Senator Jackson's Understanding of the SALT I Treaty
Pitfalls of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
Senator Jackson's Criticisms of the SALT II Agreement
Negotiating With the Soviet Union
Military Priorities of the Reagan Administration
Ronald Reagan's SDI Speech
The Vital Role of a Partial Space Shield
The Benefits of SDI
Reykjavik Summit

 
 

Senator Jackson's Understanding of the SALT I Treaty

Interviewer

I think I'm going to plunge right into the safeguards debate in 1969 and '70. What was Senator Jackson's feeling about the safeguard ABM program, whether he supported it and why?

Perle

Uh, Senator Jackson was a keen supporter of the safeguard antiballistic missile defense program, and in fact, I think, had it not been for Scoop's adroit management of the issue in the Senate, it would never have been approved.

Interviewer

Was he sort of going out on a limb to defend that program on behalf of President Nixon when a lot of his colleagues were so adamantly against it?

Perle

Well, as a Democrat, it was not the most comfortable position to be in, but Scoop Jackson was the most unpartisan, non-partisan senator I've ever known, where issues of national security were concerned. He believed that it was ahistoric, uh, to continue without any defense whatsoever, that sooner or later there would be defenses, that, uh, the United States ought not to be behind in their deployment, that safeguard was about the best technology we could manage at the time, and a good place to start. And, uh, he didn't care much that that was not the predominant view within the Democratic Party, and in fact he succeeded in bringing a great many Democrats along with him, uh, and without that, uh, coalition which he was, in which he was the center, uh, it would not have survived a test in the Senate, uh, when in 1969 it was approved by a single vote.

Interviewer

Did he feel a little betrayed by it being traded away at SALT I?

Perle

He was unhappy with the outcome of the SALT I agreement. Uh, I wouldn't say that he felt betrayed by... I'm sorry, I've left Scoop out again. Senator Jackson felt that the SALT I agreement was a poor agreement, and not in the security interests of the United States. He voted for it. But he only voted for it after the resolution supporting it was amended to provide that future agreements, uh, would provide for equality between the United States and the Soviet Union. So he didn't like the offensive arms agreement, the interim agreement reached in 1972. He voted for the ABM Treaty without, uh, serious reservation; uh, he thought that was a reasonable treaty at the time, although he never interpreted it to mean, uh, that it was desirable to be vulnerable to attack by the Soviet Union. He didn't turn it into an ideology. Uh I don't think he felt betrayed,uh, by the decision to abandon, uh, defenses. He did think it was unwise, having negotiated one site, uh, which came subsequently, to make that one site around the national capital, because he thought that that was unwise and wouldn't be approved, and in effect it meant we would have no defense at all.

Interviewer

Could you repeat the last part of that? Starting with the defense site around Washington. Saying Senator Jackson...

Perle

Senator Jackson thought it unwise, if we were entitled to only one defensive site, to place it around the national capital, around Washington, and, uh, he was convinced that the decision to do that meant that there would be no defense at all. And of course he was right.

Interviewer

What was wrong with the limited offensive agreement? The negotiators and Henry Kissinger argued that it was fine because the forces were asymmetric and our bomber forces, which were far superior, were not restricted, and there were other advantages we had. And we didn't have a lot of bargaining leverage because they had an ongoing program, and we didn't. We were better off stopping it somewhere than letting it go. What was Senator Jackson's feeling about that?

Perle

Well, Senator Jackson was highly critical of the interim agreement on offensive arms: he was amused by Henry Kissinger, on the one hand maintaining that, uh, it was the best we could do given the scant leverage we had, and on the other hand arguing that it was a profound victory for the United States. Uh, it was not a profound victory for the United States -- it was an unbalanced lopsided agreement in which the Soviets were entitled to higher levels of weapons than the United States. In the areas in which, uh, the Soviets had an advantage, that advantage was frozen in the agreement; in the areas where the United States had an advantage, the competition was permitted to go forward under the terms of the agreement, so it was simply a matter of time before the American advantages that were claimed to offset the Soviet advantages would be eroded by Soviet developments. And that, of course, is what happened, uh, with the result that, uh, uh, years later, one could look back at that agreement and see in it the beginning of a radical shift in the nuclear balance between the United States and the Soviet Union. I think it's significant that some of those involved in that, uh, SALT I negotiating experience, eventually, with the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, concluded that it had not been a good agreement: I know that's Paul Nitze's view.

Interviewer

I assume that when you're talking about areas that were to America's advantage that weren't frozen, you're speaking about the MIRV program. Could you restate that and use the specific program?

Perle

Yes, the, the, uh, the SALT I interim agreement, uh, permitted competition to continue in some areas where the United States was ahead. Uh, we were ahead of the Soviets in the deployment of multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles, but the treaty allowed the Soviets to deploy MIRV's. Where the Soviets were ahead, uh, in numbers of submarines, for example, the treaty froze the submarine level, uh, and thereby froze the United States in a, uh, a permanent inferiority.

Interviewer

Now in the decision to go into SALT negotiations, how did Senator Jackson feel about this idea that we were going to enter into negotiations which were basically going to ratify or condone a situation of parity between the United States and the Soviet Union? Did he feel that it was unwise to do that, and maybe we should have pushed ahead with our technological superiority and not given them the credibility of being an equal power?

Perle

Uh, Senator Jackson never quarreled with the, the concept that the Soviet Union was a superpower in the same and distinct class as the United States. But he believed that our advantage in antiballistic missile defenses, the, uh, ability rapidly to commence deployment of the safeguard ABM system, uh, could be used in the course of negotiations to obtain significant restraint on the momentum of the Soviet strategic offensive build-up. I know he thought it was a, uh a fatal mistake to conclude the ABM Treaty before we had any firm outline of a conclusion to the negotiations on offensive arms. It was the sort of mistake that a careful negotiator would not make. He also believed that...

Interviewer

Can you start "Senator Jackson?"

Perle

Okay? Senator Jackson, uh also believed that the SALT I interim agreement focused on the wrong things; it limited the wrong things; it limited the numbers of launchers for ballistic missiles, for example. But it, uh, was either silent or ineffective and vague on the issue of what kinds of weapons one could place in those silos. And he correctly anticipated that the growth in Soviet strategic forces would come, not through the construction of additional missile silos, but through the improvement of the missiles placed in those, uh, those launchers, buried in the ground. And in fact in, uh, October of 1970, he sent Henry Kissinger a secret memorandum, which said, "You are headed down the wrong path; you are restraining the number of launchers, but within the number of launchers the Soviets would be permitted under the agreement you are negotiating, they could treble their effective forces, uh, by resorting to better missiles, improved fuels, lighter alloys, new launch techniques, and, uh, and multiple warheads." That is exactly what happened. The Soviets did all of those things: better fuels, new alloys, new launch techniques, with the result that they more than trebled their effective, uh, ballistic missile forces, within the total number of launchers that was agreed.

Interviewer

I just want to clarify one thing: when I asked about the parity-superiority issue, I think what you're saying is that he thought that we weren't going in there to give up our lead and accept parity. It was useful to go into SALT negotiations in order to stem their ongoing development.

Perle

No, he wasn't troubled about parity, this was a completely phony argument that, uh, that we wanted to cling to superiority. That never bothered him.

Interviewer

But what he would want to get out of the SALT negotiations. What his chief motive was for wanting to go?

Perle

He wanted to slow the momentum of the Soviet buildup, because he, he could see the curves they were on, and where it would eventually lead.

Interviewer

Can you restate that saying that Senator Jackson, that SALT negotiations would be... and so forth.

Perle

Senator Jackson thought that the critical function of the SALT negotiations in the beginning was to halt the momentum of the Soviet strategic buildup, because he could see the trends, and where the Soviets would eventually arrive if those trends were permitted to continue unencumbered. When the SALT I agreement was concluded, the, uh, the argument for it from Mel Laird and Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon and others, was that it had in fact halted the momentum of the Soviet strategic buildup, and Scoop Jackson's opposition, uh, to the interim agreement was that it hadn't done that at all, and we have the advantage of hindsight that Scoop was right. It didn't halt the momentum, it permitted it to continue.

Interviewer

Now I wanted to ask you how he felt about President Nixon and Kissinger's strategy of detente. Was it an appropriate way to deal with the Soviet Union?

Perle

No, Senator Jackson thought that the Kissinger-Nixon concept of detente was fundamentally unsound. Uh, he believed that Kissinger, in attempting to tie the Soviets down in a series of agreements that would somehow lead to a moderation of their behavior, that he was really kidding himself, that we were going to get tied down, that in any effort to encumber the monolithic, or near-monolithic institutions of the Soviet state, dealing with free and independent, uh, and widely disparate institutions in the United States, that you would not wind up with an American hand on the lever, you'd wind up with a Soviet hand on the lever. I think that was all rather badly said.

Interviewer

You might want to say that... I don't understand the hand on the lever. It's good. Their idea was that a prolonged period of peace and trade ties would be to the advantage, our advantage. And your saying not.

Perle

The Kissinger-Nixon concept of detente was that we would engage the Soviets in a broad number of agreements, covering many fields: science, technology, medicine, transportation, uh, nuclear weapons and the like. And that the Soviets would become dependent on the United States, in a manner that would cause them to moderate those of their international policies that we found most objectionable. We would end up, uh, exercising influence and leverage over Soviet decisions. But Scoop Jackson was acutely aware of the fact that you had a democracy with its free and disparate institutions, um, being put into a series of relationships with the Soviet state, and whether one talked about transportation or medicine or energy, uh, there were many, uh, agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union, it was our universities and our research institutes and our professors dealing with officials of the Soviet government, who had a single purpose, and under those circumstances, Scoop believed, the Soviets would end up manipulating us, and not the other way around. And I believe that's what happened: uh, we turned the business community into a virtual lobby for the Soviet Union when they saw the prospects of increased, uh, trade. We turned the scientific community into a sympathetic, uh, voice in our own politics, when they saw the prospects of scientific cooperation. So the theory, uh, was not only wrong, it was a hundred and eighty degrees wrong.

