An Evaluation,” World Politics, Vol. 31, No. 1
(1978), pp. 1–25.

5. See especially John Maurer, “An Era of Negotiation: SALT in the Nixon Administration, 1969–
1972,” Ph.D. Diss., Georgetown University, 2017; John Maurer, “Divided Counsels: Competing
Approaches to SALT, 1969–1970,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 43, No. 2 (2019), pp. 353–377; Arvid
Schors, Doppelter Boden: Die SALT-Verhandlungen 1963–1979 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016); David
Tal, US Strategic Arms Policy in the Cold War: Negotiations and Confrontation over SALT, 1969–1979
(New York: Routledge, 2017); David Tal, “‘Absolutes’ and ‘Stages’ in the Making and Application of

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Strategic Arms Limitation during the Nixon-Kissinger Period

sources themselves, many are now readily available, either in print or online.
The volumes on SALT and related matters in the U.S. State Department’s For-
eign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series for 1969–1976 are particularly
rich, in large part because of the wonderful job the editors did in transcrib-
ing some of the Nixon tapes.6 The FRUS volumes can be supplemented with
various other important collections—the Kissinger Transcripts collection, for
example, on the Digital National Security Archive (DNSA) website, and the
collection of audiotapes (with transcripts) dealing with Nixon’s SALT policy
in early 1971 published in digital format by Erin Mahan and Patrick Garrity
in 2015.7 Some European sources can shed light on certain aspects of SALT;
much of that material is also easily accessible, either in print or online.8 More-
over, exceptionally important collections of declassiﬁed Soviet documents re-
lating to SALT I became available at the Russian State Archive of Recent
History (RGANI) in August 2015, December 2018, and December 2019.
Other declassiﬁed Soviet documents, mainly from the archive of the Rus-
sian Foreign Ministry, appeared in a collection of materials on the détente
years published jointly by the U.S. State Department and the Russian Foreign
Ministry in 2007.9 In addition, crucial memoirs by former Soviet ofﬁcials,
including the long-time ambassador to the United States Anatolii Dobrynin,

Nixon’s SALT Policy,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 37, No. 5 (2013), pp. 1090–1116; Matthew Ambrose,
The Control Agenda: A History of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2018); and James Cameron, The Double Game: The Demise of America’s First Missile Defense
System and the Rise of Strategic Arms Limitation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). For the
important NATO side of the story, see Ralph Dietl, Equal Security: Europe and the SALT Process,
1969–1976 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2013); and Ralph Dietl, Beyond Parity: Europe and the SALT Process in
the Carter Era, 1977–1981 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2016).

6. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIII (SALT I),
Vol. XXXIV (SALT II through 1979), Vols. XXXV and XXXVI (National Security Affairs), and
Vols. XII to XVI (USSR), available online at https://history.state.gov (hereinafter referred to as FRUS,
with appropriate year and volume numbers).

(available online

at https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/
7. The Digital National Security Archive
digital-national-security-archive) is a subscription service, but access is available through many
university and public libraries. The material dealing with early 1971 was published by the University
of Virginia Press’s Rotunda imprint as a digital edition in 2015, along with a descriptive essay
by the editors. Patrick J. Garrity and Erin R. Mahan, eds., Nixon and Arms Control: Forging the
Offensive/Defensive Link in the SALT Negotiations, February–May 1971 (Charlottesville, VA: Rotunda,
2015), available online at https://prde.upress.virginia.edu.
8. See esp. the volumes in the Akten zur auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland and the
Documents diplomatiques français dealing with the period, and, for British material, the Adam Matthew
digital collection The Nixon Years, 1969–1974, available online at https://www.archivesdirect
.amdigital.co.uk/Nixon.
9. David Geyer and Douglas Selvage, eds., Soviet-American Relations: The Détente Years, 1969–1972
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, 2007).

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appeared after the end of the Cold War.10 Beyond that, in interpreting SALT
one also needs to take account of important new work on the nuclear balance
in the later Cold War published mainly by Brendan Rittenhouse Green and
Austin Long. As Green and Long show, the nuclear stalemate was not nearly
as solid as it appeared to be to many people at the time, and arms control
policy has to be analyzed with that key point in mind.11

So the time has come to take a new look at SALT as a whole—to stand
back and try to understand what the SALT effort was really about and how
SALT ﬁts into the larger story of international politics in the later Cold War
period. My goal here is to focus on one part of that problem. Speciﬁcally, I
try to make sense of U.S. policy during the period when Nixon was presi-
dent of the United States (1969–1974). I begin by looking at the conceptual
framework within which U.S. strategic arms control policy was devised at that
time. The focus here is on the theory of strategic stability—on the idea that
the most stable nuclear world was one in which neither side had an incentive
to launch a ﬁrst strike during a crisis—and on the related idea that the goal
of arms control should be to move toward a world of that sort. The section
after that is concerned with policy, looking in particular at whether policy was
in any important way built on the stability theory. If it was not, what was it
based on? The basic point that emerges is that the absence of a strong concep-
tual core had a good deal to do with the disillusionment that set in later on.
This point is explored in the ﬁnal section, which traces the long-term impact
of the early SALT process on U.S.-Soviet relations, including certain perverse
effects that have been scarcely noted in the historical literature on the subject.
The ﬁnal section emphasizes how the SALT experience tended in practice to
undermine the détente policy, the very policy it was supposed to support.

The Conceptual Matrix

Perhaps the most important point to emerge from the new scholarly work on
SALT is that arms control was not pursued by either side as an end in itself—
that is, out of a simple belief that the “arms race” was a threat to humanity as

10. Anatoly Dobrynin, In Conﬁdence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (New
York: Times Books, 1995).

11. See especially Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long, “Stalking the Secure Second Strike:
Intelligence, Counterforce, and Nuclear Strategy,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 38, Nos. 1–2
(2015), pp. 47–51; and Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Austin Long, “The MAD Who Wasn’t
There: Soviet Reactions to the Late Cold War Nuclear Balance,” Security Studies, Vol. 26, No. 4
(2017), esp. pp. 609, 618, 638–639.

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a whole and that, whatever the political differences between the United States
and the Soviet Union, the two sides had to do what they could to bring the
military competition under control. The SALT process was not a thing apart,
and U.S. policy on strategic arms control certainly has to be understood in
the context of U.S. policy as a whole, above all, national security policy. As
Kissinger, the most important U.S. policymaker dealing with SALT during the
Nixon-Ford period (1969–1976), stated at the time, national security policy
and SALT “should be looked at together, with strategic force posture deci-
sions being the theoretical basis for SALT preparations.”12 This means that
U.S. arms control policy has to be understood in the context of the body of
thought relating to nuclear issues that had taken shape during the early nuclear
age.

The main ideas had been worked out by the beginning of the 1960s. In
the 1950s under Dwight Eisenhower, a nuclear war was seen as a real possi-
bility. Eisenhower did not believe that, in a war triggered by a Soviet attack
on Western Europe, both sides would refrain from nuclear use for fear of re-
taliation. “It was fatuous,” he said, “to think that the U.S. and USSR would
be locked into a life and death struggle without using such weapons.” But if
nuclear weapons were to be used, the United States needed to make sure that
the Soviet Union could not inﬂict severe damage on the U.S. homeland, and
this meant that the United States had to be able to destroy the USSR’s nuclear
forces while they were still on the ground. The counterforce mission—what
was then called the “blunting” or “bravo” mission—thus had to have top pri-
ority and had to be executed at the beginning of the war, perhaps even before
conventional hostilities had begun in Europe and certainly before the Soviet
Union was actually able to mount a nuclear attack.13

U.S. ofﬁcials assumed, however, that sooner or later the USSR would be
able to develop a force that could survive a U.S. attack, no matter how mas-
sive and concentrated that attack was or how quickly it was mounted, and
then go on to inﬂict “unacceptable losses” on the U.S. homeland. As Secre-
tary of State John Foster Dulles put it in 1958, the “massive nuclear deterrent
was running its course as the principal element in our nuclear arsenal.”14 In
September 1963, President John F. Kennedy was informed by the Net Evalu-
ation Subcommittee, the group within the National Security Council (NSC)

12. Review Group Meeting, 29 May 1969, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIV, p. 98.

13. See Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 159–165 (the quotation is on p. 161) and the
sources cited there.

14. Ibid., p. 185.

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responsible for assessing the damage that would result from a nuclear war, that
the long-predicted “nuclear stalemate” had ﬁnally arrived. Even if the United
States attacked ﬁrst, the president was told, “surviving Soviet capability is suf-
ﬁcient to produce an unacceptable loss in the U.S.” This meant, as Kennedy
himself pointed out, that preemption was no longer a viable option.15

How then could that situation be dealt with? The most common view
was that the U.S. nuclear edge had been permanently lost and could never
really be regained. This meant that a ﬁrst strike was bound to be suicidal
and that the “nuclear standoff ” was here to stay, but it also meant that the
“balance of terror,” as Winston Churchill had predicted years earlier, might
lead to a relatively stable peace. Nuclear weapons, the argument went, served
mainly to “deter their use by others.” The deterrent effect, to be sure, would
be somewhat broader because it was always possible that a conventional war
might escalate, whether political leaders wanted it to or not. But the basic
assumption was that deliberately risking nuclear escalation for general polit-
ical purposes was too dangerous, even if the fate of Europe was hanging in
the balance. That kind of threat was a relic of the era when the United States
could rationally strike ﬁrst—an era when a ﬁrst strike could be so effective that
whatever damage Soviet retaliation might cause could be kept to “nationally
manageable” proportions. But with the United States no longer able to limit
damage to itself in any meaningful way by launching a massive counterforce
attack when war was imminent, a ﬁrst-strike strategy was no longer viable.
The United States had to opt for a “second-strike” strategy, one focused on
deterrence through the threat of retaliation—that is, through the threat of re-
sponding to a nuclear attack on one’s own homeland with an attack on the
enemy’s cities. This implied there was no point in placing such heavy em-
phasis on the counterforce mission and that the defense of Europe could no
longer be based on the threat of deliberate nuclear escalation. Instead, Eu-
ropean members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would
have to be defended mainly with conventional forces.

But an inﬂuential minority of national security experts in the United
States never really accepted that line of argument. They basically denied that
deterrence was more or less automatic once nuclear forces of a certain size had
been built, and they argued instead that the strategic balance was in fact far
more precarious than people had been led to believe. The nuclear strategist
Albert Wohlstetter, the leading ﬁgure in this school, laid out the argument
in a famous 1959 article titled “The Delicate Balance of Terror.” Numerous

15. Ibid., p. 183.

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hurdles, Wohlstetter wrote, had to be cleared if a country’s ability to strike
back after an attack was to be assured. Not only did its forces need to be able
to survive both massive conventional and unconventional enemy attacks, but
they had to be able to receive the order to retaliate, penetrate active enemy de-
fenses, and destroy their targets despite whatever passive defenses the enemy
had employed. Wohlstetter then reviewed the many problems the retaliatory
force would have in clearing these hurdles, noting that prizes were not given
out for getting over just some of them and that an effective system had to get
over all of them.16 His basic point was that deterrence was not easy, that coun-
terforce targeting and strategic defenses might in some circumstances be effec-
tive, that in those circumstances a ﬁrst strike might not be irrational, and that
the strategic balance was therefore not meaningless. Analysts in this school
tended to emphasize the eventual vulnerability of U.S. deterrent forces to So-
viet attack—rallying support for a defensive policy was always easier—but
they were also aware that the U.S. government itself might be able to take ad-
vantage of the “delicacy” of the balance. Indeed, because ﬁxed-site, land-based
intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBMs) accounted for the great bulk
of Soviet strategic forces (whereas U.S. forces were much more diversiﬁed),
counterforce targeting might be an even more attractive option for the United
States than for the USSR.

Each of those approaches to the nuclear problem was associated with a
particular approach to arms control. For the more dovish analysts, the point
that nuclear superiority was beyond reach and the world was locked into a
situation in which neither side could develop forces that could rationally strike
ﬁrst in a crisis was not just something they had been reluctantly forced to
acknowledge. That situation, as they saw it, had some clear advantages. A
world in which both sides could rationally reach for superiority was not at
all to their liking. A superior force was one that might actually be used in a
crisis. But the overriding goal in that camp was to make sure that a nuclear
war never happened. Thus, too tight a linkage between strategic forces and
ordinary political life was to be avoided. If each side was trying to shift the
strategic balance in its favor, either as an end in itself or in response to what
the other side was doing, the result would be an arms race, and it was an
article of faith in the dovish camp that arms races were in themselves a great
source of danger. That view was so widespread that even political leaders who
did not share it felt obliged to use that kind of rhetoric. (President Nixon, for
example, referred in some public remarks to the possibility that a nuclear war

16. Albert Wohlstetter, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 37, No. 2 (January
1959), esp. pp. 216, 221.

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“could be touched off by the arms race among the great powers.”17) The idea
was that the military competition made little political sense, that it was driven
instead largely by an “action-reaction process,” with each side reacting to what
the other side was doing or to what it feared the other side might do in the
future. But the hope was that the two sides might be able to escape the “mad
momentum” of the arms race through negotiated arms control agreements.

