254. Letter From the Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Council (Cleveland) to Secretary of State Rusk1
Dear Mr. Secretary:
I gather that among other uncertainties about strategic arms limitation talks with the Russians, the question is still open as to just how our bilateral negotiations will be related in practice to the consultative machinery of the North Atlantic Council. Since it is a special responsibility of mine to try to think hard about this, I want to set down for your consideration my thoughts on this matter as you prepare our national position on what may turn out to be an historic undertaking.
My net conclusion is that we can manage to meet our commitments to allied consultation in a way which avoids either interfering with the inherently bilateral character of direct negotiations or appearing to play loose with our allies. To put it the other way around, our interests and the interests of our allies in this affair can be reconciled handily in practice.
As to the interests of our allies, it is already clear from concerned conversations which my colleagues here have opened up with me that they are in no doubt whatever that when we negotiate with the Russians about the western half of the nuclear deterrent, we are negotiating about their vital national interests as well as our own. The dependence of our non-nuclear allies on our nuclear arsenal has just been copper-bottomed by the NPT; and their sense of involvement in our negotiations about [Page 643] nuclear missiles can only become more acute as the implications of this enterprise become more clear.
As for our own interests, we have the positive one of continuing to nourish western unity and the negative one of avoiding the kind of divisive and potentially ruinous hassle we had over the MLF. With a lot of hard work and very late in the day, a dangerous drift on the military side of nuclear affairs was reversed by establishing the Nuclear Planning Group; now, we have to tackle just as creatively the parallel problem on the arms control side of nuclear affairs. And surely it is deeply important to us—in domestic political, as well as foreign policy terms—to choke off that irrational but just-beneath-the-surface possibility that the European politicians and press would feel inspired to revive the specter of “nuclear complicity” by the “Soviet-American condominium.”
Our proper course in these circumstances, it seems to me, is really quite simple. Consultations in the NAC must of course be geared to progress, or lack of it, in the bilateral channel. But it is easy enough to foresee an opening phase which I should think would take us through the summer and into the early fall. In this phase, our role in the NAC should be to explain the background, the environment, and the political and technical context, without the need to predict substantive US positions before we are clear about them ourselves.
I already have speculated in the Council, along the lines of an INR analysis, about what may have inspired the Soviets to answer their mail on this subject at this moment of time. By inviting the speculations of others on the same subject, we have opened a “consultation” with no conceivable damage that I can imagine to US interests. On the other hand, I can well imagine spinning out this manner of consulting within the Alliance over the period it may take the US Government to pull itself together internally.
At a second, later stage (say, early fall) I can imagine our floating some general propositions as a basis for NAC discussion. Surely we could, without danger to our own position, invite discussion of the kinds of rather bland “principles” we wrote into the Reykjavik Declaration on Mutual Force Reductions.
At a still later stage it might help to induce a more pervasive sense of “participation” if the NPG-NDAC machinery were brought into play—not in direct relation to any specific aspect of the bilateral talks, but to review its own work on, for example, the level of assured destruction which is essential to the allied concept of nuclear deterrence.
Surely it would be futile to attempt to foresee at what point and in exactly what way we are going to need the understanding and support of our Western allies in this affair. But just as surely, in my view, we would be derelict if we did not begin the process of education on which that understanding and support eventually must rest.
[Page 644]We have persuaded our allies to continue to forego nuclear weapons by accepting NPT; we have predicted that sooner or later we are going to bring home some of our forces from Europe; we are now proposing to discuss possible limitations on the nuclear deterrent which we have persuaded them is the foundation of their security. I do not think it is alarmist to fear that out of such a sequence of events our European friends might be tempted to reassess their interests in directions which would not serve any US interests. In any event, we should certainly not risk losing any important opportunity for us to participate, via the consultative process, in their thinking about these matters.
Warmest regards, Sincerely,
- Source: Department of State, Central Files, DEF 18. Secret; Exdis. The source text is Tab B to a July 17 memorandum from Springsteen to Secretary Rusk.↩