“Linkage” was supposed to be good when Henry Kissinger tried to link the United States in economic interdependence with the Soviet bloc in order to create a mutuality of self-interest that supposedly would flow over into political policies. “Linkage” is supposed to be bad when SALT II critics try to link treaty ratification with Soviet behavior in Africa or the Middle East.
Despite the fleeting nature of fashions in words, there is a real linkage between SALT II and our national will. Do Americans have the will to stand up for our own self-interest? Or have our leaders dissipated our national will through tactics of complexity, confusion, and classification?
Former Senator Margaret Chase Smith, the only woman ever elected to both the Senate and the House, recently gave a rare interview in which she said that our country is going through a “national crisis” because “people have lost their will.”
She blamed this loss of will on the conflicting statements made by our leaders, which confuse the people and convince them that the truth is too difficult for them to understand. She criticized “a constant line of rhetoric rather than action, style rather than substance.”
Mrs. Smith’s Senatorial specialty was military defense. Her recent remarks are – reminiscent of her forthright statements made in 1972, when she was the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, that one of her chief regrets is “that the American people still have not been told the whole story about how the [Nuclear Test Ban] Treaty [of 1963] worked to the Russians’ tremendous advantage and to our own vast detriment.”
She told how the President and Secretary of Defense classified vital information as “secret,” thereby prohibiting her and others who had official access to it from telling us the treaty was “a disaster for the American people and a great victory for the Russians.” President John F. Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara hailed the treaty “as a great peace breakthrough,” while they used the power of their office to classify information and thereby silence potential critics.
This is a good description of how the Carter Administration is selling SALT II. Carter and Defense Secretary Harold Brown are working in tandem alternately to scare us with threats of nuclear war and to promote apathy with cheap assurances that we do not need to worry; to confuse us by the artful and misleading use of the complexities of nuclear weaponry; and to classify information to frustrate potential SALT critics.
A good example of the “constant line of rhetoric rather than action” is Carter’s announcement that he will go ahead with the development of the MX mobile missile. Senator John Stennis hailed it as a good move and said it will help SALT II ratification; Senator George McGovern deplored it and said it might make him vote against SALT II.
Carter’s announcement was not a military decision but a political ploy; he needs the Stennises far more than he needs the McGoverns. A closer inspection of Carter’s announcement shows that the joker word is “development.” Carter did not promise he would build the MX mobile missile; he merely teased us with the hope that deployment might begin in 1986.
Carter will not be calling the shots in 1986, so holding out hope for 1986 is a promise he can cheaply make. The question is, what will protect us from the Soviet missile force until 1986 when the MX mobile missile will supposedly take the strategic place of our Minuteman missile force?
When Defense Secretary Brown spoke to the Annapolis graduates this year, he said that the Soviets will have “high assurance of destroying most Minuteman silos in a preemptive strike after the SS-18 and SS-19 deployments are complete, sometime in the early 1980s.” But the “early 1980s” start only six months from now, and there are five years between the “early 1980s” and 1986.
It’s a good move to “develop” the MX missile, but that’s not enough and it’s not fast enough. We “developed” the B-1 bomber, but Carter cancelled its deployment when it was ready for production. There is absolutely nothing in Carter’s or Brown’s record to give us the slightest assurance that the MX is headed for any fate other than the B-1’s.
