Kissinger: Troubles to Come With New Treaties

El Pais: You said recently that the proposed Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty was the result of Western European nations pressing for a disarmament deal they really did not want, and that the West had focused on whether it could prevent the Soviets’ violating an accord rather than on whether a violating act could be verified.

Kissinger: I said the West has to think about what countermeasures it takes in case of violations, not just on what verification procedures it has for discovering violations.

Q: We still have the same problem facing us with the (coming) Moscow summit?

A: Infinitely worse, because the INF agreement reduces weapons to zero. So in the case of INF if you find one or two such weapons, that’s already a violation. The START agreement reduces weapons by 50%, which still leaves thousands of weapons around, so you have to be sure you’re counting the permitted 1,600 missiles correctly, and that’s a much harder thing to do.

Q: Is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s flexible response still sound doctrine?

A: I agree with the flexible response doctrine, but I think that the INF agreement has made flexible response more difficult, because it means that you cannot retaliate from Europe against an attack on Europe to the same degree that you could before. It leaves only tactical weapons in Germany and strategic weapons in the United States. It leaves a small number of airplanes that can perform a strategic mission but that could shorten the conventional period because, in order to avoid using up its airplanes in the conventional phase, NATO would have to go earlier to the nuclear phase.

There is an additional operational consequence of INF. The terms of the treaty shift the nuclear defense of Europe from Europe to the United States and to the sea. Now the practical consequence of START (strategic arms reduction talks) is to reduce the nuclear weapons at sea and in the United States by 50% so the total impact of this must be to reduce the credibility of strategic nuclear wars.

The idea that the Soviets will launch an all-out attack on Central Europe is, of course, one danger against which we have to protect ourselves, but it is highly possible that if the Soviets launch an attack it will be in a more discriminating and limited way. This then raises a political and a military problem for the West: To what degree and with what weapons does it want to resist? Does it have the capacity to resist those attacks where they occur? I think the initial resistance should be by conventional means. But realistically one has to accept the proposition that NATO will be forced to use nuclear weapons much earlier than the Soviets and that NATO cannot defend itself at present or at any stage in the next five years without recourse to nuclear weapons.

Q: What do you see as the disparity between conventional forces in NATO and the Warsaw Pact?

A: I think it is very difficult to calculate conventional balances. The Germans nearly won World War I and won many battles in World War II with numerically inferior forces in men, tanks and airplanes because they concentrated their forces. The history of conventional warfare shows that a great deal depends on concentration of forces and on many intangibles that are very hard to calculate. NATO has to spread its forces over a very long front. The best NATO forces on the central front are in the south, the Americans and then come the Germans. The most logical area to attack is in the north and is covered by the British, the Belgians, the Dutch and a few Germans. Those are also the forces that have the fewest stockpiled supplies, so the idea of a prolonged conventional defense is highly unrealistic and I have never known a NATO commander who thought we could do more than hold for at most a few weeks. If it turned out that the capacity of NATO is stronger than that, it would be a tremendous bonus.

I think such an attack improbable, although I would not rule out some form of blackmail like another Berlin crisis. I do believe, however, that if the only answer we have is the mass extermination of civilian populations, that is not credible. The Soviets know they can kill as many Americans as we can kill Soviets, and they will ask themselves whether any rational decision-makers would resort to such actions. That is the problem. As to the first step, if the Soviets face the high probability of some significant nuclear response and if they feel that once it starts it will be very hard to calculate how it could be limited, then that would contribute to deterrence.

At the (NATO) summit they found a formula to support modernization of nuclear weapons but attached no timing to it. They found a formula for the reduction of conventional forces but they made no specific proposal about it. I believe the Europeans have avoided confronting the President in the last nine months rather than risk any real decisions, and the President decided that he didn’t want to face the Europeans with any real decisions, so I construe the summit as a way of getting through this year without solving anything.

