Old Cold War Proposals Went Lower

From The National Security Archive, GWU – 8 April 2010

By:  Thomas Blanton and William Burr

Gorbachev and Reagan at one of their one-on-one sessions at Hofdi House during the Reykjavik summit, October 1986. During these meetings, Reagan and Gorbachev discussed proposals for the abolition of nuclear weapons. U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock is seated to Reagan's left. (Source: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library)

Washington, D.C., April 8, 2010 – The new START Treaty signed today in Prague represents “real” but “modest” cuts in strategic nuclear forces comparable to some Cold War alternatives but still higher than the most far-reaching proposals considered by Presidents Reagan and Carter, according to documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The documents show that the Prague cuts reach levels lower than than the Carter administration’s “deep cuts” SALT II proposal in 1977 and very close to the “finite deterrence” numbers contemplated by Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke in the late 1950s. Yet the Prague cuts do not reach the far lower numbers of nuclear weapons recommended by former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, or initially considered by President Jimmy Carter, or the zero nuclear forces in 10 years proposed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986.

The Prague Treaty represents the first time in this century that U.S. and Russian heads of state have agreed to a schedule of specific cuts of strategic nuclear force levels, but they are only a small down payment on President Obama’s pledge to use the power of the presidency to move the nuclear weapons states toward abolition. In light of the historical record, the Prague Treaty levels are still significantly higher than what some Cold War presidents and top officials thought was even possible. While President Ronald Reagan proposed going down to zero by 1996, his initial target, a 50 percent cut of strategic warheads and delivery systems, would have left the U.S. arsenal with thousands of strategic warheads and almost a thousand strategic delivery systems as of 1991. President Jimmy Carter also saw nuclear abolition as a desirable goal, but the first SALT II proposal he presented to the Soviet leadership in 1977 would have left both sides with around 2,000 strategic delivery systems, far more than what is currently being considered.

The Prague Treaty levels are in the range of what at least one Cold War military leader thought was conceivable.  During the late 1950s, Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke developed a concept of a “finite deterrent” force of 45 Polaris submarines, with 720 submarine-launched ballistic missiles [SLBMs], of which 400, or 55 percent, would be on patrol (“on station”). Burke made interesting and compelling arguments for strategic forces dominated by Polaris submarines and the numbers he had in mind are close to U.S. force levels in the Prague Treaty.

Chart: From Finite Deterrence to Zero -- Force Level Alternatives during the Cold War

The Prague Treaty numbers are significantly higher than what other Cold War statesmen thought possible or worth looking into. In 1964, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara posited a force of 400 strategic warheads (one megaton)  as enough for the basic “assured destruction” deterrence mission, Years later, McNamara revisited this number when he wrote than “less than five hundred” was enough for deterrence. In 1977, when Jimmy Carter became president he contemplated the possibility of massive cuts bringing U.S. and Soviet strategic forces down to 200-250 strategic delivery systems. Even after Secretary of Defense Harold Brown questioned whether such low numbers were compatible with U.S. security, Carter remained interested in missile force levels of a “few hundred,” although his preferences could not be translated into negotiating positions.

The United States and Russia have some distance to go in order to match the low numbers–200-250 missiles, 400-500 strategic warheads–proposed during the Cold War.  And even those numbers are far from abolition, although much closer than the thousands of missile and nuclear warheads deployed during the height of the arms race. The documents suggest that the process of moving toward zero will be a prolonged and complex one necessarily involving arms control negotiations with other nuclear states, such as China, France, India, and Pakistan, as well as the enactment of other measures, such as the fissile materials production cut-off and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Read the NSArchive post and the original documents–> http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb311/index.htm

Cold War Ethos, alive and well during 2008 presidential election.

Crossposted from Care2.com’s Political Causes Blog ~ Originally published 16 February 2010

Former Congressman Charles Wilson, the title character of the 2003 book/2007 movie, Charlie Wilson’s War, passed away Feb. 10 of a heart attack.  He was 76 years old.

