HOW DID HE FIRST BECOME AWARE OF PROBLEM OF VULNERABILITY IN ICBM FORCE?

The vulnerability of ICBMs had become increasingly apparent as we went into the late '60s and early 1970s for two reasons. First the improving accuracy of weapons on all sides, the American and the Russian, and secondly the advent of the MIRV, the multiple independent re-entry vehicle warheads, so that we could put up to 10 warheads on our missiles and we expected the Russians would put even more because their missiles were larger. That meant that one incoming missile from the Russians could take out 10, 12 maybe even 20 American ICBMs with great accuracy. In my time as director of Central Intelligence we improved...we changed the estimate of Soviet accuracy to where they had improved in our opinion, or were going to improve, thereby increasing the vulnerability even more during that particular time.

HOW COULD HE TELL THEY WERE MAKING THEIR WARHEADS MORE ACCURATE?

Because of good intelligence work, good sleuthing on our part, some very, very sophisticated techniques that the Central Intelligence Agency had developed and which I think they're to be commended for.

DISCUSSES ANSWER FORMAT. REPEATS.

The Central Intelligence Agency used its sleuthing techniques, used some very sophisticated analysis to deduce that the Russian accuracy was improving. I think they are to be very much commended for doing that.

WHEN DID HE NOTICE THE INCREASED SOVIET ACCURACY?

It was not a surprise. Everybody anticipated it would come. Perhaps it came a little sooner than we expected but no, everyone knew that accuracy was one of the trends in technology that was affecting all weaponry, not just ICBMs. Every weapon practically in the arsenal of mankind today has become more accurate than its predecessor.

WAS ACCURACY SOURCE OF DISPUTE?

Well always there are differences between analysts on this but everybody agreed I believe that the trend was in the direction that we estimated, it was just a question of how fast we thought the Russians would get there.

ASKS ABOUT 1978 INTELLIGENCE REPORTS - HE WON'T RESPOND. WAS THERE A TURNING POINT IN THE 1970S WHEN WE REALIZED WE HAD TO ACT QUICKLY?

I don't believe there was a marked turning point. There were different times when we changed the estimates but I think that it was always part of a steady progression.

ASKS HIS RECOMMENDATIONS TO CARTER.

A Chief of Intelligence should not make recommendations on policy matters but in the critical meeting in which President Carter addressed whether he would proceed with the MX missile as our response to the Soviet buildup in their ICBM force, I presented an intelligence estimate of what the Soviets would do if we built the MX. At that time we were talking about building I believe it was 50 MXs to be put in 200 shelters.

ASKS IF THOSE ARE THE NUMBERS.

President Carter held a meeting of the National Security Council to make his final decision on whether to proceed with the MX missile. Our new ICBM. At that meeting it was my task not to make any recommendations but to give the intelligence estimate, in this case, what would the Soviets do if we built an MX missile? The proposal for for some 200 MXs to be scattered about between some 4000 or so shelters. I told the President that within the limits of SALT II the Soviets could proliferate warheads on their existing missiles without breaking any rules to the point where they wouldn't worry about which of the 4000 some shelters had MXs in them, they would just hit all of them. In short, I believed we were vulnerable even if we tried to hide these 200 missiles in some 4000 hiding places. They would just knock all 4000 of them out and they had enough warheads to do that. Later in that meeting the President said he believed he should go ahead with the MX and that everybody at the table agreed. And although it was not my role as chief of intelligence to agree or not agree with a policy decision, since he put it in those terms, I spoke up and said "No, Mr. President, I do not agree. I believe the Soviets will respond in some way that will just make this new MX as vulnerable as the old Minuteman”.

WHY WERE THEY NOT MORE CONCERNED?

Because you don't make these decisions on, totally on logic and military rationale. The President had the problem of getting the SALT II treaty through the Senate and I believe, although I've never heard him say this or had any indication it was the case other than my intuition, that the President felt he had to approve the MX missile in order to get the conservative Republican votes out of the Senate in order to secure passage of the SALT II treaties. I don't think the debate we had in the National Security Council was a very meaningful debate. I think the President was boxed in politically and knew that and had made his decision even before we talked about it.