Interviewer

I'm going to ask you to just make one more concise statement saying that the Nixon-Kissinger theory was wrong, and why.

Perle

Senator Jackson thought that the Kissinger-Nixon concept of detente was fundamentally wrong, because it would not lead to a moderation of Soviet behavior and greater American influence over Soviet decisions, but on the contrary it would lead to greater Soviet influence over American decisions.

Interviewer

After the SALT I agreement was ratified, the White House apparently gave Senator Jackson certain concessions, because of his dissatisfaction with the SALT I agreement. One of them was that he would have the opportunity to handpick the next SALT negotiating team and also a lot of the active staff. Can you talk about how Senator Jackson had that power at that time, and what his purpose was in trying to restructure the people making those moves?

Perle

It has been claimed that, following the SALT I agreement Senator Jackson was given extraordinary authority to restructure personnel involved in arms control. This is simply false. The story's been around a long time Gerard Smith, who had been our chief negotiator and decided, uh, to resign, and a new negotiator had to be, uh, selected. Uh Scoop was under no illusions about who had, uh, who was responsible for the unbalanced, as he saw it, SALT I agreement. It wasn't the negotiators, and it wasn't officials of the arms-control agency, it was Henry Kissinger, and Richard Nixon. And he was never under any illusion that you could improve the performance of the administration by, by changing relatively minor subordinates.

Interviewer

You're saying that he didn't have a role in picking the SALT team and the active staff. The other story is that he was feeling pretty strongly that General Allison should be relieved of his duties and that Allison had failed to serve the interests of the military of this country. Can you describe what mistakes Allison made?

Perle

Scoop was unhappy with General Allison's performance, when he represented the joint chiefs of staff in the negotiations, and I think what led him to that conclusion was the frequency with which Allison seemed unable to answer questions about the treaty, when the negotiating team came before the Senate in hearings on the treaty, and that shook Senator Jackson. Uh, I remember him saying to me, uh, "I deal with these issues from time to time when they're before the Senate, and I know the answers to questions. He's been doing this full-time, for the last two and a half years, and he can't answer the questions I can answer. There's something wrong here."

Interviewer

Did he feel that General Allison hadn't represented well the national security or military interests of the joint chiefs?

Perle

I think Senator Jackson thought that the SALT I agreement, uh, was hopelessly ambiguous, that critical details had not been nailed down in the negotiations, and that, uh, unlike the broad policy, was the responsibility of the negotiators, and in particular, uh, on the technical military questions, the responsibility of the representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Pitfalls of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks

Interviewer

'Cause he says, he actually said to us in an interview, "I think it was a big mistake of mine that I let Senator Jackson pick people, because that put the White House, instead of mediating in the middle, that the White House was far to the left of everybody else." Kissinger said that. Do you have any comments on that?

Perle

I think it's, it's flatly wrong.

Interviewer

Can you?

Perle

Yes. Any changes that were made in personnel following the SALT I agreement were made by the White House, and by Henry Kissinger, and not by Scoop Jackson. And if Henry Kissinger says otherwise, it's because that, uh was an easier way to explain firing his own people, than accepting the responsibility himself.

Interviewer

Ok. Kissinger came increasingly under fire, in the first negotiations of SALT II, in Nixon's second term. What was the fear about his handling of those negotiations?

Perle

We feared that there would be a repetition of the SALT I agreement, another agreement that was unbalanced and that conferred, uh, unacceptable advantages on the Soviet Union. We were very doubtful about a negotiating process that led to agreements that permitted significant increases above the levels in effect on the date the agreements were signed. Because it seemed to us that the purpose of arms control should have been to constrain the military forces on both sides, and not simply to provide for their increases, legitimized, uh, through a bilateral agreement.

Interviewer

Was there a sense of distrust that because of Watergate and President Nixon's decreasing, what's the word for it, credibility, that they would be willing to give more concessions to the Soviet Union in order to get some positive accomplishments?

Perle

There, there was a point when, uh, Nixon was enmeshed in Watergate, when we feared that there would be a desperate effort to conclude an agreement in order to substitute, uh, one set of headlines for another recurring set of headlines. Uh, and that our national security was being put at risk in order to help the president solve a personal problem of his own making. And Scoop Jackson had no sympathy at all for that, and worked rather hard to assure that, uh, that would not be permitted to happen.

Interviewer

Can you talk about the purpose behind the Jackson-Vanik amendment, the amendment to the trade bill that was to grant the U.S.S.R. most-favored-nation status?

Perle

The purpose behind the Jackson amendment, which ultimately became known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment, uh, was to condition concessions to the Soviet Union, trade concessions, credits, and most-favored-nation status, on an improvement in the emigration policies of the Soviet Union, which, when the amendment was introduced, threatened to bring emigration to a grinding halt. The Soviets had introduced an education tax, and anyone with any formal education was subject to prohibitive and punitive taxes that people were simply unable to pay. And it looked as though this might be the device by which emigration would be brought to an end. By offering an amendment that made trade concessions to the Soviets contingent upon an end to the education tax, and an improvement in the plight of, uh, would-be emigres. We hoped to create the conditions in which the administration could negotiate some kind of compromise with the Soviets, and our biggest disappointment was the reluctance with which the administration regarded the leverage that we placed in their hands.

Interviewer

Kissinger said to us that emigration, during his tenure, soared from three hundred a year in 1968 to thirty five thousand a year in 1973, and that after the Jackson-Vanek amendment passed it dropped by twenty thousand again. And that that was a sign that his strategy of wreaking liberalization from the Soviet Union was more effective than trying to legislate changes, internal changes in their system. What was Senator Jackson's response to that?

Perle

Well, Senator Jackson was quite convinced that the improvement in emigration figures was directly related to the Soviet effort to prevent the Jackson amendment from being legislated, and that the threat of legislation was a very effective tool that could be used by a willing administration, if one had had one, uh, to try to increase the flow of emigrants and diminish the, the suffering inflicted on people who applied to leave. The, the figures subsequent to the passage of the Jackson amendment have gone up and down, uh, reaching higher levels than ever, in 1979, uh, when fifty thousand people where permitted to leave. Uh, what I think the Kissinger view of history, and here I, I think he's distor..., distorted, uh, the facts both in his memoirs, and evidently in what he's had to say to you. Uh, what that overlooks is that, uh, from the beginning, Scoop Jackson's view was that Kissinger should use the imminence of legislation to work out a compromise with the Soviets. Uh, Kissinger refused even to attempt such a negotiation for a very long time, and when he finally did begin negotiations, uh, under pressure of the, uh, amendment, an agreement was reached, and an agreement that provided for a substantial increase in emigration. We have Kissinger's testimony for that. He now says that that agreement unraveled when it was made public, but he was very much involved in the drafting of the public statement that was to be issued on the day that the agreement was concluded. So it's a, it's a wildly distorted account. Uh, Scoop's effort from the beginning was to bring pressure to bear in the hope that, uh, a compromise would ultimately be reached, and it was.

Interviewer

Can you just summarize from the point you mention Kissinger's memoirs?

Perle

Kissinger's account of the battle over the Jackson amendment and its implications, uh has been greatly distorted in his memoirs, and in things he has said elsewhere. The fact is that from the beginning, uh, we attempted to work with him, making it plain that the imminence of legislation gave him the kind of leverage that, had he been willing he might have used to produce a compromise. For a long time he resisted a negotiation of that sort, and when eventually he undertook it, under pressure from the amendment, it did lead, on October 18th, 1974, to an exchange of correspondence between Senator Jackson and Henry Kissinger that constituted an agreement with the Soviet Union. The Soviets subsequently, uh, reneged on that agreement, for reasons that, uh, we cannot possibly know, or at least we can't know for sure.

Interviewer

Can you just give us a summary of what was wrong with the Nixon-Kissinger concept of detente? How should we regard the Soviet Union and deal with them in arms-control negotiations and in trying to gain more influence over their activities? What did Senator Jackson felt at the time?

Perle

Senator Jackson, uh, who read history a great deal, and in particular the history of the Soviet Union, believed that in dealing with a totalitarian state, it was necessary for the United States to have clear negotiating objectives. Uh, to mobilize our own military strength in order to create, uh, favorable conditions, that the Soviets refer to as the correlation of forces, and then to negotiate, uh, fairly but firmly. What he objected to most of all was the tendency to seek agreement for agreement's sake, to lower continuously one's sights, to abandon one objective after another, and wind up in the end with a piece of paper that didn't serve our interests. And he objected to that strenuously because he believed it was unnecessary to wind up with, uh, agreement for agreement's sake. If one kept one's objectives clear, it was possible to negotiate them.

Interviewer

Is there a way to negotiate an agreement with the Soviet Union in which... Is everything that they would agree to not to our advantage?

Perle

I believe it's possible to negotiate, uh, agreements with the Soviet Union that are in the interest of both the Soviet Union and the United States, but we'll never know whether that's true unless we put propositions to them that have that quality, and have the courage, the political courage, and the patience, uh, to stand firm for the, an outcome of that nature. If we abandon, uh, agreements of that type, uh, early in the negotiating process, as we've had a tendency to do, then we wind up with agreements that don't serve our interests, and may not serve the interests of the Soviet side either.

Interviewer

Do you have a concluding analysis of what SALT I did for the United States?

Perle

The great failure of the SALT I interim agreement was that it did not do the thing that it was claimed, it was intended to do, and that was halt the momentum of the Soviet strategic buildup. Uh, on the contrary, it legitimized that buildup, by limiting uh, the wrong things. It permitted the Soviets to add enormously to their military forces, under the terms of an agreement, which therefore had the effect of, uh creating a very misleading impression that the Soviets were not in fact rapidly building up their strategic forces. The fact that everything they were doing was taking place under the terms of an agreement created the misleading impression that it was okay, and that it was not inimical to the interests of the United States.

Interviewer

Can you just say that in one sentence, sort of?

Perle

Far from halting the momentum of the Soviet strategic buildup, the SALT I agreement permitted the Soviets to continue a massive buildup of their strategic forces, without creating the normal apprehensions that would have been associated with an unrestrained, because it largely was unrestrained, military buildup, because what they were doing was being done pursuant to an agreement, it did not touch off the apprehensions that it should have touched off.