Those arguments about the dangers of the arms race had been made many
times before, even in the pre-nuclear age. For example, Lord Grey, the British
foreign secretary at the start of World War I, claimed in his memoirs that
“great armaments lead inevitably to war.”18 But the dovish analysts did not
rely solely on arguments of this sort. Something new was brought to the table
at the end of the Eisenhower period. This was the idea that a world in which
both sides had an incentive to go ﬁrst in a crisis could be highly unstable—
that a war could break out not for any real political reason but largely because
both sides had an incentive to preempt—and that by reducing that incentive
through arms control the great powers could bring about a less war-prone
world. The idea was that what was called “strategic stability” or “crisis sta-
bility” should become the central goal of arms control. The two sides should
agree not to threaten each other’s retaliatory capability. “Mutual deterrence”—
the “mutual hostage relationship”—should be the paramount goal. Cities
should remain at risk; strategic forces should remain invulnerable; their effec-
tiveness should not be compromised in any way. A ﬁrst strike could not, in
such a world, result in a signiﬁcant reduction in the amount of damage a retal-
iatory attack could inﬂict; indeed, a ﬁrst strike would for all practical purposes
be suicidal; it therefore would not happen, and there would be no war.

The stability theory was not developed to provide an intellectually re-
spectable basis for arms control. The key idea, laid out by Wohlstetter in his
1959 “Delicate Balance” article, grew out of his deep concern about the vul-
nerability of U.S. strategic forces. But in that article he argued that, if each
side’s forces were vulnerable to attack, the resulting situation could be highly
unstable:

Suppose both the United States and the Soviet Union had the power to destroy
each other’s retaliatory forces and society, given the opportunity to administer
the opening blow. The situation would then be something like the old-fashioned
Western gun duel. It would be extraordinarily risky for one side not to attempt
to destroy the other, or to delay doing so, since it not only can emerge unscathed

17. Quoted in Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to
Reagan, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1994), p. 217.

18. Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years, Vol. 1 (New York: Stokes, 1925), pp. 89–90.

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by striking ﬁrst but this is the sole way it can reasonably hope to emerge at all.
Evidently such a situation is extremely unstable. On the other hand, if it is clear
that the aggressor too will suffer catastrophic damage in the event of his aggres-
sion, he then has strong reason not to attack, even though he can administer
great damage. A protected retaliatory capability has a stabilizing inﬂuence not
only in deterring rational attack, but also in offering every inducement to both
powers to reduce the chance of accidental war.19

Wohlstetter’s manuscript had been circulated in draft form to experts prepar-
ing for the Surprise Attack conference in 1958, which was where Thomas
Schelling was ﬁrst exposed to the idea. Schelling then did more than anyone
else to develop the theory and show how it could serve as a basis for arms
control. In 1961, he published a book (coauthored with Morton Halperin)
on the subject. That same year two other inﬂuential books on the subject,
developing similar ideas, also came out. By that point most academic analysts
focusing on these problems had come to accept the basic theory.20

The reason the new thinking had such a powerful impact is not simply
that it parted company with traditional views about disarmament. Rather,
its appeal in the expert community stemmed mainly, one suspects, from its
strong counterintuitive ﬂavor. The whole idea that strategic forces should be
protected and that populations should be left vulnerable to attack, no matter
what was possible technologically, was quite extraordinary. A strategy based on
the idea that “offense is defense, and defense is offense,” that “killing people is
good, and killing weapons is bad,” seemed to turn traditional thinking on its
head.21 Yet that meant that the theory had real bite—that the theorists were

19. Wohlstetter, “Delicate Balance of Terror,” p. 230; emphasis in original.

20. See Thomas C. Schelling, “What Went Wrong with Arms Control?” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 64,
No. 2 (Winter 1985), pp. 220–223; Schelling’s foreword to Elbridge Colby and Michael Gerson,
eds., Strategic Stability: Contending Interpretations (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute and U.S.
Army War College Press, 2013), pp. v–vi; and my interview with Thomas Schelling, Cambridge, MA,
3 October 1983. For the books in question, see Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin, Strategy
and Arms Control (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961); Hedley Bull, The Control of the Arms
Race (New York: Praeger, 1961); and Donald Brennan, ed., Arms Control, Disarmament, and National
Security (New York: George Braziller, 1961).

21. See Newhouse, Cold Dawn, p. 176. The basic idea was that offense (in the sense of being able
to attack the enemy’s cities) was defense (because that kind of capability would deter an enemy from
attacking in the ﬁrst place). Defense (of one’s own population), on the other hand, was offense (because
it tended to neutralize the other side’s deterrent capability and would thus weaken the adversary, and
because it would facilitate a ﬁrst strike by providing a degree of protection against a retaliatory attack
mounted by whatever enemy forces survived the attack). Killing people, moreover, was good (in the
sense that forces targeted on cities would deter an attack, whereas other kinds of targeting—especially
the targeting of the other side’s strategic forces—were “destabilizing”), whereas killing weapons was
bad (because targeting the enemy’s strategic forces might spur him to strike before his forces were
destroyed, and because that sort of targeting would lead to an arms race).

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not just mouthing clichés but had something new and important to say about
fundamental issues of policy.

It is tempting to assume that the stability theory was so powerful intellec-
tually that it swept all before it—that a conceptual breakthrough had occurred
and the new theory provided the only really compelling basis for dealing not
just with arms control but with the nuclear problem in general. However, be-
fore that view is accepted, we must keep three points in mind. The ﬁrst has to
do with whether the theory focused attention on a major real-world problem.
The analysts who developed the theory believed that, in the world they then
lived in, a major risk of “crisis instability” had to be dealt with. According
to Schelling and Halperin, for example, “the most mischievous character of
today’s strategic weapons is that they may provide an enormous advantage,
in the event that war occurs, to the side that starts it.”22 Yet, by the time
those words appeared in print, the United States had already begun to deploy
weapons so capable of surviving a ﬁrst strike that it was hard to see how the
enemy could see any advantage in striking ﬁrst.23

But even if there was a real or potential problem of “instability,” did
attempting to deal with it through arms control (and not unilaterally) neces-
sarily make sense? Formal arms control agreements, after all, had to be veriﬁ-
able. This meant that weapons had to be countable, identiﬁable, and therefore
targetable and destroyable. For the stability theory, the veriﬁability criterion
could pose a real problem; it could lead to force structures more likely to invite
a preemptive attack. Arms control could thus actually be dysfunctional, even
self-defeating. This problem was clear to theorists like Schelling; it was clear
even at the time to key ofﬁcials like John Foster, head of Defense Research
and Engineering at the Pentagon from 1965 to 1973.24 Yet the commitment
to arms control as an end in itself was so entrenched that people were pre-
pared to sweep problems of this sort under the rug. Indeed, some writers
argued that deploying hard-to-ﬁnd and thus hard-to-count weapons was ac-
tually “destabilizing” because it would make arms control agreements much
harder to reach.25

22. Schelling and Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control, p. 9.

23. The ﬁrst Polaris submarine went on patrol in 1960. The ﬁrst Minuteman missile entered service
in 1962.

24. Schelling, “What Went Wrong?” pp. 228–229; and Foster to Packard, “A Possible Conﬂict be-
tween Our ABM Plans and the Arms Limitation Talks,” n.d., but attached to Packard to Laird, 4
March 1969, in Digital National Security Archive, item NT00061 (henceforth cited in the form
DNSA/NT00061).

25. Schelling, “What Went Wrong?” p. 229. For the claim that concealable weapons were “destabiliz-
ing,” see, for example, Newhouse, Cold Dawn, pp. 26, 124–125.

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A third problem was more fundamental. The stability theory assumed
that “instability,” in the sense of both sides having an incentive to preempt
so strong that it might lead to a war that would otherwise be avoided, was a
major concern. It implied in particular that the Soviet Union, in a crisis, might
actually attack the United States because going ﬁrst would be signiﬁcantly
better than going second. Yet in other contexts—especially when dealing with
alarmist “window of vulnerability” arguments—the same people who took
that view made the opposite argument, claiming that the strategic balance
was such that it would never make sense to try to disarm the enemy in a
ﬁrst strike. Such an attack, they insisted, was close to insane. The assumption
here was that neither side could hope to get a meaningful edge in the nuclear
competition. The nuclear stalemate was inescapable because a nuclear war
would inevitably be disastrous for all concerned. The strongest supporters of
arms control often argued along those lines. McGeorge Bundy, for example, in
his 1969 article “To Cap the Volcano,” wrote that, given “the certain prospect
of retaliation, there has been literally no chance at all that any sane political
authority, in either the United States or the Soviet Union, would consciously
choose to start a nuclear war.” This situation, he maintained, was here to
stay. But, as Robert Jervis has pointed out, if Bundy’s basic analysis here was
correct, “there was no volcano to cap”—no risk that a war could break out
because of what Schelling called “the reciprocal fear of surprise attack,” and
thus there was no compelling need to reach agreements that would provide
for a more stable nuclear relationship.26

The hardliners’ views on arms control were rather different. They did not
really have a theory of their own about why efforts in this area were impor-
tant. Their views took shape essentially in reaction to what the more con-
vinced proponents of arms control were saying. They tended, ﬁrst of all, to

26. McGeorge Bundy, “To Cap the Volcano,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 48, No. 1 (October 1969), p. 9; and
Robert Jervis, “Security Studies: Ideas, Policy, and Politics,” in Edward Mansﬁeld and Richard Sisson,
eds., The Evolution of Political Knowledge: Democracy, Autonomy, and Conﬂict in Comparative and In-
ternational Politics (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), p. 118. With regard to Bundy,
compare what he says in his book Danger and Survival about the “inevitability of mutual destruction
in general nuclear war” with what he says two pages later about the “powerfully destabilizing effect”
of multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) because of the premium they place
on striking ﬁrst. Why would a country have an incentive to strike ﬁrst if doing so would lead “in-
evitably” to its own destruction? McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in
the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 548, 550. Even today, one occasionally
comes across the same sort of problem. Fred Kaplan, for example, wrote in 2016 that, given the size of
both sides’ arsenals in the 1980s, the chance that either of them would have started a war was almost
nil. On the other hand, he also wrote that MIRVing gave each side a real “incentive to launch a ﬁrst
strike with its ICBMs, if just to preempt the other side’s launching a ﬁrst strike with its ICBMs.” Fred
Kaplan, “Rethinking Nuclear Policy: Taking Stock of the Stockpile,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 95, No. 5
(September–October 2016), pp. 18–20.

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doubt whether the nuclear “arms race” was nearly as dangerous as the more
dovish analysts seemed to think. To be sure, they recognized that each side, in
working out its own military policy, had to take into account what the other
side was doing, and in that sense a certain “action-reaction mechanism” clearly
did exist. But writers who spoke about the dangers of the “arms race” claimed
not just that each side was, to a certain extent, reacting to what the other side
was doing, but also that the weapons competition had a life of its own, that
it went well beyond what was warranted by whatever political differences still
existed, and that it could on its own generate such serious tensions (as each
side mistakenly read aggressive intent into what its opponent was doing) that
it might well lead to war. The hardliners did not see things that way at all. The
weapons competition, in their view, had to be seen in political context; it was
not nearly as irrational, as self-propelled, or as dangerous as the dovish school
seemed to think. Indeed, the very term “arms race” did not sit well with the
hardline analysts. It implied a ﬁnish line that each side was trying desperately
to reach in order to “win.” But that, in the hardliners’ view, gave a highly mis-
leading impression of what was actually going on. As Wohlstetter noted, the
United States and the Soviet Union were obviously “rivals,” but there was “no
race.”27

But if the hardliners did not believe that the “arms race” as such was a
serious problem, this did not mean they saw no point to arms control. They
were deeply concerned about the vulnerability of U.S. strategic forces. This
was a prominent theme in their writings on the nuclear issue from the 1950s
on, and they recognized that the two major powers could agree in principle on
measures that would ensure the survivability of both sides’ deterrents. If the
Soviet Union were to accept measures that would make the U.S. force more se-
cure, then the United States, for its part, would have to take steps to insure the
survivability of the Soviet force. That situation could be accepted not because
it was ideal—most of the hardliners would have preferred a world in which
the United States had both a ﬁrst-strike and a second-strike capability—but
because, given current political and technological realities, a secure U.S. re-
taliatory force was the best they could hope for. Sometimes they went further

27. Albert Wohlstetter, “Is There a Strategic Arms Race?” Foreign Policy, No. 15 (Summer 1974),
esp. p. 4; Albert Wohlstetter, “Rivals, but No ‘Race,’” Foreign Policy, No. 16 (Fall 1974), reprinted
in Global Politics and Strategy, Vol. 16, No. 6 (1974), pp. 277–292, available online at https:
//doi.org/10.1080/00396337408441511; Albert Wohlstetter, “Optimal Ways to Confuse Ourselves,”
Foreign Policy, No. 20 (Fall 1975), https://doi.org/10.2307/1148133; and Albert Wohlstetter, “Rac-
ing Forward? Or Ambling Back?” in Robert Conquest et al., eds., Defending America (New York: Basic
Books, 1977), reprinted in Robert Zarate and Henry Sokolski, eds., Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writ-
ings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2009), pp. 414–471.

