Interviewer: THIS IS C10039, INTERVIEW ON THE 4TH OF NOVEMBER WITH SIR ARTHUR HOCKADAY.
Interviewer: RIGHT, SO I MEAN THE FIRST QUESTION REALLY IS THAT YOU KNOW NOW THE DRAFT OF FLEXIBLE RESPONSE AS A DOCTRINE.
Interviewer: COULD YOU JUST DESCRIBE FOR US WHAT YOU ACTUALLY HAD TO DO IN TERMS IN ACTUALLY GETTING THE DOCUMENT OUT...
Hockaday: Yes, the basic problem was one of an international secretariat trying to bring together and produce a coordinating and agree the result reflecting the different needs of different countries within the alliance.
Hockaday: The basic initiative behind the SSIs flowed from the review that President Kennedy and Secretary McNamara had carried out on coming into office in 1961.
Hockaday: They were dissatisfied with the doctrine generally known as massive retaliation, which had been the current NATO policy since 1956.
Hockaday: They felt increasingly that as the Soviet Union began to develop a capability that was beginning to approximate to that of the United States that any substantial use of nuclear weapons by NATO was likely to set off an exchange that would do neither side any good at all and they also I think felt a genuine repugnance against the notion of using nuclear weapons in the sort of quantities that might be involved in massive retaliation.
Hockaday: So they were looking for other options and for alternative and the basic philosophy behind flexible response was that instead of having virtually only one set of options open for retaliation against a Soviet attack, there should be a whole range and as the term flexible response implies, the response should be flexible in the sense of being suited to the particular character of the attack.
Hockaday: Well that was the American approach.
Hockaday: Some of the Europeans, certainly the French up to the time when they left the, its greater military organization was of some help, and also to a considerable extent for Germany were not very happy about this because they feared to perhaps to oversimplify it a little bit, that anything which seemed to be reducing the nuclear threat in response to an attack might be likely to as it were make the battlefield safe for conventional war and might increase the possibility of a conventional attack and of course the Europeans had had a conventional war fought in Europe only 20 years previously and therefore felt that they had more firsthand experience of what happens when you're the battlefield in a conventional war than the Americans had had, and those were the basic differences of approach and that's what we were, we were charged by ministers to advise them...in trying to produce an agreed document and eventually after a good deal of negotiation, both formally around the committee table and perhaps more importantly more informally in, in the corridors and in private conversation and after one or two false starts we did produce the document which was accepted by ministers as political guidance strategy and was then followed up by the developments of an actual military committee document.
Interviewer: I MEAN DID, YOU PRODUCED THE DOCUMENT, I MEAN DO YOU THINK IT WAS EVER IMPLEMENTED REALLY IN TERMS OF FORCES ON THE GROUND?
Hockaday: It was implemented in the sense that it provided the basis for the working out by the NATO commands of the actual on the ground military plans for how they manipulate the strategy.
Hockaday: In terms of whether it was fully implemented in terms of force structures, I think one has to be put a question mark over that.
Hockaday: The obvious corollary of the adoption of this strategy was that without in any way diminishing the importance of strategic nuclear forces as the, the last resort and as underlined the whole strategy, nevertheless, the will, both of conventional forces and of theatre nuclear forces became more prominent.
Hockaday: In terms of force structures, a good deal was done and has been done up to the present in terms of theatre nuclear forces of intermediate nuclear forces and in terms of conventional forces I don't think that, although of course there've been numerous improvements in conventional forces as new technology has come along and one weapon system has succeeded another and so on but nevertheless I don't think one could say that the conventional component of NATO's deterrent force has been strengthened to the extent that was envisaged at the time when the new strategy was adopted in 1967.
Interviewer: I MEAN ROUGHLY DURING THE SAME PERIOD, I THINK IT EXTENDED PAST 1967 ANYWAY, THE, THE NUCLEAR PLANNING GROUP WAS CARRYING OUT VARIOUS STUDIES, LOOKING AT THE IMPLICATIONS OF SOMETHING, OF NUCLEAR WAR STARTING AND THE USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN THE BATTLEFIELD AND SO ON AND SO FORTH.
Interviewer: I MEAN FIRST I'D LIKE TO, COULD YOU DESCRIBE THOSE STUDIES AND WHAT THEY REALLY LOOKED AT?
Hockaday: The Nuclear Planning Group was established in 1977 and actually two months before the new strategy was formally adopted but nevertheless it reflected the same sort of strategy of thinking and its creation was very much a child of Secretary McNamara partly I think that following the collapse two or three years earlier of the multi-lateral force idea and of the alternative Atlantic Nuclear Force idea, the Americans then felt that rather than go for hardware solutions for bringing non-nuclear NATO gunboats more into NATO nuclear planning.