Interviewer

Does that mean we should have tried for a MIRV ban? Would Senator Jackson have pushed for a MIRV ban at that time?

Perle

Well, we did, uh, early in the negotiations, propose a MIRV ban, but we didn't know how to verify a ban on the development of MIRV's, so we proposed a ban on the deployment of MIRV's, with on-site inspection, and the Soviets would not accept that proposal, they wouldn't accept the on-site inspection and I'm convinced that they were determined to develop their own multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles.

Interviewer

Was senator Jackson in favor of actually trying the MIRV ban? Would he have preferred if we had concluded one?

Perle

Senator Jackson supported the MIRV ban when it was proposed early in the first rounds of the SALT I negotiations. It was a ban...

Interviewer

Start over.

Perle

The, the American position early in the SALT I negotiations was to ban the deployment of MIRV's. We knew that we couldn't ban the development of, uh, MIRV's, because it would be unverifiable, and we could only ban the deployment of MIRV's with on-site inspection, so we insisted on on-site inspection, and the Soviets flatly rejected it. The Soviet position was that we should cease development of MIRV's.

Interviewer

Was Senator Jackson in favor of both sides not MIRVing, or was he in favor of freezing a US advantage in MIRVing at that point?

Perle

Uh, Senator Jackson supported the administration when it proposed a MIRV ban to the Soviets. When that proved unachievable, he was very much in favor of the United States proceeding to deploy MIRV's on US forces.

Interviewer

The proposal that was made would have frozen a US advantage, because it would have stopped the Soviets from testing, and we'd already achieved testing. So was he in favor of one that would have frozen an advantage to the US to remain ahead of the Soviet Union in testing on MIRVs?

Perle

No, the American proposal was for a ban on the deployment of MIRV's, and it was a ban that could only be verified by on-site inspection. That was the American proposal. The Soviets proposed a ban on MIRV testing, uh, but no ban on deployment and no on-site inspection. And that was unacceptable to us because it was too risky. But the MIRV agreement really foundered on the issue of on-site inspection.

Interviewer

And a lot of people say that was deliberate on the administration's part. That they didn't really want a MIRV ban that it was better for us to push ahead where we had superior technology and had a lead in that. Do you think that was true?

Perle

I, I, I think, I believe that this business of, uh, of always attributing dark motives to people who agree with, uh very soft negotiators, uh, is not helpful to understanding the debate, and the issues. On-site inspection was necessary if you were to have any confidence at all that the Soviet Union, uh, was not cheating, and, uh, the suggestion that the demand for on-site inspection was intended to prevent an agreement is, is the kind of unfair argumentation that, that really confuses issues.

Interviewer

So you thought that in that situation it was better for us to go ahead and MIRV, knowing that when the Soviets MIRVed their SS-9's that it would put our land-based force in a more vulnerable position.

Perle

Well, we did not know how to prevent the Soviets from MIRVing in a verifiable manner without the ability to inspect, and they wouldn't agree to the inspection. So that made it impossible to agree to a ban on MIRV's, despite the obvious consequences of that.

Interviewer

Kissinger said that in working on SALT II, on those negotiations, that the equivalency amendment placed unneeded restrictions on the process, that he would have rather had some unequivalency in the numbers of launchers, in return for more restrictions on their MIRVing, because we were more vulnerable to their MIRVing at that point. Was there any sense that the equivalency rule was sort of stilted in dealing with the asymmetric forces, and could get in our way in terms of stopping this MIRVing which wasn't in our interest?

Perle

I, when Henry Kissinger was in charge of negotiations and had no equivalency rules, and no other encumbrances of any kind, he succeeded in negotiating an agreement that was lopsided in favor of the Soviet Union, and my sympathy is limited for a negotiator who says he can do a better job if those who insist on equality would, uh, would not encumber his freedom to negotiate.

Interviewer

What do you think was the main problem with SALT II? With the beginning of SALT II. Henry Kissinger at one point in 1974 said, "If i'd realized what a MIRVed world meant, I would have been more serious about obtaining a MIRV ban." Because by that time we had a real problem on our hands with the MIRVing. What was Senator Jackson's attitude?

Perle

Well, Senator Jackson realized what a MIRV'ed world would mean. Uh, he didn't come lately to, uh, discoveries of this kind. There's a somewhat extraordinary remark that Henry Kissinger after two years in office was beginning to understand one of the fundamentals of the negotiation that he was superintending. Uh, I think the record will show that, uh, Scoop Jackson saw further into the future, including the problems eventually discovered by others, and, uh, I would offer as some evidence of that his memorandum to Henry Kissinger in October of 1970, in which he correctly anticipated Soviet developments if the administration was so unwise as to conclude an agreement in which the only significant constraint was on launchers, and there were no further constraints on numbers of warheads or the size of the missiles in those launchers, or improvements in the missiles in those launchers, all of which, uh, had the potential for adding significantly to the military capability of the Soviet missile forces. And that is exactly what happened.

Interviewer

He said that in SALT II we went for levels of launchers that were far beyond what we ever built, because our forces are structured differently than theirs, and therefore we gave away crucial bargaining leverage on things that we wouldn't utilize.

Perle

Henry has a million rationalizations for why he produced an agreement that was unbalanced in favor of the Soviet Union. Uh that is one of many such rationalizations. You, if, if his view is that we didn't want additional launchers, and therefore there was no reason why we should insist on additional launchers, uh, one can turn that around and say, "As we did not desire additional launchers, we should have insisted that the Soviets reduce their launchers down to our lower and satisfactory level." That at least would have produced an agreement balanced in terms of the numbers of launchers.

Interviewer

What do you think in general about what the purpose of arms control is, and about this, what do you make of this sort of "bargaining chip" argument that's usually applied to weapons systems? In that we can't have a moritorium on MIRVs because once we stop we'll never get ahead and we need to build them. And the other side says well we can't freeze a situation where we're ahead. What is your philosophy?

Perle

Uh, in my view the purpose of arms-control negotiations is to achieve agreements that diminish the military threat that we face, and that enhance the stability of the strategic relationship between the signatories. That is not a description of most of the arms-control agreements in history, many...

Senator Jackson's Criticisms of the SALT II Agreement

Interviewer

In february of '77, Senator Jackson had a breakfast meeting with President Carter, anticipating the strategic arms negotiating posture. After that, you wrote a long memo to President Carter. What were your and Senator Jackson's concerns?

Perle

Senator Jackson was concerned that the path we were negotiating now, which was inherited from the previous administration would lead to the kind of agreement that in fact we wound up with, uh, in SALT II, that is, an agreement that protected, uh significant Soviet advantages, with respect, for example, to, uh, heavy missiles, that failed to achieve significant reductions in strategic forces, for which he had been arguing for many years. So he, uh, strongly advised President Carter, in a memorandum, to abandon the policy line of the Carter, of the, uh, previous administration, and press the Soviets for significant reductions in strategic forces and an equal ceiling on, on both sides.

Interviewer

Was he interested in just the Soviets reducing their forces, their heavy missiles, or mutual reduction?

Perle

Well, the United, the United States had no heavy missiles. We were prepared to make, uh, reductions; we insisted that they make reductions, and we insisted that the agreed-upon reduced levels should be equal for both sides.

Interviewer

You weren't seeking superiority for the United States.

Perle

No, I think as a practical matter, uh, superiority for the United States is, uh, not only impossible to define, it is surely impossible to negotiate: the Soviets are not about to, uh, permit the United States, uh, superiority, nor should we be prepared to allow that for the Soviet Union.

Interviewer

Jackson said at the time that the time that Vance and Warnke went to Moscow in March of '77, that the proposal they were carrying was, "a step in the right direction." What did he mean by that?

Perle

Jackson liked the early, uh, Carter proposal, or at least liked elements of it, because it did move in the direction of significant reductions and it would have led to equal ceilings on both sides. He was bitterly disappointed at the rapidity with which Carter and Vance abandoned that proposal. I think it was only, uh, under consideration for six weeks or so in Moscow; the Russians said they wouldn't accept it and, uh, we accepted their rejection and then returned to the negotiating track that had been set by the previous administration, and that was a profound disappointment for Scoop.

Interviewer

Is that when he went into opposition on SALT II?

Perle

From the moment that the Carter administration abandoned its proposals, made by Secretary Vance in Moscow, uh, Senator Jackson believed that he would influence the conduct of the negotiations only by monitoring them extremely closely, by holding hearings on a regular basis, by forcing the administration to share, uh, its views, its philosophy, its judgments about tactics, uh, and the nature of the strategic balance, uh, all of which would serve either to influence the administration, or failing that, to build some firebreaks that would turn out to be important in the ratification debate that would eventually take place.

Interviewer

We talked to Marshall Shulman and he said that the proposal that Vance and Warnke carried to Moscow in March was very one-sided, there were no US concessions, and he wondered about, he speculated about the motivation of Scoop, if it wasn't designed to kill the arms talks, because he knew the Soviets couldn't accept it. Does that make sense?

Perle

Well, I, I have never agreed with Marshall Shulman's judgment about how to deal with the Soviet Union. I think it's been altogether too supplicatory. Uh if, Marshall's policies would, uh, would hand massive advantages to the Soviet Union and ask virtually nothing in return. A negotiation is a negotiation; you table a position, uh, and you work toward a reconciliation of conflicting views. One of the mistakes, uh, in the conduct of negotiations by a number of American administrations has been to put forward proposals that are rather close to the, the minimum final outcome that's acceptable to the United States, while the Soviets put forward proposals that are uh, heavily weighted in their favor. And if you then end up dividing the difference between our proposal and theirs, you've concluded an agreement that, uh, that fundamentally favors the Soviet side. So I think Marshall Shulman's view of the tactics in 1977 is simply wrong.

Interviewer

Paul Warnke said that he didn't feel that you, or perhaps Scoop, but he mentioned you in particular, felt that we could do business with the Soviets. Is that right?

