Authors: Hedrick Smith
Among the Democratic moderates, Albert Gore revived the idea. Although not on defense or foreign-affairs committees, Gore boned up on strategic-arms issues with an intensive thirteen-month program of reading and consulting experts, especially his own arms specialist, Leon Fuerth. Gore gained influence on arms policy by sheer intellectual effort and a drive to find some path toward a safer, more stable nuclear balance. His game was a new breed tour de force, end-running the committee system.
The root of the problem, as many strategic analysts saw it, was the American decision in 1968, later copied by the Soviets, to put multiple warheads on strategic missiles. These were called MIRVs, for multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles. MIRVs were not merely like buckshot scattered out of a shotgun; each could be independently guided to its target. The American Minuteman 3 missile had three
MIRV warheads; the Soviet SS-17 had four, the SS-19 had six, and the SS-18 had ten. The Carter and Reagan administrations planned to put ten warheads on each MX and eight on the Navy’s Trident D-5 submarine-launched missiles. Multiple warheads were what made a first strike theoretically advantageous and made the arms race so scary.
MIRVing had created serious instability in the nuclear balance. The critical yardstick was the
ratio
between warheads on one side and missile launchers on the other side, especially when the attacking warheads were extremely accurate and carried high destructive power. Such warheads were called “hard-target killers” or “silo busters” because they could knock out missiles based in fixed, hardened silos. As a rule of thumb, the nuclear-arms experts calculated that because of problems with reliability, accuracy, and blast power, it would take two hard-target warheads to knock out one missile in its silo.
To one committee, Gore illustrated the significance of the 2–1 ratio, and why MIRVs caused such fear and instability. He put six paper cups on a table, three for each side.
“If the USSR and the US have three missiles apiece and that’s their total arsenal, and each missile has six warheads, then the nation launching a first strike can launch one missile and put two warheads there, two there, and two there,” he said, hitting the other side’s cups—smash, smash, smash. “In the aftermath, the aggressor has two thirds of its forces remaining, and the victim has none,” he said. “If you have the same scenario with only one warhead on each missile, then the nation striking first has to use up two missiles to knock out one missile on the other side.” The attacker winds up with one missile left while the victim has two—no incentive for surprise attack.
“So the key for me became the ratio of counterforce [hard-target] warheads on one side to targetable silos on the other side,” Gore said. “If you get that ratio down to two for one, then it’s impossible to gain an advantage from a first strike. If you get the ratio above that, then it becomes increasingly capable of generating fear and wild responses on the other side.”
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What caused angst in the Pentagon was the estimate that the Soviets had more than three thousand hard-target warheads on their 308 SS-18 missiles, plus another fifteen hundred warheads (not all silo busters) on SS-17’s and SS-19. That was more than enough to knock out America’s 1,054 land-based ICBMs plus bomber bases, radars, and command headquarters. The fateful ratio of Soviet hard-target killers was
well over 3–1
, leaving the United States very vulnerable.
The ratio of American warheads to Soviet silos was
under
2-1 because
only part of America’s two thousand ICBM warheads were silo busters, not enough to eliminate Moscow’s 1,398 ICBM launchers. The United States also had 5,500 warheads on submarine-launched missiles, but they were not accurate and powerful enough to be silo busters. That’s why Reagan and Carter wanted the MX and the Trident D-5 missiles: to get more hard-target warheads and make Soviet leaders feel the same threat that the White House felt. The danger was that mutual fear could accidentally trigger a holocaust.
Gore’s idea, shared by others, was to go in the opposite direction, to “de-MIRV.” In other words, to move away from multiple warheads and go back to single-warhead missiles so that the warhead-to-silo ratio would go
down
, not up. On the House floor on March 22, 1982, Gore argued for an immediate freeze on silo-busting weapons under the 1979 strategic arms agreement, the freeze to be followed by gradual dismantling of multiple-warhead weapons and new arms agreements requiring both sides to shift to single-warhead missiles. Gore proposed building one thousand single-warhead missiles, enough to disperse and protect the American force but not enough to menace Moscow seriously. His goal was nuclear “stability”—no advantage to either side in pursuing the arms race. In short, a safer balance.
