IF YOU COULD JUST EXPLAIN TO US WHAT YOUR POSITION WAS AND HOW YOU STILL MAINTAINED AN INTEREST IN DEFENSE MATTERS UNDER THE CALLAGHAN --

Well as you know, I was Defense Secretary in Britain for six years since '64 till '70 and worked very closely with Bob McNamara from the United States and Helmut Schmidt was Defense Secretary then in Germany on the whole of set of problems to do with NATO nuclear strategy and of course, nuclear disarmament. And when I went back into government as Chancellor of the Exchequer in '74 for five years, um, besides being on the normal weekly meetings of the defense and overseas policy committee of the cabinet, Jim Callaghan, as Prime Minister, put me on a very small committee dealing with nuclear weapons problems which was not set up until I think 1977, mainly at the time uh, to consider our view on a comprehensive test ban treaty and our view as to whether the so-called forward based systems like the American bombers in Europe, and the British and French strategic um, nuclear forces should be included in SALT III. At that time we expected the SALT II agreement to be signed and ratified, and negotiations for another strategic arms limitation treaty to start the following year.

YOU'VE WRITTEN A LOT ABOUT MILITARY DOCTRINE. FROM YOUR EXPERIENCE AS A DEFENSE MINISTER, HOW SERIOUSLY DO YOU THINK POLITICIANS GENERALLY TAKE MILITARY DOCTRINES LIKE THAT...

I think most politicians haven't the slightest idea what any of these words mean. And I'm sorry to say most countries, even the defense ministers who are the link if you like between this area of policy and the government, cabinet uh, are in office for too short a time really to bother mastering it. In many European countries defense ministers tend to be ex-military people who hold their job as functionaries almost with very little political clout. Uh, in Britain, the conservatives had nine defense ministers in thirteen years uh, during the um... Macmillan uh, Heath period and Mrs. Thatcher's had uh, five in eight years. And defense strategy, for somebody who's not studied it at all in advance, is a very, very difficult thing to get hold of. The words are different from the words you use in normal life. It's almost as difficult if you like as learning word processing.

YOU'VE REFERRED TO A DECISION TO (?), BEING TAKEN BY A NUCLEAR MAFIA. WHY DID YOU USE THAT PHRASE?

Well, because since politicians don't have the time, energy and sometimes capacity to master this area of policy, they tend to hand it over to a small group of middle-ranking officials and middle-ranking stop officers who concentrate on this issue and who form part of an international trade union or mafia of similar officials in other countries, and really, develop the whole thing entirely on their own without much reference to governments. And if governments are told about their decisions they normally rubber stamp them. They, they play a very little active role. Uh, it was different a little bit in my time because I'd been in the army for six years in the second world war, and incidentally, the disappearance from politics of people who've actual experience in fighting is rather important because if you've ever been a soldier...in a real war, you know that Murphy's Law is supreme. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. You always lose control of events when the fighting actually starts. But in my time, we had McNamara who played an important role in the second world war in the American strategic bomber survey. Like Paul Nitze uh, who had also played a similar role. Uh, we Helmut Schmidt in Germany and myself in Britain who had been writing and thinking about strategic problems in a small intelligentsia mafia uh... from mainly, almost entirely Germany, Britain, and above all, the United States. So that in a sense we came into office at least knowing what the problems were and understanding the language.

I'LL JUST ASK YOU ABOUT THE TERM INTELLIGENTSIA MAFIA. AND THE PERIOD THAT WE'RE REALLY LOOKING AT INVOLVING THE (?). EVERYBODY NOW SAID THAT IT STARTED WITH SCHMIDT'S SPEECH, THE ISS IN 1977. WHAT DO YOU THINK WAS REALLY ON HIS MIND WHEN HE MADE THAT SPEECH? WHAT WAS HIS MAJOR NUCLEAR CONCERN?

