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After the Viet Nam cease-fire—and the first SALT agreement—we managed to increase the defense budget by some 5%. But even this relatively modest change ran up against the lingering inhibitions of Viet Nam, compounded by Watergate. Every new weapons system had to run a gauntlet of objections: it was unnecessary because we already had an "overkill" capability; it was dangerous because it would compel offsetting Soviet moves; it would jeopardize SALT negotiations; it would weaken us because it might preclude newer and even better weapons down the road. The attainable was being blocked by a quest for the ideal. The B70 bomber, the antiballistic missile, the Bl, the MX, the Trident II missile have all been canceled or delayed.
DEBATING ARMS CONTROL
At a moment when efforts to upgrade U.S. defense were thus stymied, Kissinger faced the formidable task of trying to negotiate a new agreement with Moscow on strategic arms limitations. He had to do so, he notes, in the midst of a long-running debate over the question, Does arms control enhance our security or damage it?
Arms control has a complicated history. In the earliest days of the nuclear age, some concerned scientists had argued that unilateral restraint would induce the Soviets to follow suit. There was not the slightest proof that the Soviets operated by such a maxim, and overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown said during the Carter Administration: "We have found that when we build weapons, they build; when we stop, they nevertheless continue to build."
By the '60s another theory had emerged: strategic stability was to be achieved by invulnerable strategic forces on both sides; neither side should be able to benefit from a first strike or avoid cataclysmic destruction in retaliation. But if mutual invulnerability of strategic forces was to be the objective, our strategic power would no longer compensate for Soviet superiority in conventional strength or capacity for regional intervention. Given strategic parity, the democracies would have to build up their conventional strength if they wanted to avoid political blackmail. With every passing year, official arms-control theory thus ran more and more counter to the official strategic doctrine of nuclear retaliation.
Conservative opponents of SALT sometimes spoke as if it were possible to regain our nuclear superiority, but they soon recoiled before the twin obstacles of technology and cost. Liberals, on the other hand, were reluctant to draw the consequences for local defense from the strategic parity they were both advocating and accelerating. Both schools tended to neglect the need for strengthening regional or conventional forces.
The Nixon Administration at first sought to link SALT to Soviet geopolitical conduct. But it found itself under mounting pressure to begin arms-control talks, in effect unconditionally. Finally, the Defense Department, hitherto leery of SALT, seized on it as a means to close the gap that congressional budget cuts were opening up between Soviet and American strategic forces; the Pentagon urged us to put a numerical ceiling on Soviet offensive missile deployments through arms-control negotiations.