Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981–1988, Volume I, Foundations of Foreign Policy

162. Memorandum From Secretary of Defense Weinberger to President Reagan¹

Washington, June 23, 1983

SUBJECT

• Goals and Priorities (U)

(U) When you took office you established an action agenda that included:

• Significant movement toward reducing the risk of nuclear war through an active program to modernize our deterrent and to negotiate significant reductions in the levels of nuclear armaments.
• A reversal in the decline of our military capability vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and a restoration of the Nation’s margin of safety.
• A revitalization of our role as the leader of the Free World.
• An increase in the security and freedom of the world community, based on the rule of law and the inalienable rights of the individual.

(U) This Administration has made major progress toward carrying out this agenda. It is appropriate that we now reflect on our progress to date and to lay out our program to finish the task that we boldly undertook when you began your Administration.

(C) The following thoughts represent the considered views of this Department in setting priorities and an agenda for continuing our progress. We have sought to incorporate objectives that both follow-up on current activities and break new ground as well. Broadly speaking, we have grouped our proposed initiatives into four major categories:

• Reducing the Risk of Nuclear War
• Maintaining the Defense Buildup to Restore the Nation’s Margin of Safety
• Supporting our Policies Worldwide
• Broad Initiatives, with a National Security Content, to Reinforce America’s Image Abroad and at Home

REDUCING THE RISK OF NUCLEAR WAR

(U) Your Administration has devoted a new and carefully balanced effort to reduce the risk of nuclear war. We have successfully launched our strategic forces modernization programs and arms reduction initiatives in order to achieve this goal.

(C) Your strategic forces modernization program strengthens deterrence, enhances our credibility as a negotiating partner in arms reduction talks, and improves our image as a leader of the Free World.

(C) It is important that we made the Nation more fully aware of our progress in achieving better command, control, and communications for our strategic nuclear forces. While these systems account for a small fraction of our strategic force costs, they are vital in ensuring that we have a safe and effective deterrent.

• The issue about the safety of command and control, fueled by the recent “War Games” movie,² could be turned to our advantage as we publicize planned and accomplished improvements to ensure firm control over our forces. We could demonstrate how your initiatives provide for greater nuclear safety in peacetime, as well as control, survivability, and responsiveness of our forces in the event of attack.

(C) We should also highlight our ongoing efforts in the realm of space and strategic defense, as a follow-up to your recent speech. We must continue to publicize our efforts to expand our deterrent to include a defensive capability, explaining the rationality of this approach and its consistency with our overall deterrence and arms reduction policies.

• We should utilize space-related events, such as your welcome of the Space Shuttle astronauts, for a Presidential address on these themes, as well as on the importance of our other space initiatives including the Combined Space Operations Center.
• Another speech by you on your strategic defense initiatives could include some of the actual technological problems involved and possible solutions. For example—you could point out that while we can track and destroy some Soviet missiles now, we need enormously increased computer abilities to locate, track on thousands of Soviet missiles and then fire assembled weapons to destroy the Soviet missiles before they get into our atmosphere. It can be done but it is a big job.

(C) This Administration can count among its major achievements the formulation of arms reduction initiatives that in both breadth and scope go well beyond mere limitations to the growth of both strategic and intermediate range nuclear systems. We must maintain these initiatives and explain our premises to the American people.

• You might utilize the State of the Union address as an opportunity to highlight two key concepts that govern our policy:
• That we are determined to raise the nuclear threshold, and that nuclear arms reduction, coupled with a strong conventional force capability provides the best hope of doing so.
• That we cannot achieve anything in this regard without Soviet cooperation, and that while we have modified our proposals to retain maximum negotiating flexibility, the Soviets must, of their part, become less rigid if a meaningful agreement is to be achieved.

MAINTAINING THE DEFENSE BUILDUP TO RESTORE THE NATION’S MARGIN OF SAFETY

(C) A key element of any strategy for raising and keeping the nuclear threshold as high as possible, both in NATO and elsewhere, is the readiness and combat staying power of our conventional combat forces. Thus far—in the first two years of this Administration—we have successfully identified the Nation’s defense requirements and received from the Congress necessary funding to get a start on meeting our national security objectives. This task has not been without a good deal of effort and political will. Our military strategy is balanced in terms of priorities between readiness and sustainability, and modernization and investment in new technology. Without continued adequate funding in the decade of the 1980s we could lose this balance.

(C) We must persevere in our determination to improve our own combat readiness and encourage our Allies to do the same. Similarly, we must set the example for our Allies, by ensuring that our own forces could fight a conventional war as long as could the Warsaw Pact.

(C) We have achieved a good rate of increase in the level of funding in this area for both active and reserve forces. This must continue. Our forces are now becoming better trained, better equipped, and more mobile, thanks to more and better manpower programs and the availability of additional reserve stocks, spare parts, and equipment. We have also emphasized improved airlift and sealift for our rapidly deployed forces.

(C) As part of our efforts to modernize our conventional forces, this Administration is taking the lead in pressing the Alliance to employ new technologies to enhance NATO’s conventional capabilities and begin to offset the Soviet quantitative superiority and qualitative improvement that threaten to undermine the balance of forces in Europe.

(U) We should take the lead in developing a public recognition of the success of the Defense Department in improving the efficiency of its operation and acquisition management and the strengthening of the industrial base. In addition, we should stress the contributions the Defense Department has made to enhancing our industrial base and its responsiveness in peacetime and during any mobilization.