Let me say two things. First of all, Helmut Schmidt, for whom I have the greatest admiration -- I think he was the last great statesman in Europe; we haven't got any at the moment -- uh, he had a disconcerting habit of thinking aloud about a problem without thinking the problem through. Uh, and the reason he thought aloud about this problem was that he had been dreadfully let by President Carter over the neutron bomb. Uh, Carter had... uh, persuaded Schmidt that the neutron bomb should be deployed in Germany. Schmidt had gone through hell persuading his own cabinet to accept this. And then Carter suddenly decided not to deploy it at all. So Schmidt disliked and distrusted Carter, and he didn't like what he saw as the risk that the Americans would fail to protect Europe in their arms negotiations against a threat from the east, and he was particularly worried when the Russians started deploying the SS-20, very accurate uh, multi-warheaded missile in place of the old SS-4s and 5s. And he referred in broad terms to this as a danger, in a speech in London although I'm told that the particular words in this speech were written into the text at the last minute in the taxi from the German embassy by the man who was then his adviser on foreign affairs, later ambassador in London, Mr. Rittles (?). And uh, he didn't know then what he wanted NATO to do, but Carter was determined that he should say what he wanted. Uh, in a way it was Carter's revenge on Schmidt for Schmidt's rude remarks about Carter. And the whole period -- I was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Callaghan government -- uh, neither we nor the Americans could get Schmidt to say precisely what he wanted Western Europe to do. He finally made up his mind, as you know later in the summer, and that was the beginning of the (?). But I think it's important to recognize that this argument between politicians was started by European politician, Helmut Schmidt who was then chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, was running parallel with an argument inside the mafia which was a very theological argument. Now, when McNamara and I were defense ministers in the middle '60s we had a long argument in NATO about how to replace the doctrine of massive strategic nuclear retaliation with something, which was palatable to the Americans in terms of risk. Uh, McNamara really wanted to do without nuclear weapons altogether in the defense of Europe. The Germans didn't want to move from massive retaliation. I tried to develop a compromise between them, which was the doctrine of flexible response in which NATO would fight with conventional weapons until it was in danger of being overrun and maximize its conventional capability, and then introduce nuclear weapons in stages, giving the Russians a chance at each stage to stop or see NATO escalate. Um. And the NATO officials who went to work on this policy after we developed it was one of the few examples where politicians played the central role in developing a strategy. They took it very seriously and they said you've got to have enough rungs on this ladder of escalation, and there'd be something missing unless there were land based missiles in Western Europe parallel with the land based missiles which would hit Western Europe from the Soviet Union. And this group, the high level group as it was called, was essentially the NATO mafia I was talking about. They wanted these weapons whether or not the Russians had SS-20s as a matter of fact, and that has become very clear in the argument over the double zero option as it developed. So far as the politicians are concerned, like uh... uh, Callaghan, Mrs. Thatcher, uh, Schmidt, Chancellor Kohl and uh, Carter uh, the important thing was the SS-20. It was a new, very accurate missile which uh, posed a much more serious threat to Western Europe than its predecessors. Uh, but for the -- for the military and the intellectual mafia, it wasn't the point. The point was they felt that there should be something between uh, shorter range battle, and battlefield nuclear weapons and the uh, long-range weapons. You see, at that time and since, the NATO supreme allied commander has had allocated to him a lot of war heads from America's Poseidon and NATO Trident submarines to deal with any local threat. But the mafia didn't believe that that was enough. And their decision to go for land based missiles was independent of the SS-20. On the other hand, the politicians could only sell the uh, deployment of cruise and ...in Western Europe uh, by reference to the threat from the SS-20 so that when in the end the Russians agreed to get rid of all medium and short ranged missiles uh, the... defense mafia was left very, very unhappy indeed. And then NATO supreme allied commander in Europe, General Rogers, made this very clear that uh, whether or not the Russians had the SS-20s, Western Europe needed land based missiles and the British government took the same position initially until they realized it was so un... it was so unpopular in the coming British general election they decided to fall into the other option.

YOU'VE WRITTEN THAT FLEXIBLE RESPONSE IS NO LONGER A TENABLE POSITION. WHY DO YOU SAY THAT?