The series of arms agreements that are being made have the practical consequence of stigmatizing the weapons on which the defense of the Atlantic Alliance depends, namely nuclear weapons. They also are reducing the capacity to use them. But the Western governments have told their publics for so long that they want to eliminate the very nuclear weapons on which their security depends that nobody feels strongly enough, except perhaps (British Prime Minister) Margaret Thatcher, to speak the truth. This in effect weakens, at a minimum, the Western capacity to make decisions. Moreover, nobody wants to say that a conservative American President is going too far, having criticized him all during his first five or six years for being too tough. So I think the European reaction avoids all problems and it is not particularly heroic. Most Europeans were appalled by Reykjavik, but you will find nobody who said so publicly.

The European nuclear countries, at least subconsciously, feel, on the basis of Reykjavik, that the President is clearly determined to give away some nuclear weapons, and they’d rather have him give away American nuclear weapons than British and French nuclear weapons.

The Germans feel, rightly or wrongly, that they have been singled out for special nuclear devastation because most of the tactical nuclear weapons are on their territory and their range is limited to targets inside Germany territory. So the end result will be that the Soviets can operate at both ends of the spectrum. They can make the Germans uneasy by suggesting the tactical nuclear zero-option and they make the British and French uneasy by hinting that the next round of strategic arms negotiations must include the British and French forces.

Q: What about Franco-German cooperation?

A: I’m in favor of Franco-German cooperation even though I disagree with (French) President (Francois) Mitterrand, who wants to return to massive retaliation. He wants to play the game of pretending that no nuclear weapons will fall on German territory and therefore make Germany totally dependent on the French nuclear forces. That won’t work because the French nuclear forces are less credible than the American nuclear forces. But I also think that for Germany to be left alone as defender of the Continent magnifies all the psychological problems of a divided country with a complex history.

Q: Congress has, for now, cut off aid to the guerrilla forces in Nicaragua.

A: The issue has now become totally confused. Nobody knows anymore what we are trying to accomplish in Central America. The Administration made a mistake to begin with by putting forward a request for aid that was so small it could not convince the American public that the security of the United States was involved. Secondly, they defined the peace process in terms of criteria that permit no objective assessments.

If we had said that the Cubans must leave Nicaragua and that the Nicaraguan army should be reduced to historic Central American dimensions, that would have been concrete criteria the public could understand. But when you say that you want democracy in a country which has never known democracy in its whole history, then you create a criterion with no clear-cut objective definitions. So the combination of an originally small sum and criteria that were hard to understand led to the first defeat. There was also the American illusion that negotiations can take place independent of the pressures that are generated on their behalf. The next round failed, in part, because the Republicans did not want the Democrats to get credit for sending any aid at all. As for non-lethal aid, it is an insult to the intelligence. It says we Americans will support a guerrilla war but we are so noble that we do it only with humanitarian aid which means somebody else has to give the weapons because otherwise there’s no point in giving even the non-lethal aid. So there’s now such a confusion of objectives and the issue has become so politicized that I fear that we are beginning to look ridiculous.

Q: We in Spain have always said let the Central Americans sort out their own problems without interference.

A: You can’t tell America that it must defend Japan, Europe and everybody else but has no right to security on its border. Certainly the Central American countries should have a significant voice and certainly we should listen to them. But the fact that Costa Rica has no army, with 90,000 armed Nicaraguans on its borders, is bound to affect its perception of the risks it can run and the positions it should promulgate. I’m not attacking the Arias plan, I’m attacking the notion that you can negotiate independently from the whole context of things, both positive and negative, without regard to either pressures or incentives.

I find it very difficult to believe that the Sandinistas will agree to a significant reduction of their powers under present circumstances, when with every passing month American’s capacity to bring pressure is being reduced.

Q: Would you venture a guess as to who will be your next President?

A: I find that situation rather confusing and uncertain. You have to understand that I am of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, which barely exists any more. Logically one would have to say that unless there’s a recession the Republican candidate will have a better chance than the Democratic candidate. On the other hand, there are some similarities with the situation in 1960 when another popular President (Dwight D. Eisenhower), getting on in years, was leaving office and the public was looking for a new face; that produced John Kennedy. I really think it’s a very close election. The personalities of the leading candidates are not so remarkable when you consider the basic differences. Right now they’re spending all their time fighting each other within each party.