Defense Secretary Harold Brown, in making the Pentagon’s Annual Posture Statement to Congress, testified that the Soviets have added 1,000 strategic nuclear warheads to their forces — twice the increase he predicted only a year ago. Thus, Brown admitted not only that he was 100 percent wrong in forecasting Soviet weapons, but that the Soviets are moving so rapidly that his 100 percent error was exposed within one year.
Only two days earlier, President Carter went before Congress to promise in his State of the Union Message: “I will sign no agreement which cannot be verified.” That is a solemn promise the President cannot and will not keep. He has made it clear that he is pushing as hard as he can to sign a SALT II Treaty.
Brown’s 100 percent mistake, plus the total failure of our worldwide intelligence-gathering apparatus to forewarn about the tragic events in Iran, should be proof to even the most starry-eyed dreamers that our government is either incapable of gathering proper intelligence about what is going on in other countries, or is incapable of evaluating it once it is gathered.
In an important recent revelation that may become the “Pentagon Papers” of the SALT negotiations because both reveal how policy decisions were arrived at behind closed doors, former CIA analyst David S. Sullivan charges that “the Soviets have used the SALT negotiating process as a smoke screen to conceal their increasing strategic superiority from a complacent United States.”
His report, an unclassified version of a top-secret CIA report, says that the Soviet Union won virtually all its objectives in SALT I by repeatedly deceiving U.S. negotiators and by exploiting the “conciliatory attitude” toward the Kremlin of Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. Among the crucial issues on which our side was duped in SALT I were the deployment of Soviet heavy missiles and the range of their most advanced submarine-launched missiles.
Sullivan spent two years preparing his SALT analysis and reportedly another two years resisting efforts inside the Central Intelligence Agency to rewrite and suppress his book-length report. Sullivan resigned from the CIA last summer after admitting he had turned over his classified report to an aide to Senator Henry M. Jackson (D-Wash). Sullivan is now an aide to Senator Lloyd Bentsen (D-TX) and obtained permission to publish a shorter “sanitized” version.
Sullivan concludes in his report that “the Soviets clearly have gained the most from the SALT process. SALT has stimulated the arms race by allowing a Soviet buildup without any real quantitative and qualitative constraints. The United States traded away its ABM [anti-missile system] for a tripling or quadrupling of the Soviet strategic threat against it, all the while tolerating Soviet negotiating deception and massive operational concealments and ruses in Soviet strategic [weapons] deployment.”
Although Kissinger was at the helm during the SALT I negotiations, Sullivan makes clear that the basic errors were made by Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968. These errors included the decisions to impose a U.S. freeze on additional land-based and submarine launched missiles in 1967 which has continued to this day, to scrap our large force of B-47 and B-58 bombers and to cancel the great new B-70, and to deactivate about 185 Atlas and Titan 1 land-based missiles (most of which were brand new).
Of course, the Soviets did not scrap any weapons or freeze any building programs, but kept pushing forward to parity and then to superiority. The McNamara decisions to impose unilateral restraints were then compounded by the Kissinger errors at the SALT I bargaining table. Sullivan quotes Kissinger as later lamenting, “We obviously did not know in 1972 what missiles the Soviet Union would be testing in 1974.”
It takes much longer than two years to bring a major weapons system from development to testing. If our government doesn’t know today what weapons the Soviets will be testing two years hence, we have no business signing a SALT II agreement that binds us not to build weapons to defend America. And the sorry evidence is that our government is, indeed, precisely that uninformed about Soviet weapons.
