234. Memorandum From the Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State on Arms Control Matters (Nitze) to Secretary of State Shultz1
SUBJECT
- Luncheon with General Herres—November 27
As we were leaving the meeting with the JCS,2 General Herres asked me whether I would have lunch with him; I agreed. To save time, I showed him a copy of the “Draft Instructions to the Geneva Negotiators”. I explained that it was an effort on my part to get a process of organized thought on this subject, there being so few days left before the Summit. I told him you had not had a chance to see it prior to your meeting with the Chiefs; I did not leave a copy with him.
He approved of the presentation of the sub-limits question saying the Chiefs did not care about an ICBM sub-ceiling but from a negotiating standpoint, it was wise to leave it in with the 4800 number as trading material. He was much interested in the treatment of the counting rule for long-range ALCMs. He thought the right number might be eight but agreed with the idea of an initial position of six per bomber, thus allowing some trading room.
It was his view that if the Soviets wish to cheat, they could do so as easily with non-mobile ICBMs as they could with mobiles. If they could covertly build additional missiles, they could also construct a number of concrete slabs adequate to serve as launching pads, transporter vehicles not easily associateable with a given missile, and cranes capable of erecting such missiles not distinguishable from other mobile cranes.
He suggested that SLCMs just be left out of any agreement. I said I doubted the Soviets would permit that to happen, that we needed a better posture than that.
On the section dealing with the Defense and Space Treaty, he said he favored making a distinction between non-withdrawal and non-deployment. He favored a five-year period of non-withdrawal and an additional five-year period of non-deployment. I explained why I thought it unlikely the Soviets would agree to such a position and why [Page 1013] I thought it better to push the negotiating problem forward to the period beginning no later than 1989 or 1990.
His position on Filingsdale phased array radar is similar to that of the other Chiefs. He said that no one built big mobile dish radars any more and that he doubted the heavy precision cast parts for such a radar could be obtained except at great expense. He thought it best to have the Soviets agree that they would not resume construction of Krasnyosk and permit us on-site inspection to see that this would not happen.
He said that in sum, he thought that we were inches away from being able to work out a START Treaty. As he saw it, there were only two real issues: one was the problem of verification; the other was the relationship of a START Treaty to the ABM Treaty and SDI testing.
On the latter point, we had an extended discussion on whether kinetic kill vehicles were based upon other physical principles. I noted that they were included in the Soviet list of “devices” and thus were treated by the Soviet side in the same manner as devices based upon “other physical principles.”