Well there are many reasons. First of all, those of us who devised flexible response didn't realize at that time, although many of the scientists did, that the first explosions of nuclear weapons on the battle field would black out communications for hundreds of miles around. And therefore you'd lose control of the battle. And for this reason alone uh, the gradual escalation from one level of nuclear weapons to another was nonsense. Uh, secondly, it became clear when we looked at the various options, the ladders on the... lad... uh, steps on the ladder of escalation in the nuclear planning group which we set up inside NATO to consider these matters, that nobody was really keen on any steps. I mean, the first step would have been the explosion of nuclear land mines, the so-called atomic demolition munitions which would be placed in areas where they'd cause very little collateral damage. But even the Turks wouldn't agree to placing these ABMs in unoccupied mountain defiles. And the Germans would never agree to having them exploded on German territory so that went out of the window. And I don't believe NATO's ever reached agreement on how they would fight a nuclear war at any level. And I think anyone who's had experience of real war knows that the idea that when literally millions of people are being killed, uh, you can control a battle is nonsense. And then I think the decided argument is that... even if you could control the number of explosions and the place where they took place on a bat... battlefield, we notion the Chernobyl disaster, that it can cause gravely damaging consequences, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of miles away. And if, as is all too likely, and we've been told by NATO commanders that any use of nuclear weapons is likely to escalate into all-out nuclear war, well the scientists now tell us if you have all-out nuclear war uh, life may become impossible throughout the northern hemisphere, and everybody would be affected whether they're involved in the fighting or neutral. And so that whole approach to the problem I think is a busted flush.

[QUESTION INAUDIBLE]

Well I lost my faith in flexible response really towards the end of my period as Defense Secretary, round about 1970 when I found in the meetings we had of the nuclear planning group that we couldn't really reach agreement on even the first step of the ladder. And this feeling developed steadily over the years for the other reasons I'd come in to. I think you've got to recognize a central point about nuclear weapons. They've only been used twice in war. They were used by a nuclear power, which only had at that time two weapons against a non-nuclear power to accelerate victory. They've never been used since then. They've never been used for war fighting. And nobody really can know what would happen. We all, those of us who take is seriously, wrestle with the problem, its moral dimension, its military dimension, its political dimension. And we often start by making mistakes. Uh, Henry Kissinger and I who were among the first people on our side of the Atlantic to worry about this problem in the early '50s, only ten years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We believed at that time and wrote to our shame that it was possible to fight a limited nuclear war in Europe. It would be just like a conventional war but on a bit larger scale. Now within two years each of us had abandoned this view and one of the worries about nuclear weapons is that the uncertainties attending theories about their use are bound to remain unless you fight a nuclear war, but after nuclear war there'll be learn the lesson it teaches.

IN THE EIGHTIES, THIS WHOLE DEBATE ABOUT THE (?), PARTICULARLY IN EUROPE, THEY BROKE THE BIPARTISAN CONSENSUS AND THE POLITICAL ONE ABOUT NUCLEAR DEFENSE AND ABOUT NATO. WHY DO YOU THINK THAT HAPPENED?

Well, first of all, there was the purely military argument uh... Many people thought there was no military case for deploying these medium ranged missiles on land in Europe. NATO had done very well without land based missiles for twenty years. Nothing had essentially changed uh, since the uh, Apollo and Thor missiles were taken out of Western Europe following the Cuban missile crisis. Uh. And even the Reagan administration's initial view was that it was not uh, militarily necessary to deploy them. Mr. Perle(?) clear in an unguarded moment, uh, an interview with the Boston Globe way back I think in 1982 or 1983. The second thing was that the argument used by many people, especially governments, was that while they may be no good... militarily, but they're very important because they strengthen the nuclear link between Western Europe and the United States. Now, I took exactly the opposite view. Uh, I thought and many people in Germany did and some in America, that the only rationale for putting these missiles in Europe was that the Americans might be more ready to authorize their use in Europe because they could keep America as a sanctuary. In other words, it raised the possibility of a limited nuclear war in Europe alone and...the American deterrent. And I remember making this point at um, an American-German meeting uh, in New York at the end of '79 when I was free to tour, after we'd lost the election. And a German friend coming up and saying to me, "Please, never say that in public because it's cutting the ground from underneath Helmut Schmidt's feet." And so uh, I agreed not to say it again in public until uh... he'd lost the election and was on the back benches. And as you know, I argued it very strongly in the debates in Britain in the following year.