Hockaday: They would go for what one might call a software solution, that is to say bringing them in round the table and getting their people taking part in the studies.
Hockaday: As to the actual study, it would not be possible to go into very great detail as to what they examined but basically they were concerned with trying to think through the implications of various possible scenarios in which nuclear weapons might be used in response to various kinds of Soviet attack and working them through in the, almost one might say in a chess-playing sense, if we do this what will they do and so on and what will the implications be and where would, where would we be likely to be at the end of it? what will this lead to; who would be the better off; what would be the, the risks of this leading to escalation? On the other hand what was the probabilities that the threat of escalation would act as a sort of intra-war deterrence and bring it all to an end.
Interviewer: DID THEY, I MEAN WHAT CONCLUSION DID THEY COME TO? DO YOU, WOULD YOU SAY, DID THEY EVER DECIDE THAT IT WOULD BE A GOOD THING THAT THIS WOULD WORK? DID THEY EVER COME TO THINK IN TERMS OF ACTUALLY IT WOULD BE A DISASTER?
Hockaday: They came, they came to different conclusions in respect of the various ideas.
Hockaday: I'm not going to go into detail as to what these answers were but there were certainly some options, which it became apparent, were probably not worth pursuing very much further.
Hockaday: I think one can say in genera] terms however that where you had two sides each equipped with much the same sorts of armories of nuclear weapons, it's hardly surprising that you might reckon that after an exchange and that each had discharged much the same sort of number of weapons, situations, except in terms of the destruction that will happen, would not be very different from what it has been at the start.
Interviewer: WHAT, WHAT IMPACT DID THEY HAVE THEN THOSE STUDIES I MEAN HERE YOU HAVE, YOU'VE GOT A GROUP OF DEFENSE MINISTERS WHO'VE DETAILED A SENIOR OFFICIAL TO GO OFF...TO LOOK AT ALL THE IMPLICATIONS AND THE PRACTICALITY AND THEY COME BACK WITH, YOU KNOW, SOME RATHER PERHAPS AMBIVALENT CONCLUSIONS.
Interviewer: DID THAT EVER RESULT IN ANY CHANGES IN POLICY?
Hockaday: Well what it did was it did cause people, official as much as ministers or, or military men, it did cause people to think in three dimensions, if I can use a phrase that I once heard Solly Zuckerman use that because we have so little experience, thank God, of what nuclear weapons actually mean from practice, there is a temptation to theorize about them and to exaggerate; on the one hand I think you've got much more than bigger and better artillery and on the other hand possibly to exaggerate their doomsday effect and actually thinking some of these problems through did cause people I think to realize more vividly what it was all about and what it would mean.
Interviewer: CAN I TAKE YOU ON A BIT FURTHER NOW, TO LATER ON, ABOUT 1970, I DON'T KNOW, '76, THAT PERIOD WHEN JAMES SCHLESINGER, THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR DEFENSE IN THE UNITED STATES, NOW HE INSTITUTED A SERIES OF THREE EXAMINATIONS OF NUCLEAR OPTIONS THAT WERE OPEN TO THE UNITED STATES AND TO NATO AND EUROPE.
Interviewer: FROM YOUR PERSPECTIVE WHAT WAS THE EFFECT OF THOSE, OF HIS TENURE AS SECRETARY OF DEFENSE AND THE STUDIES HE IMPLEMENTED?
Hockaday: To quite a considerable extent Schlesinger was not doing very much more than recharging the batteries of what McNamara had done.
Hockaday: In America, a Secretary of Defense who wanted to be known as a reforming Secretary of State seemed to concern himself not so much with changing the organization of the department, as with looking again at the nuclear target controversy.
Hockaday: You've seen it with McNamara and with Schlesinger and with Harold Brown, most, all three of them I suppose might have regarded themselves as creative Secretaries of Defense where there have been others, whom we don't need to enumerate but who've perhaps rather just let things go along, but Schlesinger came back against the same sort of basic considerations that McNamara had in mind.
Hockaday: Again, he felt that it just would not do for the President to be faced simply with alternatives of a very substantial exchange or of virtual surrender and so the, the, the doctrine of a limited nuclear option, as it became known, was developed under Schlesinger and fostered by him within NATO.
Hockaday: This was not, it was not bringing so, so much absolutely new thought as had come in in the 1960s but nevertheless it was taking the process a little bit forward and really building on the studies that had been carried out in NATO between 1967 or so and 1974 or so and again trying to look at the situation in realistic terms and thinking what might realistically happen.
Interviewer: RIGHT, YEAH.
