Paul Nitze Interview (page: 2 / 9) Presidential Medal of Freedom	Print Interview

In the talks between President Reagan and Chairman Gorbachev, there was talk of even more sweeping changes. Almost a complete elimination of nuclear weapons. To what extent were the advisors on both sides involved in that? Were you surprised when you found out what the President was discussing with Gorbachev?

Paul Nitze: That all came about at the luncheon the next day after this long all-night session. The morning session did not make much progress. Then it was decided to continue the session for one more afternoon. It was agreed to have a luncheon between (Soviet Foreign minister) Edvard Shevardnadze and Mr. Shultz, and each one could have some advisors with them. I was on Mr. Shultz's left-hand side and Bob Leonard was on his right.

Mr. Shultz was trying to summarize the discussion so far between the President and Mr. Gorbachev, and what issues remained to be decided. Shevardnadze interrupted and said, "There is no use in doing that. There is only one issue which we should be discussing. And that is whether or not you agree not to deploy SDI for a period of ten years." That caused people on both sides of Mr. Shultz to begin trying to work out how one would respond to that.

Leonard, and the admiral who was his boss, came up with a piece of paper which they had also cleared with Richard Perle, who was sitting on that end. It was a paper which proposed that we would be prepared to follow a 50 percent reduction in long-range strategic weapons, which included bombers and submarine-based missiles and so forth, in the first five years, but following with an agreement for both sides to eliminate all the remaining ballistic missiles in the second five years. If we could get rid of all ballistic missiles, we would also agree not to deploy defenses against them. This was agreed to by the President, and everyone at the meeting on the U.S. side, that this was how we should answer the Soviets, and that is what the President did propose.

But in the discussion, Gorbachev kept insisting that the only thing that he would agree to was the total elimination of all strategic systems, not just ballistic missiles. At one point, the President got somewhat confused about the distinction between strategic systems and ballistic missiles, and I think he led Mr. Gorbachev to believe that he, the President, also inclined to the elimination of the remaining strategic systems in the second five-year period. Mr. Shultz quickly corrected him and pointed out to him that his earlier position, the one he really meant, was that there had to be an elimination of ballistic missiles on two sides, not strategic systems. That distinction is very important indeed. Because we were fully equal to the Soviets with respect to the non-ballistic missile systems. We had better bombers, better systems of all kinds other than ballistic. Their great advantage was in these big, heavy ballistic missiles. So if we could get rid of all the ballistic missiles, we would have been way ahead of the game.

Did you get a sense at that meeting of Gorbachev as a gambler? Someone willing to change things in a radical way in order to enhance his own position?

Paul Nitze: No, I didn't get that impression. I got the feeling that he was being very careful to stick to the position that he had outlined before the meeting, so he wasn't about to get misled into agreeing to what we were proposing. What we were proposing technically met the demand he had made. We were prepared to live without the deployment of SDI (the Strategic Defense Initiative -- a space-based defense system) for ten years, but the conditions under which we were prepared to do that were very much to our advantage, not to the Soviet advantage.

That's what caused Gorbachev to walk out. On the U.S. side it was Gorbachev's definition of what was a laboratory that caused the President to say "No, I will not agree." Gorbachev was insisting that work could only be done in a laboratory, and a laboratory was a thing in four walls, and that wasn't our understanding of where one did experiments, particularly with space systems. One did them in the atmosphere. We were talking about laboratory experiments, but to have them just within four walls seemed to the President to be intolerable.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When the meeting broke up, and Mr. Gorbachev got up and left his meeting with the President and all the Soviet team followed after Mr. Gorbachev. I was standing at the bottom of the stairs. The meeting between the President and Gorbachev was on the ground floor and the room where we secondary people had been meeting - and been up for 48 hours - was up above it. I'd come down the stairs to be there to see what was going on, and I was standing right on the bottom step when the Soviet team walked out the door from this hearing room on the ground floor. The last person out was Marshal Akhromeyev. He turned to me and he said that, "It wasn't my fault, Mr. Nitze." What he meant by that was the breakup hadn't been due to his demanding it. He hadn't wanted to see the meeting break up in the way it did.

Did you ever have the chance to discuss this afterward with the others who participated in these negotiations?

Paul Nitze: I have.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Shortly after Reykjavik, I sat down with Marshal Akhromeyev. Marshal Akhromeyev is ten years younger than I, but I think he looks ten years older. I was complimenting Marshal Akhromeyev on his stamina during that all-night session because he never tired at all. He returned the compliment. So, Marshal Akhromeyev got along very well together personally, in part because we'd had this intense experience. Very few people are locked in really intense negotiations beginning at eight o'clock (in the evening) and lasting until 6:30 the next morning; not everybody has that opportunity.

We are now (1990) seeing a tremendous change in our relationship with the Soviets and inside the Soviet Union. What has prompted the change?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Paul Nitze: The Soviets themselves have come to a conclusion that they'd gone too far, devoted too much of the gross national product, of their productive capabilities, to this contest. After all, their economy basically is perhaps half the size of that of the United States. They've got more people and just as many resources as we have, but it is not as an advanced economy as ours. But, for them to put the effort that they put into it, which really is as great or greater than the effort we put into it, and it meant that instead of, when we have put 5.5 to 6 percent of our Gross National Product in defense, they were putting 25 to 30 percent of their Gross National Product into defense. That was so good, so demanding, required such enormous sacrifices on such a great percentage of their population, that it was intolerable after a period of time. And, it's intolerable still today. It's hard to see how they are going to come back from damage which was done by that excessive effort.

