Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981–1988, Volume XI, START I

46. Editorial Note

On January 12, 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced the resignation of Director of Arms Control and Disarmament Eugene Rostow and his nomination of Deputy Representative to the United Nations Kenneth Adelman as successor. (“Letter Accepting the Resignation of Eugene V. Rostow as Director of the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency,” January 12, 1983, Public Papers: Reagan, 1983, vol. I, p. 41.) Later that day, Deputy Secretary of State Kenneth Dam dictated a personal note that read in part: “This was an extraordinary day, because this was the day that the Administration chose to seek the resignation of Gene Rostow as head of ACDA. There has been a long series of difficulties between Rostow and the Administration, stemming from many different factors, some political, some psychological, and some inexplicable. Without going into all of the reasons, it was desirable that this be done rather than what appeared to have been the previous strategy of trying to force him out by indirection. The result, however, is an extraordinary situation, because Rostow’s letter of resignation, which was asked for this afternoon at 3:30 and announced publicly at 5:30, is effective immediately. This means that the next person in charge is Bob Grey, who for two years has not been able to obtain a confirmation in the Senate and has never been confirmed and therefore is not an appropriate person to head ACDA. As a result, ACDA is essentially rudderless at the present. The discussion this evening was that I might serve as acting director of ACDA until Kenneth Adelman, Rostow’s successor, can be confirmed. The alternative of letting Adelman act, even if legally possible, is that he might then get into trouble for any actions and statements he might make in the interim, and this might lead to his having difficulty with confirmation. The politics of arms control is exceedingly stormy, with the right headed by Senator Helms staunchly against any arms control agreement. It will be interesting to see how all this works out. There was in fact an arms control meeting this morning in the Secretary’s office. The Secretary is now working very hard to get up to speed on all of the INF and START issues. It’s a good thing, too, because the INF issue is turning white hot in Europe, and we will be under great pressure very soon to have a new START position. Moreover, the Rostow affair is certain to hype the issue enormously.” (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. 1982–Sept. 1983)

In a news conference on January 13, Secretary of State George Shultz announced that Reagan had named Assistant Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency James George Acting Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, pending Adelman’s confirmation, adding that Dam would “provide day-to-day policy guidance” to George and aid “in assuring that A.C.D.A’s crucial responsibility in implementing the President’s arms control policy is fulfilled.” (Bernard Gwertzman, “Shultz Says Policy Won’t Be Affected By Rostow Ouster, New York Times, January 14, 1983, p. A1)

On January 14, Dam dictated a personal note that read in part: “I had my first meeting today in my role as the overseer of ACDA. I met with the senior staff for an hour. The latter part of the hour was a discussion of the IG group dealing with the instructions to the INF delegation. It will be interesting to see how this works out. Starting next week, I’m going to try to go to ACDA twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. It will be hard to stick to that schedule.” He also noted: “We had an excellent briefing at 3:30 on START issues for the Secretary. One has to go over these issues time and again to get them fully in one’s mind. It certainly is a difficult and technical area, and unless one has a good grasp of the technical materials, it is hard to handle the interagency negotiations, which are in some ways more difficult than the negotiations with the Soviets.” (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. 1982—Sept. 1983)

On January 17, Dam dictated a personal note about a meeting of his discussion group on arms control that morning. “Bud McFarlane and General Boverie were there from the NSC, General Paul Gorman (JCS), Fred Ikle and Richard Perle (OSD), Admiral Jon Howe (PM), and Harry Rowan (CIA) were also there. This is getting to be a first-class seminar. We talked today about the compliance problem in arms control. Even though verification may identify a violation, there is still the question of how one enforces compliance. The history has been that the United States has tended to back down and not force the issue on possible violations situations. On the other hand, there apparently has not been in recent decades any example of a clear-cut violation. The evidence is always ambiguous or, more often, the Soviets are simply exploiting a loophole that they negotiated into an arms control agreement. In short, the Soviets, recognizing what they want to do in the future, have been able, by getting nasty in the endgame as the negotiations come to a close, to get enough running room so that they can do what they want to. This in my mind raises the question whether the United States, being an open society, is really in a position to negotiate an arms control agreement that does not favor the Soviet Union far more than ourselves. I had two meetings at ACDA today in my new role of giving day-to-day policy guidance. One was in the morning when I attended the staff meetings, and the second was in the afternoon when I got several briefings, one on what is going on in the interagency group on START and the other on the administrative structure and budget of ACDA.” (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. 1982—Sept. 1983)

On January 19, Dam dictated a personal note about a two-hour meeting that afternoon in Shultz’s office to discuss the U.S. position in the START negotiations in Geneva. “We spent quite a long time talking about the specifics of arms control and gradually getting back to the basic theoretical and philosophical issues about arms control. Is the purpose of arms control to reduce the state of armaments, and if so, is it possible? Or is it only possible to prevent unlimited growth in particular areas? History does seem to show that arms control agreements are quite unsuccessful in reducing existing armaments, except possibly in areas where the arms are outmoded, and are rather more successful in limiting what countries don’t want to do anyway. The fact of the matter is that the drive for arms control agreements is largely political, and while it may have some economic sense (and even that is limited by the fact that the armaments subject to control are only a small percentage of total defense budgets), the military achievements of arms control over the last dozen years have been relatively restricted. Nevertheless, the drive for arms control agreements in most democratic countries is very strong, and the psychological results may be good or bad depending upon the political temper of the individual countries. On the one hand, arms control agreements may lead to reduced international tensions, but on the other hand, they may, as critics have charged, lead to a lulling of one’s critical senses and indeed to a kind of unilateral disarmament attitude. Specifically, critics have charged that the arms control negotiations of the 1970s led the United States unilaterally to reduce its spending on defense while the Soviet Union went steaming ahead with expenditures on defense that increased by about 5% a year in real terms, a rate which compounded over time has resulted in a massive Soviet buildup at the very time when U.S. Government expenditures have fallen in real terms. Moreover, the Soviets have very modern weapons, whereas the United States has strategic weapons that are, on the whole, quite old. One statistic that I have seen says that over half of Soviet strategic weapons are under five years of age, whereas over half of U.S. strategic weapons are more than fifteen years of age. As President Reagan has said, our bomber force is on average older than the pilots that fly the planes.” (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. 1982—Sept. 1983)

On January 20, Dam dictated a personal note about a meeting on START that morning with President’s Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs Robert McFarlane, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Fred Ikle, and Director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs Jonathan Howe. “Ikle came in with an odd proposition. He suggested that if we didn’t get into a fight about this round, perhaps we could make some private arrangement on the START position which wouldn’t have to go through the IG process. However, what he was really suggesting is that we could postpone any movement at all in our START position until next winter. Under a little pressure, specifically the suggestion that that would make it impossible in this term to have any START agreement, he suggested that maybe the movement could come next summer. He gave lots of reasons why no movement was possible in the IG process, but the real argument was that we shouldn’t try to have a START agreement at all, or if we did have one, it should be of a completely different kind than that in the President’s decision of last spring. Bud McFarlane, speaking for the NSC, made it clear that the President did want to have a START agreement. I’m not sure where we came out, but I found it one of the most curious examples of the kind of maneuvering that goes on at the top level of government.” (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. 1982—Sept. 1983)