Interviewer: QUITE RAPIDLY AFTERWARDS THE THEORIES IF YOU LIKE OF FLEXIBLE RESPONSE, THE QUALIFICATION OF FLEXIBLE RESPONSE WAS THAT THE CHIEF, ITS HIGHEST STATE OF ART WHEN PEOPLE STARTED TO TALK VERY MUCH ABOUT LEVEL OF ESCALATION AND CUT THE WHOLE QUESTION...ALSO STARTED TO BE TAKEN INTO CONSIDERATION.
Interviewer: I THINK IT WAS MICHAEL LEGG WHO ARGUED THAT, YOU KNOW, THE CRUISE AND PERSHINGS PACKAGE WAS THE VERY FIRST TIME THAT A, ACTUALLY A PROCUREMENT DECISION HAD BE MADE BY DOCTRINE RATHER THAN THE REVERSE...IN HIS, IN HIS...I MEAN WHAT, WHAT'S YOUR VIEW OF, OF, OF THAT WHOLE SET OF THEORIES ABOUT THE SEAMLESS WEB IF YOU LIKE OF ESCALATION AND THE LEVELS OF ESCALATION AND ESCALATION ...
Hockaday: I have never been convinced that the so-called seamless web has to be entireless seamless.
Hockaday: I would entirely subscribe to the McNamara or the Schlesinger compilation that there should be a considerable range of options of various kinds but I don't think it necessarily follows from that that you have to cover every possible contingency and have every different sort of weapon in your armory.
Hockaday: The decision, the two-track decision of 1979 had a number of motivations or rationales behind it and I suppose virtually just as the flexible response decision in 1957 had a number of different rationales behind it and different people would have, would have given you a different interpretation of what it meant depending on what was paramount in their own mind, I think the same applies to the two-track decision or '79.
Hockaday: Now one strand was the strand which followed from the Russian...which I suspect they saw simply as a modernization question, to replace their SS-4s and SS-5s in central Europe by SS-20s.
Hockaday: How the SS-4s and the SS-5s had been around for 15 years or more and back in the 1960s people, and perhaps especially the Germans, used to express worries over the threat that the SS-4s and the SS-5s posed to Germany in particular and the question used to be raised then whether those weapons made Europe a nuclear arsenal, as the phrase goes, and whether the Europeans would really rely on the American nuclear guarantee in circumstances where you had weapon systems which whatever their range may be were jolly strategic as far as the Europeans were concerned, but were not strategic in the same sense as far as the United States was concerned.
Hockaday: So in a sense conceptually the SS-20s weren't all that different from the 4s and 5s in that they, alright they presented a threat to Europe and to Germany in particular but it was a threat that had been there for quite a number of years.
Hockaday: On the other hand, they were a quite different sort of weapon.
Hockaday: In particular they had a longer range.
Hockaday: Their range was up to about 5,000 kms instead of 2,000 kms of the SS-4s and SS-5s.
Hockaday: They were mobile, which made them less vulnerable and also they were...that is to say they had three warheads each and could attack quicker directly against three separate targets where the SS-4s and SS-5s had had only one warhead each.
Hockaday: So it was understandable that people should be worried about them.
Hockaday: Now the mythology is that the great figure which drew attention to the SS-20s was Helmut Schmidt's Alistair Buchan Memorial lecture...in 1977.
Hockaday: If you actually read that lecture you will find no reference whatever to the SS-20.
Hockaday: You will find that it is mostly about trade and finance but nevertheless there is, there are some references to security against the background that at that stage SALT I having been concluded in 1972, SALT II seemed to be well on the way towards some sort of conclusion, which indeed it reached in 1979, although it was never ratified, and what Schmidt is saying is well, it's great to see the super-powers getting somewhere on strategic systems but let not that blind us to the existence of the powerful Russian theatre nuclear and conventional forces and let us not overlook the implications of an imbalance in theatre nuclear and conventional forces in, in Europe.
Hockaday: So this was, here was one strand: people were worried about the SS-20s and so you ask, then you ask yourself the question how do we get rid of the SS-20s? And that was one strand under, underlying the proposition ...
Hockaday: the Russians that we are prepared to deploy new theatre nuclear forces ourselves, specifically the Pershings IIs and the Tomahawk cruise missiles and we will deploy those in numbers up to 464 cruise missiles and 108 Pershings, wasn't it, in numbers up to 572.
Interviewer: THIS IS C10040, CONTINUATION OF SIR ARTHUR HOCKADAY.
Hockaday: NATO made clear that it was...
Hockaday: NATO made clear that it was prepared to deploy in Europe 464 cruise missiles and 108 Pershing IIs but at the same time that it wanted to enter into negotiations with the Soviet Union with a view to reducing or doing away altogether with a weapons system of this kind in Europe.