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and appeared to accept the stability argument—that is, to accept the idea that,
regardless of what was possible technologically, both sides should have surviv-
able deterrent forces so that neither side would have an incentive to go ﬁrst in
a crisis. Wohlstetter, after all, had played a key role in the process that gave rise
to the theory. But their support, by and large, was at best unenthusiastic, and
as a general rule the hardliners, including Wohlstetter himself, were hostile to
the stability theory and to the doctrine that was based on it: “mutual assured
destruction” (or MAD, as ﬁrst they and then everyone came to call it).

The fundamental problem was that even if the point about the “delicacy”
of the balance was correct, the policy implications were by no means clear.
On the one hand, one could argue that it was important to try to stabilize the
balance because the nuclear stalemate could not be sustained automatically. In
that case, arms control could be based on the idea that the two great powers
needed to take joint action to make sure that both sides’ deterrent capabili-
ties were secure. On the other hand, the delicacy of the balance also meant
that the United States might be able to take measures that would improve its
position—measures that would give it a real edge in the competition with the
Soviet Union. Analysts were a bit reluctant to make this point too explicitly.
After all, no one wanted the United States to come across as an aggressive
power—and to reach for anything like a ﬁrst-strike capability was bound to
come across as an aggressive policy. But the hardliners’ interest in keeping that
option open was reﬂected in a certain coolness toward an arms control posture
based on the stability theory—a certain coolness toward the banning of sys-
tems (like ABM systems and missiles with multiple, highly accurate warheads)
that might in the long run make damage limitation possible.

But perhaps the most important reason why many conservatives did not
put much stock in the stability theory, and thus had little enthusiasm for an
arms control policy that took the theory as its point of departure, is that the
theory of war with which it was associated struck them as somewhat me-
chanical and artiﬁcial. Consider, for example, the passage in which Schelling
described how war might begin in a world in which one side had a ﬁrst-strike
advantage:

If surprise carries an advantage, it is worthwhile to avert it by striking ﬁrst. Fear
that the other may be about to strike in the mistaken belief that we are about
to strike gives us a motive for striking, and so justiﬁes the other’s motive. But, if
the gains from even successful surprise are less desired than no war at all, there
is no “fundamental” basis for an attack by either side. Nevertheless, it looks as
though a modest temptation on each side to sneak in a ﬁrst blow—a temptation
too small by itself to motivate an attack—might become compounded through
a process of interacting expectations, with additional motive for attack being

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produced by successive cycles of “he thinks we think he thinks we think . . . he
thinks we think he’ll attack; so he thinks we shall; so he will; so we must.”28

So a war could come even though there was no fundamental (i.e., political)
basis for it. Many hardline critics found it hard to believe that this was the
case. To their mind, as one of them put it, the stability theorists had “been
bemused by theoretical models of strategic interactions, models which seem
sophisticated and intellectually appealing but which are in fact much oversim-
pliﬁed descriptions of reality.”29

The Impact on Policy

These two sets of views provided the intellectual framework within which
U.S. arms control policy was worked out in the 1970s. But what exactly was
the impact of these ideas on the measures adopted at the time? Many writers
have claimed that the stability theory played a crucial role in shaping U.S.
policy—up to 1972, at any rate. Schelling, for example, viewed the stability
theory as not just an extraordinary intellectual accomplishment but also the
basis for the policy that culminated in the signing of the ABM Treaty in 1972.
He saw a “remarkable story of intellectual achievement transformed into pol-
icy” unfolding in the period from the late 1950s to 1972. The ideas that had
taken shape by 1960, he wrote, “became the basis for U.S. policy and were
ultimately implemented in the ABM treaty.”30 Newhouse and Talbott went
a bit further, arguing that U.S. policy on SALT as a whole had been based
on the stability theory.31 Both Wolfe and Smith clearly shared that view. “A
central American concern,” Smith wrote, “was to assure that a stable state
of mutual deterrence continue indeﬁnitely to keep the risk of nuclear war as
low as possible.”32 Wolfe likewise maintained that the doctrine of “mutual as-
sured destruction” was the “basic strategic rationale that has tended to inform
U.S. SALT policy.”33 That view is echoed in many other accounts written by

28. Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conﬂict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960),
p. 207.

29. Donald Brennan, “Strategic Alternatives: II,” The New York Times, 25 May 1971.

30. Schelling, “What Went Wrong?” p. 223.

31. See Newhouse, Cold Dawn, esp. pp. 2–4, 9; and Talbott, Endgame, esp. pp. 22, 27–29.

32. Smith, Doubletalk, p. 123. It should be noted, however, that much of the discussion in the book
points in the opposite direction. The United States, Smith thought, was not really interested in ban-
ning MIRVs, which were, in his view, the most “destabilizing” weapons system. See ibid., ch. 4.

33. Wolfe, SALT Experience, p. 249.

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analysts from both schools and even by scholars writing in the post–Cold War
period.34 The argument could be made because high-ranking government of-
ﬁcials, especially from the State Department and the Arms Control and Dis-
armament Agency, often emphasized the importance of “strategic stability”
when defending the SALT agreements in public.

But the declassiﬁed documents relating to these matters give a very dif-
ferent picture. These sources show that U.S. policy in the period leading up
to the 1972 accords was not rooted in the theory of strategic stability.35 It was
not as though the basic tenets of that theory were accepted as ﬁrst princi-
ples, and that key ofﬁcials then developed their proposals taking those princi-
ples as their point of departure. The fundamental idea that both sides should
have survivable forces—that the most stable strategic relationship was one in
which neither side could limit damage to itself in any major way (through
either counterforce or population defense)—is not what drove U.S. policy.
When U.S. policymakers considered ideas for limitations of various sorts,
what mattered to them was whether a particular step would give an advan-
tage to the United States, not whether it would contribute to “stability”—
although concerns about stability did sometimes play a secondary role in these
discussions.

Scholars did not have to wait for classiﬁed documents to be released to
reach this conclusion. Steven Miller, in a superb dissertation completed in
1988, convincingly showed that the policies “prescribed and required by the
modern theory of arms control” had “not been embraced by either super-
power.”36 The key point here should have been clear to anyone who read the
ﬁrst volume of Kissinger’s memoirs, published in 1979. The main concern
at the beginning of the Nixon administration, as it emerges from Kissinger’s
account, was that the Soviet missile buildup was proceeding rapidly, whereas
the United States was not building any new missiles and had no plans to do so

34. See, for example, Garthoff, “SALT I,” pp. 3–4, 8 (where he suggests that both the United States
and the Soviet Union accepted the stability theory); and Richard Burt, “The Relevance of Arms Con-
trol in the 1980s,” Daedalus, Vol. 110, No. 1 (Winter 1981), pp. 162–163 (where he argues that U.S.
policy was based on the stability theory, but that Soviet ofﬁcials did not accept it). For later comments
reﬂecting that view of U.S. policy, see, for example, Charles Glaser and Steve Fetter, “National Missile
Defense and the Future of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy,” International Security, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Sum-
mer 2001), p. 57; Michael Krepon, “Moving Away from MAD,” Survival, Vol. 43, No. 2 (2001),
p. 85; William Walker, “Nuclear Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment,” International Affairs,
Vol. 83, No. 3 (May 2007), pp. 435–436; and George Lewis and Frank von Hippel, “Limitations on
Ballistic Missile Defense—Past and Possibly Future,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 74, No. 4
(2018), pp. 200–201.

35. See especially the FRUS volume on SALT I, 1969–1972: FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXII.

36. Steven Miller, “The Limits of Mutual Restraint: Arms Control and the Strategic Balance,” Ph.D.
Diss., Tufts University, 1988, abstract (see also pp. 225, 373–374).

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over the next few years. In discussions regarding arms control policy, the cen-
tral U.S. goal was therefore to put some brake on the Soviet program—but in
working toward that goal the United States would avoid putting any real limit
on its own programs. The Soviet Union, Kissinger wrote, actually agreed to a
deal of that sort, the ﬁve-year interim agreement on offensive forces that was
half of SALT I. In exchange, the United States agreed to ban the large-scale
deployment by both sides of ABM systems—but that was scarcely a conces-
sion, Kissinger argued, because Congress was not going to fund a major ABM
program anyway. The aim had been not to “stabilize” the balance but to reach
a deal that served U.S. interests—a goal that, he insisted, had been achieved.
The ﬁve-year “freeze on numbers” of missiles called for in the SALT agree-
ment, he wrote, “stopped no American program; it did arrest a continuing
Soviet program that was deploying over 200 ICBMs and SLBMs a year. In
exchange for this we accepted a limit on ABM, our bargaining chip, which
our Congress was on the verge of killing anyway.”37

The basic point here should not be surprising. It has long been clear that
Nixon, as Kissinger put it in his memoirs, was “far from a zealot on arms
control.”38 To be sure, the president recognized that, because of what he called
“the pathetic idealism on arms control in this country,” one had to pay lip
service to the idea.39 An arms control agreement might be of value for both
foreign policy and domestic political reasons, but he doubted that it would be
substantively important.40 The president certainly did not accept the stability
theory. In June 1969, for example, he was presented with contending views
about how the U.S. strategic posture should be designed. One was to place
“emphasis on crisis stability,” and another was to place “additional emphasis
on disarming attacks.” The latter view, he noted in the margin, reﬂected his
own thinking.41 When the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said
that he would like to have a “ﬁrst strike capability” if it were technically and
ﬁnancially possible—that he would “advocate it, destabilizing or not,” and

37. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 821.

38. Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 121. See also Francis
J. Gavin, “Nuclear Nixon,” in Francis J. Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s
Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), pp. 104–119.

39. National Security Council (NSC) meeting, 11 February 1971, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIV,
p. 708. See also NSC meeting, 25 June 1969, and Nixon-Kissinger-Haldeman meeting, 17 April 1971,
in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXII, pp. 84, 445, respectively.

40. Nixon-Kissinger meetings (tape transcripts), 16 March, 17 April, and 23 April 1971, in FRUS,
1969–1976, Vol. XXXII, pp. 429, 445, 455, respectively.

41. NSC paper, “U.S. Strategic Posture: Basic Issues,” 5 June 1969, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIV,
p. 124.

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that the stability problem would not bother him—Nixon remarked that it
would not bother him either.42 The president also agreed with the JCS view,
not shared by other elements in the government, that U.S. forces should have
the ability “to insure relatively favorable outcomes if deterrence fails”; “ﬁrst
strike, counterforce,” he pointed out, “can be an asset.”43 By that he meant
an asset in political dealings with other countries. “We must recognize that
this game is all about diplomacy,” he said; “the main purpose of our forces
is diplomatic wallop.”44 But he knew he was by no means a free agent in this
area. Policy had to be shaped with an eye to domestic political realities, and the
real reason for signing SALT I was that “we simply can’t get from the Congress
the additional funds needed to continue the arms race with the Soviet [Union]
in either the defensive or offensive missile category.”45

Nixon, however, was not the most important U.S. policymaker in this
area. As Kissinger pointed out, the president was “bored to distraction” by the
whole issue of what exactly a SALT agreement should look like; “his glazed
expression” at one early NSC meeting “showed that he considered most of the
arguments esoteric rubbish.” This meant that Kissinger himself played the key
role in the negotiations.46 With him the story was more complex. On the one
hand, after leaving ofﬁce he often denied that the Nixon administration had
based its arms control policy on the stability theory. When Henry Rowen,
for example, accused him of setting out in 1969 “to lower incentives for a
preemptive nuclear strike by reducing the threat to our forces while keep-
ing populations vulnerable”—that is, of basing policy on MAD—Kissinger
was quick to object. That claim, he said, was “preposterous”: “neither Richard
Nixon nor his advisers were ever comfortable with that doctrine.”47 In later
writings, Kissinger often attacked the MAD doctrine, characterizing it at one
point as marking “a deliberate ﬂight from rationality in strategic theory.”48 On

42. NSC meeting, 19 February 1969, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIV, p. 25.

43. NSC paper, “U.S. Strategic Posture: Basic Issues,” p. 128; NSC meeting, 18 June 1969, in FRUS,
1969–1976, Vol. XXXIV, p. 141.

44. NSC meeting, 13 June 1969 (ﬁrst quotation), and NSC meeting, 13 August 1971 (second quo-
tation), in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIV, pp. 136 and 855, respectively. He made this point many
times. See, for example, Nixon meeting with key advisers, 28 July 1970, in FRUS, 1969–1976,
Vol. XXXIV, p. 534.

45. Nixon to Haig, 20 May 1972, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXII, p. 833.

46. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 542.

47. Henry Rowen, “The Old SALT Gang Returns,” The Wall Street Journal, 2 November 1984, p. 28;
and Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, “Old Wine in New Bottles,” The Wall Street Journal, 12
November 1984, p. 24.

48. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 216; and Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schus-
ter, 1994), pp. 750, 779 (for the quotation).

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the other hand, before coming to power he had not only accepted the stabil-
ity theory but had even insisted that stability could be achieved only through
arms control.49 “To seek to protect the retaliatory force solely through uni-
lateral measures,” he wrote in 1960, “is almost certain to produce an arms
race. If the goal is stability, negotiated arms control schemes must therefore
accompany unilateral measures.”50 In 1957, he even thought the prospect
of a counterforce attack might induce the enemy to launch a counterattack
preemptively:

Any attempt to deprive an enemy of his retaliatory force would inevitably bring
on all-out war. Confronted by the prospect that it will be completely impotent
once its retaliatory force has been destroyed, a Power will almost certainly decide
to use it to deprive its opponent of the means to impose his will.51

Those views were fairly extreme, even by the standards of the time.

Was his thinking still built on the stability theory during his early years
in ofﬁce? The evidence suggests that by 1969 he had moved away from the
doctrines and theories he had absorbed in academia. As he himself later wrote,
the notion that the United States had an interest in ensuring that its popula-
tion was vulnerable to Soviet attack was just one of those ideas “that sound
impressive in an academic seminar but are horribly unworkable for a decision-
maker in the real world.”52 Practical considerations were far more important.
The key thing was to try to put some limit on the Soviet nuclear buildup, es-
pecially on the Soviet threat to U.S. land-based forces, and arms control could
be a means to that end.53 Kissinger’s goal was to do so without putting mean-
ingful limits on any major program the U.S. government was likely to get
funded, no matter how “destabilizing” those U.S. programs were considered
to be. During Nixon’s ﬁrst term, Kissinger opposed a ban on MIRVs, which
were widely viewed as the most “destabilizing” weapons system then being
developed. A MIRVed force, the argument ran, could support a ﬁrst-strike
strategy. Because the number of warheads would greatly exceed the number of

49. This point has not been universally recognized. According to one leading scholar, for example,
Kissinger “had never been an advocate of arms control because he thought that nuclear weapons had
both a strategic and tactical usefulness.” Joan Hoff-Wilson, “‘Nixingerism,’ NATO, and Détente,”
Diplomatic History, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Fall 1989), p. 511.

50. Henry A. Kissinger, “Arms Control, Inspection and Surprise Attack,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 38, No. 4
(July 1960), p. 560; emphasis added.

51. Henry Kissinger, “Strategy and Organization,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 35, No. 3 (April 1957), p. 388.

52. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 216.

53. This point comes through clearly in White House Years and is conﬁrmed by recent scholarship on
the subject. See esp. Maurer, “An Era of Negotiation,” pp. 45, 155.

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Strategic Arms Limitation during the Nixon-Kissinger Period

strategic targets and because the warheads were highly accurate in hitting tar-
gets, the attacker would have a good chance of disarming the enemy in a ﬁrst
strike.54 If both sides developed MIRVed missiles, each would have a strong
incentive to go ﬁrst in a crisis—a very unstable situation. Given that problem,
ofﬁcials in the government who were most committed to the stability theory
were eager to reach an agreement that would ban MIRVs. Smith, for example,
felt that if MIRVs were “not included in the negotiations, then an agreement
is meaningless.”55 High-ranking military ofﬁcers, on the other hand, did not
accept the stability theory and were “utterly opposed to foregoing MIRV.”56
Kissinger sided not with Smith but with the Pentagon on this issue.57

Was this because U.S. policymakers, including Kissinger himself, wanted
to deploy a system that might in time give the United States a meaning-
ful counterforce capability? Certainly the military’s highest ofﬁcers believed
that damage limitation continued to be an important objective—and to their
mind, “damage limitation” meant having “a ﬁrst-strike pre-emptive option.”58
MIRVs were important in that regard because for a counterforce strike to be
effective, the great bulk of the USSR’s ICBMs would have to be destroyed, and
only a MIRVed force could do the job. An un-MIRVed missile force would
not provide the necessary degree of target coverage. As JCS Chairman Earle
Wheeler pointed out in 1969, “the sufﬁciency of our current strategic forces
is dependent upon the timely deployment of MIRV in order to regain cover-
age of the increased Soviet nuclear threat.”59 The advent of MIRVs, he told
the NSC a few months later, was “important to us not only as it concerns

54. As one document pointed out, some ofﬁcials thought that the United States should develop the
capability to “limit damage to ourselves and our allies by a counterforce ﬁrst strike” and that “MIRVs
would contribute to this capability.” Ofﬁce of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis,
“MIRV Issues,” 21 June 1969, in Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library (GRFPL), Melvin Laird Papers,
Box 10, Folder MIRV 1–3, reprinted in Richard A. Hunt, ed., Melvin Laird and the Foundation
of the Post-Vietnam Military, 1969–1973: Documentary Supplement (Washington, DC: Ofﬁce of the
Secretary of Defense Historical Ofﬁce, 2016), p. 401, available online at https://history.defense.gov/.
55. NSC meeting, 10 November 1969, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXII, p. 158.

56. Ibid. On JCS opposition to MAD, see, for example, Walter S. Poole, The Joint Chiefs of Staff and
National Policy, 1973–1976 (Washington, DC: Ofﬁce of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Ofﬁce of Joint History, 2015), p. 61, available online at https://www.jcs.mil/.
57. See editorial note, FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIV, pp. 165–166.

58. Admiral Thomas Moorer (then Chief of Naval Operations, later JCS Chairman) in Defense Pro-
gram Review Committee meeting, 26 April 1971, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIV, p. 772. For
the JCS goal of damage limitation, see Walter S. Poole, The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy,
1969–1972 (Washington, DC: Ofﬁce of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Ofﬁce of Joint
History, 2013), pp. 16–20, available online at https://www.jcs.mil/.
59. Wheeler to Laird, 1 August 1969, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXII, p. 126. See also Wheeler’s
remarks in NSC meeting, 18 June 1969, p. 67.

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penetration” (i.e., overwhelming whatever ABM defenses the Soviets might
deploy) but also because the United States needed to be able to hit many So-
viet “hard targets which we are not able to hit now.”60 Or as Admiral Thomas
Moorer, by this point the JCS chairman, observed in December 1972, “quali-
tative improvements [a euphemism for MIRVing] should provide our strategic
retaliatory forces with a hard target kill capability.”61

The idea was that the United States should try to attain what could rea-
sonably be called “nuclear superiority.” That view was shared at least to a cer-
tain extent by some key civilian ofﬁcials, including James Schlesinger, secretary
of defense from 1973 to 1975. Schlesinger clearly did not accept the view that
damage limitation was essentially beyond reach and that counterforce could
never be strategically meaningful. “We certainly desire,” he declared in a clas-
siﬁed talk at the National War College in 1973, “to develop a strategic edge in
terms of hypothetical war-ﬁghting capabilities against a slowly reacting Soviet
Union.”62 Years later, he explained even more explicitly what his thinking was
at the time:

The key issue, in terms of hardware, was for us to be conﬁdent that we could
destroy all of their missile forces. MIRVs certainly would help achieve that goal,
and in 1972 [the United States had produced] more nuclear warheads than in
any year in history.63

All this is important because it sheds light on the kind of thinking that led to
the emergence by the early 1980s of a U.S. military force with vastly improved
“hard target kill” capabilities.64

60. NSC meeting, 10 November 1969, p. 156.

61. Moorer to Laird, 12 December 1972, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIV, p. 1031.

62. Schlesinger address at the National War College, 21 August 1973, p. 6, in U.S. Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), Electronic Reading Room, available online at https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/.
63. Quoted in Gordon Barrass, The Great Cold War: A Journey through the Hall of Mirrors (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 181; emphasis added.

64. See Desmond Ball, “The Future of the Strategic Balance,” in Lawrence Hagen, ed., The Crisis in
Western Security (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982), pp. 126–127. The shift in Defense Department policy
in this area took place in 1972, well before Schlesinger moved to the Pentagon. Melvin Laird, secretary
of defense during the ﬁrst Nixon administration, was the key ﬁgure here. The initial Defense Depart-
ment policy, adopted under political pressure from Congress, was cool on counterforce. According
to the ofﬁcial planning guidance, “we should not plan strategic offensive forces for the purpose of
limiting damage to the United States in the event of a large nuclear attack.” Quoted in NSC Defense
Program Review Committee, “U.S. Strategic Objectives and Force Posture: Executive Summary,” 12
January 1972, in DNSA/NT01153, p. 6. But by mid-1972, Laird was pushing for the development
of new warheads with an improved counterforce capability. One of Kissinger’s assistants was worried
by what seemed to be afoot. The only real strategic justiﬁcation for those warheads, he wrote, “is to
knock out Soviet ICBMs, which only seems sensible in a pre-emptive strike, and a pre-emptive strike
does not appear sensible,” even on the basis of the targeting study conducted by Laird’s own ofﬁce.

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Schlesinger shed a bit more light on his thinking in a 1987 interview. Did
he believe he had achieved his goal, the interviewer asked, “of being able to
threaten an attack that would not call forth an immediate escalation?” “Oh, of
course,” he said. Soviet leaders understood that “under great provocation”—
he had in mind here a massive Soviet assault on Western Europe—the United
States could retaliate with an attack that avoided Soviet cities. That would
place on the Soviet Union “the burden of responding to” the U.S. attack in
a way that kept the war from escalating up to the counter-city level—that is,
Soviet policymakers would have to “respond with restraint.” Although he was
reluctant to make this point too explicitly and some of the things he said in
that interview and elsewhere actually pointed in the opposite direction, his
assumption probably was that the more effective the U.S. counterforce attack,
the greater the pressure would be on the Soviet Union to limit its response.
In any event, the goal was deterrence. The aim was to provide some rational
basis for linking U.S. strategic forces to the defense of Western Europe.65

The question of why a MIRV ban was opposed during the Nixon period
thus has to be approached in this context. One gets the sense from the doc-
uments that in 1969 the main reason for opposing a ban on testing MIRVs
was that the existing MIRV systems were not capable of destroying anything
other than soft targets (like cities), whereas to “employ them in a counter-
force role against hard targets” they had to be made more accurate, and this
would require more testing.66 The assumption was that developing at least
some counterforce capability was important—and not just because the So-
viet Union was also going that route. It was also important for its own sake,
and the administration’s MIRV policy was rooted in that assumption. Thus,
for example, in 1970, Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard answered
the president’s question about why the MIRV was of value by pointing out
that, whereas the United States had an “adequate capability to attack urban

“Until now,” he wrote, “we have avoided deliberately acquiring silo killing weapons,” and any change
in that policy should be made by the president, not by Laird on his own. Odeen to Kissinger, 24 June
1972, p. 9, in DNSA/NT01378.

65. Interview with James Schlesinger, 16 December 1987, taped in connection with WGBH tele-
vision series War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, WGBH Open Vault, available online at https:
//openvault.wgbh.org/. The basic point here comes out clearly in another part of the interview.
Schlesinger told the interviewer that even if the new MX missile, a large ICBM designed for the
counterforce mission, might be vulnerable to a Soviet ﬁrst strike, that was not very important because
the whole point of the weapon was to threaten a U.S. ﬁrst strike. “The purpose of the MX,” he said,
“was not to achieve invulnerability in basing. That was desirable, but the purpose was to provide for
the Soviet Union an indication that the United States, if it initiated, if it initiated . . . could go after
the Soviet forces” (ellipsis in original).

66. MIRV Panel report, 23 July 1969, quoted in editorial note, FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIV,
p. 167.

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industrial targets,” it did “not have a good counterforce capability,” adding,
“we need to improve this.”67

Was it absurd for U.S. ofﬁcials to think that the United States could ac-
tually achieve a meaningful strategic edge by developing its counterforce ca-
pabilities in that way? Many of them obviously did not think so, and the key
point to bear in mind here is that the USSR was in principle much more
vulnerable to a ﬁrst strike than the United States was. Fixed-site ICBMs ac-
counted for roughly 85 percent of Soviet strategic warheads. If those missiles
were attacked by a fully MIRVed U.S. missile force, according to one docu-
ment from 1973, “we could destroy over 90% of the Soviet ICBM force in a
preemptive strike.”68 In 1976, the estimate was pretty much the same. Two of
Kissinger’s aides told him that if the United States deployed the new missile
being developed in this period (the large payload MX ICBM), Soviet lead-
ers “could expect to lose nearly 90 percent of their total strategic warheads [i.e.,
not just those on land-based ICBMs] from a US ﬁrst strike in the mid-1980s.”
This, they wrote, was a “reasonably close approximation of a disarming ﬁrst
strike.”69 As one ofﬁcial pointed out in 1974, if Soviet commanders contin-
ued to place “large amounts of their missile throw weight in ﬁxed land-based
silos” and the United States continued to deploy a more diversiﬁed force, the
USSR would “end up in a most disadvantageous position.”70 The growing vul-
nerability of Soviet ICBMs was especially important because the small Soviet
bomber force was not considered very effective and the U.S. Navy had devel-
oped anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capabilities sufﬁcient to wipe out Soviet
strategic submarines at the start of a war.71 The USSR had nothing equivalent.
Because the United States had a survivable strategic force in the form of its

67. NSC meeting, 19 August 1970, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIV, p. 589.

68. Kissinger to Nixon, 3 April 1973 (draft), in DNSA/NT01527.

69. Goodby and Lord to Kissinger, 16 November 1976, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. 35, p. 459; empha-
sis in original. By around 1980, the basic point made here had become public knowledge. The former
CIA analyst Willard Matthias, for example, wrote in 1980 that the MX missile had been “established
as an Air Force requirement” in 1971 and that an “advanced development program was begun in
1973.” That missile, along with other U.S. systems, would “give the United States a substantial ﬁrst-
strike capability against the largest and most vulnerable sector of the Soviet strategic force—the Soviet
missile forces in silo.” Willard Matthias, letter to the editor, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Winter
1980), p. 424. Desmond Ball, a leading academic specialist in this area, saw things much the same
way. “With the deployment of the MX ICBM force of 200 missiles in 1986–9,” he wrote in 1982,
the United States would “achieve a full counterforce capability.” The 200 MX missiles, he calculated,
would “be more than sufﬁcient to destroy the whole Soviet ICBM force.” See Ball, “Future of the
Strategic Balance,” pp. 126–127.

