Nixon, Kissinger Warn Reagan on Arms Control

Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger, speaking out jointly for the first time since they left office, have issued an extraordinary warning to President Reagan that it would be “a profound mistake” to sign a nuclear arms reduction agreement unless Moscow accepts major changes in the formula now being negotiated.

The former President and his chief foreign policy adviser declared that there is “little doubt” a U.S.-Soviet summit will occur this year and predicted that an arms control agreement of some kind will be signed.

‘Wrong Kind of Deal’

But they cautioned that “the wrong kind of deal” could leave Western Europe vulnerable to Soviet attack with conventional forces or to blackmail with Soviet-based nuclear weapons. That, they said, would provoke the worst crisis in the 40-year history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

In a 1,700-word column written for today’s Times Opinion section, Nixon and Kissinger urged that the United States insist on two major changes in the arms control agreement now being worked out between U.S. and Soviet diplomats:

- First, that withdrawing intermediate-range nuclear weapons from Europe be linked to eliminating the Soviets’ overwhelming advantage in conventional forces.

- Second, that the proposed pact be widened to provide for eliminating all of these missiles, including those in Asia.

The agreement now being negotiated would permit the Soviets to retain 100 medium-range nuclear warheads with ranges of 1,000 to 3,000 miles, to be deployed in Asia. They would be balanced by 100 American medium-range warheads in this country instead of Europe, where such U.S. weapons are now positioned.

Coming from two such prominent fellow Republicans with unique credentials in foreign affairs, this open criticism of the Reagan Administration’s arms control goals and the call for U.S. insistence on what would be major new concessions by the Soviet Union, is likely to increase the pressure on Reagan and have a substantial impact on the coming debate over a new agreement.

A White House spokesman said Saturday that the Administration would take Nixon’s and Kissinger’s comments into consideration. “We welcome comments from all sides,” spokesman Dan Howard said.

‘Our Goal as Well’

He said the Administration agrees with Nixon and Kissinger that the proposed pact should eliminate all intermediate-range missiles. “That is our goal as well,” Howard said. “We would vastly prefer zero on (such missiles), because that would make a treaty easier to verify.

“Our position is that we are still in consultation with our allies,” he said. “Beyond that, we are not going to say anything further about the . . . treaty, except that we expect hard bargaining.”

Nixon and Kissinger, although controversial figures even in their own party, are nonetheless two of the nation’s most experienced and knowledgeable figures in foreign policy who ushered in the era of “detente” in the mid-1970s. Nixon met with Soviet leaders three times during his presidency. And Kissinger, who also served as secretary of state under President Gerald R. Ford, participated in five such summit meetings. Nixon, in fact, signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty during his presidency.

A Historic Opportunity

Implying that they would favor signing an agreement if their conditions were met, Nixon and Kissinger said that Reagan has a historic opportunity to promote world peace and to take a major step forward in American-Soviet relations if he signs “the right agreement.”

“Every President has an understandable desire to assure his place in history as a peacemaker,” Nixon and Kissinger said. “But he must always remember that, however he may be hailed in today’s headlines, the judgment of tomorrow’s history would severely condemn a false peace.

“Because we are deeply concerned about this danger, we who have attended several summits and engaged in many negotiations with Soviet leaders are speaking out jointly for the first time since both of us left office.”

Skepticism about elements of the Reagan Administration’s arms control effort already had been expressed by such figures as Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wis.).

NATO Chief’s Doubts

Additionally, Gen. Bernard W. Rogers, NATO’s commander-in-chief, has expressed serious doubts about a companion proposal by Moscow to wipe out all so-called short-range nuclear missiles--those with ranges of 300 to 1,000 miles.

The Soviet Union now has a monopoly on short-range nuclear arms. During Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s recent Moscow visit, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev suggested eliminating short-range weapons entirely.

Reagan, although his record as a hard-liner on U.S.-Soviet relations remains strong, thus finds himself in the unusual position of being urged to take a tougher approach by moderates who have criticized him in the past for failing to reach an agreement with the Soviets. So far he is the first President in the last two decades to fail to sign an arms control agreement with Moscow.

Against ‘Zero Option’

The Times column marks the first time Nixon has spoken out against the so-called “zero option” agreement, which would eliminate all medium-range missiles, except for the 100 retained by each side.

