Both those who argue for and against the forthcoming SALT II treaty seem to assume that the only utility of nuclear weapons is to attack or retaliate, and that the denouement in the nuclear drama will occur in the mid-1980s. That is a highly dangerous and costly assumption. Nuclear weapons have immediate utility, as the following hypothetical scenario shows. —
Scene: The Kremlin, Moscow. Time: October 1979. Dramatis personae: Members of the Politburo are hosting a meeting of the chiefs of Iran and the Arab-producing states. Brezhnev (or his successor) is doing all the talking.
Comrades of the Middle East, we all have a common interest in world peace and prosperity. Although we have been enjoying apparent peace, our great leader Lenin warned us that, so long as Capitalist Imperialism exists, war is a constant danger. Our courageous intelligence agents have uncovered a massive plot by the Capitalist Imperialist Warmongers to launch a new world war. This would bring death and destruction such as the world has never seen before.
This would be bad for your business. Your good customers, the United States and Western Europe, would be destroyed by our necessary retaliation. Since your economies are based on continuing revenues from your great oil resources, you have a vital interest in preventing such a senseless Armageddon.
Fortunately, there is a peaceful way to avert this nuclear destruction and depletion of your treasuries, and that is why I have invited you to Moscow. I want you all to agree to impose immediately a total embargo on sales of oil to the warmongering United States and all her NATO allies.
Within a few weeks, hardly a wheel will be turning in Western factories. They will have little electricity. They may even be unable to pump water. They will be on their knees to you, pleading for oil on any terms.
Then you and the great peace-loving U.S.S.R. will impose our joint terms. The Western democracies will pay any price you set for your oil and you can easily recover tenfold the revenues you lost during the embargo.
For our part in the settlement, the Soviet Union will demand that the Capitalist Imperialist Warmongers surrender all their nuclear and conventional weapons to the United Nations. Since most UN members are too small and unsophisticated to handle the takeover of those terrible weapons, the U.S.S.R. will gladly take custody for the UN.
Do you want to know what the United States will do to pressure you into terminating your embargo? The answer is NOTHING. Just remember back to your first courageous and innovative use of your “oil weapon” back in 1973. What did the United States and Western Europe do then? Nothing! They meekly agreed to pay you a five-fold increase in the price of oil, even though that increase disrupted the stability of their governments and their economies.
It was your courageous action in 1973 which brought about so much costly inflation and unemployment in the Western nations. The following year became known as “the year Europe lost its head” because the heads of all European nations were ousted.
Note that the United States and every one of the Western nations had more conventional military power than any of the Arab nations. Yet the Western nations dared not use their power because the great peace-loving Soviet Union gave you the protection of our strategic nuclear umbrella.
Our technique of keeping SALT negotiations pending continuously for ten years has kept the United States from building any additional ICBMs, submarines or bombers, while we built up continuously and massively.
The Soviet nuclear umbrella is now three times more powerful than it was in 1973. During the last six years, we have tripled the throw-weight of our strategic forces. We have replaced a thousand of our older ICBMs with advanced models five times more powerful and vastly more accurate. We have deployed 27 of our huge Delta-class missile-firing submarines and hundreds of new strategic bombers.
Thus Oil Embargo II will enable our Middle East friends to become richer and richer at the expense of the Capitalist Imperialist nations, and it will give the great Soviet Union the power to enforce world peace, on our terms. Nuclear superiority is, indeed, very useable in the 1970s.
