If Henry Kissinger had been subjected to cross-examination on SALT I, it would have exposed the loopholes and inequalities of that agreement, and our country would not be in the predicament of weakness we are today. On SALT II, Kissinger was questioned by Senate committees and on Meet the Press, events which never took place during the SALT I debate.
The SALT I Agreements of 1972 were Kissinger’s handiwork; he negotiated them and he was their principal advocate. He never testified on SALT I before appropriate Congressional committees, claiming “executive privilege.” He answered a few questions from Congressmen on June 15, 1972, in a staged media event in the East Room of the White House which had many peculiar aspects such as a refusal to allow his voice to be sound-recorded.
When Secretary of State Kissinger was engaged in SALT-selling in 1972, he stated that there was a “safeguard” (his word) in SALT I against the Soviets’ substituting new “heavy” missiles for old “light” missiles. It was not until seven years later, a few weeks ago on Meet the Press, that Chicago Sun-Times reporter Rowland Evans publicly nailed Kissinger on his “safeguard” falsehood.
There was absolutely no such “safeguard” in SALT I and, immediately after its signing, the Soviets started substituting their new heavy SS-19s for their older light SS-11s. Evans made Kissinger admit three crucial points: (1) that “the Soviets pressed against the legal limits of SALT I” by “sharp practice,” (2) that he “did not know in 1972 what missiles the Soviets would be testing in 1974,” and (3) that “our weakness today is bound to create opportunities for political nuclear blackmail against us by the Russians” in the Middle East like 1973 (the year of Oil Embargo I).
Evans accurately pointed out that Kissinger overlooked mentioning those crucial points in his Senate testimony, preferring to shift the argument to a need for an increase in the defense budget. But when those three admissions are applied to SALT II, as they should be, our conclusion must be that the Treaty must be rejected.
SALT II is shot through with just as many loopholes, inequalities, and ambiguities as SALT I, and we can expect the Soviets to press their advantage at least to the legal limit (if not beyond). Even if our satellite reconnaissance and verification were adequate (and they aren’t), we still cannot know what missiles the Soviets will be deploying two years from now. SALT II makes us just as wide open to political nuclear blackmail in the Middle East as SALT I, but with far more fatal consequences.
We already had a taste of this during the crisis in Iran. Brezhnev ordered the United States not to meddle in Iran, and President Carter and Secretary Vance meekly replied that we had no intention of meddling. We are already paying the price in gasoline shortages and higher prices, and we and our allies will pay more as our nation is perceived as unable to defend even our own vital interests.
Dr. Ghazi A. Algosaibi, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Industry and Electricity, said in a July speech in Los Angeles: “Your industrial way of life for the coming decades will collapse without Arab oil. The independence of the Arab countries in the face of expanding Communism cannot be maintained without your strength and resolve. No interdependence could be more complete.”
Translated into plain English, SALT II = Soviet superiority in nuclear arms = Soviet ability to wage political nuclear blackmail in the Middle East curtains for the independence of Saudi Arabia and Israel = more gasoline shortages in America.
Ratification of SALT II by our Senate will advertise to the world that we accept strategic inferiority to the Soviets and are willing to place our future in the hands of the good faith of the Kremlin bosses. Any “peace” bought at that price will be as dangerous as the “peace in our time” bought by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at Munich in 1938.