COMMENTS.

It's very unfortunate when political factors overrule logic. But that's because the United States for many years has been obsessed with the MX type land-based intercontinental ballistic missile. We have a fixation in our country that we need power, we need largeness, we need speed and so on. We have misunderstood the nuclear equation, we have misunderstood the fact that nuclear weapons are not really usable other than to threaten massive destruction. We have traditionally said to ourselves, if the enemy has a weapon that can seriously injure our country, we must have some way to counter it. So we have gone about since the 1950s when the Soviets first began to have an intercontinental nuclear weapon capability, a capability to strike the homeland of the United States, we have gone about countering that weapon. It's not capable of being countered, at least until we get an SDI or some purely defensive system if we ever can. In short, because those Soviet ICBMs were sitting there, our military and our political military leaders felt we must have a capability to strike those weapons that could strike us. If you're talking about infantry tanks or troops or tanks or artillery, it's not a bad logic. When you're talking about ICBMs it doesn't work because you cannot have any assurance that you can strike all of an enemy's ICBMs before he launches them at you. Because he has 20 minutes or so notice once you've aimed at him and launched. And he may counter launch while your missiles are en route. If he launches first, you have no way of stopping that. Therefore we have misled ourselves in feeling that if they have ten ICBMs, we have got to have ten that can hit them, or some such calculation. That's not applicable in the nuclear age with nuclear weapons because those weapons are so powerful, because they can be launched so quickly.

ASKS IF THE ARGUMENT IS NO LONGER OVER PRACTICAL MATTERS BUT SYMBOLISM AND THEORY.

What we have fallen error to.. Where we have made a mistake in the United States and in the Soviet Union, is in thinking that you treat nuclear weapons the same way you treat conventional weapons. If the enemy has ten of those, he's going to have an advantage over you, if you don't have ten. If the enemy has weapons that he can launch at you but you can't counter, that he's got some advantage. That's not really the case with nuclear weapons. They are just not usable other than in retaliation or in deterrence.

DOESN'T LIKE HIS ANSWER. RECALLS THE CREDIBLE DETERRENT ARGUMENT FOR MX.

The argument for the MX was totally fallacious in my opinion. What the Soviets hold dear is not their ICBMs nor their leadership bunkers, it's their society. And we don't need accurate missiles to destroy their society. We don't need MX type missiles to deter them from attacking us. They don't want to lose their whole society, their whole economic value. I think what we are doing here is saying to ourselves that what we want is a capability to threaten a first strike. Threaten an ability to knock them out without our being endangered. I don't believe there's one chance in a million that we could do that. That is, that we could target every Soviet nuclear weapons in a submarine, in a bomber, in a cruise missile or in an ICBM and hope in a matter of minutes to knock them all out so the United States would not receive any damage in response. There are people who talk about, well, we might just receive a few hundred nuclear weapons and we might lose only 10 or 20 million people and I think that's just sheer nonsense. All you have to do is look at the nuclear accident in Chernobyl in the Soviet Union. Here was a case of a very, very small nuclear detonation. The impact of that.

INTERRUPTS HIM.

All we have to do is look at the nuclear accident in Chernobyl in the Soviet Union and…

DID PENTAGON WANT FIRST STRIKE IN MX?