70. Weiss to Kissinger, 31 January 1974, in DNSA/NT01683.

71. See Brendan Rittenhouse Green, The Revolution That Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control,
and the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 37–39, 95–96, 127–129, 208–
210. According to a former high-level U.S. intelligence ofﬁcial, the U.S. Navy in the 1970s “could

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powerful submarine ﬂeet—and planned to deploy submarine-launched ballis-
tic missiles (SLBMs) capable of destroying Soviet ICBMs—the United States
might soon have both a ﬁrst-strike and a second-strike capability, whereas the
Soviet Union would have neither. In such circumstances Schlesinger and oth-
ers believed it was not unreasonable for the United States to pursue what was
sometimes called a “theoretical war-winning capability.”

But was that Kissinger’s view? Had he opposed a ban on MIRVs because
he sought nuclear superiority? He sometimes appeared to suggest that the
United States needed the ability to go ﬁrst with its strategic forces, especially
for alliance reasons. During the SALT II hearings in 1979, for example, he ar-
gued explicitly that “the growing invulnerability of Soviet land-based forces”
(and not the vulnerability of U.S. ICBMs) was the most important prob-
lem the United States faced in its strategic nuclear policy.72 The clear impli-
cation was that the United States would be better off if Soviet forces were
vulnerable—that is, if the United States could develop a meaningful counter-
force capability. That view could be justiﬁed by the simple point that, to deter
a Soviet attack on Europe, the United States needed to be able to threaten
that it might respond by launching a nuclear attack on the USSR, something
it could do only if it could limit the damage the Soviet Union could inﬂict in
a retaliatory strike. The idea that the United States might be able to develop
that kind of capability could have been based on his understanding that, given
the asymmetrical ways in which the two sides had structured their forces (with
the Soviet Union relying much more heavily on land-based missiles), MIRV-
ing gave the United States on balance a clear advantage. As he told Schlesinger
in 1974, for example, “we are the only ones who could gain in a ﬁrst strike
because most of their force is land-based.”73

Despite all that, the basic impression one gets from the documents is
that Kissinger did not really believe that nuclear superiority in any meaning-
ful sense of the term was in the cards—certainly not for the United States

have taken out the entire deployed [Soviet missile-carrying submarine] ﬂeet on a signal.” Quoted in
ibid., p. 37. See also Green and Long, “Stalking the Secure Second Strike,” pp. 47–51; and Green
and Long, “The MAD Who Wasn’t There,” esp. pp. 609, 618, 638–639. That information about
U.S. anti-submarine warfare capabilities was closely held at the time. See Anne Cahn, Killing Détente:
The Right Attacks the CIA (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), pp. 126–
127; John Foster’s remarks in Ford meeting with members of President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board, 8 August 1975, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXV, p. 692; and report prepared by Foster,
Galvin, and Teller, 1 April 1976, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXV, p. 746.

72. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, The SALT II Treaty: Hearings, pt. 3, 96th
Cong. 1st Sess., p. 164.

73. Kissinger-Schlesinger meeting, 23 April 1974, p. 3, in GRFPL, Digital Collections, National Se-
curity Advisor: Memoranda of Conversations, https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/.

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and probably not for the USSR either. In all likelihood, both sides would do
whatever was necessary to prevent the other side from developing a ﬁrst-strike
capability. But there were no guarantees in this regard, and, if the balance re-
ally did come under threat, it would be because the U.S. side, for domestic
political reasons, would not make the necessary effort even if the USSR ac-
quired a meaningful strategic edge. That, in fact, was one of Kissinger’s main
justiﬁcations for SALT in his ﬁnal years in ofﬁce. He told his closest advis-
ers in 1974, “we should say that without SALT, both sides will race. What
I really believe is that they will race and we will stop.”74 He often seemed
apprehensive that domestic political constraints would prevent the United
States from taking necessary measures and would leave the country in deep
trouble a few years down the road. Increasingly accurate Soviet ICBMs, he
said in 1969, were a “real nightmare worry.” In 1974, he said that if So-
viet leaders put “most of their MIRVs into ICBMs,” this “would give them
a ﬁrst strike counterforce capability.”75 But just as often he made the point
that concerns of this sort were overblown. The United States, he said, was
talking itself into a “psychosis” over these issues.76 He viewed as “crazy” the
very idea that the Soviet Union would ever launch a ﬁrst strike against U.S.

74. Kissinger meeting with Sonnenfeldt, Hyland, and others, 11 September 1974,
KT01321.

in DNSA/

75. Working notes from Kissinger Veriﬁcation Panel Meeting, 29 August 1969, p. 4 (for the ﬁrst
quotation), in DNSA/ NT00294; Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982),
p. 274 (for another reference to the developing “strategic nightmare”); and NSC meeting, 24 January
1974, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIII, p. 166 (for the second quotation). Kissinger also states
in Years of Upheaval that MIRVing would give the Soviet Union (and perhaps the United States as
well) a “ﬁrst-strike capability” (p. 265n). Note also in this context Kissinger’s remarks in a 17 April
1971 meeting with Nixon, as paraphrased by Patrick Garrity and Erin Mahan in the introduction
to a collection of extracts from the Nixon tapes dealing with U.S. policy on SALT in early 1971.
Soviet strategic deployments, Kissinger said, were “scary,” and he “expressed concern that Moscow’s
nuclear buildup, especially its heavy ICBM forces, pointed toward a ﬁrst-strike capability, which the
United States could not counter in a timely fashion because of the potential for a Soviet breakout.
In Kissinger’s opinion, this enhanced capability would provide Moscow with enormous psychological
leverage, especially during the President’s second term. The danger would be compounded by the
determination of the President’s domestic critics to attack the U.S. military-industrial complex and
undermine American strategic strength—a familiar theme in the White House conversations.” See
Garrity and Mahan, eds., Nixon and Arms Control. In 1973, despite the SALT agreements, Kissinger
was if anything even more pessimistic. “I think a serious crisis is almost inevitable with the world
the way it is,” he told Schlesinger on 9 August. He elaborated on this point in another high-level
meeting later that day. “My nightmare,” he said, “is that with the growth of Soviet power and with our
domestic problems, someone might decide to take a run at us.” “Someone else,” he added, “will be
sitting here in the late 1970s. By that time the Soviet systems will be more mature. Our successors will
be living in a nightmare if we don’t do what is right.” See Kissinger meeting with Schlesinger et al.,
9 August 1973, and Veriﬁcation Panel meeting, 9 August 1973, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXV,
pp. 96, 105–106, respectively.

76. Kissinger-Schlesinger meeting, 23 April 1974, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXV, p. 165; and
Veriﬁcation Panel meeting, 23 April 1974, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIII, p. 251.

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Minuteman missiles. Any such attack would entail great uncertainties, and So-
viet leaders knew that the United States would retain other forces, especially
on submarines, that could destroy the USSR as a functioning society.77

Thus, it seems that his core belief was that nuclear superiority had be-
come a “largely chimerical” goal—for both sides.78 That belief found expres-
sion in his oft-cited outburst in Moscow in 1974: “What in the name of God
is strategic superiority? What is the signiﬁcance of it, politically, militarily, op-
erationally, at these levels of numbers? What do you do with it?”79 To be sure,
he later dismissed that comment as a mere product of “fatigue and exaspera-
tion.” But the fact is he took exactly the same line in a meeting with a group of
journalists a month after the Moscow press conference, when he presumably
was no longer exhausted from his trip to the Soviet capital.80 He also made
essentially the same point in a meeting with President Ford later that month.
He told the president that even if Soviet missiles were able to wipe out the
Minuteman force in a ﬁrst strike, which was very unlikely given all the uncer-
tainties involved, the United States would still have its bombers, submarines,
and forward-based forces. In such circumstances, he said, it was “hard to vi-
sualize what strategic superiority is.” “We have to say we are second to none;
to ourselves we must recognize that it is probably an unusable force”—and
not just because of the threat of retaliation. Even if the United States got off
scot-free with a ﬁrst strike, the murdering of tens of millions of people would
be unconscionable: “I don’t think a political system which inﬂicts or accepts
20–90 million [deaths] can survive.”81

Kissinger’s basic approach to arms control does seem to have been rooted
in assumptions of that sort. Deep down he did not really believe there was

77. Kissinger meeting with main advisers, 31 July 1974, p. 5, in DNSA/KT01266. That this was his
view was more or less public knowledge at the time. According to The Washington Post’s military affairs
reporter, for example, “one top ofﬁcial who always travels on Secretary of State Kissinger’s airplane”—
probably a roundabout way of referring to Kissinger himself—told him that the whole scenario on
which the “window of vulnerability” argument was based was “just plain ‘crazy.’” See Michael Getler,
“The Specter That Fuels the Arms Race,” The Washington Post, 15 December 1974, p. B1. On these
points see also Kissinger, Years of Renewal, pp. 119–120, 126.

78. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 1009.

79. Kissinger quoted in Richard Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington, DC:
Brookings, 1987), p. 212.

80. Kissinger meeting with Time, Inc. journalists, 13 August 1974, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. 38,
pt. 1, pp. 222–223.

81. Ford-Kissinger meeting, 28 August 1974, in GRFPL, Digitized Memoranda of Presidential Con-
versations, pp. 3–4. Kissinger often dismissed the “window of vulnerability” alarmism as baseless. See,
for example, Kissinger-Schlesinger meeting, 23 April 1974, p. 165; and Kissinger, Years of Renewal,
p. 126. Note also his analysis of the issue in a 25 October 1974 meeting with Brezhnev, summarized
in Years of Renewal, p. 276 (full notes of the meeting are available in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XVI,
p. 226).

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any major “stability” problem that needed to be dealt with through arms con-
trol. In the real world as it would exist for the foreseeable future, neither side
would have any incentive to go ﬁrst with a major nuclear attack. In that sense
he parted company with many of his former colleagues in the academic world
who felt that U.S. policy in this area had to be based on the stability theory.
On the other hand, he did not really agree with people like Schlesinger who
were looking to achieve a meaningful nuclear edge. To be sure, Kissinger was
against a ban on MIRVs, but that was not because he thought that technology
could provide the United States with something close to a ﬁrst-strike capabil-
ity. He wanted to keep that program in place because it was “the only offensive
program that was going on in the United States” at the time, and he wanted
to bargain with the Soviet Union from a position of strength.82

The key point to bear in mind here is that in dealing with nuclear arms
control Kissinger was concerned above all with the political side of the prob-
lem. To be sure, whatever arrangements were reached would have a certain
strategic signiﬁcance, especially at the psychological level. Perceptions of the
balance, whether warranted or not, were also important for domestic politi-
cal reasons and in dealing with third countries. But given the nature of the
nuclear balance, and given political realities on all sides, such concerns were
ultimately of secondary importance. What really mattered was that arms con-
trol policy was a lever that could be used in support of more general foreign
policy goals.

The great hope was that by moving ahead in this area the USSR could
be locked into a relatively moderate policy—that Soviet leaders, as Kissinger
put it in an important memorandum he sent to Nixon in 1970, could be tied
“to the softer more optimistic line implicit in a SALT agreement.” For So-
viet ofﬁcials, SALT implied that the United States “would act more in parallel
with the USSR,” and they wanted an agreement for that very reason. U.S.
policy, he said, had to be framed with that in mind. “If we choose to move
in a direction of more open cooperation with the Soviet Union,” he wrote,
“we would, of course, ﬁnd the Soviet leaders responsive.” (The “of course” is
a revealing indicator of Kissinger’s true assessment of the “Soviet threat.”) If,
however, the United States chose to take a tougher line, “the net gains from
SALT over any long term might prove fragile.” Kissinger also seemed to think
that the United States should opt for the ﬁrst, more accommodating, course
of action because that would help keep Soviet policy on a moderate path: “If a

82. Transcript of interview with Henry Kissinger, 26 November 1986, taped in connection with the
WGBH television series War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, WGBH Open Vault, available online at
https://openvault.wgbh.org/collections/war_peace/interviews.