Hockaday: But by this time the Russians had deployed I s'pose l00 or so SS-20s and the NATO message for them was if you continue deploying these systems we shall reply with...
Hockaday: systems.
Hockaday: On the other hand wouldn't it be a good idea if we didn't have to deploy our systems and you got rid of yours? So that the, the arms control side of it, the getting rid of the SS-20s and as a consequence stopping the NATO deployment stemmed very much from the fact that the Russians had deployed the SS-20, but I think it is equally true that a number of people felt that here was a missing piece of the seamless web and that it would be a good idea to deploy systems of this kind rather separately from the existence of the SS-20s so that this would be an additional, two additional sets of options that, that NATO would have and that NATO would therefore have a, a greater range of responses to use the bomb in the event of aggression and would have a greater number of arrows as it were in its quiver oF deterrence.
Interviewer: WHAT DO YOU THINK THE RUSSIAN RESPONSE WOULD BE THOUGH? I MEAN THERE THEY, HERE ARE THESE MISSILES SUDDENLY COMING, WELL NOT SUDDENLY BUT THERE THEY ARE.
Interviewer: THEY'RE GOING TO BE DEPLOYED IN WEST GERMANY...
Interviewer: I MEAN HOW DO THEY EXPECT US TO VIEW THEM?
Hockaday: The Russians made clear right from the outset that as far as they were concerned an American missile on Russia was an American missile on Russia irrespective of whether it was fired from the continental United States or from the continent of Europe or from somewhere at sea, and if they meant what they said, and I can see no reason to suppose that they didn't, the implications of that is that the nature of their response and the probability or otherwise of their replying against the continental United States will be very much sustained whatever the prominence of American missiles fired against Russia.
Hockaday: Now you can draw the conclusion from that that on one hypothesis if, as I do, you believe in the American nuclear guarantee, well the American nuclear guarantee is there and is valid whether or not you have systems of this kind of the frontiers of Europe...
Hockaday: American systems elsewhere and therefore the question arises whether this deployment actually added...If on the alternative hypothesis you, you don't believe in the American nuclear guarantee, it's not entirely clear I think how far this deployment would make it valid if the Russian response would not pay very much regard to where missiles had come from.
Hockaday: So while certainly these weapons were an addition to the NATO armory, I think that it, it's, it's not terribly clear what their strategic...On the, on the other hand one can see a very considerable political logic in it that if it was desirable or necessary in order to reassure people in Europe of the ability of the American guarantee, if it was necessary to show not only that you have 300,000 American servicemen on the ground in Europe but that there actually were American nuclear weapons visible in Europe as well as scudding around in the surrounding sea.
Interviewer: I MEAN THERE WAS AN ARGUMENT REALLY WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN PURSUED VERY MUCH BUT THAT THE SOVIETS REALLY DID CONSIDER THE DEPLOYMENT OF MISSILES IN EUROPE CAPABLE OF REACHING THE HEARTLAND OF RUSSIA, REACHING MOSCOW AS BEING IN BREACH OF SOME SORT OF AGREEMENT THAT WAS ACHIEVED AFTER THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS.
Interviewer: WHAT, I MEAN DO YOU KNOW, WHAT, WHAT'S YOUR VIEW OF THAT?
Hockaday: I don’t know of any specific basis for that.
Hockaday: Again, just as I questioned a moment ago the extent to which the deployment of the weapons actually strengthened or validated the American guarantee, in the same sort of way from the Russian point of view I think I would find it difficult to see the weapons on the continent of Europe as actually more threatening than similar weapons, the same sort of systems away in the surrounding waters- I think that this is probably a useful political point for the Russians to make because the, the Russian response to the NATO moves was to launch a very considerable political offensive to stop it and the, the line that they took was sometimes that, well they would be prepared to discuss some reduction of their own systems if NATO did not deploy or that they would freeze their systems where they were if NATO did not deploy in variance at that time, but all of these meant of course that the Russians would still have 300 or however many it may be whereas NATO would have zero and even after Reagan first launched the zero-zero proposal in 1981, and don't forget that (a) it was NATO who first proposed negotiating on reductions of these weapons and (b) that it was Reagan who first proposed zero-zero.
Hockaday: Even then, for some time, the Russians put forward various ideas, which were always X against zero, rather than zero against zero.
Hockaday: For a time they were keeping up a political campaign hoping that the Western Governments would be diverted from the deployment, which, as we know, didn't happen.
Hockaday: Deployment has actually taken place in Britain, Italy and Germany and in Belgium and the Netherlands although after quite considerable political debate but nevertheless both of those countries had decided that they would implement the deployment and I have no doubt at all that it has been the determination of NATO Governments to go through with 6hat deployment which eventually brought the Russians to the zero-zero situation which we seem to be in at the moment.