Oh yes the Pentagon has never renounced a first-strike capability. I think the Pentagon feels that if you're going to defend the United States you've got to be able to take out any threat that is posed against us. Unfortunately I don't believe there's any way to take out this kind of nuclear threat against us. But we talk openly in the United States. I think foolishly, but openly, about the possibility of a first-strike against Soviet Union. We do it on the grounds that we would be persuaded that the Soviets were about to strike us, and pre-empting would be the way to limit damage to the United States. I would suggest you put yourselves in the shoes of a President of the United States and ask whether you think he would ever pre-empt. I don't believe there's any logic that would lead him to do that. If he pre-empts, he has a 99 percent probability that the Soviets will hit the United States with nuclear weapons, with substantial numbers, because we have no ability to target all of their nuclear weapons. We don't know where all their submarines are for instance at any given time. And therefore the chances are very, very high, 99 percent in my opinion, that the Soviets if we attacked first, would respond. And we would lose New York or Washington or Chicago or San Francisco and maybe all of them. Now the President, if he decided to pre-empt would have that as a near certainty. Whereas what would he gain by pre-empting? He would hope to lessen the damage on the United States but it only takes half a dozen nuclear weapons to do irreparable damage to any country. So I don't see there's any logic that a President would come to which would accept the near certainty of nuclear destruction on the United States against the probability that the Soviets really were going to strike us first. When he turned to his Chief of Intelligence and said, "Chief, how certain are you that the Soviets are about to launch against us?" The Chief would have to say, "Well, 80 percent, 90 percent." Not 99 percent. He would never information that was that persuasive in my opinion.

QUOTES OTHERS ON DETERRENCE (PART OF QUESTION ON TAPE).

The threat of American retaliation for a convention attack on Western Europe by striking the Soviet Union's homeland with nuclear weapons is meaningless. No President of the United States in my opinion, is going to strike let's say Odessa in the Soviet Union and accept the fact that the Soviets will almost certainly strike let's say Chicago in the United States, in order to defend Bonn. And that's what the doctrine of nuclear retaliation for a conventional attack on our allies in Western Europe actually says. The Europeans don't really believe we're going to do that any more. We certainly don't really want that to happen. What advocates of that doctrine resort to them is. Well, we won't strike Odessa but we might strike Prague or Warsaw or the Soviet troops themselves in East Germany as they were marching towards West Germany. And I think a President might make that decision and might use nuclear weapons in that way to respond to such an attack on Western Europe. But ask yourself then, do the Western Europeans want that as a way of defending themselves? Because if the United States strikes Prague, the response is likely to be on Bonn or Paris or London. What we've been kidding ourselves with since the 1960s is a fiction called the nuclear umbrella. Now the Europeans see the United States as having put this nuclear umbrella over Western and Eastern Europe. And if a war, conventional, starts inside that umbrella, the United States they believe will use nuclear weapons outside that umbrella to strike the Soviet Union. If there is a response as there almost certainly would be, it would be outside that umbrella on the United States. And from the European point of view, this is perfectly fine. Since the 1960s the United States has seen the umbrella quite differently. We've placed these shorter-range nuclear weapons inside the umbrella. Our concept is that if war starts conventionally inside the umbrella, we will strike Eastern Europe inside the umbrella. If there is a response, it will be inside the umbrella against Western Europe and that's not so bad from our point of view. So we're kidding ourselves. We and the Western Europeans see this nuclear umbrella in totally different perspectives. We don't want the one, they don't want the other. It really is not a viable deterrence. Now, there is uncertainty today in the Soviet mind as to whether we're going to be foolish enough to do either one of these things. And so it does have a deterrent effect, there's no denying that. But it's a dangerous form of deterrence for several reasons. The first is that the Western Europeans are increasingly coming to understand it's not a good deal from their point of view, because we're not going to do the one and they don't want the other. And pretty soon they'll realize that they are an emperor with no clothes, they don't have a deterrent. And their only recourse will be to make political concessions. Not really their only recourse. Their other recourse will be to buildup their conventional defenses. But one way or the other, they are going to have to do something and there's the risk that it will be political concessions. Beyond that, playing with nuclear deterrence when it really is not sensible or logical is dangerous because we are likely to find in a crisis we believe what we've been saying. In particular I'm very concerned about the tactical nuclear weapons in position in Western Europe, because if our forces were being overrun and the nuclear weapons were about to be captured, for instance, what would an American military commander do? After all, he's been... had it drilled into him for years that our national policy is to use those weapons if we're being overrun in Western Europe. And I would not be surprised if he found a way to use them whether or not in the chaos he actually had instructions to do so. So I think it's a dangerous doctrine to continue. We should get away from it and realize that nuclear weapons are good for deterring nuclear war. They are of no use for deterring conventional war. The intermediate range nuclear treaty is a sign that we understand that better today. When we can withdraw a whole category of nuclear weapons which we used to say were essential, were a critical part of our deterrent. Weapons that we designed especially for this purpose. And now we've said, Oh, suddenly we don't need them. It indicates there's a basic flaw in the overall thesis. It's only a matter of time until we understand that we cannot use the threat of nuclear response as a way of deterring a conventional attack.