Perle

Well, I, I think this is, uh, uh, uh, a trivial and, uh, annoying slander, to suggest, uh, that because I hold a different view of what constitutes a sound agreement, uh, those views should be dismissed with the simple accusation that, uh, I don't believe in any agreement. Um, Paul Warnke isn't alone in making this suggestion, uh there's never a shred of evidence to back that up. Uh, the counterpart of that argument would be to say, uh, that Mr. Warnke and others who share his view would sign any agreement, uh, whether it was in the interest of the United States or not, and I've never said that about him and I don't ex... I don't expect that, uh, those who hold a different view of what constitutes a good agreement should, uh, should reduce the argument to that, that kind of, uh, ad hominem attack, questioning motives.

Interviewer

Why did Senator Jackson oppose the nomination of Paul Warnke as chief negotiator?

Perle

Well, Senator Jackson was, uh, opposed to the idea that a single individual should be both a negotiator with operational responsibility, and one of the formulators of the policy. Um for the same reason that one hires a lawyer to go out and represent one, uh, but he is not necessarily the same fellow who's making the corporate, uh, decisions. He thought those two responsibilities should be separate and distinct, so he voted for Warnke for one job and against him for the other. But frankly, he examined the Warnke record very carefully, and interrogated Paul Warnke closely at the hearings, and came to the conclusion that, uh, that Mr. Warnke, in order to gain the approval of the Senate, was prepared to, uh, characterize his previous views in a way that made them unrecognizable. And that bothered Scoop.

Interviewer

In his speech to the coalition for a democratic majority on June 12th, 1979, Jackson called the SALT treaty "appeasement." Why did he feel that way? This was before Carter had signed it, and after it had been agreed.

Perle

Well, Scoop was acutely conscious of the ease with which in the process of negotiation, one abandons one's negotiating objectives. And for him, uh, the great lesson of the appeasement of the 1930's was precisely that, that, uh, one could sit down and negotiate, and in order to get an agreement, uh, abandon those things that were most important about the negotiation. And I believe he concluded, as the SALT II agreement was shaping up, that the administration's principal objectives had been abandoned along the way. The deep cuts proposed early when Secretary of State Vance went to Moscow were gone. The agreement now provided for significant increases, the agreement permitted a fifth generation of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, it failed to reduce the Soviet advantage in heavy missiles, which was enormous, it failed to narrow the gap in ballistic-missile throw weight between us, in short it met very few of the criteria that the administration had set for itself. Something that Scoop Jackson knew at that time, that he chose not to share with the public, was that he had in his possession a letter from Jimmy Carter, handwritten, in which then-president Carter outlined his twelve objectives for SALT II, and Scoop knew that, uh, he had barely realized half of those. It was a confidential correspondence, and he chose not to use it, even at the height of the ratification debate. But he knew that, uh, Carter had failed to achieve the objectives he had set for himself.

Interviewer

If the Soviets set twelve objectives and achieved half, and we set twelve objectives and achieved half, isn't that what bargaining is about? You can't get everything you want.

Perle

Well, this goes back to the question of whether the proposals put forward are relatively balanced in the first place. If the Soviets have, uh, twelve objectives, all of which are heavily weighted in favor of the Soviet Union, and we have twelve objectives, more or less divided, in order to constitute a balanced and reasonably fair proposal, then it is not a good outcome if each side achieves six, and especially depending on which six it is.

Interviewer

But he really thought that Carter's conduct in negotiating this was analogous to Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler?

Perle

Well, I don't remember the exact words that, uh, that Scoop used, and obviously, uh the situations are, are very different. But Chamberlain, at Munich, uh believed that he was concluding an agreement that would stabilize the relationship between Germany and the United Kingdom and avert a war, which was a well intentioned, although, as history has shown, fundamentally wrong policy. There was no moral judgment, uh, entailed in this, it was a question of how effectively, uh, we had, the administration had represented the interests of the United States. And in, in the sense that it involved the abandonment of the principal objectives of the negotiation, I think Scoop thought appeasement was not an inappropriate term.

Interviewer

And the principal objective, from Scoop's point of view, was getting rid of heavy missiles.

Perle

For Scoop Jackson, the principal objective of the SALT II agreement was significantly lower levels, and equality in all relevant measures at the lower levels.

Interviewer

Of the heavy missiles.

Perle

Across the board, uh... obviously the...

Interviewer

Start that again, please.

Perle

Scoop wanted equality across the board, not simply with respect to heavy missiles, although there the inequality was perhaps most glaring. Uh, but with respect to throw weight, with respect to warheads, uh, with respect to the freedom to deploy short- and medium-range systems and so forth, and this was a treaty that was defective in those respects. And moreover, and about this, uh, Scoop was not only troubled but he was remarkably prescient, uh, almost clairvoyant; he saw in the SALT II treaty a variety of ambiguities, uncertainties, loopholes, that if exploited by the Soviet Union would have the effect of profoundly changing the rights and obligations of the parties under the treaty. And that is exactly what has happened, on issue after issue the Soviets have gone ahead and done things that it was alleged, in the course of the presentation of the treaty to the Congress, the Soviets would not be able to do under the treaty. And in virtually every instance, the subsequent administrations had to report to the Congress that the, the loopholes and ambiguities were such that, uh, the Soviets were in fact permitted to undertake those actions.

Interviewer

The CDM speech was June 12th. Carter announced his decision to deploy the MX on June 16th. Was it part of Jackson's motivations to get the MX?

Perle

I, I can't recall whether MX was, uh, prominent in his thinking.

Interviewer

Carter did decide to deploy the MX just before he went to Vienna for the summit, and yet Scoop was still opposed to SALT. Why? If the MX would solve the vulnerability of our land-based missile problem, why wouldn't he go along with SALT?

Perle

Well, Scoop was not persuaded that the MX would solve the vulnerability of our, of our land-based missiles, and he was rather doubtful about, uh, the deployment scheme that Carter had in mind, and I think he was ultimately proven right that, that deployment scheme, uh, could not be, uh, put into effect. But his complaint with the SALT II, uh, treaty was very carefully laid out in the report of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the treaty, which concluded by a vote of 10 to nothing, with seven abstentions, that the treaty was not in the national security interest of the United States. And it cited a number of specific flaws, the imbalance in heavy missiles in particular, the protocol that limited the right of the United States to deploy systems in Europe, uh, problems of verification, problems of ambiguity, and loopholes that would almost certainly be exploited subsequently. The failure to stop the next generation of Soviet, uh, ballistic missiles, and so forth, virtually all of the things that, that turned out to be true. But perhaps most of all, he was disappointed that the agreement provided for an increase in the number of weapons on the Soviet side, and permitted an increase on the US side as well, and in anticipating that that increase would take place, he was exactly right. The Soviets have added more than four thousand warheads to their strategic forces, under the SALT II treaty and since the SALT II treaty was signed.

Interviewer

Not an increase in launchers, but an increase in weapons.

Perle

An increase in the number of warheads that can be delivered against the United States, the number is even larger if you include warheads that can be delivered against our allies.

Interviewer

Do you think there was any possibility that SALT would have passed the senate, that it would have been ratified?

Perle

I don't believe that the SALT II treaty could have been ratified, uh, even before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The votes simply weren't there, and if they had been there the administration would have moved, uh, the treaty to the floor for a vote uh, there was no parliamentary impediment to a vote, uh, no one was threatening a filibuster. But recall that, uh, the Armed Services Committee had voted overwhelmingly against the treaty; the Foreign Relations Committee had voted to approve it by a single vote. So the two relevant committees together, uh, by a majority, had opposed ratification of the treaty, and I don't believe that a two-thirds majority could have been mustered for that treaty.

Interviewer

Did Scoop Jackson feel closer to the views of President Carter, or to the views of the Committee on the Present Danger, in terms of dealing with the Soviets and nuclear posture?

Perle

Oh, I think it's clear that Scoop Jackson was much closer to the views of the Committee on the Present Danger than he was to Jimmy Carter's pre-Afghanistan views. Now there was some reason to believe that President Carter experienced a, uh, an epiphany, uh, when the Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan, and from that point on took a, uh, a much tougher view of the Soviets. I'm not altogether convinced of that, but there was, he himself certainly said that, uh, that his mind had been changed by Soviet behavior.

Interviewer

Did he speak out or have strong feelings about the Soviet intentions in Africa in 1978, in Ethiopia and South Yemen? The Committee on the Present Danger had the grand design theory and the state department didn't. Where did he stand on that debate?

Perle

I think Scoop, uh frequently compared Soviet foreign policy to a hotel burglar, who walks down the corridor trying all the doors, and if he finds an open door, uh, in he goes. And if he finds the doors locked, uh, then he doesn't commit a crime that day. Scoop's view was that if you, uh, if you kept your defenses in good repair, you could deal with the Soviet Union, that they exploited weakness when they found it, but they were not adventurists, they were not, uh, uh, aggressive where, uh, they could expect to be countered. So Scoop wanted to keep, uh, our strength up, uh, together with our allies, in the conviction that that would lead to a much more harmonious relationship between us.

Interviewer

Did he buy Pipes' notion of a grand design?

Perle

I don't think Scoop did believe in a grand design. I think he believed there was a great deal of energy, uh, some of it, uh, with historic origins. Uh, he used to, he used to cite, uh, the collaboration be... between Peter the Great and the Bey of Egypt in 1788 as an indication, when the Soviets were, were in Egypt in the 1970's, as an indication of how, uh, persistent certain themes were in imperial Soviet policy, imperial Russian policy, and, uh, together with that imperial perspective, and remember, we are talking about what was once the Duchy of Muscovy, and now encompasses, uh, the, the better part of the Eurasian landmass, an expansionist power if ever there was one. Um, Scoop believed that that imperial energy was if anything, augmented by, uh, Marxist, and in particular Lenist ideol... Leninist ideology. But he believed that you could nevertheless, uh, if you were strong, and if you had clear objectives, uh, you could deal effectively with the Soviets, and there was no master plan for world conquest, there was, uh, an energy that would, would seek its own level.