Let's talk about Gorbachev. Tell us when you first encountered Gorbachev and what your view was of him then. How has that view evolved?

Paul Nitze: I first encountered Mr. Gorbachev as a part of Secretary Shultz's team when he began negotiating directly with Mr. Gorbachev. I guess that was in '85 or '86. Thereafter I was with Mr. Shultz whenever he negotiated with Mr. Gorbachev and with Shevardnadze. We used to go every other month to Moscow to see Shevardnadze for the foreign ministers' meeting, but Gorbachev would always see us and give us four or five hours of conversation. When Mr. Gorbachev came to Washington, of course, we would see both men at those meetings.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It was a very frequent matter to talk to Mr. Gorbachev and I think I got to know him as well as the next man on our side. I was very impressed with him right away. He seemed to me a very intelligent man. He was very lucid, clear, and didn't let himself be pushed about. He knew what he wanted to do, was forceful in the way he presented it and I came to the conclusion that if he had been an American he would have risen to some high position in the United States as a Director of Finance or some position. He was a true strategist who had some idea as to where he wanted the Soviet Union to be, and some idea as to how to get from where the Soviet Union was to where he thought would be a better position for it to be. I estimated what he was going to do next on the basis of my appreciation of him as a great strategist. And, I found that every time I was wrong. I never got it right once during those years when I looked upon him as being a strategist. So, I decided there was something wrong with my hypothesis as to what kind of a man he was and what made him tick. One would do better if one had started from the premise that he was a great tactician, that he knew how to see the divisions that existed amongst his opponents and concentrate on one group of them and get them off in some isolated position, then hop on them, suddenly by surprise and totally do them in and eliminate them from the landscape so he didn't have to worry about that group any more. After that decision, I found that my estimates as to what he would do in the future were right about 50 percent of the time, but only 50 percent of the time. I still didn't have it right. Then, watching him when he came to the United States, went first to Canada and then came and talked before our Congress -- this was not too long ago -- he was full of self-confidence. He wasn't at all discouraged about anything, even though everything was falling apart back in the USSR at the same time. How could that be? He was too intelligent both as a strategist and tactician to not be concerned about that. I came to the conclusion he was neither a strategist nor a tactician. He was, in fact, a Zen Buddhist, that he believed in "the Force," and he believed that the Force was with him, and that he was closer to understanding the Force and the Force was going to carry him on to great victories, no matter what the strategic or tactical situation happened to be. That's why he radiated such confidence at all times. And, from that moment on, my predictions as to what he was going to do next have been almost totally right.

Except in recent months, I have changed my view. The Force isn't wholly with him. His timing is wrong. He should have been moving more rapidly in order to stay with the Force. I think he has gotten slow in his reactions and it is not necessarily in tune with it. He was very adept at staying on the top, and now it's gotten a little bit ahead of him.

What about the Strategic Defense Initiative -- the space-based defense proposal some people called "Star Wars?" Did you see SDI as an actual defense system against the Soviets, or was it really more effective as a psychological and economic lever against the Soviets?

Paul Nitze: I was never quite sure the ideas behind SDI could be translated into workable military systems. I made a speech outlining what I thought the criteria must be before we really should go into SDI deployment. The systems had to be effective -- had to be able to shoot down these missiles. It had to be cost effective, it had to be less costly for us to add to our SDI deployment than it would be for the Soviet side to add to its offensive, to defeat SDI. And it had to be defensible against a direct attack, because that would be the logical course for the Soviets, to direct their initial effort at defeating the SDI and destroying the components thereof. Those were the major elements: that it be effective, that it be cost effective at the margin, that it be defensible against a concentrated attack against SDI itself. I outlined it in this speech, and it met with wide approval. They weren't original ideas, I borrowed them from Admiral Watkins and he from somebody else, but I think they were more succinct and more clearly stated in that speech of mine than elsewhere. They became known as the "Nitze Criteria," and they were adopted by the Reagan administration and by Congress, and they are now part of the law, so it is illegal to begin the deployment of any SDI system unless it meets those three criteria.

The Soviets were terribly preoccupied with our SDI program. Was their fear that we would actually come up with a workable system, or was their fear that the competition to come up with a system would cost them so dearly that they would not be able to keep up?

Paul Nitze: Aren't the two interrelated? If they can't keep up, then we might really have an effective system, if we have mastered the technology.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Mr. Gorbachev, I believe, was truly impressed with the tenacity and the will with which Mr. Reagan continued to back SDI against the most ardent threats, explanations, opposition that Mr. Gorbachev could advance against it. I think he finally came to the conclusion that Mr. Reagan could not be that determined to preserve SDI unless he knew something about the SDI program that he -- Gorbachev and his advisors -- did not know. And so, he took it very seriously indeed. Perhaps more seriously than I thought, having tried to get the scientists to explain to me how it was going to work -- being unable to get them to tell me how they were going to meet these criteria. He (Gorbachev) was more persuaded about its potential efficacy than I was.

Gorbachev was convinced because the President seemed convinced?

Paul Nitze: Yes, the president was convinced by people that I don't think should have been able to convince him, but that's another matter.

You don't find the case for SDI nearly as persuasive as its most ardent supporters, do you?

Paul Nitze: I don't, no. Because I don't think they have come up with a program which would meet these three criteria, even if it worked as designed.

Paul Nitze Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9