Now, a lot of people like myself uh, oppose the uh, cruise Pershing deployment for military and political reasons. But the fact that there was a large number of people both sides of the Atlantic within what you might call a consensus who were very unhappy about the decision of course made it a wonderful issue uh, to be exploited by the people who were against nuclear weapons under any circumstances. And the cruise...uh, deployment decision was of course grist of the mill of the uh, anti-nuclear movement on both sides of the Atlantic. And they naturally exploited their opportunities to the maximum. But I think it should be said too that the contradictions in which NATO strategy was becoming involved uh, over the cruise...decision did need a lot of people, including myself, to think again about the whole nuclear problem. I'd always taken the view that you couldn't actually use nuclear weapons in war. I wrote an article for Encounter magazine along these lines call "The Bomb That Wouldn't Go Off" in the early '50s. And uh, many of us who'd been led by circumstance um... particularly the unpredictability of Soviet policy after the Cuban missile crisis, the invasion of Hungary, the invasion of Czech... Czechoslovakia uh, came to rethink our approach and of course it became much easier to think fresh about it when the Russians were clearly rethinking their approach and particularly when uh, Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union because he has carried out the revolution in Soviet strategic thinking which I would like to see copied in western strategic thinking.

...WHAT DO YOU THINK SHOULD BE THE NEXT STEP AFTER THAT?

Well in the nuclear field the obvious next step uh, should -- uh, will be uh, a fifty percent cut in strategic nuclear weapons and continental weapons, and I hope that that will concentrate uh, on the weapons which destabilize the balance between Russia and the United States by uh, presenting what one side believes to be a first-strike capability. Uh, and that would be the SS-18 missiles in the Soviet Union, multi warhead very accurate missiles and in the United States the MX and the Trident D5. And I suspect that they will move into the center of the argument. But oddly enough I think the most important thing, especially for us in Europe, is to concentrate on battlefield nuclear weapons and conventional forces. What worries me very much is that by accident really, uh, American Russians started the breakthrough by talking about intermediate nuclear forces. But if a war happens it'll happen by accident. And accident is much more likely, a nuclear accident uh, if uh, NATO has got a very large number of very short range uh, battlefield weapons right up against the front line....which can only fire you know a few miles. And the important thing I think is to get them out of the way and I think there's a lot to be said for uh, having a nuclear free corridor both sides of the dividing line, both Germanys. Uh, and uh, as you know, there's varying support for that in many countries but so long as Russia is thought to have a big preponderance, particularly of tanks in Eastern Europe, uh, the West European governments will be reluctant to see nuclear disarmament in Europe go very far. So in an odd way I think that the most important single thing now is not so much nuclear disarmament but to make a success of the talks which the Russians have offered and NATO has accepted in principle to cut uh, conventional forces in Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, well back into European Russia and to get rid of any area where one side or the other has a superiority by abolishing the superiority. That would get rid of the Soviet tank superiority and what depressed me in the early year -- months following the development of the INF talks is the inability of the NATO governments to get their act together so that uh, there's been no really effective response to the proposals made by the Warsaw pact in the correspondence to Gorbachev.

A LOT OF THE NATO GOVERNMENTS ARE STILL VERY DETERMINED TO HOLD WHAT THEY WOULD CALL A NUCLEAR FIRE BAIT. THEY'RE DETERMINED TO PREVENT THESE NEGOTIATIONS GOING BELOW THE SIX HUNDRED KILOMETER RANGE. WHAT DO YOU THINK THAT IS?

I -- You've got a very interesting thing that's developed since the uh... INF talks began. And that is that the German government, although it's one of the most right wing governments in European terms of domestic policy, wants to get rid of the battlefield nuclear weapons. It wants to get rid of this fire bait because the weapons that are left are those that can only kill Germans. They'd be exploded on the soil of Western Germany or Eastern Germany and from this point of view, West Germans make no distinction. The uh, East Germany is in the common market. It's regarded practical purposes of Germany. And uh, the French and the British on the other hand uh, are not too worried providing the nuclear weapons are there and uh, in their view, they think the Russians are w... unlikely to risk anything so long as nuclear weapons are likely to go off. So that in a way this issue is splitting Western Europe between Germany and France and Britain. The other thing of course is the French and British governments are terrified that if the movement towards nuclear disarmament in Europe goes then further, then their own strategic forces are bound uh, to be under pressure. And this terrifies Mrs. Thatcher and it terrifies the French government.