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SALT agreement produced a generally conciliatory American attitude, includ-
ing more generous economic policies toward the USSR, the Soviets would
have a strong incentive to keep us on such a course.”83 He argued in his mem-
oirs that SALT not only provided the United States with “an opportunity to
redress the strategic balance” but might also enable the two sides to “create the
conditions for political restraint without which escalating crises were in [his]
view inevitable.”84 SALT could also have certain secondary political purposes,
like “keeping the Europeans honest” (by stoking concerns about a possible
U.S. “condominium” with the USSR if the Europeans went too far in pursu-
ing their own détente policies) and outﬂanking the left at home. These points
were always important considerations for Kissinger, but clearly his main goal
had to do with the USSR: if détente were strengthened, the Soviet threat could
be kept at bay—and SALT was the great symbol of détente.

Thus, for Kissinger, détente was of value not so much because he was
deeply committed to peace and to better relations with the Soviet Union as
an end in itself. The policy was of value primarily because it would restrain
the USSR and thus give the U.S. government greater freedom of action. The
United States, Kissinger thought, had been able to push ahead in the Middle
East only because Soviet leaders were so committed to putting their relation-
ship with the United States on a relatively friendly basis. “We would not,”
he later wrote, “have had such a margin for unopposed action in a period of
open, across-the-board confrontation with the Soviet Union.”85 He believed
that Soviet ofﬁcials were genuinely interested in détente, but he said in 1975
that the United States had been “using it tactically.”86 He made the same point
in his memoirs. Détente, he wrote, “was a method for conducting the Cold
War,” and in the Middle East in particular “our policy to reduce and where
possible to eliminate Soviet inﬂuence . . . was in fact making progress under
the cover of détente.”87

All of this may be true, and all the talk at the time about building a
“lasting structure of peace” might well have been overblown. One gets the
impression from the documents that the pursuit of U.S. national interests, in

83. Kissinger to Nixon, on “Implications of a Limited SALT Agreement,” 13 July 1970, in FRUS,
1969–1976, Vol. XXXII, pp. 317–318. These passages were left out of the long extract from this
document quoted in Kissinger, White House Years, p. 550.

84. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 550.

85. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 943–944.

86. Kissinger meeting with Israeli leaders, 22 August 1975, p. 60, in GRFPL, Digital Collection,
National Security Advisor: Memoranda of Conversations, cited in Galen Jackson, “The Lost Peace:
Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Problem, 1967–1979,” Ph.D. Diss., UCLA, 2016, p. 241.

87. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 248, and Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 594.

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a fairly narrow sense of the term, counted for far more than the public was led
to believe at the time. This general point applies in particular to U.S. policy
on SALT. Still, one of the most striking things about U.S. policy in this area is
that Kissinger’s thinking seemed to shift quite dramatically in the period after
the SALT I agreements were signed in 1972. By 1973 he appeared to take
the stability theory, and the related idea that something needed to be done
about MIRVs, much more seriously. A situation, he said, in which each side
“could wipe out the other’s land-based missiles” would put “an unbelievable
premium on the ﬁrst strike.”88 Although his real view was that the problem
of ICBM vulnerability had been totally blown out of proportion, he now
repeatedly argued along these lines. He claimed, for example, in April 1973
that a situation in which each side could destroy its opponents’ ICBMs would
create “a massive element of instability”—as though the submarines, bombers,
and so on no longer mattered.89 Or, to give another example: on 6 March
1973 he told the head of the U.S. SALT delegation, the veteran diplomat U.
Alexis Johnson, that “if we put no limits on [Soviet] MIRVs, we are going to
have an unbelievable strategic problem. It doesn’t do us any good if we get
equally good MIRVs or even equally many; that just makes it a ﬁrst strike
world again.”90

Even when Kissinger later wrote his memoirs, he made the point that
with high throw-weight limitations and no limitations on MIRVs, “both sides
would develop a ﬁrst-strike capability.” Agreeing to that kind of arrangement,
he argued, would violate “every precept of arms control because in a crisis it
would give each side an incentive to strike ﬁrst.”91 Because U.S. policy was not
based on those precepts, he found it hard to understand “what the hell” the
U.S. government was trying to do.92 He now seemed to think that the U.S.
government’s mindless policy had to be replaced with a policy based squarely
on the stability theory and that the new policy should focus on ﬁnding some
way to limit MIRVs. For if MIRVs were not restricted, he wondered, what
would that do to all those “ﬁne theories of arms control based on discouraging
a ﬁrst strike by reducing the advantage of the attacker?”93

88. Veriﬁcation Panel meeting, 15 August 1973, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. 33, p. 109 (see also
p. 105).

89. Veriﬁcation Panel meeting, 25 April 1973, quoted in Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 270.

90. Kissinger-Johnson phone conversation, 6 March 1973, in DNSA/KA09682.

91. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 265n, emphasis in original.

92. Ibid., p. 270, and Veriﬁcation Panel meeting, 15 August 1973, p. 107.

93. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 270.

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Why the shift? It was not as though Kissinger had suddenly awakened and
for the ﬁrst time was able to see how the MIRV issue was connected to this
kind of problem. Numerous observers have argued that Kissinger had simply
failed to understand how important this issue was when he ﬁrst dealt with it
in his early years as national security adviser, and some remarks he made in a
background brieﬁng in December 1974 are often cited to support that view.
“I would say in retrospect,” he admitted at that brieﬁng, “that I wish I had
thought through the implications of a MIRVed world more thoughtfully in
1969 and 1970 than I did.”94 But that admission can scarcely be taken at face
value. As Laurence Lynn, who worked closely with Kissinger on nuclear issues
during those early years, later told an interviewer, Kissinger had in fact put a
great deal of thought into the MIRV problem in 1969 and 1970.95

What this implies is that those remarks, and indeed the whole shift in
Kissinger’s position on the “stability” issue, need to be interpreted in political
(i.e., instrumental) terms. The 1972 SALT agreements, and the détente policy
they symbolized, were at ﬁrst widely supported. But public enthusiasm faded
rapidly, and that shift in opinion had a profound effect on the administration’s
ability to carry out its policy. The USSR had opted for a détente policy in
large measure because of the economic beneﬁts it hoped to achieve, but U.S.
congressional opponents of détente were able to prevent those beneﬁts from
materializing. The problem then got worse after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war,
for which the Soviet Union (unfairly, in Kissinger’s view) was blamed.96 In
such circumstances, as Kissinger saw it, U.S. policy on SALT had to shift.
There had to be more meat on the bone. An arms control agreement had
to have more substance to it, especially from the USSR’s point of view. As it
was, the “peace policy” championed by Brezhnev had not produced the results
Soviet leaders had hoped for. It was therefore important that Brezhnev not be
totally discredited in the eyes of his colleagues. If he were, the whole détente
policy would unravel, and the United States would be confronted by a much
rougher international environment. If SALT became “like the trade issue,”
Kissinger said, “I think we will see a massive reversal of the Soviet position on
détente.”97 On the other hand, if a SALT agreement were reached, that would

94. Kissinger background brieﬁng, 3 December 1974, republished in “The Vladivostok Accord,” Sur-
vival, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1975), p. 195.

95. Interview with Laurence Lynn, 11 January 1987, taped in connection with WGBH television series
War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, WGBH Open Vault, available online at https://openvault.wgbh.org/
collections/war_peace/interviews.

96. See, for example, Kissinger meeting with key advisors, 1 August 1974, pp. 4–5, in DNSA/
KT01268.

97. NSC meeting, 2 December 1974, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIII, p. 397.

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help Brezhnev “claim that détente had become irreversible.”98 The political
factor was thus of fundamental importance. “SALT may give us no strategic
beneﬁts,” Kissinger said, “but it would give us political beneﬁts.”99

But his ability to pursue the kind of SALT policy he had in mind was
now quite limited. As the Watergate scandal unfolded, Nixon’s authority was
draining away almost by the day, and Kissinger could exercise power only
as the president’s agent. Nixon’s successor, Ford, was an unelected president
subject to strong right-wing pressure from within his own party, preventing
him from giving full support to the policy Kissinger seemed to have in mind,
one that involved overriding the objections of military authorities and the top
civilians at the Pentagon. Nor was Jimmy Carter, after being elected president
in 1976, able to pursue an arms control agenda that would breathe new life
into the détente policy. To be sure, in 1979 Carter and Brezhnev signed SALT
II, but by then the bloom was off the rose. In 1972, the SALT I agreements
had been welcomed as a major step toward international peace, but the 1979
SALT II treaty was widely seen as a vestige of the now largely discredited policy
of détente.

Souring on SALT, Souring on Détente

The SALT process that Nixon and Kissinger had helped launch in the early
1970s had a major impact on U.S.-Soviet relations in subsequent years. The
assumption around 1972 was that the SALT agreements and the SALT process
more generally were cornerstones of what people hoped would be a relatively
stable U.S.-Soviet relationship. But by the end of the decade, a strong element
of disillusionment had set in. As people soured on détente, they also tended to
sour on SALT as the great symbol of détente. But the causal arrow pointed the
other way as well. The SALT process itself had been discredited, and that in
turn helped to discredit détente yet further. After 1972, experts and ordinary
people alike had difﬁculty grasping what the point of the whole arms control
effort was. As Schelling later wrote, the focus after the ABM Treaty was signed
had been on offensive weapons. But the negotiations on that issue had been
“mostly mindless, without a guiding philosophy.” “What guiding philosophy
there used to be”—here Schelling had the stability theory in mind—had got-
ten “lost along the way.” After 1972, arms control had been pursued for its
own sake, not for the sake of stability. Indeed, if the goal was to promote

98. NSC meeting, 17 September 1975, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIII, p. 467.

99. NSC meeting, 22 December 1975, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIII, p. 503.

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strategic stability, the arms control mentality had in some ways become coun-
terproductive. Putting cruise missiles on submarines was for Schelling a good
case in point. A cruise missile deployed that way would have been a superb
second-strike weapon, “too slow for preemptive attack, yet difﬁcult to defend
against as it penetrates Soviet air space, impossible to locate on station be-
cause it can be based on submarines.” And yet this option was opposed by the
arms controllers for the very reason it was attractive to people like Schelling:
“if you cannot ﬁnd them you cannot count them; if you cannot count them
you cannot have veriﬁable limits; if limits cannot be veriﬁed you cannot have
arms control.” This was a good example of “what had gone wrong with arms
control.” The problem was that the U.S. effort after 1972 had apparently
not been “informed by any coherent theory of what arms control is supposed
to accomplish.” It was thus scarcely surprising that so little of real value had
been accomplished. Schelling, in fact, thought that after the signing of the
ABM treaty, essentially nothing had been achieved. To his mind, the treaty
had marked “not merely the high point but the end point of successful arms
control.”100

The sense that arms control had not lived up to its promise, and indeed
that little of value had been achieved in the 1970s, was fairly widespread, es-
pecially in left-of-center circles, the natural constituency for arms control and
for the détente policy in general. To give but one example: Leslie Gelb, who
had recently retired as head of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs at the
State Department, began a 1979 Foreign Policy article with an extraordinary
admission. “Arms control,” he wrote, “has essentially failed. Three decades
of U.S.-Soviet negotiations to limit arms competition have done little more
than to codify the arms race.”101 The idea that SALT had essentially served to
“codify,” “institutionalize,” or “legitimate” the arms race was common at the
time. Even the leaders of the two governments that had signed the SALT II
Treaty understood that not much had been accomplished. The treaty, Presi-
dent Carter told Brezhnev, would allow “a massive buildup in nuclear arms
and a buildup in warheads,” and the Soviet leader agreed. “On the whole,”
Brezhnev said, “very little—in fact, almost nothing—had been done in terms
of curbing the arms race.”102

This basic point had been clear to close observers for some time. Mil-
ton Leitenberg, for example, had noted in 1976 that the main effect of the

100. Schelling, “What Went Wrong?” pp. 223–225, 228–229.

101. Leslie H. Gelb, “A Glass Half Full,” Foreign Policy, No. 36 (Autumn 1979), p. 21.

102. Carter-Brezhnev meeting, 17 June 1979, in DDRS/CK2349073513, pp. 2, 4.

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agreements had been to “bilaterally legitimize the continued buildups on both
sides.” “Since neither side,” he pointed out, “wants to give up anything it al-
ready has, usually including those programs already under development, what
is ‘negotiated’ is that level that permits both sides to have all its programs and
then some.” It was for this reason that the SALT II “ceilings” in the frame-
work agreement reached at Vladivostok in 1974 were “as high as they are.”103
Leitenberg’s interpretation was fully conﬁrmed by Kissinger himself in his
memoirs:

High-ﬂown theories about the moral signiﬁcance of arms control notwithstand-
ing, in the real world, the basic assignment of each side’s negotiators became to
protect those weapons which their planners were in the process of developing
and eager to deploy. . . . In this sense SALT I served as a kind of acceptance by
each side of the unilateral plans of the other. Certainly on the American side,
SALT I stopped no program, existing or planned. The numerical inequality of
weapons it ratiﬁed were the voluntarily chosen existing programs for the foresee-
able future. SALT II began the same way.104

His point applied not just to U.S. policy but to Soviet policy as well. “Even as
[Brezhnev] put his name to SALT,” Sergey Radchenko notes, the Soviet leader
“privately assured his party comrades that these agreements would ‘in no way
obstruct the implementation of the existing programmes to further strengthen
[Soviet] defence.’”105

The implication was that arms control had not made much of a differ-
ence one way or another in terms of what each side ended up doing. This
point was often noted at the time. To take but one example, Soviet Ambas-
sador Dobrynin told Kissinger in 1972 that in the SALT agreements the two
sides had just agreed “to do what we were going to do anyway.” Kissinger, for
his part, did not disagree.106 Dobrynin’s observation about SALT I applied to

103. Milton Leitenberg, “The SALT II Ceilings and Why They Are So High,” British Journal of In-
ternational Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (July 1976), reprinted in U.S. Senate, Foreign Relations Committee,
Subcommittee on Arms Control, Oceans, and International Environment, U.S.-Soviet Strategic Op-
tions (Washington: USGPO, 1977), pp. 183, 187.

104. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 252. He reiterated the point on p. 277: “The overriding concern
of both sides [in 1974] was the same as it had been all along: to protect its existing strategic programs,
all of which had been designed before arms control negotiations had even begun.”

105. Sergey Radchenko, “The Soviet Union and the Cold War Arms Race,” in Thomas Mancken,
Joseph Maiolo, and David Stevenson, eds., Arms Races in International Politics: From the Nineteenth to
the Twenty-First Century (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 168.

106. Kissinger-Dobrynin meeting, 9 August 1973, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIII, p. 100.
Kissinger claimed in the ﬁrst volume of his memoirs that although the SALT I interim agreement
had “stopped no American program,” “it did arrest a continuing Soviet program that was deploying
over 200 ICBMs and SLBMs a year.” See Kissinger, White House Years, p. 821. He repeated that claim

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the SALT process more generally—a point many of those involved in these
matters later conﬁrmed. Gelb, for example, looking back in 1994, saw trends
in both countries in the late 1970s “making the whole arms control process
more of a dance for each side to keep whatever strategic programs it was al-
ready developing.”107 That in itself was enough to sour many people on arms
control.

But the disillusionment ran even deeper because the whole arms control
process not only seemed to have done little to bring the “arms race” under
control but had led to more spending on strategic weapons than would oth-
erwise have been the case. This phenomenon was often attributed to three
distinct mechanisms. The “bargaining chip” argument could play a decisive
role in winning congressional support for particular weapons programs, but,
once procured, the “chips” might not actually be “cashed in” at the bargaining
table.108 The decision to proceed with the development of cruise missiles is the
main example usually cited in this regard. Kissinger had pressed the Pentagon
to develop strategic cruise missiles as a “bargaining chip” for the SALT talks.
The military authorities, who had initially been unenthusiastic about the idea,
later came to see the weapon’s strategic value and were very reluctant to give it
up in the bargaining. “How was I to know,” Kissinger later complained, “the
military would come to love it?”109

A second mechanism had to do with the domestic politics of arms con-
trol, in the sense both of the bureaucratic politics of proposal development
and of the politics of treaty ratiﬁcation. As Miller points out, a country’s arms

in the second volume of his memoirs, Years of Upheaval, p. 268: “After all, SALT I constrained no
American program; it stopped several Soviet programs.” But in internal discussions at the time, he was
more cautious, claiming only that the agreement “may have stopped several Soviet programs” and not-
ing in another meeting that it was “open to some argument whether we stopped the Soviet program”
or just “froze their existing program.” See NSC meeting, 24 January 1974, p. 165 (emphasis added);
and NSC meeting, 14 September 1974, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIII, pp. 306. See also NSC
meeting, 23 April 1974, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIII, p. 243.

107. See the transcript of the discussion at a conference on “SALT II and the Growth of Mistrust,”
p. 149, held at Musgrove, St. Simons Island, GA, 7–9 May 1994, under the auspices of the Carter-
Brezhnev project.

108. See Miller, “The Limits of Mutual Restraint,” pp. 374–376 and the sources cited there.

109. See, for example, Robert J. Bresler and Robert C. Gray, “The Bargaining Chip and SALT,” Politi-
cal Science Quarterly, Vol. 92, No. 1 (Spring 1977), pp. 77–79; and Garthoff, “SALT I: An Evaluation,”
pp. 21–23. For the Kissinger remark, see Leslie Gelb, “Another U.S. Compromise Position Is Reported
on Strategic Arms,” The New York Times, 17 February 1976, quoted in Bresler and Gray, “The Bar-
gaining Chip and SALT,” p. 78. Archival evidence indicates that Kissinger in mid-1973 urged the
Pentagon to develop the weapon at least in part for SALT-related bargaining purposes, but it is by no
means clear that he intended to give it up in a ﬁnal agreement and was prevented from doing so only
by opposition from the military. See: Kenneth Werrell, The Evolution of the Cruise Missile (Maxwell
Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1985), pp. 154, 190, 214 n. 7.

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control position has to be worked out in internal negotiations, and in that
process “some participants often have to be bought off.”110 When the agree-
ment is ﬁnally signed, “internal critics will usually have to be paid for their
public support of the treaty.” Thus, for example, the JCS indicated that they
would support the SALT I accords only if the administration supported “a
broad program of strategic modernization.”111 The same mechanism seemed
to be at work during the Carter period. As one former Carter administration
ofﬁcial noted in 1994:

On repeated occasions when we were approaching negotiations that looked
promising with the Soviet Union, the price of that progress was for us to agree
to additional military programs—for example, the agreement to proceed with
the R&D and eventual deployment of MIRVs. That was part of the price paid
in order to get the positions accepted by the Chiefs or the military services for
progress in SALT. And similarly on many other programs, such as the MX. A
deployment program for MX was part of the price of SALT.112

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as Carter’s national security adviser, basi-
cally agreed. The MX decision, he said, “was heavily driven, in addition to its
own strategic merits, by the thought that this would ensure a higher degree
of probability for SALT ratiﬁcation, which otherwise was very problematical
in the United States.”113 All of this was well understood at the time. Senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in a long article on the SALT process published in
The New Yorker in 1979, highlighted the bizarre way the arms control process
had led to weapons like the MX, a counterforce missile being deployed by a
country that (Moynihan believed) had based its strategic doctrine on avoid-
ing counterforce and focusing instead on a secure second-strike counter-city
capability. How ironic, he argued, that the SALT process had not only “failed
to prevent the Soviets from developing a ﬁrst-strike capability” but had also
prompted “the United States to do so.” “The process,” he wrote, “has pro-
duced the one outcome it was designed to forestall. And so we see a policy

110. Steven E. Miller, “Politics over Promise: Domestic Impediments to Arms Control,” International
Security, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Spring 1984), p. 82 and the source cited there.

111. Ibid., p. 82. On this episode, see also the documents cited in Kissinger to Haig, 25 May 1972, in
FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XIV, pp. 1114–1115, nn. 1–2.

112. Marshall Shulman, in “SALT II and the Growth of Mistrust,” transcript, p. 115. Shulman, a
Columbia University professor, had been Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s special adviser on Soviet
affairs during the Carter period.

113. Ibid., p. 133. That this was his view at the time is conﬁrmed by newly released archival evidence.
See Green, Revolution That Failed, p. 235.

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in ruins.”114 Other observers, as Moynihan noted in the article, had already
come to see things in much the same way.

The third presumed mechanism that made arms control a spur to the
strategic “arms race” was the assumption that a SALT agreement would be
negotiable only if it provided for rough parity in strategic forces. The num-
bers permitted in an agreement reﬂected an agreed view of what a balanced
relationship would look like. To build fewer arms than one was entitled to un-
der the agreement would therefore be to accept something less than parity. In
the United States, this factor alone might create pressure on Congress to au-
thorize funding for military programs allowed under the agreement. Kissinger
seems to have had this sort of phenomenon in mind when he said that the
administration probably had “a better chance of maintaining our programs
with SALT than without it.”115 He made the same point even more explicitly
in a meeting with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping a few days after the Vladi-
vostok summit meeting, outlining for him the arms control arrangement that
had just been worked out with the Soviet Union. “In terms of our domestic
situation,” Kissinger said, “it is, strangely enough, easier to get Congress to
give funds for limits in agreements than to get funds for the same amounts
without an agreement.”116

SALT thus meant higher military budgets, which was why, Kissinger
thought, the military authorities had complained so little about the SALT
process. “We haven’t heard a word from our military,” he said in 1974, “since
they ﬁgured out how SALT could get them a bigger military establishment.
It’s the best legitimization of Trident they have. (Senator) Symington has told
me they don’t know how many SALT agreements we can afford.”117 Kissinger
in his memoirs quotes from a memorandum he sent the president explain-
ing why the United States should move ahead on SALT. One key argument
was that “the prospective agreement has the advantage that it is premised on
carrying out the Trident and B-1 programs, thus improving the chances for
their survival in Congress.” The irony did not escape him: “Arms control had

114. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The SALT Process,” The New Yorker, 19 November 1979. Moynihan
sent a copy of the original article to Carter. That copy, with its original pagination, can be accessed
via the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, https://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/. The quotation is on
p. 152.

115. Kissinger meeting with Sonnenfeldt, Hyland, and others, 11 September 1974, p. 3.

116. Kissinger-Deng meeting, 27 November 1974, 9:45 a.m., p. 11, in DNSA/KT01428.

117. Veriﬁcation Panel, 15 February 1974, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIII, p. 202. See also
Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 125.

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come a long way from its original intention when it became a means to make
possible new strategic programs rather than to limit them.”118

For many people, especially on the left, the conclusion seemed in-
escapable. The arms control process was a sham, a fraud. The SALT II Treaty
was not disarmament, or even arms control. It would simply pave the way for
yet more military spending. As Richard Barnet, a former Kennedy administra-
tion ofﬁcial, put it in a Washington Post op-ed article, the treaty had “secured
the acquiescence of the military in both countries because it ratiﬁes the huge
weapons acquisition programs both are pushing.” In the United States, in
particular, SALT was “something to stir the hearts of generals, defense con-
tractors and senators from states brimming with military reservations and
arms plants.”119 The sense of disillusionment, perhaps even of betrayal, was
palpable.

But none of this meant that hawkish observers were particularly happy
with the SALT process. From the start, the hardliners had been wary of strate-
gic arms control. They might have recognized that in the post-Vietnam period
Congress would not support a major U.S. military buildup. They also may
have acknowledged, somewhat grudgingly, that in those circumstances an ac-
tive arms control policy might be of value in limiting what the Soviet Union
would otherwise do. But they thought SALT would have a certain lulling ef-
fect and make it harder for people to see the Soviet threat for what it was, and
this perhaps caused them to lean harder against détente than they otherwise
might have. They certainly attacked SALT I for being tantamount to U.S. ac-
ceptance of Soviet strategic superiority (under the agreement the USSR could
deploy a larger missile force than the United States could). Kissinger felt all
this was deeply unfair. Those inequalities, he pointed out, were the result of
policies each side had adopted long ago, and before 1972 analysts who were
now denouncing SALT had been perfectly willing to live with such dispari-
ties. Why, then, was it so outrageous that the 1972 agreement was built on
that reality? Was it not absurd that “force levels unilaterally established by the
United States for over ten years by administrations of both parties—without
opposition” were suddenly “declared ‘dangerous’ when embodied in an agree-
ment”?120 If opponents of SALT were so concerned that U.S. missiles were not

118. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 292. On the general issue of perverse effects, see the insightful
analysis in Bruce Berkowitz, Calculated Risks: A Century of Arms Control, Why It Has Failed, and How
It Can Be Made to Work (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), chs. 2–3.

119. Richard Barnet, “Do We Want to End the Arms Race?” The Washington Post, 9 September 1979,
p. A19.

120. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 1007. See also Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1245.

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big enough, nothing in the agreement prevented the Congress from authoriz-
ing the deployment of missiles with much larger throw weights. “If we want a
bigger missile,” he said, “why aren’t we building one? Who’s stopping us?”121
But the hardliners maintained that such arguments missed the point. SALT
was the great symbol of détente, and it was the détente policy itself that was
the real target of their complaints. The whole idea of developing a friendly re-
lationship with the USSR they found deeply distasteful. Any agreement that
seemed to put a seal of approval on what the Soviet Union was doing, above
all in the military area, did not sit well with them.