Gore’s position required changing President Reagan’s military’ buildup and his arms proposals. For by Gore’s logic, Reagan’s 1982 arms proposals increased the dangers. They called for dramatic fifty-percent reductions in both sides’ nuclear arsenals to five thousand warheads, but they also would cut land-based launchers to 850 for each side. Appealing as those reductions sounded, they failed to push the warhead-to-silo ratio below 2–1. Better to have more missile launchers and fewer warheads, Gore argued, so as to lower the fatal ratio. That would make each side’s nuclear forces less vulnerable—removing the advantages of surprise attack and reducing the risk of nuclear catastrophe.
In April 1982, Soviet arms specialists told an American delegation in Moscow they found the Gore’s approach “an interesting basis for negotiations.”
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In early 1983, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger endorsed the same approach. It was a turnaround for Kissinger; he admitted that putting multiple warheads on missiles—which he had pushed in the 1970s—had eroded the arms agreements which he had negotiated.
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Dickering Through the Middlemen
Enter the middlemen: The opposition game played by Aspin, Gore, and Dicks usually requires mediators. Stymied by Congress, Reagan farmed out his MX problem to a presidential commission, a time-honored gambit. In years past, presidential commissions have often served as burial grounds for controversy. They are appointed to let the president unload a political hot potato and consign it to limbo, preferably to be forgotten. Their function is damage control, not problem solving.
But occasionally, presidents intend a commission to forge a solution. That was the case with Reagan’s Social Security commission in 1982–83. It was also the case with the bipartisan MX commission appointed on January 3, 1983, led by Brent Scowcroft, a former three-star Air Force general and national security adviser under President Ford. The Scowcroft Commission became the broker for the White House and moderate House Democrats. It succeeded because both sides wanted it to. Also because its two chief operators were skilled in the power game: Brent Scowcroft, who is a trim, soft-spoken, thoughtful military intellectual, and James Woolsey, a bright, agile, imaginative Democratic thinker who had been Navy undersecretary in the Carter administration.
Scowcroft and Woolsey are classic Washington insiders: knowledgeable and well connected with power networks in Congress, the administration, and in both parties. Many administrations rely on retired generals like Scowcroft and policy-oriented attorneys like Woolsey to lubricate the political machinery and build consensus. Both are respected as fair-minded policymakers with a knack for working inside politics as well as the issues. Happily, Scowcroft was a mentor of Robert C. McFarlane, then Reagan’s deputy national security adviser, and Woolsey was a crony and tennis partner of Les Aspin. What is more, serving on Reagan’s Pentagon advisory panel in 1981, Woolsey and Scowcroft had favored a small, single-warhead missile, an idea that was shunted aside by the panel. So their thinking paralleled Gore’s.
Moreover, they saw that Reagan’s MX problem was more political than technical, for they understood a basic rule of the power game that Reagan and Weinberger sometimes ignored: No president’s nuclear strategy can survive over time without a durable political consensus. Jimmy Carter had ignored that in 1979 in negotiating the SALT II Arms Treaty. Carter could never submit the treaty for Senate approval
because he could not sell it politically. Reagan had that problem on MX.
“Politics is really part of strategy,” Woolsey said, laying out the game. “For a democracy, the degree to which the country can unify behind a coherent strategic policy is a very important part of strategy. So we felt the solution had to be strategically sound in a military hardware sense. But it also had to be a deal between the Reagan White House and a Democratic House. Now there were other players: The Senate was important; the Pentagon was important. But basically, if Ronald Reagan and enough House Democrats got behind a common solution to the problem of ICBM survivability, then a lot of other things could be worked out.”
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Woolsey’s instincts led him straight to Aspin as an ally and sounding board. Before long, he, Scowcroft, and Aspin were huddling at Aspin’s town house in fashionable Georgetown. Aspin bragged that the Democrats had “kicked the administration all over the block on the MX,” but he added that “obviously this is a serious national problem and something has to be done.”
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Aspin’s willingness to seek a middle way got the trading game started. Gore and Dicks were brought in. The first session between Gore and Scowcroft was prickly. “
Confrontation
is probably too strong a word—but acerbic,” Scowcroft told me later. “We had a long talk and some very sharp words. Gore said, ‘Let’s scrap the MX and go with a small missile that makes sense,’ and I was arguing why a direct transition to a small missile was not the way to go.”