Negotiating With the Soviet Union

Interviewer

You've probably answered this ten times. I'm not going to push it but... How do you deal with the Soviets? What was your view or what was Scoop's view? How did they differ from the state department's view? The Carter state deparment.

Perle

Scoop's view of how to deal with the soviets had a number of ingredients that one rarely finds, uh, in professional diplomacy. And the first was candor and straightforwardness; he thought it terribly important to say exactly what one meant to the Soviets, and not to be diplomatic, and not to dance around, uh, the issues. Second, he thought it was important to be fair, but firm. He was convinced it was wrong to back the Soviets into a corner, and it was wrong to put the Soviets in a position where they had to choose between concluding an agreement or some, uh, visible humiliation. He was never interested in, uh, delivering a defeat, uh, to the Soviet Union, but I suppose most of all he was convinced that you had to have a very clear view of your objectives, and whatever else you did, you had to be prepared to walk away from the table, rather than conclude an agreement that didn't meet those minimum objectives, and he was appalled at the negotiations in which the objectives were lowered with virtually every encounter, uh, so that in the end the agreement reached bore no relationship, uh, to the purposes that had caused us to embark on the discussions in the first place.

Interviewer

You say that he didn't believe the MX would solve the vulnerability problem. Was this because he was concerned that the basing mode wouldn't be politically acceptable in the United States? I believe that Nitze thought that it wouldn't be acceptable under the SALT agreement.

Perle

Scoop Jackson had reservations about the MX that was proposed by the Carter administration, partly because he thought this, the construction of thousands of garages in, uh, in the desert would probably never be approved politically. Uh, he was concerned that the design of the system had been, uh, encumbered, and the costs greatly increased in order to, uh, make it consistent with a sense of what was verifiable under an arms-control agreement, and that this was a, a pointless and, uh, um, absurd diversion, since the Soviets were never going to agree that, uh, a scheme of the sort that Carter had in mind was verifiable no matter how hard we tried to persuade them otherwise. And of course he objected to a situation in which we concluded arms-control agreements that permitted the Soviet threat to our security to grow, and then were compelled to build additional weapons ourselves in order to restore the balance that he thought could better be achieved by agreements that reduced the threat.

Interviewer

But if you don't have SALT, you kill it and then you're saying there's nothing you can do. You can't negotiate away their advantage in heavy missiles. Our missiles are vulnerable there's no scheme that we can come up with that will make them invulnerable, so you're worse off.

Perle

Well, Scoop never believed that you couldn't negotiate a, uh, a balanced agreement with the Soviet Union. It always depended on what the alternatives were as they saw them. And, uh so he was, he did not share the view that, uh, the Soviets would never, uh, diminish their advantage in heavy missiles, and I, uh, I think that subsequent negotiations, beyond the Carter administration, have indicated that the Soviets are indeed prepared to accept a diminuition of their advantage in heavy missiles, so you can't obtain at the bargaining table something you don't even ask for, or something that you asked for with, uh, near indifference, and abandon at the first sign, uh, that it, it might not be immediately agreeable to the other side. It was a question of how tenaciously you negotiated.

Interviewer

Going back to Moscow, you think that they shouldn't have gone to their fallback position so soon. As soon as Gromyko said no, they said okay, how about Vladivostok?

Perle

No, the, the great mistake...

Interviewer

Start again, please.

Perle

The great mistake that, uh, the Carter, the new Carter administration made, uh, early in 1977, was in abandoning its negotiating position almost, uh, immediately when it encountered objections from Gromyko. That is not the way to negotiate with the Soviets, they never make concessions easily, and they never make them early in a negotiation, and from that moment, I think, the Soviets believed that they had the psychological advantage in the conduct of those negotiations. And so at the end of the day, the SALT II treaty failed to achieve Carter's most important ambitions, as he himself understood them, and, uh, constituted an agreement, uh, that the Senate Armed Services Committee voted was not in the national security interest of the United States. But the fatal, the fatal mistake was made at the very beginning.

Interviewer

On December 15th, '79, seventeen members of the armed services committee signed a letter to Carter saying they might back the treaty if there were some changes made in the overall defense posture. Jackson didn't sign it. Why didn't he? Why did he separate himself out from seventeen other members?

Perle

Well, it was not seventeen other members of the Armed Services Committee, because there were only seventeen members of the committee. It must have been seventeen senators.

Interviewer

Anyway...

Perle

Uh, Scoop thought the SALT II treaty should not be ratified, and the view that you would swallow hard and ratify a marginal treaty if the administration put more money into defense, which was a view that Sam Nunn and some others uh, took the lead in proposing, was not Scoop's view. He thought a bad treaty ought not to be ratified. He believed that we needed to invest more in defense, because through the decade of the 1970's there was a decline in real terms in American defense spending that had left us deficient in almost every category, principally conventional levels. And so he was very much in favor of the kinds of increases that that, uh, were being advocated by the seventeen signers of that letter.

Interviewer

Carter jacked up the defense budget five billion dollars, didn't he, at the end?

Perle

After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and in, in a, a futile effort to, uh, obtain approval for the SALT II treaty, Carter put additional funds into the, into the defense budget, that's right. But the, the, the, the only really impressive Carter defense budget was his last one, and in particular the projections of what he would do in his second term, and he never got the second term. Those projections have often been more fanciful than real.

Interviewer

Do you think it was a weakened president because of the hostage crisis and the inflation due to the oil embargo, and the Cuban brigade fiasco, that killed SALT? Not necessarily in Jackson's mind, he may never have voted for it.

Perle

I believe there was, uh, very broad public support for an arms-control treaty with the Soviet Union, and a halfway decent treaty would have been approved, despite the weaknesses of the administration. But it was, in fact, at that point, a weak administration, weakened by the Iran hostage crisis, weakened by, uh, Carter's uncommunicativeness and his relative unpopularity in the country, and a variety of other problems. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was clearly the coup de grace, but I believe that even before that, uh, that treaty couldn't have been ratified, but a halfway decent treaty could have been ratified, a treaty supported by, uh, Scoop Jackson and a Howard Baker and, and others who were influential in the Senate, would have been readily ratified.

Interviewer

Can you imagine what would have happened if they had ratified the treaty in the fall and the Soviets had gone into Afghanistan? wWhat would that have done to future negotiations? Would the senate have been irate?

Perle

Well, the length of Senate indignation is, uh is, uh, measurable, and it isn't that long. It would not be the first time; uh, you have the invasion of Czechoslovakia right after, uh, Glassboro, uh, you have the Yom Kippur War shortly after the 1972, uh agreement. Uh, the Soviets, in fact, will do what they think it is in their interest to do, independent of whether there exist agreements between us, and if that comes as a shock to the Senate, then we have some very naive senators.

Interviewer

Thank you very much.

Military Priorities of the Reagan Administration

Interviewer

The sense we had from outside the administration was that when Reagan comes into office, brings in a brand new team of people, many of them from the Committee on the Present Danger, that there is a semblance of a crusade. There's a real strong feeling that America's in enormous trouble and needs to be saved and this is a team of people who are going to restore some kind of power and dignity to the country. I wonder if you could reflect, think back to those early days and tell us is that a proper assessment of the mood, looking from inside out?

Perle

The president, coming into office, was made quickly aware of immense deficiencies in our defense posture. Added to that, there was the psychological burden of the Iran hostage taking and our helplessness in the face of that, the sense that drift in the Carter administration had left us without much prestige, un-respected in the world and certainly diminished as a military power. And that was the practical reality. It was both psychological and material. In a material sense, there were terrible deficiencies. Ships that couldn't go to sea because they hadn't been overhauled, empty ammunition bunkers and declining skill level among entrants into the armed forces made necessary because low pay and allowances were not attracting people with higher skill levels. We were losing more tactical aircraft than we were building, losing them through normal attrition. And as one looked across the board there were problems that needed immediate solution. So it would not have taken much of a crusade simply to occupy one's self with fixing things that were broken.

Interviewer

In the area of strategic arms, one of the phrases that one remembers from the both the campaign for the presidency was the window of vulnerability. Could you define that for us.

Perle

The phrase "window of vulnerability" was not Ronald Reagan's phrase. It was Harold Brown's phrase or a variation of Harold Brown's phrase. Harold Brown's phrase was a bathtub of vulnerable. This is just an historic footnote. And it was called a bathtub because that was, because a bathtub was roughly the shape of the curve in which the number of American missiles surviving Soviet attack at varying levels of Soviet missiles followed the shape of a bathtub, the bathtub of vulnerability. And it was a fact. It was a fact that at, the numbers of warheads with their yield and accuracy, that the Soviets had achieved they could anticipate attacking and destroying a significant faction, virtually all of our land-based missiles. Now this would not have destroyed everything. But because our land-based missiles operate synergistically together with our sea-based missiles and our bomber aircraft, we were vulnerable to a Soviet attack that would significantly deplete our ability to respond.

Interviewer

It's a wonderful anecdote. I'd never heard that bathtub of vulnerability, that's is terrific. Almost everything, with the exception of the B-1 bomber and a new basing mode for the MX, correct me if I'm wrong here, almost everything Reagan put money into had really begun to be financed under Carter. So, what's the distinction here?

Perle

All administrations, when they come into office seem to repeat the mistake of insisting that everything they're doing is new and different and necessarily new and different, because everything their predecessors did was wrong. In fact, the Reagan strategic modernization consisted principally of continuing forward programs that had been started in previous administrations, and in most cases programs that had been sustained, although not at adequate funding levels, through the Carter administration. But new people coming in were keen to differentiate themselves from their predecessors, so they overstated and distorted in so doing it the differences between the Reagan program and its antecedents. In fact, virtually everything the Reagan administration proposed in the strategic area was carried forward from the past. Its sole exception was the B-1 bomber. And even the B-1 bomber had been a close call within the Carter administration with some of Carter's advisors recommending for it and others recommending against it. It was hardly a litmus test of the attitude towards strategic forces of the Carter administration. I believe the incoming Reagan administration made a mistake in stressing differences rather than continuity, because continuity was the single most important note of the new administration's policies. Continuity of programs, continuity of doctrine, the only difference was increased levels of spending and a readiness to spend money on some low visibility, but very important sustaining programs like improvements in command, control and communications.

