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Perhaps the most complicated and fateful issue facing the Nixon Administration—and one likely to be unresolved long after the Vietnamese war has ended—is an agreement on arms restraint with the Russians. Because the Johnson Administration and the Soviets agreed last summer to begin talks aimed at holding down offensive and defensive nuclear weaponry, the Nixon Administration expects to come under increasing domestic pressure to follow through with the negotiations. The President has said repeatedly that he favors such talks, but he has added a crucial new element to the equation by linking the arms question to the general political atmosphere in the world. What Washington is now saying to Moscow, in effect, is that the U.S. requires an earnest of good intentions.
Will the Soviets now continue to back the Arab states down the line, keeping the flash point high with military assistance and advisers? Will the Russians make a more active effort to induce Hanoi to compromise? Will the old cycle of crisis and relaxation in West Berlin continue? The Nixon Administration does not hold out for a full settlement on any or all of these problems as a precondition of arms talks. It doubts that any general, genuine détente is possible in the immediate future. Rather, it hopes to make the world "less risky and more tolerable," as one official puts it.
For its part, Washington is making some conciliatory gestures. Nixon's request for prompt Senate approval of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty is one example. Another is that he no longer asks "clear-cut superiority" for the U.S. in nuclear capability, as he did during the campaign, but now speaks of "sufficiency."
The linkage of arms and political issues is a reversal of the approach during the Kennedy and Johnson years, when the U.S. pursued limited nuclear pacts with the Russians regardless of other considerations. Kissinger spelled out his reasoning most recently in an essay published two months ago: "The risk is great that if there is no penalty for [Soviet] intransigence, there is no incentive for reconciliation. The Kremlin may use negotiations—including arms control—as a safety valve to dissipate Western suspicions rather than as a serious endeavor to resolve concrete disputes or to remove the scourge of war."
Implicit in this approach is the belief that weaponry itself, even the destructive power of nuclear arms, is not to blame for the cold war confrontations that might produce general war. With the possible exception of the Cuban missile crisis, the major tension points since World War II have developed over what Kissinger terms problems of "structure"—the two Germanys, the two Koreas, the two Viet
Nams, the Arab-Israeli impasse. Dangerous turmoil in Asia, Africa and Latin America, of course, is a legacy of events that began long before most people had ever heard of atoms, let alone atom bombs. The Nixon Administration apparently views the weapons issue by itself with less urgency than its predecessor did.
At a Crossroads