CITES BROWN'S CONTENTION MX WAS NOT A FIRST STRIKE WEAPON.

The MX is a first-strike weapon, there's no question about that. It has the ability to hit the Soviet Union in maybe 30 minutes. From a Soviet point of view, that's a first strike potential. The fact that the MX is viewed by some as survivable, and I don't think there's any chance it's survivable in any form that's been presented so far, but even if it were survivable, what would you do with it after the first strike came? You would strike their counterforce capability, their remaining ICBMs? Nonsense. I don't believe we have the capability to determine which silos are empty and you don't want to go hit 1400 of them in order to find 10 percent that didn't get launched in some… in the first strike, for instance. And besides, if the Soviets have launched a big strike at us, but still have some reserves and we go launch at those reserves, even if we know precisely where they are, the Soviets are certainly going to be very alert under those circumstances and they are going to launch those reserves out from under our attack before it can hit them. I mean there is no way you can hit their remaining counterforce capability once that kind of war gets started. You either are not going to find it or they're not going to let you strike it, they're going to launch it out as soon as you launch your attack on it.

ASKS ABOUT WINDOW OF VULNERABILITY?

Oh that's like... The thesis that they could blackmail us after making a limited nuclear attack on us is a, game of nuclear chicken. And they're not that dumb. The risks are too high in that kind of a contrived scenario. To begin with they do not know what American, an American president would do when he was told "Here comes a first launch from the Soviet Union. It's only 50 missiles, Mr. President, but it's coming." The president might launch out from underneath that. He might launch the whole thing and say, "Well, I'm not going to take that. And my best thing is to launch everything I've got and hope we can knock out as much of their retaliatory force as possible. "Not a good strategy but maybe the best he can do under the circumstances. At least a president might decide that and the Soviets have to count on that. The games they would have are not commensurate with the potential loss they would have if we just launched 100 or more weapons out from underneath this. Even if that didn't happen and the President absorbed that let's say 50 weapons first, the Soviets still don't know what he would do next. And they have no way of stopping it if he launches 50 back, 100 back. Or 10,000 back. No, it's a gamble that you would have to be extremely desperate in the Soviet Union to take. And you'd have to assume that the American president was gutless enough to just take that and sit back. It would mean capitulating entirely. No president I believe is going to be that chicken.

CRITICS FEEL THAT SOVIETS DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THEIR PEOPLE TELLING THEM THAT THEY WOULD HOLD THEIR MILITARY RESOURCES AND THEMSELVES DEAR, NOT THEIR PEOPLE. WE COULD THEREFORE PINPOINT THEM IN THEIR BUNKERS TO DETER THEM.

The idea that the Soviets don't care about anything but their leadership and their military assets is jejune. It's not meaningful. The Soviets probably have a greater concern for physical destruction of their country and their people and their cities than do American. We've never had destruction in this country outside the Civil War. We have not suffered that kind of invasion that they have, repeatedly, in the 100 some million people killed in World War II. I'm not trying to take the Soviet point of view, I'm trying to understand the Soviet mentality. They know what it is to have cities destroyed. They have a lower standard of living than we and they are just beginning to get to the kinds of nicer life that we've known for decades. And so they've a greater stake in not having their society and their economy destroyed. No. I don't think a Mr. Gorbachev is going to be happy or willing to accept the idea that hundreds of millions of Russians die but he and Raisa are living fine in a bunker someplace. No. And he's got lots of missiles that are still safe.

WHY WERE CARTER AND YOU MINORITIES AGAINST THIS MISSILE?

