If President Reagan is to maintain his commitment to his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) at the forthcoming Summit, he needs to have the support of a staff that is loyal to America, to Reagan, and to the goal of building SDI. Paul Nitze fails on all three counts and should be sent packing.
The record shows that Nitze has no commitment to maintaining American freedom and independence against an aggressor, no belief in the principle of peace through strength, and he does not support the building of SDI or any system to defend American cities against incoming enemy nuclear missiles.
President Reagan has already been warned by the liberal media. Four years ago, the New York Times called Nitze “smart, devious, charming, tough, and fiercely determined to get his way.”
And what does Nitze want today? He is working to tie the forthcoming INF Treaty to SDI, that is, to put INF in a package that would extend the ABM Treaty for 7 to 10 years. This would mean that we would promise not to build SDI for 15 years, at which time the Soviets would already have fully deployed their own SDI-type defense.
The 80-year-old Nitze is a 30-year advocate of U.S. unilateral disarmament in the face of the Soviet missile threat. He is the author of the peculiar notion of laying down our arms and announcing that the United States will not retaliate even if attacked.
Rejecting “nuclear retaliation” means telling the Soviets in advance that, if they hit us, we will not hit back. That’s a step beyond Mutual Assured Destruction; it means Assured U.S. Surrender.
At a National Strategy Seminar at Asilomar, California on April 29, 1960, Paul Nitze carried his unilateral disarmament message to one of the most important gatherings of military strategists ever assembled. He proposed that the United States scrap all “Class A” or counterforce-capable strategic weapons (the weapons that are capable of knocking out Soviet weapons) and retain only systems capable of retaliation.
But that’s not all. He advocated giving the trigger on our retaliatory weapons to the United Nations, where they would be controlled by Soviet and Third World enemies.
Specifically, Nitze then urged “(3) that we multilateralize the command of our retaliatory systems by making SAC [our Strategic Air Command] a NATO command, and (4) that we inform the United Nations that NATO will turn over ultimate power of decision on the use of these systems to the General Assembly of the United Nations.”
Of course, that would mean that we could never defend ourselves against an aggressor. How could any American advocate such an incredible plan to scrap or surrender all our nuclear weapons?
Nitze presented his rationale by means of an analogy. He said, “In a poker game with several players, what is the most dangerous hand? Not the worst hand, but the second best hand. With the second best hand, one is tempted to follow up the betting, but if one does, one gets clobbered.”
In other words, Nitze’s plan to scrap our counterforce weapons and turn our retaliatory weapons over to the U.N. was designed to make us so very much weaker than the Soviets that they would never feel the “need” to attack us.
Nitze served the John F. Kennedy Administration first as Secretary of the Navy, and subsequently as Deputy Secretary of Defense. As one of the key policymakers in the Kennedy Administration, Nitze helped implement McNamara’s program of scrapping all the weapons he could, while the Russians scrapped none at all.
The Reagan White House staff has no business accepting advice from a retreat from the Kennedy Administration. Nitze was the leading architect of the discredited policy of peace through weakness which Ronald Reagan so eloquently campaigned against.
Now, Nitze is trying to con President Reagan into making an agreement with the Soviets which would prevent us from building SDI, while the Soviets rush forward with theirs. We will, indeed, then have the “worst hand” in the nuclear poker game, and our only option will be to surrender to the men in the Kremlin holding all the aces.
Paul Nitze is not playing on Ronald Reagan’s team. If President Reagan includes Nitze in the Summit negotiations, Nitze will arrange a sellout not only of SDI, but of America.