Interviewer

Coupled with this build up is a new level of anti-Soviet rhetoric, a severe criticism of previous arms-control agreements and negotiations on the part of the administration, a generally hostile stand toward the Soviet Union, more hostile than we've seen before. I guess my question is it's easy to say in hindsight that this was all designed to lead us to where we are today: that is, to negotiations with the Soviet Union, an agreement. But at the time, it appeared to many, the question was asked by many, "Is this administration building up in order to negotiate from a stronger position or is it building up to position itself to, if necessary, fight some kind of nuclear exchange or to gain superiority over the Soviets so we can dictate terms?" Could you comment on that?

Perle

I believe that the administration's principal goal was in correcting problems that had arisen in the decade of the 1970's, when in most of the years of the 1970's we reduced the defense budget by an average rate over that period of three percent a year in real terms. And the aggressive rhetoric had little to do with the reality of the administration's programs. I don't believe there was any deliberate policy of building up weapons in order to negotiate other than there was surely a sense that our ability to extract agreements and extract concessions from the Soviets at the negotiating table would turn in large measure on what we brought to the table. And if we had nothing to bring to it, we couldn't expect to get much back. But precisely because the administration's program, more ambitious rhetorically than in any other sense, it couldn't be expected to move mountains.

Interviewer

I guess to me the rhetoric harkened, particularly as I reread it in the last year, it harkened back, there was a period when, when we had a monopoly, a nuclear monopoly, when we really could, in a sense, our own security depended upon our own resources. Our own ability. We could decide what happened to us on the basis of our own power. For a period after that, but security depended upon negotiations reached with the Soviet Union, agreements reached with them. And I think the sense that I had was that this administration was looking for a way to go it alone, to try to return to a time when we weren't dependent upon complicated and questionable negotiations with the enemy. Any sense of that at all, do you think?

Perle

I don't believe that our security has ever depended on concluding agreements with the Soviet Union. And, indeed, the principal arms-control agreements in the decade and a half preceding the Reagan administration barely touched the Soviet weapons program and barely touched our own. We built what we had it in mind to build and the Soviets built what they had it mind to build and with or without those agreements, the resulting nuclear forces from the two sides would have been pretty much the same. Indeed, they might have been lessened by not concluding agreements, since in some respects the agreements of the early 1970's were a stimulus to growth in areas not covered by those agreements. The best example being the Soviet SS-20 missile, which the Soviets began to deploy only after limits were put on SS-16 missiles that were essentially SS-20's with one additional stage. And because of that additional stage, their range was such that they fell under the SALT limitations, the strategic arms treaty limitations. So, our security has depended and will in the future depend on how intelligently we organize our retaliatory forces and the other elements of our military power. And it is a great mistake to believe that we can turn to agreements as a means of insuring our security. They have a role to play, but they're not an alternative for real military power.

Interviewer

But in a world of mutual assured destruction, MAD, our security was in the end dependent upon good will or whatever you want to say of the enemy or the rationality of the enemy if you want to say.

Perle

It's quite sure that mutual assured destruction, the threat to destroy the civilian population of the Soviet Union, which is what it amounts to, if they attack us, assumes that they will make a rational calculation that they would rather not be destroyed and that suffering their own destruction is too high a price to pay for the privilege of attacking us. That, I believe, is one of the reasons why Ronald Reagan would like to move to a strategic posture that is less dependent on decisions made in Moscow and on decisions that, over which we have no direct control. All we can do is structure the incentives for the Soviets and hope that their priorities and their reasoning parallel the priorities and reasoning with which those incentives are structured.

Interviewer

I don't want to belabor this, but the only problem, of course, is if you have a mad man. I mean. We, all of us remember or, at least if you're my age or older, the time when there was the guy who probably would have taken the rest of the world down with him if he had the opportunity to do so.

Perle

I have not only not forgotten that the world was at one time afflicted with a mad man who would have taken us all with him, but that seems to me one of the very important reasons for not remaining utterly defenseless which is the condition in which we find ourselves today, To refrain deliberately, as an act of policy, from developing and deploying any defense whatsoever against ballistic missiles is to ignore that lesson of history and to ignore the possibility that an accident or a miscalculation could bring terrible destruction. I think Ronald Reagan is right in believing that for the long-term future we have to have some means of defense other than the threat to deliver brutal destruction on anyone who attacks us.

Interviewer

In the early years of the administration, prior to the March 23rd speech, the SDI speech, when he announces the program, what's the thinking that was going on within the administration or his supporters about an ABM defense of some kind? Was there any early talk about it?

Perle

I'm not aware of any. There is a widely-reported briefing that had been given to the president by the joint chiefs of staff in which remarks were made to him, as I understand it, I wasn't present, about the evolution of some technologies that might make it possible for us to develop a strategic defense. But I don't believe there was any serious careful deliberation.

Interviewer

There, of course, has always been a constituency out there pushing for ABM defenses, I mean, since they were abandoned in '76. Were those people influential to your knowledge in the administration? Did they play role in the president, or the administration's thinking of moving toward an ABM defense?

Perle

I don't think so. I can't be sure. But I am quite sure that the stories about an individual going into the Oval Office and, like Paul on the road to Damascus, delivering an epiphany that changed the president's mind, are quite wrong. He has for years, I gather even as governor of California, believed that some form of defense is a natural requirement for a great power threatened by nuclear weapons.

Interviewer

That's my impression too. I think he made radio addresses, which I'm trying to get hold of to that effect. I'm going to get back to SDI but I want to ask one question about the freeze movement. The country is clearly very supportive of the administration's military build-up. Congress, virtually carte blanche in the early first couple of years. But there is also, it seems, a growing concern among Americans that we aren't talking to the Soviets, expressed, I would suggest, in growing support for the nuclear-freeze movement, which like the military build up begins under President Carter. We have to remember. The freeze percolates along. Suddenly it gets, when those New England town meetings vote, suddenly it becomes a national news story and the administration begins to take notice. Was the freeze movement of concern to the administration, to your knowledge?

Perle

I think it was a, I think the freeze movement. Let me start that over again becaust it wasn't a complete thought. I believe that the freeze movement was more a nuisance than anything else. It was driven by ignorance and fear in equal measure, hopelessly unsophisticated as a way of looking at the strategic arsenal of the United States and the Soviet Union. It missed one absolutely fundamental point, which is that it came at a moment when the Soviets were completing the modernization of their strategic forces and the United States was just beginning the modernization of American strategic forces. So, had we frozen at the point at which the freeze movement was most aggressive in urging that we do so, in a very short period of time our antiquated strategic deterrent would have become hopeless ineffective, while the Soviet strategic deterrent was becoming even more effective. They could have stood up under a freeze much better than we could. But the people who were supporting the freeze didn't look at the facts. And they also had a wonderful way of begging the crucial questions by defining the freeze as a mutual and verifiable one, even though a verifiable freeze was a practical impossibility. And mutuality if it meant anything had to mean that the consequences for the strategic forces for the two sides would be roughly comparable when, in fact, they were wildly disparate and disadvantageous for the United States. But I don't believe that anyone in the administration thought that the votes would be there to freeze American strategic programs. And, so, while it was a nuisance, it was never more than that.

Interviewer

Actually that's a provocative answer in a way becaust you're suggesting, or maybe I'm misinterpreting it, if we did have an equality of forces, whatever that might mean that a freeze might not be a bad idea.

Perle

Well I, as a general rule, I think it is a mistake to impose constraints on military forces so vital to our security, that prevent us from responding in situations where we think we can improve our security, either by replacing a weapon that is becoming obsolete with one that isn't or a relatively unsafe weapon with a much safer one or reducing numbers of weapons, because the effectiveness of individual weapons is higher than the effectiveness of the weapons that are replaced. Dynamism in the construction of our strategic posture is I believe a good thing and has paved the way for significant arms control which you couldn't have if you were stuck with dinosaurs that you felt you had to keep around because they were so ineffective.

Ronald Reagan's SDI Speech

Interviewer

The president's START proposals, which I think he begins to hint at in the Eureka speech, May '82, along in that time period, were you involved in the formulation of that?

Perle

Well, I certainly tried to bring some influence to bear on the administration's START proposals and I argued vigorously for deep reductions, rather deeper than the ones that we did, in fact, propose. Because it seemed to me we could maintain an adequate deterrent with forces significantly smaller than the ones we had. There we no point in maintaining this unwieldy inventory if we could get the Soviets to reduce theirs as well.

Interviewer

I notice that you use the word deterrence. Is that the best that we can hope for in a sense as a nation, that we, a posture that allows us to deter the Soviet Union from attacking us?

Perle

I believe that for the foreseeable future deterrence of Soviet action by maintaining the capability to respond if attacked is the best we can hope for. Over the long term, maybe we can do better than that, but it will take a lot more perestroika than we've seen so far to change the relationship to the point where we can think of other ways of defending ourselves.

Interviewer

Did you have any role in the preparation of the March 23rd speech, the SDI speech? I mean, I imagine you must have had some role in the rest of the speech at least, because there was a START proposal as I recall in that speech, wasn't there, in the early part of that, and the defense of a build up.

Perle

Well, most of that March 23rd speech was about the defense budget. It was an argument for the defense budget and I was indeed involved in the preparation of that part of the speech, not directly as a speech writer, but had been following it rather closely. My only role in the March 23rd speech was delaying it for 24 hours. I was in Portugal with the secretary of defense attending a meeting of NATO defense ministers. And the White House sent the speech over for the secretary to examine. He had gone to bed, 11 o'clock at night, in the Algarve. And I read the speech and I was stunned to read the paragraphs at the end that announced the launching of the Strategic Defense Initiative. It wasn't called that in that speech. We tried to call it that later. It ended up getting called Star Wars. I think that was predictable. But it seemed to me unwise to launch a program of those dimensions without any advance preparation, without consultations with Congress, without consultations with our allies, without defining carefully the plan that we were going to pursue. And, so, I urge that we hold off until we could do those things. And the decision was made to hold off for 24 hours.

