Engineer Memoirs
He repeated in effect what the chairman had told me. Rather than embarrass the
President and resign in midstream, he felt I should continue to work on the treaty
and make it as good as I could. In the end, when the treaty was initialed, if I
thought it was not satisfactory I should then resign.
This meeting I had with Vance was in the immediate aftermath of a week of
negotiations we had just finished in which the administration thought it would wrap
up the entire SALT II agreement by Christmas. As a result, our side made a
number of concessions which I didn't think we had to make. I had cabled my
views on these issues to the Joint Chiefs of Staff who tried to stem the tide of
concessions. On some they were successful. However, on most they were
overruled by the White House. It was because I saw the way things were going
that I wrote such a pessimistic assessment. It also caused me to make up my mind
that I could not in clear conscience support a SALT II agreement along the lines
it was headed.
Q ..
Can you give me some examples of these concessions?
A ..
One of our concessions was to permit heavy missiles on the Soviet side but not on
our side. In other words, we gave them the unilateral advantage of possessing
heavy missiles. A second concession was to not include the Backfire, an
intercontinental bomber, in the count of Soviet weapons. The third concession had
to do with a number of aspects of verification. One of these was covered by
Article XV.3, which dealt with the encryption of telemetry of missile testing. In
December 1978 we gave in to a "Catch 22" arrangement. In it the Soviets said
they would not encrypt any information which was included in the provisions of the
agreement. But then they wouldn't include the things we wanted into the
provisions of the agreement. It was a meaningless proposal. We said, "No
encryption, period. They said encryption is permitted but not of that data which
would be included in the provisions of the agreement. Then they would not put
any provisions into the agreement. This made it a meaningless exercise. And we
made other concessions on verification provisions as well.
It had become quite obvious by the end of 1978 that we were negotiating on the
wrong things. We were, for example, negotiating the number of launchers of
ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles]. But launchers don't kill; it's the
missiles fired from the launchers that kill. More specifically, it's the warheads on
these missiles that kill. This was an important issue because the Soviets were
putting more warheads on their missiles and also making them more accurate.
Time was acting against us. What looked like a good d e a l when we started SALT
II was being eroded. The Soviets were circumventing the intent of the agreement
by producing more warheads.
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