Scowcroft found other Democrats chilly, too. “Part of the problem was the residue of the Defense Department’s image up there in Congress,” Scowcroft recalled. “People were mad at Defense, mad at Weinberger. You know, the notion that Defense didn’t really want to hear what the Hill had to say.”
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It took time to thaw the partisan iciness on MX. Significantly, Democratic Whip Tom Foley was willing to consider compromise. Foley played a crucial role; he persuaded Speaker O’Neill to keep the MX issue out of the Democratic Caucus, where liberals were likely to make it a partisan cause against Reagan. “I always thought it extremely unwise to take a Caucus position on national security issues or emotional issues like abortion,” Foley told me. “That sort of thing is divisive. It’ll tear the party apart.”
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It would also have nipped the budding moderate partnership with Scowcroft and Woolsey.
In three months of round-robin talks, the House Democrats dickered with the Reagan team through Scowcroft and Woolsey. In time, it
became obvious that the final bargain had to include some MX missiles to satisfy Reagan, some Midgetman missiles to bring in Gore and others, and some changes in Reagan’s arms proposals to placate moderates who felt his negotiating terms were too hard-line. Gore and Dicks argued “fifty was going to be the limit on MX.”
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(Carter had sought two hundred.) The issue was settled one Saturday afternoon in Aspin’s living room by Scowcroft and Woolsey. “They decided fifty was too low, that Reagan wouldn’t accept it, we’d better go for a hundred,” Aspin recalled.
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The Scowcroft Commission issued its report April 11, 1983, echoing the Gore-Aspin logic and exposing the destabilizing threat of multiwarhead missiles. The report advocated long-run nuclear stability by developing single-warhead Midgetman missiles, but it gave Reagan one hundred MX missiles in fixed silos for the interim. And it gently nudged Reagan to shift his arms-control position. The Pentagon squawked, but Reagan endorsed the report.
The Gang of Six Rides High
One of the enduring lessons of the Washington power game is that agreement does not equal solution. It is merely a transition point to a new struggle, the winners trying to secure their gains, the losers trying to undo them. The Scowcroft report, backed by former Defense secretaries Harold Brown (under Carter) and James R. Schlesinger (under Ford), gave the politicians “cover” for compromise. But it left no one fully satisfied. It had something for everyone—but it was also something distasteful to everyone. In Aspin’s apt metaphor, it was a “stapled-together job,” and the stapling nearly came undone.
The House moderates felt Reagan’s endorsement of the Midgetman missile and his promise to review his arms-control position were too vague and lukewarm; they feared he might sabotage their game. So the core group of Gore, Dicks, and Aspin, joined by six other Democrats and one Republican, wrote Reagan asking for more concrete assurances. After weeks of dickering, Reagan tried to swing them in line with a letter sent on May 11—just minutes before the scheduled House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee vote on the frozen MX funding. Gore and Dicks objected that the letter had a loophole, implying that Reagan need not change his arms-control package. “This is unacceptable,” Dicks declared.
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Bowing to the leverage of the moderates, the White House produced a reworded letter—in only twenty minutes. With that obstacle cleared, the subcommittee began the process of
freeing up the MX money that had been fenced in December 1982.
On the eve of the first big MX vote by the full House, Reagan nearly upset the applecart. He invited about thirty House members to the White House for dinner, and afterward made a rambling speech that showed how poorly he grasped the issues and the package he was pushing. Previously, Reagan had admitted his ignorance to the House group. “You know, I didn’t realize my original position required the Soviets to dismantle two thirds of their land-based missiles,” he said. “No wonder they thought it was unfair.”
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Now, I was told, Reagan’s effort to answer questions at the White House dinner were so embarrassing that Brent Scowcroft had to take over. Near the end, Tom Foley, as the ranking Democrat, thanked the president and put in a word for developing “bipartisan approaches to national security matters.” Even that mild a pro-Reagan pitch angered some Democrats, and White House legislative strategist Ken Duberstein said Foley’s prestige provided crucial support to Reagan.