First Published: The Call, Vol. 8, No. 22, June 4, 1979.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Following a secret meeting in Moscow aimed at reaching an accord with the Soviets on the terms of the first SALT agreement in 1972, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger quipped, “I’d do anything for caviar, and I probably did.”
Kissinger’s private joke later became public and inadvertently shed light on an essential aspect of the SALT process: appeasement among U.S. ruling circles has and is allowing the Soviets to gain clear military advantages during the negotiations. It is, thus, encouraging Soviet aggression and bringing the world closer to war.
The Carter administration is claiming that the new treaty will moderate U.S.-Soviet rivalry. But Moscow is aiming to achieve nuclear superiority over the U.S., and the terms of the SALT II treaty could well enable it to do this.
The history of SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) and the details of the latest SALT II agreement reflect the fact that the Soviet Union is the rising superpower, most likely to launch a new world war, while U.S. imperialism, although still armed to the teeth, is on the defensive and generally trying to maintain the status quo.
The Soviet Union today is embarked on a military spending and arms modernization program that is reminiscent of the rearming of peacetime Germany under Hitler fascism. Hitler’s rearmament, too, was aided financially and politically by the appeasement policies of the Western imperialist circles which culminated in the Munich agreement, a vain effort to satisfy German imperialism’s appetite and turn it against the then-socialist Soviet Union.
Since 1967, the Soviet social-imperialists have been increasing arms spending at the rate of four to five percent a year so that it now accounts for approximately 13% of its Gross National Product (GNP). This figure is nearly three times that even of the U.S., where the already bloated military budget accounts for 5.2% of the GNP. Some estimates have placed the Soviet share of GNP as high as 20%.
Since 1965, the Soviets have introduced seven different ICBM types, the most recent being the so-called fourth-generation missiles (the SS-16s, -17s, -18s and -19s) which are replacing their outmoded missiles at a rate of 125 to 150 a year, while a fifth generation missile is being tested.
In October 1977 the Soviets tested the SS-19 rocket capable of carrying six nuclear warheads and achieving the same accuracy as U.S. missiles—the ability to travel thousands of miles through space and land within a few hundred yards of its target. As early as 1981, the Russians will have 500 of these missiles and 300 SS-18s, an eyen larger missile armed with 10 nuclear warheads.
As a result, the U.S. JCBM force is considered to be vulnerable by the early 1980s to a Soviet first-strike attack, a possibility acknowledged even by Defense Secretary Harold Brown, who supports SALT II. Where in the 1960s the U.S. had clear-cut superiority over the USSR in every aspect of nuclear weaponry, today the Soviets have not only caught up but have surpassed the U.S. in terms of numbers of missiles and their ability to deliver large megaton warheads.
The Soviet war machine presently totals 1,400 ICBMs, 1,015 SLBMs, 135 strategic bombers and 4,500 nuclear warheads (See glossary). Its military manpower numbers 4.4 million with conventional forces of 50,000 tanks. 4,650 tactical aircraft and 243 surface combat ships. Projections show that by 1985, the Soviets will have 820 MIRVed ICBMs, in contrast to the U.S. with 464, and some 300-400 Backfire bombers.
With or without SALT, Soviet aims to achieve world hegemony would have dictated this military buildup. But the SALT negotiations played an important role in allowing the Soviets to gain certain advantages.
U.S. policies, in fact, mandated that the Soviets be allowed to catch up with the U.S. and even to have an edge in certain areas.
These policies rest upon the thinking that the best way for U.S. imperialism to contend with the Soviet Union is to give the Soviets a stake militarily, politically and economically in maintaining a stable international situation. According to this line of thinking, instability would result if either superpower gained nuclear superiority. An unregulated arms race would also damage the economies of the two countries.
So long as the Russians were behind the U.S., presumably their insecurity would result in instability. Therefore, the Russians should be allowed to catch up, to achieve “parity” with the U.S.
“In accord with these assumptions, the United States in the mid-1960s unilaterally froze its force of ICBMs at 1,054 and dismantled nearly all its defenses against enemy bombers,” writes Richard Pipes, a professor of Russian history at Harvard University and a critic of SALT from the viewpoint of other U.S. imperialist ruling circles. “The Russians were watched benignly as they moved toward parity with the United States in the number of intercontinental launchers, and then proceeded to attain numerical superiority. The expectation was that as soon as the Russians felt themselves equal to the United States in terms of effective deterrence, they would stop further deployments.”