Because nuclear sanity is catching up with the world slowly. And for many years now, both we and the Soviets, have accepted the idea that you treat nuclear weapons very similarly to conventional weapons. You've got to match the other side. We've talked occasionally about sufficiency as opposed to superiority or equality. But we haven't really meant it or understood it. Sufficiency means enough to make the other side realize that he will receive an irreparable amount of damage if he starts a nuclear war. That has nothing to do with how many weapons he has. It doesn't do a Soviet leader any good to say to himself "I can destroy the United States three times over and in response they're only going to destroy my society once." That's not a good trade from his point of view. In the old days a political leader of any country turned to his military chief of staff and said, "If I start a war with country X, can I do more damage to them than they're going to do to us?" And if the answer was yes and if there was some real political advantage, he might well start a war. You can't ask that question in the nuclear age. You ask the question, "Chief of Staff, if we start a nuclear war against the United States, what damage are they going to do to us in response? Is it acceptable? Can I accept that amount of damage in order to do whatever you can do against the United States?" I believe the answer is always going to be no. Barring the advent of an SDI and a total defense system some time in the distant future. If it ever comes. Today we are infinitely vulnerable to retaliation, infinitely because individual nuclear weapons are so powerful. Go back to the example of Chernobyl. When a very small nuclear detonation took place in the Soviet Union. Very small compared with what we are talking about. Within weeks they were killing reindeer in northern Sweden, they were destroying milk in Western Germany from the fallout... alone... from that destruction, from that detonation. Imagine that that detonation had been a megaton, ton bomb placed there intentionally by NATO. The fallout might not have been just damaging reindeer and cows and milk. Way back in NATO that launched that would have launched the weapon at Chernobyl, there might have been very serious radioactive fallout. We have totally underestimated the effects of nuclear weapons, the destruction and particularly the long term radiation impact. In this case the winds were such that some of the fallout, a substantial part of it, fell on Western Europe. Not with the prevailing winds that would go in the other direction. So NATO really has to think twice before it launches a nuclear weapons at the Soviet Union and risks the fallout coming back on itself. These weapons are just not usable other than to deter or if deterrence fails, then you've got to launch them in retaliation.

ASKS ABOUT DECISION OVER THIS MISSILE...HOW BROWN AND CARTER RESPONDED TO HIS ARGUMENT THAT A DECEPTIVE BASING MODE WOULD NOT HELP MAKE IT SURVIVABLE.

I don't remember a specific response but the tenor of it was that I don't believe that they thought the Soviets would go to that extreme of creating that many more warheads, 4000 and you really would want two for each hiding place. So it would be 8000 more warheads. They had probably only 8 or so thousand at that time, so it would have been a substantial increase, though as I said, it was achievable within the limits of the SALT II agreement that we were about to sign. So I think there was skepticism as to whether I was creating a theoretical but an impractical response here. That's all a matter of opinion and they may be right, although I don't think so. I believe the Soviets would have that capability and it wouldn't be all that costly to them. It wouldn't require building new missiles. It would require refitting the warheads or adding warheads in places that were already built for those warheads.

ASKS IF HE FEELS RUSSIANS STILL COULD HAVE OVERWHELMED US, EVEN WITH A SALT AGREEMENT.

I believe that they could have within the SALT agreement, and I made that statement to the National Security Council at that time. Yes. Now that you know, depends on how many warheads you think they need for other purposes. There are variations here and there are judgments that have to be made. But considering the fact that we had, would have had 4000 aim points for the MX, and 1000 aim points for Minuteman missiles, and you know, a few hundred more for command and control. If you add all that up you don't come to more than about the 10,000 warheads that the Soviets have today. And they haven't gone to any accelerated program. They haven't broken any, any rules of SALT II or anything else. So I don't think it's all, at all inconceivable that our adding 4000 aim points put it out of range of their being able to destroy them, them all. I think the funniest one if I can tell you a anecdote is those MPS, those shelters, multiple aim points that we were going these in, the 4000 some, were going to be out in the deserts of Nevada. And there was to be an oval racetrack with these shelters place around it, I forget how many for each racetrack but lots of the racetracks. But in order not to offend the enthusiasts for ecology, they were saying that all this territory would be open to the public, in fact youth might use the racetracks for drag racing.