COULD YOU TELL US WHAT WAS YOUR POSITION ABOUT THE ...MISSILES, THAT WHOLE THEORY THAT THEY—

Well I was always against it. I went through, in Cabinet...records of the meetings I attended and uh, uh, I strongly opposed the idea of creating a Eurostrategic balance because I thought it would decouple the United States and Western Europe and this view was held by our little group.

UP UNTIL THE START OF THIS DEBATE, AND I SUPPOSE REALLY WE'RE TALKING ABOUT 1977... THERE'D BEEN A COMPLETE QUIESCENCE IN GOVERNMENTS OF WHATEVER PART ABOUT NUCLEAR ISSUES. NOBODY HAD EVER REALLY DEBATED OR MADE PUBLIC STATEMENTS ABOUT THIS... WHY DO YOU THINK THAT WAS?

Well I think let sleeping dogs lay partially. And part is that the governments didn't really know or care very much what was going on as I explained earlier. They tended to leave the whole thing to um... the uh, mafia of officials and staff officers and not worry. When I was Defense Secretary on the other hand um, I used to debate these things in Parliament, used to surprise people very much. I would talk about you know, NATO strategy and debate. But the interesting thing was that uh, I think people welcomed the fact that there was an open discussion on it.

BUT TO GO BACK TO SOMETHING YOU SAID EARLIER. FOR THE POLITICIANS, THEY NEEDED THE EXISTENCE OF THE SS-20 TO JUSTIFY WHAT (?). WHY DO YOU THINK THAT MISMATCH OCCURRED? DO YOU THINK IT'S IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE POLITICIANS ACTUALLY TO GET OUT AND ARGUE FOR THE DOCTRINE?

Yeah. I, I did it when I was a poli... I was Defense Secretary for uh, six years and I argued my case in public, in Parliament, in speeches, at the Royal United Services Institute, at the... in Germany of course um, in the United States. I think politicians must be prepared to argue these points because if politicians won't argue the things honestly and not in comic strip fashion the way that Mrs. Thatcher has tended to argue it, then of course the argument is entirely in the hands of people who don't take defense as such all that seriously.

( )?

Well I think we kept the uh... electorate very well informed indeed if I may say so. Uh, I mean I wrote and spoke a great deal about it um, right from the moment I started taking an interest in the early '50s. Uh, when I was Defense Secretary from '64 to '70, I talked about it the whole time. As I say, in Parliament and outside. I think you've got silence under the conservative government that followed which was a great pity but I went on talking about it myself even then.

OKAY --

I mean, I mean Fred Mulley for example who is uh... uh, Defense Secretary under...

( )?

Uh, and uh, Fred Mulley who I think was a very good Defense Secretary and uh, Jim Callaghan, when I was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he talked and wrote about it a great deal. He wrote a brilliant book, I think, on uni, nuclear strategy in Western Europe. But I'm afraid the real trouble is that the media weren't interested. And you see, you're talking in a vacuum if the television companies take no interest in what you're saying and the newspapers don't report it.

THERE WAS A SERIOUS INCREASING CONCERN. IT WAS IN GERMANY AND THIS COUNTRY AND ALSO IN UNITED STATES WHEN, IF YOU LIKE, THE JUSTIFICATION FOR THE NEUTRON WARHEADS STARTED TO BE MADE. AND YET, THE PLANNING FOR FIGHTING A NUCLEAR WAR IN EUROPE, OR THE CONCEPTION THAT IT MIGHT BE POSSIBLE... ONE WONDERS WHY SUDDENLY IN 1977 IT BECAME ACTUALLY, AS FAR AS PUBLIC OPINION WAS CONCERNED, IT BECAME A SIGNIFICANT SHOCK. DO YOU THINK THAT THE WHOLE QUESTION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS AS A... IS ACTUALLY KEPT SECRET FROM THE PUBLIC?—

