329. Personal Note Prepared by the Deputy Secretary of State (Dam)1
I attended several lengthy meetings today with the Secretary and our State Department working group on the upcoming Geneva arms control talks. The group is composed of Paul Nitze, who has been named as the Secretary’s special adviser and who will be attending the talks with him, as well as Mike Armacost, Rick Burt, and Jack Chain. We went over several papers that had been prepared, primarily by Nitze, on the relationship of offense and defense, which is rapidly becoming the key idea behind a new approach to arms control.2 The Secretary is obviously trying to build on two ideas of the President’s. [Page 1173] The first is that it would be desirable to do away entirely with nuclear weapons. The second is that the way to get there is through a strong defense, namely the SDI program. These are radical ideas in view of the fact that deterrence, and specifically mutual assured deterrence, has been the reigning doctrine since the advent of intercontinental nuclear weapons.
[Omitted here is material unrelated to the Soviet Union.]
- Source: Department of State, Executive Secretariat, S/S–I Records, Deputy Secretary Dam’s Official Files: Lot 85D308, Personal Notes of Deputy Secretary—Kenneth W. Dam—Oct. 1984–June 1985. No classification marking. Dictated by Dam on December 10.↩
- For the final version of Nitze’s paper see Document 343.↩