ASKS HIM TO REPEAT ANECDOTE.

If I could tell you a little anecdote about the development of the MX. In order not to offend the ecology people, the Pentagon decided that the areas in which these missiles would be located would be open to the public and there would be a racetrack road with 23 of these shelters and one missile. And therefore the missile would move around that racetrack between these different shelters. And the Soviets wouldn't know which one it was located in. But they said, you know, it's open to the public, young people might even use the racetracks for drag racing. But I said, "This missile, every once in a while pulls out of one shelter and at high speed moves to another one. We have to keep doing that every so often to keep the Soviets from knowing which one it's in. What if the kids are drag racing and this great big million pound missile comes charging down the racetrack to go from one shelter to the other?" And they said, "We only do that if we know the Soviets have launched a missile at us, and therefore it doesn't make any difference because the kids will be dead anyway if the missile lands somewhere in that general vicinity, not on a particular shelter." It seemed to me they were going to wild extreme to do this. I also raised the point, well how are you going to find the manpower to be on alert there, to move this missile on short notice, because they were going to move it in the event the Soviets launched. And we had 20 minutes notice. We could move that missile from one shelter to the other. So even if they knew where it was when it was launched, it would be someplace else by the time the missile landed. And I said, "How are you going to find the manpower to do this and be there 24 hours a day, 365 days a year..." And they told me, "No body is going to be there." This million pound missile, on command from a bunker somewhere miles away is going to go out on a track and move at high speed from one place to another. It's Rube Goldberg. It just was out of the question that this thing would work physically in my opinion.

COULD WE PRESERVE LOCATION UNCERTAINTY?

Yes I think so. Yes, I think we could have preserved location uncertainty, but as I have said, I don't think it made any difference. In each racetrack if there were 23 locations, they'd just hit all 23. There was a marvelous cartoon in the newspaper, you know. They had Mr. Carter sitting there and Mr. Brezhnev sitting there and there was a three peas under the pod game they were playing, and Mr. Brezhnev went like this... and hit all three and Mr. Carter said, "Oh no, that's not fair." And that's I think what would have happened with the MX multiple basing system.

SAYS A UTAH RANCHER WERE SURE THEY WOULD HAVE TO HAVE SUCH TIGHT SURVEILLANCE THAT THEY'D HAVE NO FREEDOM. IS THAT CONCEIVABLE?

Oh I think that's stretching things a bit to think that there's going to be a Soviet agent out there trying to keep track of these. You're going to have just so many racetracks out there. There's going to be 4600 shelters. That's 200 racetracks. I don't... I think that's stretching things too much. And that each agent's going to have a satellite radio system to go back to Moscow and say "It's now on number ten," and no. No. I think the system was all right from that point of view. It was just too much of a Rube Goldberg to really be practical. Can you imagine a million pound…

INTERRUPTIONS.