No. I don't think so at all. I think it's the fault of the people who write articles and leading articles. Everything is publicly available. One interesting thing I discovered when I started writing about this myself shortly after the last world war ended was that nearly all the facts were available in the United States which were regarded in Britain as deadly secrets. I remember once telling the story -- When I went to the defense ministry in 1964 uh, I was given a list of the things which was so secret I must forget I'd even heard of them the moment after being told. And one of the secret things was the actual physical configuration of the Polaris submarine. Well, the following week I happened to be in New York on business and I went into a toy shop and I bought a scale replica of the Polaris submarine made by the Mattel toy company. And uh, you know, there is no excuse whatever for the public to claim ignorance. The facts are there. And they've always been. I got the Institute of Strategic Studies set up um, in the later '50s before I became defense secretary and uh, that published monthly uh, digests of articles from the world uh, defense establishment on all these problems uh, an annual on military strategy and on the military balance. Uh, it's frankly the inertia, laziness of the media which uh, prevented the uh, public from being fully aware of what was available and I think the tragedy which arose from that is that the...tends to be made by people who were not terribly interested in defense perhaps thought there was no Soviet threat at all uh, and indeed there was no danger of war, never mind whether it came from the Russians or anybody else, but that nuclear weapons were uniquely uh, morally horrible. And shifted the argument into what I've always regarded as the extremely barren and... dangerous fight between unilateral and multilateral disarmament when the real issue is to get disarmament and sometimes unilateral action will be the best force and sometimes multilateral negotiations. But it's become like an argument in the um, church in the Middle Ages between the unilateralists and the multilateralists. I'm glad to say that that's beginning to go and the evolution of Labour Party's policy in the last year or so I think has shown this.

( )?

My personal political life in some ways is being dominated by the nuclear bomb. When as a soldier at the end of the war in Europe I heard the Americans had dropped bombs on Japan my personal feeling like that of millions of soldiers ( ), was thank god. That means we're not going to have to go out to Japan now and fight another war then. And for several years the... total revolution in politics and strategy which nuclear weapons were going to introduce were little understood. But many people got very concerned shortly after the war, including myself, mainly for moral reasons because there was a new dimension of horror -- the death of millions of non-combatants. And there were groups in America who were worrying about it. There were groups in Britain. Uh, very oddly assorted collection of chaps, myself uh, the bishop of Chichester, uh, a leading Methodist called uh... uh, Allen ( ), uh, Jack...who'd been head of Walton Air Force and the ex-head of Naval Intelligence, Tony ( ). We got together and we held a conference on the problem. Some of us, including Pat Blackett, a Nobel physicist, wrote a book for Chatham House called "On Limiting Nuclear War". This was in the early '50s. At the same time Kissinger was working in the United States. And there were para-governmental institutes like the RAND Corporation whose job was to think about these things, who were doing a lot of work. And Helmut Schmidt who'd been in the army. He's just about my age. Right through the war started getting very interested in the problem. He wrote a book about it in the late '50s. And then we set up an institute in Europe to organize thinking in the Institute of Strategic Studies and I got the money for it out of the Rockefeller Foundation the very day that uh, the Sputnik went up. And the Americans at the meeting of that were so worried they were a pushover to provide the money. And since then there's been an enormous amount of very intelligent writing about the problem uh, by academics uh, by military people and by some politicians, Helmut Schmidt in Germany, myself, Kissinger in the United States. The tragedy is that the... newspapers took comparative little interest in these problems. Defense correspondents tended to write only about what regiment was due for the chop, uh, what company would get this or that aircraft contract. And the strategic problems were largely ignored although all the material was there for it. This is no longer true. I mean, you have some very good people writing regularly in the press. Uh, but this was a comparatively recent thing. It developed partly in the '60s and I've tried to encourage it a lot myself by uh, uh, putting money and resources into the military. Think tanks like the Imperial Defense College and the Joint Services Staff College uh, raising their level and relying the people there to write things for the public. And this was worthwhile. The difficulty I think was to get the people who dominated the media to recognize the importance of the problem.