The Foreign Service Journal, May 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2020 41 Arms Control Diplomacy From the FSJ Archive ON NUCLEAR DIPLOMACY The Man Who Made Arms Control ‘Respectable’: An Interview with William G. Foster WilliamG. Foster was named in 1961 by Presi- dent Kennedy to be the first Director of what is still the world’s only governmental agency of its kind, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarma- ment Agency. … In this interview by amember of his former staff in ACDA, Ambassador Foster takes a wide-ranging look at the past, the present, and the future of arms control. … As it turned out, the business of arms control not only became respected, but respectable as well, thanks to the fore- sight and the courage of President John F. Kennedy. Mr. Ken- nedy was not only deeply interested in the subject but was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea. With this kind of backing we managed to put together a team of practical men who were surely anything but dreamers. Pretty soon, what had seemed to most people to be a sort of pastime began to attract the very real interest of the Department of Defense, the Atomic Energy Commission, and of course that of our landlord, the State Department. Some of the brightest minds in the fields of foreign affairs, defense, and science joined us. But most important of all, we had a law—the Arms Control and Disarmament Act of 1961—to help us get things done. And we had some difficult work to do, not only externally but I might say internally as well. … Now, people say the Soviets never live up to their agreements. But if you get agreements down in black and white, and if you have complete understanding of the nature of the problem and the method of dealing with it, mutuality of interest in preserving such agreements becomes almost automatic. It has been my experience that where you do have that kind of understanding and have it directly committed, agreements do stand up. This has been true of the Antarctic Treaty, it is true of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, and it is true of the Outer Space Treaty. You must remember also, of course, that U.S. arms con- trol policy requires that there be means for adequately verifying compliance with agreements. —Nicholas Ruggieri, February 1971 The Prevention of Nuclear War in a World of Uncertainty Let us admit that we are dealing in this field with arguments based on only plausi- bility, not experience. Many of these argu- ments can be constructed just as convinc- ingly in their logical opposites. And since nuclear policy cannot possibly be based on actual experience—let us hope and pray it never can—it tends to feed on itself. It gets no feedback from the real world, no empiri- cal evidence of the incontrovertible kind that buttresses the physical and even the social sciences. In this sense we are a ship sailing through the night guided only by the light at the prow. Because nuclear strategy cannot offer positive proof, I think it is more like a theology than a sci- ence. Hence, we run the risk that our “theologies,” ours and the Russians’, may not be in harmony. Sudden incompatibilities can develop in military thinking and could lead to catastrophe. All the more reason, then, for us to keep our minds open and not plan the future by listening only to the echo of our old ideas. —Fred Ikle, May 1974 The Essence of the Debate over SALT II One of the most striking gaps in the analy- sis of those opposed to the [SALT II] treaty is any really systematic discussion of how the United States will in fact be better off if the treaty is rejected. Even if one accepts, for the sake of argument, that a tougher bargain might have been struck with the Russians—a generally dubious proposition in itself—simply rejecting SALT as “inade- quate,” or attaching major substantive amendments to the treaty that Moscow is bound to reject, would be virtually irrelevant to the “redressing” of the Soviet-American nuclear balance. The issue more specifically is how, without SALT II, that nuclear bal- ance will be more advantageous to us by the end of 1985 when SALT II is scheduled to expire. —Stephen Garrett, October 1979 FOCUS