ustxtxb_obs_1986_10_24_50_00018-00000_000.pdf

a book about foreign policy we would have to say wouldn’t we? that there are many instances where Americans ought not to win. Well, or America ought not to get itself into a situation where it has to win or lose. I’d put it that way. And where I’ve spelled out those conditions is in a series of lectures on foreign policy at Georgetown this spring. And the third of the lectures deals in part with the use of force when to and when not to. And I set up a series of about six criteria, which turned out curiously enough, to parallel a similar set of criteria that Caspar Weinberger spelled out in 1984 in a speech. So that book does not address that question of when to use force, but the foreign policy lectures do. The point is that the point of the book is that if the time occurs when you have to use it, in the legitimate pursuit of your national security policy or foreign policy, then you ought to be prepared in a conventional sense to succeed. I was thinking, specifically, of course, of Nicaragua. That is a place not to use the military. Do you think this is a projection, but what’s your feeling on it? do you think it’s remotely possible to get through the next two years without some military intervention in Nicaragua? Of course it’s possible. The question is, will it happen? I said in ’84 with all serious convicton that if Ronald Reagan were elected I was certain that American military personnel would lose their lives in a war in Central America. Two years have now gone by, almost two years, and that has not happened yet. But I don’t rule out the possibility. If the contra aid, [the] new hundred million dollars, doesn’t achieve whatever objectives . . . the President is now on record as saying he wants to overthrow that government, even though we have diplomatic relations with them. I don’t rule out the possibility that American military forces will be commited there. It’s hard to imagine that Ronald Reagan would leave office with that left undone. Exactly. Now what I think, I’ve said this before, I don’t think ever in print, but I don’t rule out this kind of combination: that almost simultaneously the Administration would negotiate some comprehensive arms control agreement with the Soviet Union and invade Nicaragua. Think about that. Not a cheery idea. Another un-cheery topic, which also you didn’t have a chance in the military book to go into, is the nuclear dilemma. The book is admittedly at the outset a book about conventional forces, not nuclear forces, because as [co-author] Bill Lind and I point out, if you ever get to a situation where you’re using nuclear forces, deterrence has failed in fact. And therefore none of it matters anyway. I have taken a somewhat different tack for several years on the nuclear question from traditional liberals and progressives and that is that the focus of arms control policy for 20 or 25 years has been on numbers and what I have tried to stress is that we need to refocus on the prevention of use of nuclear weapons, which is a different “I don’t rule out that .. . the Administration would negotiate some comprehen sive arms control agreement with the Soviet Union, and invade Nicaragua.” question. Increasingly, I think the danger of the nuclear arms race is not in the overall numbers, although they are horrendous; it is in the accidental or miscalculated use of those weapons. In other words if you had a nuclear freeze that halted all production of nuclear weapons or even a comprehensive agreement which reduced them by a third, you’d still have the problem, depending on what kind of weapons were left, of the accidental or miscalculated use of those weapons, particularly in a time of crisis. And we have no comprehensive policy towards that, as a nation right now. Certainly there is no international regime. And what does that mean? It means freezing the production of things like plutonium, it means joint crisis monitoring systems, with the Soviets and others, it means holding [down] proliferation of nuclear weapons and materials, a whole series of . . . kind of a new arms control agenda. That goes beyond the traditional Salt II, Salt III, START, numerical agendas. Under the current administration it seems, to me at least, just as frightening that they would be used not by accident. And in fact any administration where the tensions with the Soviet Union and the root problems are still there, you would need something more than precautions against accidental use. Well, I agree, but that’s a political problem. I mean the solution to that is to elect a president and an administration which is less inclined to use those weapons. If you elect a president like Reagan and reelect him with his agenda, which is rearmament and outracing the Russians in production of new systems, that’s a political, not a military choice. And [there’s] very little Congress can do. If the President is going to use nuclear weapons, he’s probably going to use nuclear weapons. Is that responsive? It scares me, but I must tell you that even under this administration, as hawkish as it is, I cannot imagine well, I find it difficult to imagine the circumstances under which we would use nuclear weapons first, as a conscious policy. And;:most people do. We have in Amarillo, as you know, the final assembly plant for nuclear warheads, and you go up there and it isn’t something people are thinking much about. . . . Well, or is it? From the travels you’ve been on. . . . Oh yeah. I think people think about it, but short of a catastrophic failure of restraint, by that I mean, let’s say, let’s hypothesize a Soviet invasion of Central Europe, a Warsaw Pact invasion against NATO. And the failure of the conventional deterrent. Then you’re faced with the possibility, the very strong possibility, of the use of tactical weapons, which would then expand to a strategic exchange. That’s the most likely way in which that would happen. But I don’t think the Soviets are going to do that. I think if the Soviets invaded Central Europe, they must weigh the risk of the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons by us and what that could lead to in terms of escalation. But if you’re talking about a preemptive nuclear strike of some kind, I mean Reagan just waking up some morning, calling up Weinberger and saying “I’ve had it with these Russians, let’s blow them away.” I don’t think that’s very likely. But are you saying then that there is no need to question our present deterrence theory? Oh sure. . . . Not in favor of SDI, not in terms of the basic restructuring of our nuclear strategy, towards defense rather than deterrence. No, I think we’ve got to constantly debate and discuss it, publicly and openly, and to a degree, behind the scenes. As to whether the theory now works with cruise missiles and the dispersal of weapons systems and mobile systems, you know. Because technology has as 18 OCTOBER 24, 1986