Can you imagine a million pound missile suddenly disgorging itself with nobody there, out of a silo and running around a race track 20 or 30 miles and disappearing into another one, all by itself? I raise the question, "Well isn't it going to run right over the kids who are drag racing out there?" and they said, "No, no that doesn't make any difference because we only do that if an incoming missile is headed this way and that missile will kill the kids anyway." And I... that's just, that's just an absurd concept. There is no way in the modern age of satellite reconnaissance and in the modern age of technology that let's you have great accuracy with weapons, of defending, protecting, a large, vulnerable, visible system like the ICBM. The ICBM is on its way out. There is only one reason to keep the ICBM and we must keep some. And that is that what we called the triad has two aspects to it. The first aspect is you had three different methods of basing the triad, bombers on airfields, ICBMs in silos, and what we call SLBMs, sea-launched ballistic missiles in submarines. So there were three different kinds of bases to avoid the possibility that one or the other of those basing modes became vulnerable. Now the one mode has become vulnerable. The ICBM in the fixed silo. But there's a second aspect to the triad. In order to be an assured retaliatory force you have got also, not only to survive, you've got to be able to penetrate. You've got to be able to make a convincing case that if you had to launch, you would get there. You would destroy the Soviet Union. To do that you have to worry about his defenses. And one defense is anti-ballistic missile defenses, SDI, another are air defenses. Now if you rely only on bombers or cruise missiles that fly through the air and he builds a good air defense, you are out of business, you can't penetrate. So we always want to keep some ballistic missiles that cause him to create two kinds of defenses so that you have a greater assurance that you will be able to retaliate and penetrate. So therefore you need some ballistic. Now those should be primarily in the submarines. But again you don't want to count on one basing mode. And so you will keep some ICBMs and I think the Midgetman mobile missile is probably the best way to do that, not the big, fixed ICBM. Let me suggest that the one other argument I made with the National Security Council was that instead of building the big MX we should build a smaller MX, less capability, fewer warheads, but one that was mobile, one that could fit on a transporter, on a railroad. But no, the quest of the military for the most powerful, the most accurate weapon with the largest number of warheads was too great. And they argued with the President that they wanted the big one. They wanted one that was in fact approaching what the Soviets had. Whereas I think we would have been much better off and here we are now spending more money, to build a Midgetman that is mobile. So I think we really went down the wrong track.

IS AIR FORCE MORE CONCERNED WITH FRONT END OF MISSILES RATHER THAN SURVIVABILITY?

Yes I think so. I think that's because again we talk about...

INTERRUPTS.

I think the Pentagon was more interested in the front end, the warhead and accuracy end of the MX than they were about the vulnerability. And, you know, when you do sit around and talk about a pre-emptive first strike, vulnerability is not an issue.

ASKS ABOUT SMALL MX ON SUBMARINES

I've always been in favor of smaller ballistic missile submarines. We have a lot of talk about will the submarine ever become vulnerable. The submarine is the real backbone of our triad. The real backbone of our nuclear weapons deterrent posture. All the rest of these things, bombers and ICBMs are useful but...when the crunch comes the Soviets know they have not the capability of finding and destroying those submarines. They might do the ICBMs, they might do the bombers, but they haven't a prayer of doing the submarines. We worry though that that could change. It will change but I don't think it will change night and day but we don't want the submarines to become vulnerable. One doesn't know today how a submarine might become vulnerable tomorrow. Would it be because they detect its weight as it moves slowly through the water? Because they can with satellites detect some other phenomenon like its nuclear radiation from its reactor or its heat, or anything else. But the chances are that if they do find a way of detecting submarines, it will be easier with a big submarine than a small. There will be more nuclear radiation, there will be more weight, there will be more heat. Whatever. And therefore, although it's more costly, I believe we should be moving toward smaller ballistic missile submarines. Because it isn't quantity of weapons that we want, it's quantity of platforms so they are spread around and so they individually have less signature we call it, less ability to be detected. And we're moving in a very dangerous direction today. We're moving towards fewer and fewer hulls, fewer and fewer submarine platforms. We used to have 42, I believe we're down to about 30 and I think we're going down to the low '20s. And only a little more than half of those are out at sea at a given time. So that means maybe we've got 12 submarines out there in the future if we go to these smaller numbers. That could get dangerous because if they find some little clue, they're not going to find out how to pinpoint each one exactly very soon, but maybe they get a little clue. And if we only have a few of them out there, they could do things like send up a barrage of nuclear weapons to hit the ocean and just, you know, destroy a whole big area. If we had just the handful of submarines they had to find. So, as we move on in the arms control field, it's extremely important that our reductions in weapons not be taken proportionately with bombers, ICBMs and submarines. That submarine element must have priority and it must leave us with enough hulls out there that we don't have to worry that they may be able to find them all at once.

WAS HE RESPONSIBLE FOR DESIGNS TO REQUIRE SALT VERIFIABILITY—WINDOWS, SUN ROOFS?