The Democratic representative from East Texas was one of Washington’s most colorful characters during his tenure.  Wilson was known best for two things:  First was his reputation as a playboy.  “Good Time Charlie” was seldom seen without a young lady on his arm possessive of most of the attributes prized by the superficial male.

Second, and infinitely more significant, was Wilson’s role in the covert effort to support rebel factions in Afghanistan fight against the Soviet army in the 1980s.

Charlie Wilson’s Role & Regrets

From Afghanistan: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1973-1990 , introductory essay by Steve Galster:

In 1984, Wilson used his powerful position on the House Intelligence Committee to tack on an additional $50 million for Afghan covert aid and convinced the CIA to purchase high-quality, Swiss-designed Oerlikon anti-aircraft missiles, which could pierce the heavy armor of the USSR’s most formidable counterinsurgency machine, the Hind Mi-24 helicopter. The CIA went even further in 1985, purchasing the sophisticated British-made Blowpipe anti-aircraft missiles. And in 1986, due to pressure from several congressmen and a number of bureaucrats at the State and Defense departments, the CIA provided the mujahidin with U.S.-made Stinger missiles, the most effective shoulder-held anti-aircraft weapon in the world. It was the first time the CIA had provided U.S.-made weaponry as part of a covert insurgency support operation, and the legislative branch was largely responsible…

Wilson was the toast of Washington following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989.  His efforts in support of the Afghan mujahidin, however, would have tragic unforeseen consequences.  Wilson, himself, admitted as much in 2003 National Public Radio interview.

“I take my full share of the blame, but – and at the time I didn’t realize how serious it was, but the United States, once the Communist government had fallen, once the Russians had left, we sort of lost interest, the United States and other Western countries,”  Wilson lamented to NPR’s Terry Gross.  “And because of that, we created a vacuum.”

Supporting Pakistani interests in fight against Communism

That a power vacuum existed in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal and subsequent American neglect is true but only partially so.  What Wilson failed to mention was that in pursuit of America’s Cold War “triumph,” by allowing Pakistani intelligence (ISI) officials to distribute the American resources, that outcome was a foregone conclusion.

Melissa Roddy noted the consequences of allowing the ISI to select the beneficiaries of “American largesse” in a Dec. 2007 Alternet.org post.  Within it, Roddy scolds the filmmakers behind Charlie Wilson’s War for misrepresenting this historical aspect, particularly their failure to mention the substantial support– up to 40 percent of billions of dollars worth of American aid — given to “…a blood-thirsty, fundamentalist, loudly anti-American bastard named Gulbaddin Hekmatyar.”

Not only is Hekmatyar anti-American, but he and another anti-American fundamentalist, Abdul Rasul Sayaf, received lots of support during the 1980s from the Saudis. That support included cash and thousands of Arab volunteers, including a wealthy young engineer named Osama bin Laden. It was Hekmatyar and Sayaf who, with bin Laden, established terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That is why after 9/11, Wilson went on Fox News and said, “This was as much my fault as anybody’s.” He understood the link between U.S. support for these thugs and the events of that terrible day. But Wilson’s mea culpa is not included in Charlie Wilson’s War, nor is there any mention of Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rasul Sayaf or Arab volunteers.

Upon the news of Wilson’s death, Roddy – a documentary filmmaker with a focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan, past and present – published a post at ThePublicRecord.org entitled, “I Come Not to Praise Charlie Wilson, But to Bury Him.”  Her more recent condemnation pertains to the less romantic aspects of Wilson’s tireless efforts; namely, the Congressman’s ties to oil companies with regional interests and his lucrative, post-legislative career as a lobbyist for Pakistan.

Be sure to view the clip from Roddy’s documentary on the subject at the bottom of this post.  However, I’m less interested in the condemnation of Wilson than I am the Cold War mindset that facilitated him.

The destructive persistence of America’s Cold War Ethos

Historian H.W. Brands described the evolution of the American Cold War ethos in his 1993 book, “The Devil We Knew:  Americans and the Cold War.”

