Washington, D.C., 8 November 2001 – The most difficult topic
to be discussed by Presidents Bush and Putin at the Crawford, Texas, summit
next week, now that Russia is an ally in anti-terrorism operations, will
be the Bush administration’s intention to withdraw from, abrogate or rewrite
(depending on what is negotiable) the ABM Treaty of 1972. Newly declassified
documents posted on the Web today by George Washington University’s National
Security Archive reveal the previously secret inside story of the ABM negotiations,
explaining why the U.S. and the USSR agreed that the Treaty was in their
best interest, and how it specifically restricts what the Bush administration
can do on missile defense (posted at <www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB60>).
Other U.S. administrations have chafed at the ABM Treaty but the Bush
White House is the first to consider withdrawal. As national security
adviser Condoleeza Rice has explained, the “treaty is so restrictive that
anything you do that isn’t ground-based that you use in an ABM mode, so
to speak, is a violation of the treaty” (Los Angeles Times, 7/27/2001).
New documents from the Nixon administration, including a never-before published
record of one of national security adviser Henry Kissinger's back-channel
telephone conversations with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, show how
the ABM Treaty took the form and content it has, and why its architects
found it useful to negotiate such a restrictive agreement. The documents
reveal that:
*Nixon and Kissinger initially opposed strict limits on ABMs in order
to strengthen U.S. retaliatory capability against a Soviet nuclear attack;
* The Soviets shocked Nixon and Kissinger by accepting a U.S. proposal
to limit ABMs to defense of national capitals [national command authority/NCA],
thereby undermining U.S. ABM plans presented to Congress;
* Kissinger would later profess to be puzzled by the initial U.S. offer:
"I can't understand how it happened that we accepted NCA ... I often make
mistakes but usually I know why afterward";
*One of thorniest negotiating issues was a U.S. initiative for a ban
on space-based and advanced laser-type ABM systems, which the Soviet military
was reluctant to accept; later the Reagan administration tried to reinterpret
treaty language on "future" weapons systems in order to allow SDI development
* Nixon’s negotiators accepted limitations on future U.S. freedom of
action as a necessary trade-off to prevent Soviet development of Ms and
reduce incentives for both sides to ratchet up nuclear arsenals
According to Ambassador Raymond L. Garthoff, a member of the original
SALT negotiating team and an historian of detente associated with the Brookings
Institution, "these well-chosen documents give valuable insight into the
SALT negotiating process, not only the Kissinger back channel to the Soviet
leadership but also the front channel that produced the ABM treaty."