Interviewer

I guess the other side said if you run it through the regular bureaucracy and it's going to get so diluted or so, or leaked to the press. What was the argument on the other side?

Perle

I'm not sure what the argument against taking time before announcing SDI, to prepare the way for it, was. In retrospect it seems clear that we would have been far better off explaining the extent of the Soviet strategic defense developments before launching our own. In part, because we didn't do that, what the administration tried to say about the Soviet program tended to be dismissed as an effort simply to sustain support for the American program, when, in fact, the Soviets had been vigorously pursuing strategic defense technologies for the last twenty years. So, I don't know why, I don't know what argument was used not to do the kind of normal preparation. As between working a program like that through the bureaucracy, which would probably have been unwise, and springing it full born like Venus emerging from the sea, there was a middle ground and that middle ground was for the president to decide that he would proceed with the program and instruct the department of defense, department of state and others to take thirty or sixty days in consultation in preparation for officially launching the program.

Interviewer

Tacked on the end of the speech, not a major part of that speech, and yet big reaction when it came out, the Senate went crazy and the press, well, not the press, somebody, I forgot who it was dubbed it Star Wars, which was bound to catch on. You're absolutely right. I tried to call this program star wars but they said it would be too offensive to conservatives. Although most scientists I talk to...

Perle

It's true.

Interviewer

Well in a way, not really, they really refer to it that way among themselves. But it's different, I understand it's different for the fraternity talking about itself. Why that reaction? I mean, could you put the idea of ABM defense in a little perspective for us.

The Vital Role of a Partial Space Shield

Perle

I think the vehement, negative reaction to the president's SDI speech reflected fifteen years of acceptance in the community of experts of the proposition that defenselessness is next to godliness. That it is desirable to be defenseless. That only if we are naked before our enemies can we have a stable relationship with the Soviet Union. I think that's rubbish. The Soviets never accepted that notion. The ABM Treaty of 1972 which was said to be the document that enshrined it did nothing of the sort. It was a tactical maneuver on the part of the Soviets to buy time to achieve parity in ABM technology, which is precisely what they did in the period after the ABM Treaty. But it became an article of faith, a part of the catechism that it was a bad idea to be defended. And any effort to mount the defense would surely bring in its wake soviet increase in offensive forces and you would get a spiraling arms race out of control at the end of which we would be worse off than if we never embarked on the defense in the first place. This ignores entirely the fact that if we are defenseless we are defenseless not only against the unlikely event of a deliberate Soviet nuclear attack on the United States, but defenseless with respect to all other far more likely ways in which nuclear weapons could cause terrible destruction, like an accident or a miscalculation or an unintended or an unauthorized launch. Or a launch by a third party. All of which contingencies in my view are far more likely than a massive Soviet deliberate attack from the United States. And, so, we are, those who believe that it is unwise to have any defense at all are prepared to run the extravagant risk of a disaster in an area where the probabilities will probably catch up with us sooner or later in order to implement a theory that has to do only with the least likely way in which nuclear harm can be done.

Interviewer

When one first heard that speech, the sense that I got any way was that the president was really offering at some point in the future a virtually, if not entirely, impenetrable defense, an umbrella that would protect both our civilian population and our military resources. Do you think that was what the president's speech said? Did we misinterpret it or did he mislead us or did we miss...

Perle

I think the president set for the Strategic Defense Initiative a goal that can't possibly be realized in the near future, if it can ever be realized, of a perfect defense, an impenetrable shield. It seems to me unlikely that we will be, unlikely that we will be able to achieve that level of perfection in any weapons system, offensive or defensive. Nevertheless, a partially effective strategic defense, one that would intercept, let's say, half the missiles aimed at the United States, in a deliberate attack, would destroy the effectiveness of that attack. It would not achieve it's objectives, if the objectives were to destroy the American capacity to retaliate. And, of course, it would be available to deal with accidents or miscalculations. I believe it's a mistake to argue that SDI is only worth pursuing if it can lead to perfection. Partial defenses have a vital role to play in protecting this country, not only against a missile attack, but against a variety of contingencies that seem to me more likely.

The Benefits of SDI

Interviewer

My observation again is that when the speech first comes out, it gets a lot of criticism, not only from the obvious critics, but almost from many supporters of the administration who are concerned about it because of this promise. Later they get on board, they become supporters of SDI for a variety of reasons, one you just mentioned. Is that an accurate recollection on my part or...

Perle

I believe that it is possible to support a vigorous program of research, development and testing aimed at determining whether we can produce an effective strategic defense, without setting an impossibly high criterion for it. And it would be terrific if we could have an impenetrable shield, but even if you can't get that there are good reasons for proceeding with SDI. So, no one should be disappointed at the inability to achieve that rather grand objective of a perfect impenetrable defense. I think, like any military system, a strategic defense can serve multiple purposes. You know, I frequently hear the argument made that the SDI that I support, which would include a partially effective defense is not the SDI that the president supports and critics will say which is it? Well, it's both. You don't have to accept perfection in order to attempt to build the best defense you can. And we don't do it with other weapons systems. Most of the things we build have multiple purposes and the strategic defense as well would have multiple purposes, only one of which, which may not be achievable, would be the kind of impenetrable defense that the president seemed to have in mind in 1983.

Interviewer

Every scientist I've talk to agrees that impenetrable defense is just not likely. I guess what we all hope is that there would be something that would deliver us from living under Damoclean sword of destruction that we constantly have to, it would be wonderful to wake up in the morning and say, hey, the essence of the nuclear age is done and over with.

Perle

But we are not going to wake up in the morning and discover that nuclear weapons have been abolished or even rendered impotent or obsolete. Nevertheless, it would be worth rendering them ineffective for military purposes and it would be worth defending ourselves against an accident.

Interviewer

Let me turn to the Summer of '83 and going into the Fall of, and Winter of '84 when Soviet-America relations go into a, what some have referred to as a twenty year nadir, or the low point of twenty years. Just touch on a couple of events and how they were perceived from the administration. Obviously great reaction to SDI. What about the Soviet initial reaction to the SDI? Very very critical from the very start. Right?

Perle

The initial Soviet reaction to SDI was in equal measure critical and hypocritical. Hypocritical because the Soviets had their own program. And I recall a letter signed by a significant number of Soviet scientists deploring American work on strategic defenses and declaring ex-cathedra that it couldn't possibly work. And included among the signers of this open letter, which was widely published, was the man who runs the Soviet SDI program as well as the principal designers of their offensive nuclear weapons. It was their military-industrial complex saying to the world that we Americans had no right to divert science to the cause of defense. And it was intensely hypocritical and they repeated that line ever since.

Interviewer

Although Gorbachev came close in his press conference, not that close, but he admitted that they were engaged in their own SDI research.

Perle

At the Washington summit, Gorbachev for the first time acknowledged that the Soviets had a program but then he quickly said its purpose was not to develop a defense, it was something else.

Interviewer

I want to get back to that. A few more things. The shooting down of the KLA plane, what was the reaction of that at the time. I mean, was that a huge shock or surprise? Was it, any level at all said boy this really shows them for what they are. Not, obviously not welcome in nobody likes to see the death of three hundred and whatever it was x people. It did certainly make a case didn't it?

Perle

Great many people reacted to the Soviets shooting down a civilian airliner by recognizing that they applied a different standard than one would expect in any other country in taking the action that they had taken. And it wasn't the first time they had fired on a civilian airliner. So, there was shock and dismay. There were Americans aboard that aircraft to add to it. And the Soviets lied, of course, initially about what had happened. There wasn't the slightest sign of contrition. They brought out generals to explain how it had all happened. It, I don't 'know why that should not have been the nadir of US-Soviet relations or indeed Soviet relations with the world rather than some of the other events that are often described as having touched a low point in U.S.-Soviet relations.

Interviewer

I want to move on from there. We invade Grenada. Not a big deal to them, I imagine. We put our missiles in Western Europe. They walk out of, first, the INF talks and then the START talks. What about their walking out of the START talks?

Perle

The Soviets did themselves a great deal of harm when they walked out of the talks in Geneva. And if anyone doubted it, it was evident immediately when the demonstrators who used to hang around the meeting site in Geneva, always with placards deploring American deployment of intermediate missiles, suddenly lay down in front of the Soviet limousines taking their negotiators away from the talks. And from the moment the Soviets left, it was clear that it was only a matter of time before they returned, despite the statements they made at the time that they would never come back until we had withdrawn the missiles that we had begun to deploy in December of 1983.

Interviewer

So, this was not, I mean, the administration clearly is not concerned that something has happened that has damaged our rel... This is just a ploy on the part of the Soviets and a standard ploy actually, to pose themselves in a stronger negotiating position.

Perle

The Soviets walked out of the negotiations in Geneva in the hope that this would lead to massive protests in the streets of Europe, with the result that the West would be forced to abandon its plans to deploy cruise missiles and Pershing II missiles. It was a dreadful miscalculation from the Soviet point of view. From the day they walked out, I was convinced that they had taken the one action that could guarantee deployment.

Interviewer

But something does happen. The Administration in '84, positioning itself toward the election, Reagan at least begin talking about accommodations with the Soviets, the first time maybe. That summer as I recall, Gromyko or somebody comes and there's talk of a summit. What's that about? Why this change then?

Perle

I have never been able to explain the careening rhetoric of the president. I thought it was unnecessary and abrasive hostility in the beginning and it became sometimes even pathetically accommodating in the end. And if you draw a middle line between the early statements and the late statements, that's about what should have been said all along.

Reykjavik Summit

Interviewer

I want to talk a little about Gorbachev. Now, and I want to begin in the present, because you had dinner with him. You were seated, for reasons which escape me, anyway you were seated at the table with him when he was here in Washington and I wonder if you had any, first we'll begin with any personal impression and then maybe go on from there to more thoughtful comments.

Perle

You mean first impressions are never thoughtful.

Interviewer

I think not. There's a surface impression this guy makes and then there's a deeper analysis of what he's doing.