Within the book (and it should be noted that this pertains to a minuscule segment of Brand’s sweeping Cold War treatment) the author describes how the good vs. evil dichotomy became entrenched in American politics, foreign and domestic.  It was a black and white caricature of a gray-scale conflict, easily digestible for the American electorate.  Perhaps necessary at the time, it allowed Americans to collectively pat themselves on the back for “winning” the Cold War while ignoring the consequences, here described in the above linked National Security Archive essay from Galster:

Six thousand miles away from the celebrations, however, the war in Afghanistan raged on. Washington and Moscow’s clients, using U.S. and Soviet-supplied weapons, continued their internecine struggle for power, adding more civilian casualties to the 1 million who had already died. Although peace had broken out between the superpowers, the legacy of their long and bitter rivalry lived on in the rocket-prone city of Kabul, Pakistan’s crowded refugee camps and the war-ravaged villages in the Hindu Kush mountains.

Similarly, American ignorance of these conditions allowed for simplistic notions of the Cold War to persist in domestic politics.  “Few American voters cared to take the time to educate themselves to the nuances of the possible positions candidates might adopt on issues relating to national security,” Brands wrote.  “For the majority who didn’t, the question of whether an individual was reassuringly hard or suspiciously soft on communism simplified the sorting process.”

Also on the domestic front, this paradigm was exploited by “persons and organizations that had hidden behind the Cold War to oppose social reform…”  Brands notes that these constituencies would have no problem finding another mechanism following the Soviet Union’s collapse, however, “… red-baiting would be hard to match for its capacity to change the subject, and to throw advocates of reform on the defensive.”

There can be no doubt that these Cold War tendencies continue to poison America’s political climate.  The success of Charlie Wilson’s War at the box office is evidence that Americans were, and continue to be, willing to cling to their romantic notions well after the supposed Cold War’s end.

Replace communism with terrorism, the Soviet Union with Al Qaeda, in many of the above paragraphs and the extension of American Cold War sensibilities into the present becomes plain.  To be sure, the death of Charlie Wilson will do nothing to change this state of affairs.  Absent an American awakening to nuance in understanding U.S. foreign and domestic policy, it’s a shame that that we can’t bury the Cold War ethos with him.

See Also:

• Bob Mondello, “’Charlie Wilson’s War’ a Satirical Spin on History.” National Public Radio.  21 December 2007.
• Robert G. Anderson & George Crile, “Charlie Did It.”  60 Minutes Video, CBS News.  Aired 13 March 2001.
• Watch Part One of Melissa Roddy’s Conflict of Interest:  Patterns in Chaos.  (Part 2, Part 3)

The following is from NewYorkTimes.com, posted 16 August 2009, by Alexi Barrionuevo.  The recently declassified documents are linked within a post from the historian responsible for analyzing them, Peter Kornbluh, located at GWU’s National Security Archive.

Some thoughts below the fold.

Barrionuevo wrote:

The formerly secret memos, published Sunday by the National Security Archive in Washington, show that Brazil and the United States discussed plans to overthrow or destabilize not only Mr. Allende but Fidel Castro of Cuba and others.

Mr. Nixon, at a meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 9, 1971, said he was willing to offer Brazil the assistance, monetary or otherwise, it might need to rid South America of leftist governments, the White House memorandum of the meeting shows…

“The full history of intervention in South America in the 1970s cannot be told without Brazil coming clean about a dark past that is not previously acknowledged,” Mr. Kornbluh said.

This reminded me of a post I wrote for Care2.com following the 2009 Summit of the Americas.  There, Barack Obama was approached by Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, and they exchanged a greeting.  The post, “Gingrich Ignores History, Calls Obama – Chavez Encounter a Sign of Weakness,” is my take on the nonsense which erupted from conservative pundits & wannabe (but never will be) Presidents:

Conservatives have really got their shorts in a bunch over the Barack Obama – Hugo Chavez exchange over the weekend at the Summit of the Americas.  Their discomfort is yet another example of Obama’s detractors, digging in their heels, opposing every aspect of the three-month-old presidency; further, this conservative meme is no more rational than any of the others.  Their outrage over a simple greeting between Obama and Chavez is illustrative of a deeper problem within the American ideological divide.

