It’s probably a Jood thing that Paul C. Warnke was appointed our chief arms negotiator for the SALT II Agreements. His record of Opposition to our building strategic weapons is so clear that it makes suspect any agreement he might conclude and provides an excellent basis for the Senate’s rejecting it out of hand.
Although at the Senate hearings on his nomination Warnke said he rejected the “concept of unilateral disarmament,” his published writings clearly prove the contrary,
In the spring of 1975, Warnke wrote an article for the magazine Foreign Policy called “Apes on a Treadmill.” In it he argued that we should go beyond “formal agreements” with the Soviet Union on arms control and “try a policy of restraint, while calling for matching restraint from the Soviet Union.”
At the Senate hearings this year, Warnke restated his notion of “reciprocal” Or “parallel” restraint in weapons building.
When the Senators questioned Warnke about such statements, as well as about his Opposition to most of our major nuclear weapons including the B-1 bomber, the cruise missile, MIRVs, the ABM, the Trident, and improvements to Our Minuteman, he arrogantly replied: “I cannot defend today everything I may have said in the past, and I won’t try.”
The reason Warnke cannot defend his statement about “restraint” is that no informed person could rationally believe that unilateral military restraints by the United States will result in reciprocal restraints by the Soviet Union.
In the fall of 1958, the United States adopted a major weapons restraint. We unilaterally announced a moratorium on all nuclear tests and stopped our nuclear development. We continued to negotiate in good faith in Geneva to reach a formal agreement.
In September 1961 the Soviets abruptly terminated the nuclear test ban talks and began the largest series of nuclear tests in history. They cheated “big” and ultimately exploded more than 90 bombs, including one that former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara said would “weaponize” at 100 megatons.
Since it took at least six months to prepare for these explosions, the Soviets were obviously cheating during the moratorium, and the Geneva talks were a farce and a trap.
Or, take the restraint shown by the Kennedy Administration in the months preceding the Cuban Missile Crisis in suspending our U-2 surveillance of Cuba. The Soviets did not respond with reciprocal restraint.
Instead, the Soviets devoted that year to manufacturing nuclear missiles, transporting them by land and sea halfway around the world, and setting them up on launching pads in Cuba where they were targeted at most major U.S. cities.
Or, take the restraint the United States tried again during the negotiations for SALT I. For two and a half years, we maintained a policy of voluntarily and unilaterally remaining in a weapons freeze while we negotiated in good faith in Helsinki and Vienna. We did not add a single ICBM or a single nuclear-firing submarine to our forces during those years.
The Soviets used those same years to build their margin of superiority over the United States so that, when SALT I was finally signed in 1972, the agreement froze the superior Soviet numbers then existing, namely, 1,618 ICBMs to our 1,054, and 62 nuclear-firing submarines to our 41.
Anyone who truly believes that a U.S. “policy of restraint” will result in “reciprocal restraints by the Soviet Union is of too limited intelligence or has too little knowledge of history to be entrusted with a post of responsibility.
There remains the possibility that those who ignore the Soviet 30-year record of aggressive response to our unilateral restraint simply do not want the United States to be stronger than the Soviet Union.