No. When they came up in the Pentagon with these different schemes for making it invulnerable but still verifiable, they came out to me in the CIA to say, "Is this verifiable?" I had to put a sort of stamp of approval on it and say, "Yes, I believe the Soviets, with their kinds of capability that we believe they have, would be able to verify under these circumstances." I also had to say, "If the Soviets then responded and had this same kind of a system, would we be able to verify it?" And so that was my role, was checking on the probability of Soviet verification and my confidence in our ability to verify if they responded in like kind.

DID HE WORRY ABOUT A SOVIET ADVANTAGE?

No I didn't, I didn't think so.

DID HE SYMPATHIZE WITH UTAHANS?

No I don't, I don't believe the people of Utah and Nevada were a primary consideration in my thinking. I feel sympathetic to them of course. Our country has to make sacrifices if we're going to have a military system. Somebody has to have a base here and there. Somebody has to have something else. If it's the people of Utah and Nevada have to have these because that's what's necessary to defend the country, I think that's unfortunate but necessary.

CARTER'S VERSION WAS CRITICIZED BECAUSE IT ADDED COSTLY MEASURES TO GUARANTEE VERIFIABILITY. HOW DID YOU RESPOND TO IT'S BEING DESIGNED FOR SOVIETS AND ARMS CONTROL?

I think the system was designed to be verifiable. And the sunroof idea at first sounded to me like it was crazy but I think it was do-able. One finds that it's being revived today in conjunction with the projected START talks or other arms control talks today. I mean they are talking about opening silos or opening other shelters again in a similar way.

SO YOU AGREE AND THINK THAT WAS A GOOD THING?

Yes, yes. It was. I think the system of the multiple basing was reasonably verifiable by the Soviets. But I think in those days the Soviets would not have accepted it because it was too Rube Goldberg, they would have counted...it would have required too much confidence on their part that we would play the game right, that we wouldn't find ways to put dummies in and to hide things and so on. So I don't think it would have sold to the Soviets had we really gone forward with it. I think they would have been too suspicious. Whether now under Gorbachev with a Adm. Stansfield Turner greater desire for an arms control agreement, he'd be willing to accept that risk that we would have been very, very devious, I don't know. I'm inclined to think he would have today. But I don't think Brezhnev would have.

ASKS ABOUT PRESERVATION OF LOCATION UNCERTAINTY? ASKS HOW HE THINKS REAGAN ADMINISTRATION HANDLED THE ISSUE AND WHAT LESSONS HE WOULD DRAW?

Well I think the Reagan administration came in having criticized the Carter basing mode, searched and searched and searched and searched and still is searching and hasn't found anything any better. I'm not advocating the Carter mode, I'm simply going back to the point that with satellite surveillance, with technology giving you high accuracy with all kinds of weapons, there is no way to hide, conceal, to make invulnerable a fixed, large, visible land-based missile. The Reagan administration came in with a fixation that these were important and made us tough and strong and bigger and better. They are beginning to understand as is the whole country that this whole theory of nuclear superiority is meaningless. There is no such thing as superiority as long as the enemy can retaliate with huge amounts of power against us we have no ability to use nuclear weapons. We can only use them in great desperation if they've been used against us first. Or we use them as a threat to deter. There is nothing immoral as Mr. Reagan has contended about threatening nuclear destruction of the other side. The most moral thing we can do in the world today is to prevent nuclear war. For the years since World War II, there has been no other way to prevent nuclear war than to threaten nuclear destruction. Achieving that moral objective of stopping nuclear war is a very good thing, and we've done it through mutual assured vulnerability, I think to call it, others call it mutual assured destruction. But it's not destruction, it's vulnerability, and it's threatening by...holding that other side vulnerable, that prevents nuclear war from breaking out. Now if we can find a different way of doing that, like SDI, that's all fine and good, but until that looms as a reality, we don't look on mutual assured destruction as immoral. It's the most moral way to prevent the most immoral act that man could perpetrate. A nuclear war.