Nixon, operating out of his home in New Jersey and office in New York, and Kissinger, working while on a European visit, engaged in intensive negotiations of their own until finally reaching an agreement on their joint statement.

The former national security adviser and secretary of state, who writes periodic columns for The Times’ Opinion section, has been outspoken in the past in opposing the “zero-option” formula. In fact, today’s column marks the first time he has indicated that he would find such a pact acceptable if it were linked to a reduction in Soviet conventional forces and the elimination of all medium-range missiles.

Since the agreement being negotiated provides for phasing out the medium-range missiles over four or five years, Nixon and Kissinger declared that the pact should link the final phase of withdrawals to the elimination “of the huge Soviet conventional superiority.”

Unless negotiations to that end begin immediately and are concluded before the final phase of missile withdrawal begins, they warned, removing medium-range and short-range missiles “would simply make Europe safe for conventional war.”

“If we strike the wrong kind of deal,” they wrote, “we could create the most profound crisis of the NATO alliance in its 40-year history--an alliance sustained by seven administrations of both parties.”

Further, Nixon and Kissinger argued that if both medium-range and short-range missiles are eliminated, the only remaining nuclear weapons would be those carried by aircraft and the very short-range nuclear artillery shells and similar devices classified as battlefield weapons. Reliance on these weapons for deterrence against Moscow’s massive non-nuclear forces “would confine the use of nuclear weapons in effect to German soil,” they said.

Germany’s Options

And, they said, faced with that prospect, Germany would either give in to “the siren song of denuclearization on the one hand or the acquisition of nuclear weapons on the other.”

Assistant Defense Secretary Richard N. Perle and other hard-liners in the Reagan Administration, who have opposed arms control pacts in the past, have played down any threat that the proposed agreement may pose for the NATO alliance.

“I don’t think it’s going to prove divisive at all,” Perle said in an NBC interview last Thursday. “For a long time now, the alliance has agreed that the elimination of intermediate nuclear missiles was the Western negotiating position, and in the Western interest. The only remaining issue that needs to be resolved is how to handle some of those shorter-range systems.

“And on the Western side we don’t have any. The Soviets have a sizable number. So as we go through the normal consultation process, I think it’s highly likely that we will emerge--as we always do in NATO--with a clear consensus that all the countries can get behind,” Perle said.

Major Political Issues

Nixon and Kissinger urged that any summit convened to sign a missile agreement also deal with the major political issues separating the two superpowers, including Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Soviet arms shipments to Nicaragua and Soviet-sponsored subversion in Central America.

Shultz, in his intensive negotiations in Moscow earlier this month, sought again and again to obtain agreement on elimination of all medium-range warheads, including the last 100 that each side would be permitted to keep, as Nixon and Kissinger urge. With three warheads on each of the Soviets’ medium-range SS-20s, only 33 missiles would be involved and they represent at best a marginal increment in Soviet nuclear power.

But the Soviets refused to budge, according to sources familiar with the negotiations, and it appears that the United States would be prepared to settle for deployment of 100 Soviet missiles in Asia if the issues of short-range missiles and verification measures could be resolved satisfactorily.

‘Bumpy Road Ahead’

At the White House, a senior official told The Times that, although “there’s still a bumpy road ahead,” chances are good that a summit will be scheduled for October or November in Washington.

In addition to writing the column with Kissinger, Nixon also is speaking out on the arms control agreement in an interview with Time magazine that will be published Monday.

In the interview, Nixon elaborates on his criticism of the “zero option” agreement and establishes another point that he says any summit should include on its agenda: “linkage” between strategic offensive weapons and strategic defensive systems, such as Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which aims at development of a missile defense system.

Reagan’s Vision Scored

Nixon, according to a source familiar with the interview, was “extremely critical or dismissive of the President’s vision of a comprehensive defense that will protect the American population and ‘render impotent and obsolete’ nuclear weapons.”

“He talks with contempt for the idea of eliminating nuclear weapons entirely and defending comprehensively and protecting the United States with a pure defense,” the source said.

“Instead, he talks about a much more modest SDI defense, which he favored in the late 1960s and 1970s under the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty. And he argues that we should threaten to increase our reliance on fairly traditional ABMs that defend missile installations as a way of bringing pressure on the Soviets to reduce strategic arms,” the source said.