The Foreign Service Journal, May 2020

42 MAY 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Restarting START Contrary to [President Ronald] Reagan’s assertions, more nuclear weapons are not needed to serve as bargaining chips in START. More weapons would make it harder, not easier, to achieve mutual reductions. Soviet leader Yuri Andropov’s call for renewal of detente in his hard-line speech immediately following Leonid Brezhnev’s death made it clear that the Soviet Union would respond to a U.S. arms build- up with a build-up of its own. Thus, the funding and deployment of more American weapon systems, such as the MX, Trident II, or ground- and sea-launched cruise missiles, will result in more Soviet arms. And, in an ever-spiraling process, more Soviet arms will in turn result in more U.S. arms. Today, the United States already has thousands of nuclear weapons it could trade away without jeopardizing its security. And both sides could gain some bargaining leverage from the new and more deadly weapons still under development—a Soviet mobile ICBM, for example, or a U.S. sea-launched cruise missile—providing that leverage is used in negotiations before the weapons are deployed. It is only then that the U.S. or Soviet negotiator could offer to delay or cancel deployment or outline what conditions would lead to deployment. The issue of nuclear weapons is at the center of the U.S.-Soviet relationship, and an agreement resulting in substantial reductions would have far reaching political effects. The Reagan administra- tion should therefore introduce a new proposal on START. —David Linebaugh and Alexander Peters, January 1983 Accepting Nuclear Weapons Is there any reason to believe that the Sovi- ets would not capitalize on the enormous military advantage that goes with first nuclear use?… NATO’S central military problem is that it has opted out of the Nuclear Age, while the Soviets have unhesitatingly accepted it. Neither Americans nor Europeans have been willing to contem- plate nuclear weapons seriously as warfighting instruments. The Soviets always have. This fundamental doctrinal disparity has placed the alliance in an untenable position regarding realisti- cally defending itself. The West’s dilemma is that it will have to change its views and accept nuclear weapons to survive, but it believes it cannot survive by accepting them. So long as this quandary persists, there is no way for NATO to come up with a realistic defense. And perhaps the most danger- ously unrealistic thing it can do is to concoct new conventional panaceas to calm down the increasing political discontent over an alliance that now seems headed for oblivion. If the West seri- ously wishes to defend itself, it will have to resolve its nuclear dilemma rather than displaying new conventional looks that ignore nuclear realities. — Sam Cohen (inventor of the neutron bomb), September 1983 ACDA’s Impact on Arms Control and Its Role in the Future Kenneth L. Adelman: The success of arms control itself depends on the main- tenance of American strength. Twenty- five years after the founding of ACDA [the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency], arms control is a far larger and more complicated enterprise than it was in those early years, and in some ways a more difficult one. … But 25 years after ACDA’s start, the effort to achieve a real reduction in the nuclear dan- ger has really just begun, and all of us are conscious that we have a long way to go. George M. Seignious: To prosper in the bureaucratic fray and to keep the support of its constituency behind it, ACDAmust seek to maintain momentum in the search for realistic arms-control solutions while protecting its flanks against charges that it is “soft.” In a similar vein, ACDA, in cooperation with other parts of government, should devote even greater effort to improving our verification capabilities. Greater confidence in compliance will strengthen ACDA’s constituency and increase the viability of the arms-control process. In this regard, we should not only pursue aggressively refinements in our national means of veri- fication but also put the Soviets to the test on their new-found interest in on-site inspection. —Comments from ACDA directors, September 1986 Lowering the Nuclear Threshold: The Specter of North Korea If the United States and other concerned governments conclude that North Korea is attempting to evade its commitments under the NPT or its pledges to South Korea not to acquire either nuclear weapons or reprocessing facilities, a decision will con- front the world community more daunting by far than last year’s decision to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. For to employ conventional