Perle

Well, he, Gorbachev can be very engaging, amiable, conversational, but he remains, and he would not be in any way annoyed by my so characterizing him, a tough Marxist-Leninist of the old school, despite all the efforts that he has under way at reform.

Interviewer

Hodding Carter told me a story. He was at a party with you and a bunch of Russians and he said that all the Russians were fascinated to meet you. All the Russians wanted to come up and talk to you because you represented to them the worst, the most strident anti-Soviet or whatever. What do you represent?

Perle

They make the mistake of believing own propaganda. What can I say.

Interviewer

Did they come up and solicit comments from you? Do they? What are they concerned about? What do they ask? What do they talk to you about?

Perle

Well, about, I mean, in my conversations with various Russians, we've tended to talk about issues that were on the immediate agenda. They're here with a mission and, particularly just prior to a summit, fishing for intelligence and so on. But they have portrayed me in the Soviet press for so long now as some sort of demon, that you get the feeling that they're curious, but they don't want to get too close.

Interviewer

The Prince of Darkness.

Perle

Prince of Darkness. Although that has not been the sustained reaction of those Russians that I've come to know. And among the Russians with whom I've worked across the negotiating table, it had been possible to develop relations at least of mutual respect.

Interviewer

Gorbachev comes on the scene, first grabs American attention, probably with that trip to London in, just before Christmas of '84, before he becomes general secretary. The press describe his relationship with Maggie Thatcher in almost courtship terms. He becomes General Secretary. He and the president seem to be engaging in a international competition for Mr. Good Guy, Mr. Peacenik, which Gorbachev does very well. And, in fact, may have at one point actually been ahead of the president, at least in Western European polls. Any comment on that whole peace offensive the Soviet peace offensive?

Perle

This is not the first Soviet peace offensive that we've ever seen. There have been a succession of them historically. People's memories are so short. The Soviets began saying in December of 1987 that they were going to shift their policy to one of sufficiency, that they would only require sufficient weapons. They never explained what the policy was before sufficiency. And, indeed, they never acknowledge having any policy other than sufficiency. The real test of the Soviets, and by now it is a test of Gorbachev, because he has been in office long enough to affect changes, is whether they diminish the terribly burdensome investment in military things that is now running in excess of 20 percent of their gross national product, which they can ill afford. We are staggering under the weight of 6.7 percent. No president, no democratically-elected leader could hope to propose half of what the Soviets are spending. And the Soviet economy is a poor economy. So, the burden, the opportunity costs, the privation that results from their exaggerated emphasis on military power is very great indeed. And if Gorbachev is serious, as I believe he is, about trying to rescue the Soviet economy from oblivion then he will have to diminish the rate at which they're squandering their resources on military things. And that is the test of the peace offensive. Not the words with which a military build-up is otherwise described.

Interviewer

Now, some have used that argument to argue that that of all reasons is why we should vigorously pursue SDI, because, in fact, it's our strong suit both technologically speaking and in terms of the system that we're opposing, that is their ICBM force. And also it's going to cost them an enormous amount of money and we can beat them in that race. Do you share that assumption?

Perle

I don't believe that pursuing SDI necessarily means a race. A strategic defense that was partially effective, let's say 50 percent effective, and even the skeptics will grant that you might be able to achieve 50 percent effectiveness, would deprive the Soviets of half the number of warheads they might otherwise deliver against American targets. And even if the arsenals of the two sides were limited say to six thousand warheads, so they would be able to deliver only three thousand warheads against the United States, can anyone argue that that deprives the Soviet Union of a deterrent capability? And is it inevitable that they would respond to that strategic defense? Is it certain that they would not be content with the ability to deliver three thousand warheads, that they need the ability to deliver six thousand warheads? It's much too simple to suggest that there would inevitably be a race that would result from our mounting a defense. The Soviets have mounted defenses against which we have chosen not to race for a variety of reasons. And there's nothing inevitable about a race flowing from SDI.

Interviewer

Tell us, I want to turn to Reykjavik, an extraordinary summit as I understand it. I saw that PBS, not PBS, done by Granite television. Did you by any chance see that? Was that at all accurate?

Perle

I thought it was pretty accurate in describing the events. The president is a multi-dimensional character and he comes off rather one-dimensional.

Interviewer

Awfully one-dimensional. Almost like a caricature. Tell us if you can just a little bit of the story of that summit. I mean, we go into it at the last minute. Do we go in as they say with inadequate preparation? Are we taken by surprise at the Russian proposal?

Perle

I believe we were well-prepared for Reykjavik and the president had his usual two inch thick briefing books, painstakingly prepared by staffs of the various departments. The members of the delegation who accompanied them had been working on these issues for years and in some cases for decades, in Paul Nitze's case, half a century. We were ready for that negotiation and to those who believe we were ill-prepared, I would only comment, look at the outcome. We left Reykjavik with the Strategic Defense Initiative in tact, with the Soviets having moved substantially toward the elimination of intermediate nuclear missiles, which was ultimately the result, ultimately resulted in the INF Treaty. And with the Soviets moving significantly in the direction of deep cuts in strategic forces which was Ronald Reagan's proposal and Ronald Reagan's agenda. So, he left Reykjavik with everything he wanted or at least having set in motion everything he wanted. And Gorbachev left Reykjavik essentially empty handed. Now, if that's poor preparation, then we ought to yet rid of the briefing books and quit preparing for these meetings.

Interviewer

And, yet, when they both emerged at the end of the discussion, they look, they, Gorbachev, Reagan, Shultz, they look exhausted discouraged, depressed. And the initial take they put on it is one of, if not failure, at least of disappointment. Is that accurate?

Perle

One gets caught up in the toils of the critical negotiation and immediately after the last session in which no agreement resulted, even though a great deal was done to advance the president's agenda, it was easy to be disappointed. But recollected in tranquility, and it didn't take very long, a matter of hours, it became clear that a great deal had been accomplished in Reykjavik and the negotiations that followed would undoubtedly accomplish still more. So I believe Reykjavik was a great success.

Interviewer

This was not simply a question of both leaders recognizing the enormous heartfelt feeling on the part of people in the world for some kind of step toward peace, reinterpreting what has really been a failure.

Perle

I think that Gorbachev left Reykjavik without having stopped the SDI program which is what he went to Reykjavik to do. Ronald Reagan left Reykjavik without an INF treaty or a START treaty in hand. The difference is that such momentum was imparted to both an INF treaty and a START treaty at Reykjavik that on reflection it was a good outcome for the president, but on reflection it was a bad outcome for Gorbachev. And I believe Gorbachev subsequently understood that when he felt compelled to back away from the position he took as he left Reykjavik which was that there could be no further movement toward agreement on intermediate nuclear forces or strategic force until the United States abandoned SDI.

Interviewer

If the president had said, "I will restrict SDI to the laboratory research, Mr. General Secretary," would there have been agreement in your view at Reykjavik?

Perle

Had the president agreed to restrict SDI to laboratory research there would have been a very broad framework agreement at Reykjavik. And the Soviets would have proceeded thereafter to Ignore the parts they didn't like, pocketing the part they did like, which would have the limitation on SDI research!

Interviewer

Your interpretation of the ABM, the battle in the Senate, with Sam Nunn in the Senate.

Perle

No administration prior to the Reagan Administration had to deal with the ABM treaty in the way one had to deal with it when there was a Strategic Defense Initiative under way. That is, you had to know more or less precisely what you could and couldn't do. Previous administrations weren't troubled by that because they weren't doing anything, or at least they weren't doing anything that could conceivably be interpreted as encroaching on the treaty limitations. So, we actually went and read the treaty and when you read the treaty, you find that there are two provisions of it that are in direct contradiction to one another. One that says no testing in space and the other one that says that in the event that systems based on new technologies are developed, the parties will consult about what to do about it. You can't read those two provisions and not ask yourself which one applies in the case of an SDI type experiment. So, you have to go back and read the negotiating record to shed light on what that apparent contradiction means. And when we did that we came to the conclusion, which is unambiguous as one reads the record, that the Soviet Union never, never accepted the proposition that there should be no research, no development and no testing of systems based on other physical principles or new technologies, precisely the kinds of things that the SDI program has been doing. And it was on the basis of a reading of the treaty and the negotiating record that the administration came to the conclusion that it was free, under the treaty, to pursue development and testing with respect to SDI technologies.

Interviewer

Fifty years from now historians are writing books about this period, what are they going to say about the president's, this Administration's contribution or lack of contribution to strategic relationship with the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons.

Perle

I would think that fifty years from now, historians would observe that Ronald Reagan was the first president in the nuclear age to put to the Soviet Union a proposal for the limitation of nuclear weapons that, that cut deeply into Soviet nuclear programs and American nuclear programs. That he did it in the face of near consensus that it couldn't possibly succeed and he succeeded. So, it will be the high water mark, I suspect, for a tough-minded approach to negotiating with the Soviets.

Interviewer

Looking from the outside, the feeling, one way you can look at the last eight years, is you could see this, the president comes in with enormous support from a very conservative constituency, anti-Soviet, etc. etc. doesn't want to talk, military build-up. At the end of the eight years, a lot of the conservatives seem to be fleeing the administration in droves, leaving, leaving him alone there in a certain sense with that same old core of Washington moderates who have always, it's like a process that every president has gone through in a way, from militancy to consensus and, how would you describe that process?

Perle

Well, the process by which the president's views of, and his supporters have changed over the years may be the mirror image of the change that affected the Carter administration. Carter came in, you will recall, deploring an inordinate fear of communism and he left having been stung by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and with little confidence in his administration and the broad public clamoring for a rebuilding of our defenses. So, I suppose history is full of bizarre twists and turns.

Interviewer

Do you think that's, are we in a good stance now? Was this a good thing that happened or should the president have maintained a more forceful stand?

Perle

I think the president has been pretty forceful all along. There's a tinge of romanticism following the Washington summit. But deep down I think he realizes that the Soviet continues to be an adversary, armed as Sakharov said, to the teeth. And one that if we're not very careful, will exploit its military potential in order to expand its influence broadly speaking. Ronald Reagan knows that and his view on that hasn't changed.