• You might also wish to visit some major defense industry factories or shipyards, and in a speech call attention to the vital need for us to develop an industrial base that could respond as we did in 1941.

(U) Your Administration can point with great pride to its successful effort to enhance the public image of a voluntary military career. The pressure on the All-Volunteer Force³ will increase as the economy improves and as the population segment from which recruits are drawn shrinks during the second half of this decade. People serving in the Armed Forces today do so with great pride and with much greater respect and recognition from the general public. It is important, therefore, to maintain the commitment to providing our forces with levels of pay and benefits that will continue to make service in the military a career that is rightly viewed as one that is not only challenging but worthy of respect by the population at large.

• The “Army of Excellence” program (which seeks to achieve excellence in individual soldiers, their leaders, units and equipment) could be highlighted as one attempt to instill excellence into all aspects of military activity. It is this quality of our soldiers as well as their ability to think and act for themselves in emergency, and the ways in which our system of freedom encourages the development of individual initiatives and skills that distinguish our soldiers from those of the Soviet Union, who do not have the benefits of this tradition of freedom, and individual liberty. You could stress this theme during a visit to a field training exercise and to events such as the roll-out of the first B–1B bomber. In addition, this Administration should reaffirm the importance of physical fitness in the American way of life, capitalizing upon current Service fitness programs and the holding of the 1984 Summer Olympics in the United States.⁴
• There are a number of ways in which you could personally involve yourself in reinforcing and reaffirming the Administration’s commitment to people/fitness programs. You might use the occasion of a visit to the Fort Sheridan, Illinois, Headquarters of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, or to other Service recruiting centers, to make a major speech outlining our ongoing commitment to maintaining high quality, volunteer Armed Forces. Alternatively, you might wish to combine the themes of maintaining a quality force with physical fitness by visiting the Army Fitness Center at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. Finally, the physical fitness theme could be voiced in a major address at the opening of the Summer Olympics.

SUPPORTING OUR POLICIES WORLDWIDE

(C) The U.S. public shares our basic concerns about the stability of Central and Latin America. But we must develop a more coherent approach to promoting greater stability in these regions. This approach should focus on social reforms as well as economic and military assistance.

• I have referred to Central America as part of “mainland” America. We should reinforce this theme at every opportunity. A Presidential visit to Costa Rica could be particularly effective in this regard. Costa Rica is an “embattled democracy.” Its problems could evoke sympathy by the American public, and a visit would demonstrate to both our own public and to Latin America and the world that we are committed to the defense of those values upon which this Nation was built.

(C) We must continue to strive for a settlement of the Middle East conflict, but we must be under no illusions as to the imminence of our success.

• One accomplishment we can point to now is the success we have achieved in training the Lebanese Armed Forces, an ongoing effort that can only enhance that country’s changes of achieving stability once foreign forces have left its territory.

INITIATIVES, WITH A NATIONAL SECURITY CONTENT, THAT ENHANCE AMERICA’S IMAGE

(U) There are a number of steps that this Administration can take that would project a more positive image of U.S. policies and values, thereby improving our political and security relations with overseas states, notably in the Third World. Examples of such initiatives include:

• Establishment of a bipartisan commission to plan observances of the many bicentennial anniversaries that will take place between 1983—the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Paris, that ended our revoluntionary war—and in 1992—the 500th Anniversary of the discovery of America.⁵
• You might wish to use the occasion of the October 1983 bicentennial of the Treaty of Paris to have a ceremony in the Rose Garden, in the presence of the Ambassadors of the U.K. and France, where you could announce your support for the bicentennial commission. The more we can reinforce a sense of history, particularly in our young people, the more our Nation will understand and support the policies we are trying to implement.
• Finally, and importantly, DoD is sensitive to the enormous toll in wrecked lives, sapped human productivity, violence and other crime that this Nation bears as a result of the trade in illegal drugs—both smuggling drugs across our borders and the clandestine, avaricious network that distributes drugs within the country. Defense has already rendered substantial assistance to the U.S. Coast Guard and civilian law enforcement agencies in their attempt to break this illegal drug traffic. We will of course, continue to respond to the leadership of our Commander in Chief in the war on drugs. You may wish to highlight the role of Defense in this regard, consistent with current law, as you continue to voice your opposition to this menace to our society.

Cap Weinberger

1. Source: Reagan Library, Executive Secretariat, NSC Subject File, Goals and Priorities (June 1983). Confidential. A stamped notation indicates that it was received in the White House on June 23 at 4:20 p.m.
2. Written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes and directed by John Badham, the film, starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, and Ally Sheedy, was released in the United States on June 3. In it, Broderick played a computer hacker who accessed a U.S. military supercomputer and programmed it to run a nuclear war simulation.
3. The Nixon administration established a draft lottery system in 1969 and renewed the system in 1971. In 1972, Nixon announced that the All-Volunteer Force would replace the Selective Service System by July 1973. See Foreign Relations, 1969–1976, vol. XXXIV, National Security Policy, 1969–1972, Documents 131, 133, 135, 138, 138, and 228.
4. Scheduled to take place in Los Angeles, July 28–August 12, 1984.
5. On January 26, Senator Orrin Hatch (R–Utah) introduced a bill (S. 188) co-sponsored by eight senators, proposing the establishment of a Presidential Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution. On September 29, the President signed P.L. 98–101 into law. For the text of his statement, see Public Papers: Reagan, 1983, Book II, p. 1390. There is no indication that a broader bipartisan commission, designed to coordinate all of these commemorations, was established.