So the hardliners came to dislike the whole SALT process—not just the
treaties and agreements it had led to but even more the ideology that had
grown up around arms control. In 1974, Wohlstetter launched a full-scale at-
tack on many of the key claims associated with that ideology: on the idea that
the arms competition—driven by “runaway technology,” “worst-case” think-
ing that led to “invariable U.S. overestimation” of the Soviet threat, and a
kind of mindless “action-reaction mechanism”—tended to take on “an ex-
plosive life of its own.” He also criticized the idea that all this had led to a
never-ending growth in nuclear ﬁrepower, to ever-larger levels of overkill, and
to a dangerous “arms race” that would in itself make “war much more likely.”
In addition, he attacked the notion that only strenuous and indeed risky arms
control efforts could “cap the volcano” (an allusion to the Bundy article) and
keep the “race” from ending in disaster. Many of those claims, he showed, sim-
ply did not withstand scrutiny. U.S. spending on strategic forces had fallen,
after adjusting for inﬂation, by almost two-thirds since its peak in the late
1950s. The total explosive yield of the weapons in the U.S. arsenal had also
fallen quite dramatically from its peak in around 1960. Even the total number
of U.S. strategic warheads (including those designed for both defensive and
offensive use) had, by 1972, declined somewhat from the peak in 1964—a
decline accounted for mostly by the decommissioning of defensive warheads,
“supposedly the most destabilizing” weapons in the U.S. arsenal. Instead of a
continual tendency to overestimate the developing Soviet threat, the opposite
had been done during one key period—the 1960s.122

But Wohlstetter was trying to do a good deal more than just show that
many standard views were not supported by the evidence. What he really
objected to was what he saw as the mindless way in which many people, es-
pecially on the left, dealt with strategic issues. The basic idea that there was

121. Veriﬁcation Panel meeting, 27 April 1974, quoted in Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 1027.

122. Wohlstetter, “Is There a Strategic Arms Race?”; Wohlstetter, “Rivals, but No ‘Race,’” Wohlstetter,
“Optimal Ways to Confuse Ourselves”; and Wohlstetter, “Racing Forward?” (2009).

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Trachtenberg

an “arms race” that had to be stopped was linked to the idea that the way to
stop it was to make sure that neither side had any incentive to preempt the
other during a crisis—that each side built forces only for retaliatory purposes
and that neither side would threaten the other side’s retaliatory forces. If both
sides accepted that kind of system, the argument went, the arms race could be
stopped in its tracks. Reaching for damage-limitation, building counterforce
capabilities to support that goal, and accepting a ﬁrst-strike option, without
which damage limitation could scarcely be effective, would necessarily trigger
countermeasures on the part of the adversary and generate endless escalations
of the arms race. Clearly, the stability theory had provided, for many people,
the conceptual basis for arms control. But Wohlstetter was deeply opposed
to what he called “perverse current dogmas” of that sort.123 “At the core” of
Wohlstetter’s “disparagement of arms control,” as Richard Perle pointed out,
was “his view that the underlying rationale for treaties limiting the numbers,
types, and technologies of strategic forces served only to reinforce MAD doc-
trine, a doctrine he deplored on both prudential and moral grounds.”124

Wohlstetter, however, was careful not to claim too much, and he never
quite said that U.S. arms control policy, let alone U.S. nuclear weapons policy
more generally, had been rooted in the MAD doctrine. What he objected to
was the thinking, especially outside government; the SALT process itself was
not his main target. But the idea that U.S. policy on these issues had been
based on the stability theory was amazingly widespread, and arguments of
this sort were made both by opponents of the theory on the right and by its
supporters on the left.125 Such claims were often linked to the point that the
Soviet Union not only had refused to base its policy on the MAD doctrine but
had tended to take the opposite approach. Soviet leaders were “war-ﬁghters”

123. Wohlstetter, “Racing Forward?” (2009), p. 461.

124. Zarate and Sokolski, eds., Nuclear Heuristics, p. 385. For Wohlstetter’s views on MAD, see the
essay he coauthored with his wife Roberta in 1985: Albert Wohlstetter and Roberta Wohlstetter, “On
Arms Control: What We Should Look for in an Arms Agreement,” in Zarate and Sokolski, eds.,
Nuclear Heuristics, esp. pp. 474, 482–484.

125. Even Kissinger often argued along these lines. “The Johnson Administration,” he wrote in his
memoirs, “had had a strategic doctrine of ‘assured destruction.’ Abandoning counterforce, it calculated
our program on the basis of our ability to inﬂict industrial and civilian damage.” See Kissinger, White
House Years, p. 1232; emphasis added. But he certainly knew what the real story was. He had, for
example, noted in passing at a high-level meeting in early 1970 that the new Nixon administration
had “been told that over 85% of the force is targeted in a damage-limiting role.” Indeed, within weeks
after taking ofﬁce in 1969, a memorandum he forwarded to Nixon pointed out that “we plan to
use our Minuteman to destroy Soviet forces and thereby limit damage to us and our allies,” and so
“we want to preserve at least some of the damage limiting capability of our Minuteman force.” See
Defense Program Review Committee meeting, 10 August 1970, and NSC staff paper, c. 5 March
1969, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXIV, pp. 539, 65, respectively.

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Strategic Arms Limitation during the Nixon-Kissinger Period

who did not accept the view that nuclear weapons served only to deter their
use by others. Nor did they accept the view that a stable great-power relation-
ship could be based only on mutual deterrence. That disparity, as noted by
many (including Thomas Wolfe in his well-known book on SALT), explained
why arms control had accomplished so little.126 The two major powers were
simply not on the same wavelength on these issues.

Moynihan was among those who believed the Soviet Union and the
United States held starkly different views. He considered the stability the-
ory (which he called the “doctrine of deterrence”) “a stunning intellectual
achievement.” But it had one great ﬂaw. Its supporters had assumed the Soviet
Union would understand the logic and “do as we did.” As it turned out, So-
viet leaders never accepted the theory, and this was the real reason SALT had
failed.127 The leaders of the USSR were warﬁghters; they believed in coun-
terforce; they were reaching for superiority; they were already giving signs,
Moynihan said, “that it is their intention to control our defense policy.”128
The implications were clear. If Soviet leaders had truly been interested in
coexistence, they would have agreed with U.S. ofﬁcials about the kind of nu-
clear capability both sides should have. Their failure to do so suggested that
they intended to pursue more aggressive goals. Indeed, the whole SALT ex-
perience tended to conﬁrm the view, which had other sources as well, that
détente was a mirage and that the time had come for a much tougher U.S.
policy.

We now know that this characterization of U.S. policy—as having been
based on MAD—was essentially a myth, albeit one that was embraced at the
time by both the left and the right for their own (very different) reasons.129

126. Wolfe, SALT Experience, pp. 106–113, 247–250. Wolfe felt that this was paralleled by a related
disparity: the United States was more committed to arms control based on mutual deterrence than
the Soviet Union was and was more willing to make concessions in order to reach agreements: “if a
prime asymmetry in the SALT negotiating approaches of the two sides can be identiﬁed, it would
appear to be that the Soviet Union has displayed less inclination to alter its own basic positions and
to accommodate itself to the concerns and preferences of the other party for the sake of achieving
agreements than has the United States.” Ibid., pp. 253–254. But the evidence Wolfe cited to support
that view (on p. 95) was very thin, and, as he himself noted, the material then available was not
ample enough to allow a solid judgment about how conciliatory each side was on some key issues
(pp. 95, 104). He in fact presented evidence (pp. 12, 106) that pointed in the opposite direction: in
two keys areas (SLBMs and forward-based forces), the Soviet Union was the party that had made the
key concessions.

127. Moynihan, “The SALT Process,” pp. 114–116, 132.

128. Ibid., pp. 141, 168.

129. Scholars have been aware of this point for years. See, for example, John Mearsheimer, “Nuclear
Weapons and Deterrence in Europe,” International Security, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Winter 1984–1985), p. 23
n. 10; and John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 464

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Trachtenberg

The myth was accepted in part because of the way U.S. strategic nuclear policy
was presented to the public. U.S. leaders took it for granted, as Nixon himself
argued, that they “shouldn’t tell the whole truth” about these matters.130 U.S.
policymakers wanted the public to believe that the United States was guided
by a second-strike strategy based on “assured destruction.” Any move toward
counterforce had to be rationalized as a response to the buildup of the Soviet
Union’s own counterforce capabilities. No U.S. government wanted to admit
too openly that it sought to develop a ﬁrst-strike option for general political
purposes. Yet, it would be wrong to suggest that the myth took hold simply
because people were misled by the way the government explained its policies.
Even people who knew better—people who had served in the government
and knew very well what the real situation was—often claimed in public that
U.S. policy had been based on MAD.

n. 169. Mearsheimer in his book quotes Senator Malcolm Wallop as claiming in 1979 that for the
past ﬁfteen years the U.S. government had “built weapons and cast strategic plans well nigh exclu-
sively for the purpose of inﬂicting damage upon the enemy’s society.” Mearsheimer then notes that “it
is now well established among students of the nuclear arms race that this claim is a groundless myth
perpetrated by experts and policymakers who surely knew better.” The “seminal piece exposing this
myth,” he points out, was Desmond Ball’s Déjà Vu: The Return to Counterforce in the Nixon Admin-
istration (Santa Monica: California Seminar on Arms Control and Foreign Policy, December 1974).
This important publication, however, was not widely circulated at the time. For another summary
judgment about the myth of MAD, see Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi, “Anthony Giddens
on Nuclear Strategy: A Comment,” Sociology, Vol. 25, No. 3 (August 1991), pp. 465–472.

130. NSC meeting, 18 June 1969, p. 141. This should not be understood as a quirk of Nixon’s
personality. U.S. ofﬁcials had deliberately sought to mislead the public about these matters well before
Nixon came to power. As a former high-ranking ofﬁcial in the Johnson administration told Desmond
Ball in 1971, the basic war plan, with its great emphasis on counterforce, had not been changed in
any fundamental way since 1962, but “all public ofﬁcials” had “learned to talk in public only about
deterrence and city attacks. No war-ﬁghting, no city-sparing.” See Ball, Déjà Vu, pp. 16–17. The
U.S. government’s tendency to play down its interest in counterforce continued even after some of the
most basic facts were in the public record. Kissinger suggested in his memoirs that new U.S. programs,
like the Trident submarine and the new Trident missiles that would be deployed on it, would simply
enhance U.S. second-strike capabilities. The Trident program, he wrote, “gave us no counterforce
capability because SLBMs were generally not accurate enough to pinpoint silos and presented technical
problems of simultaneous launching.” Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 273 (see also pp. 262, 1008).
But in fact one of the main purposes of the Trident force was to provide the United States with a
major survivable counterforce capability. See Green, Revolution That Failed, pp. 33, 125, 131–132,
147. None of this was kept secret at the time. In April 1976, for example, Ford gave a speech in which
he boasted that his administration had “laid the keel for the ﬁrst of a new class of nuclear submarines
to be armed with the most accurate submarine ballistic missiles in the world. The Trident missile ﬂeet
will be the foundation for a formidable, technologically superior force through the 1980s.” Scholars
and journalists at the time understood that extreme accuracy was important only for attacking hard
targets like ICBM silos; attacks on cities obviously did not have to be highly accurate. The Ford speech
is quoted in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. XXXV, p. 333, and is by no means the only example that could
be cited. As Graham Spinardi points out, the Pentagon in 1976 openly stated that it wanted the new
submarines to have the ability to “strike hard targets” as a “hedge against dependence on ICBMs.” See
Graham Spinardi, “Why the U.S. Navy Went for Hard-Target Counterforce in Trident II (And Why
It Didn’t Get There Sooner),” International Security, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Fall 1990), p. 177.

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Strategic Arms Limitation during the Nixon-Kissinger Period

The impression thus took hold that there was an enormous gulf between
the U.S. and Soviet approaches to nuclear issues. The Soviet Union, it was
said over and over again, still took nuclear warﬁghting seriously (which was
essentially true), whereas the United States had tried to build its policy on the
stability theory and had moved in the opposite direction only when it became
clear that the Soviet approach was very different (which was not true at all).
The whole SALT experience was interpreted in a way that underscored that
basic point. The United States, the argument went, had tried to build a “stable
structure of peace” (Nixon’s phrase); U.S. arms control policy, which sought
above all to build a stable nuclear relationship, reﬂected that basic aspiration.
But Soviet leaders had rejected the olive branch. They were not prepared to
base their relationship with the United States on the idea that each side should
respect the core interests of the other—and above all its interest in having a
secure, survivable deterrent force. They were instead still reaching for nuclear
superiority and, unlike the United States, still sought to build a politically
usable nuclear force. So even for moderates like Moynihan, the SALT story
seemed to show that the Soviet Union, unlike the United States, still wanted
to build the sort of nuclear force that could support an aggressive foreign
policy, for how else (given their assumptions about U.S. policy) could the
failure of SALT be explained?

That whole line of argument about SALT thus supported a more general
view about why détente had proved so disappointing—and about who was
to blame for what had happened. For many the lesson was clear: The United
States had to wake up and take vigorous action to counter the Soviet threat.
Thus, the SALT experience of the 1970s helped pave the way for the rise of
the Reaganite right in the United States and for the hardening of U.S. policy
toward the Soviet Union in the early 1980s—scarcely the result supporters of
nuclear arms control had hoped for a decade earlier.

Author’s Note

A full version of this article, with direct links to many of the items cited,
is available online at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/
cv/SALT.pdf.

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