Edward L. Rowny
Second, it would give us leverage at the negotiating table and help drive the Soviets
down.
Q ..
What about our NATO allies?_ Did we have their full support or were they opposed
to our modernization?
In general, we had the support of our allies. But this was not easily achieved
A
because many of them were worried that our force modernization plan wold act
against arms control. They hoped that somehow the Soviets would reduce their
weapons without our having to increase ours. But we saw no way of
accomplishing this. We consulted extensively with our allies to convince them that
we were serious about arms control. At the same time we had great difficulties
with our allies in getting them to accept U.S. cruise missiles and Pershing
intermediate-range ballistic missiles on European soil. This was so even though
the NATO ministers had asked for such deployments. Once we decided to comply
with their request, it sparked a lot of debate in NATO capitals over whether they
should really accept our weapons on their soil.
Q ..
in bad shape Would you
You mentioned that our command and
elaborate?
A ..
Yes. Our means for communicating with our strategic forces left much to be
desired. We did not have a national command authority which was secure and also
redundant and had tenuous means of communicating with the forces. This was
particularly true with our naval forces. We had to push new concepts of
propagating low-frequency waves from certain locations in the U. S. to the
submarines at sea. The entire structure of our command, control and
communications required overhaul; it had been neglected too long. Our
intelligence capability also left a great deal to be desired, particularly in the number
of satellites we were putting up and the amount of information we were collecting
from them. While these matters were not publicly debated and were not very
glamorous, they were recognized by the professionals as being at the heart of the
problem.
If you can't communicate with your strategic forces, you can't control them. And
if the enemy knows you can't-and our intelligence sources told us they knew of
our difficulties-the threat of retaliation is a hollow threat.
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