The best example of irrational criticism came from a potential Obama opponent in 2012:  Newt Gingrich.  Satyam Khanna  summed up Gingrich’s position in a April 20, Think Progress post:

The right wing has responded with outrage to Obama’s meeting with Chavez, claiming face-to-face talks with a dictator show that Obama is projecting weakness. On NBC this morning, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Obama “bows to the Saudi King and is friends with Venezuela” and claimed the President showed “shallowness” in talking with Chavez. Gingrich then claimed that U.S. presidents do not “smile and greet” with Russian leaders…

Khanna goes on to explain why Gingrich, a former history professor, needs to brush up on his history.  The author provides a series of photographs of past US leaders smiling and greeting Russian leaders during the height of the Cold War.  But, Gingrich’s factual error is emblematic of the larger issue:  Americans tend to forget their nation’s history.

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Not only do we forget our history, many among us are inclined to guild memories of the past, providing them with a veneer of propriety that isn’t always deserved.  The past behavior in question — the contentious relationship between the US and Latin America — is a prime example of our historical ignorance.

Now, before you start with the “anti-American” or “Blame America Firster” accusations, hear me out.  American treatment of its neighbors to the South has been neither all good, nor has it been all bad.  Indeed, much of the most egregious offenses were undertaken with the best of intentions:  the prohibition of Soviet influence in Latin America.  While Americans are justifiably proud of their nation’s efforts in quashing their communist foes during the Cold War, too often we fail to empathize with Latin American populations who were adversely affected by US actions.

Consider that, historically, the US has, sometimes covertly, intervened in Latin American affairs over 50 times.  Regardless of the legitimacy of the interventions, a common result of such actions was American support of repressive right wing dictators for the sake of preventing leftist regimes from coming to power.

Hugo Chavez, whose handshake with Obama has garnered so much conservative ire,  was able to come to power in Venezuela because of that history.  Additionally, American support of a coup attempt to oust the Chavez regime in 2002 has served to strengthen his position in Venezuela.

In a March 2006 post at CommonDreams.org, Medea Benjamin described the consequences of the Bush Administration’s subversive actions in Venezuela, encouraging her readers to imagine if the shoe were on the other foot:

To this day, Bush Administration officials routinely deny their involvement in the coup, in spite of official US documents that prove otherwise. But the truth is widely known in Venezuela, and forms the basis for the antagonism that plagues the US-Venezuela relationship. To be fair, Chávez engages in regular verbal tirades against Bush and Rice which overreach presidential diplomacy. But imagine how the US government would treat a foreign government that had financed domestic groups that participated in a coup against the US government…

Well, what do you think?  How would you react to a foreign coup attempt?  I look forward to your comments, but consider this final question:  If it was a sign of weakness for Obama to interact with the Venezuelan President at a diplomatic summit, what action or actions could Obama have used in order to display strength?  Of course, Gingrich did not offer a suggestion.

Instead he railed against his own President, and did so without any consideration for how the Obama – Chavez encounter may have impacted the perceptions of the Venezuelan people.  Gingrich conveniently forgot that the eight years of Bush’s diplomatic neglect, combined with a long history of intervention in the region, contributed to the Venezuelans being predisposed to relish in Chavez’s anti-American rants.  His neglecting to include such considerations reflects his tacit acknowledgment that, Americans who are predisposed to accept such cynicism are ignorant of their own history. As a former history professor, Newt Gingrich should be ashamed of himself.

Incredible photographs.

From Martin Miller at photographyserved.com:
Although the term, WMD, has become a part of our daily lexicon, it remains very much an abstraction for most of us. This series of images offers a retrospective look at some of these weapons. Most of my subjects are drawn from the Cold War period during which there was a very real threat to the survival of civilization itself…

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Soviet Strategic Forces Went on Alert Three Times during September-October 1962 Because of Apprehension over Cuban Situation, Top Secret Codeword History of National Security Agency Shows

From The National Security Archive, 14 November 2008 post by Mathew Aid:

Forty-six years ago, a month before the Cuban Missile crisis, Soviet leaders put their strategic forces on their “highest readiness stage since the beginning of the Cold War,” according to a newly declassified internal history of the National Security Agency published today for the first time by the National Security Archive…

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