“The frenetic pace of the Soviet nuclear buildup,” Pipes continues, “was explained first on the grounds that the Russians had a lot of catching up to do, then that they had to consider the Chinese threat and, finally, on the grounds»that they are inherently a very insecure people and should be allowed an edge in deterrent capability.”
It was on these grounds that Kissinger argued for Senate passage of the first SALT agreement in 1972, insisting that the inequalities in favor of the Soviets in the treaty were necessary to allow the Russians to achieve “parity.”
This “parity principle” is an adjunct to the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD) first laid out by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.
Mutual assured destruction is a strategy which, its advocates claim, will deter nuclear war. It means that each superpower has the capability to destroy the other. Even if one was attacked first, it would be able to retaliate and inflict unacceptable damage on the other side. Presumably, with this knowledge, neither side would push the nuclear button.
Under the MAD doctrine, then, the Russian and American people are, in effect, being held as hostages to deter the possibility of nuclear warfare. Meanwhile, the imperialist ruling classes of both countries are free to contend with each other around the world, but this contention would allegedly never lead to nuclear war because such warfare would mean mutual assured destruction. As long as both sides maintained parity in ’nuclear weapons, the international situation could be stabilized and the status quo preserved.
War, including nuclear war, however, is bound up with the imperialist system itself. The history of the two world wars has shown that war is inevitable under this system, where ever-expanding profit is the life-blood as the various imperialist powers- clash over markets and try to achieve global hegemony. Today, only the U.S. and the Soviet Union are capable of launching a war and their rivalry is heading in that direction, no matter what subjective wishes their leaders might have.
Even within the U.S. ruling circles, thorns in the MAD doctrine have begun to prick. Although the SALT I treats passed the Senate with only two dissenting votes, a growing number of voices began to sound warnings against SALT.
Nixon’s Defense Secretarv James Schlesinger began to criticize the MAD doctrine for being too passive for a military strategy. SALT came under fire for misreading and underestimating Soviet intentions.
As a former Schlesinger aide wrote later, “strategic stability” might be good for the U.S. but “for the Soviet Union, which still seeks to extend its influence, the status quo is not a desirable state of affairs and ’strategic stability’ is thus a frustrating obstacle.” The U.S. and the Soviet Union might have “parity’ now, this writer noted, but only because at this point in time “the ascending curve of Soviet military capabilities intersects the declining curve of our own.”
These ruling class critics of SALT also noted that Soviet military writings did not seem to share the U.S. outlook of mutual assured destruction. The former Commander of Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces, for example, wrote: “Moscow could not agree with the US position that there could be no winner m a nuclear war.” The 1972 statement of a Soviet military strategist that “there is profound erroneousness... in the disorienting claims... that there will be no victor in a thermonuclear war” was one more indication that MAD was not in the Soviet war glossary.”
The main critique leveled against SALT however was that it allowed the Soviets to catch up and then to surpass the U.S.
When the Carter administration resumed the SALT negotiations, its initial priority proposal was to get the Soviets to cut the number of its heavy missiles in half. This resulted in failure, as did a U.S. proposal to include the Soviet Backfire bomber under the SALT II accord. In the face of Soviet intransigence, the Carter administration agreed to Soviet terms and the SALT II treaty emerged with the Soviets having a 100 to 0 advantage m heavy missiles. No wonder then that the Soviets are so eager to sign the SALT II treaty.
The Soviet military buildup – which exists in conventional arms as well as nuclear weaponry – is consistent with the aims of an imperialist power on the rise. The USSR is not seeking “stability” but looking to upset a status quo where its superpower rival US imperialism, momentarily has the upper hand.
In this light, the appeasement line, which has dominated U.S. policies during the SALT negotiations has only encouraged Soviet aggression. Far from being a peace policy, appeasement is thus an aggressive policy that undermines the people’s struggle for genuine peace and disarmament.
In this struggle, the people must not rely on phony superpower “arms control,” but rather expose the increasing war danger, which SALT attempts to hide. While condemning all imperialist war preparations it is especially important to oppose the appeasers, who as SALT II shows, are only hastening the outbreak of war.