: WAR AND PEACE IN THE NUCLEAR AGE - TAPES D11066-D11068 THOMAS SIMONS
Interviewer: BEGIN BY TELLING US, WE’LL TALK ABOUT REYKJAVIK FIRST.
Interviewer: WHAT WAS YOUR ROLE THERE, WHAT DID YOU DO?
Simons: My role was as a member of the support team supporting the President, in the first instance the Secretary as far as we're concerned, from the State Department.
Simons: And in particular, Ambassador Ridgeway, who’s my boss, the Assistant Secretary for European Canadian Affairs.
Simons: Which means overall planning, I was on the pre-advance groups, for instance.
Simons: Overall planning and once you're in Reykjavik, a concentration on the non-arms control portions of the agenda.
Simons: In other words, human rights, regional affairs and bilateral affairs.
Interviewer: WHEN DID PLANNING START TAKING PLACE FOR THE SUMMIT?
Simons: For the Reykjavik summit?
Interviewer: YES, THANK YOU.
Simons: Oh, planning started taking place not long before, because if you remember, it was only agreed a couple of weeks before in the outcome of the Daniloff-Zakharov Affair.
Simons: So I went, well, I guess I came back down here, but we came down from New York on September 30th or October 1st and took right off for Reykjavik to begin the pre-planning there on the ground.
Simons: Then I came back and went out again with the party.
Simons: So it was two weeks.
Interviewer: THE SOVIETS HAVE TOLD US IN INTERVIEWS THAT THEY, THAT IS, THE SOVIETS WHO INITIATED THE IDEA OF MEETING AT REYKJAVIK.
Interviewer: IS THAT ACCURATE?
Simons: I think that's accurate, yeah.
Simons: The Soviets had had a real problem ever since the Geneva summit in November of ’85 where they had accepted the concept of home and home summits in 1986 and 1987, not realizing until they got back to Moscow that they had a real political requirement for knowing what the substantial result was going to be before they agreed.
Simons: And they were sort of hung on the horns of that dilemma having accepted, but needing politically to know what the result would be without guaranteed results.
Simons: So they were hung on the horns of that dilemma all through 1986, and Reykjavik, the concept of a summit in a third capital, was one way to get off the horns of that dilemma.
Interviewer: EXPLAIN THAT A LITTLE MORE.
Interviewer: I THINK MY MIND DRIFTED A SECOND.
Interviewer: WHAT WAS THE DILEMMA?
Simons: Gorbachev in Geneva in November 1985 accepted unconditionally the idea that he would come to Washington in 1986 and that the President would visit Moscow in 1987, perhaps not realizing how strong was the sentiment in his own political establishment for knowing that before he went to Washington that there would be a substantial arms control result because there were no guarantees of that.
Simons: And so at the same time they’d had a bad experience in Geneva in 1985 because they had tried to make SDI a U.S.
Simons: concession on SDI a pre-condition for the success of the Geneva summit.
Simons: And they had to drop off that only a week before.
Simons: So it was a triple dilemma.
Simons: He’d made the commitment, he needed to know what the result was, needed a guaranteed arms control result, but he felt he could not afford to put a pre-condition on it because he might have to fall off of that.
Simons: So I think the proposal to go to Reykjavik or to some third capital, as it turned out Reykjavik, was a Soviet proposal but one of the motives was to back off the horns of this particular dilemma.
Simons: Because once they’d met at Reykjavik, the pressure to come to Washington was diffused for a while.
Interviewer: I'M JUMPING AHEAD OF MYSELF HERE, THIS IS INTERESTING.
Interviewer: WHY COME AT ALL? WHY DID GORBACHEV WANT, WHY NOT JUST SAY, “I DON’T WANT A SUMMIT, WE DON’T WANT TO DO THAT.” WHAT WAS THE PRESSURE, INTERNAL PRESSURE?
Simons: Well, first of all, dealing inadequately with the Americans is one of the telltale signs of adequate leadership, I think, in the Soviet Union, he’s a new leader.
Simons: So I think he has to prove that he can manage the relationship with the United States, that to begin.
Simons: I think they’d had a bad experience all through the early ‘80s, his predecessor, with that kind of take it or leave it ultimative approach to these issues and to arms control.
Simons: After all, they’d walked out of the arms control negotiations in Geneva in November of 1983 and they’d taken a pasting for it in terms of world opinion, in terms of American opinion.
Simons: And it had not succeeded for them.
Simons: And so I think that they would be very hesitant, they would have been very hesitant, especially having made the commitment and in a situation where the Reagan Administration was not giving them ready excuses to break that commitment, they would have been very hesitant to wash their hands of it because they would have paid a pretty high political price for it.
Interviewer: AND WITHIN THE SOVIET UNION, IS THERE A CONSTITUENCY THAT IS SEEKING SOME KIND OF A WITH THE UNITED STATES AND IS THERE A CONSTITUENCY OF HARD LINERS WHO SAY “DON’T TALK TO THEM AT ALL,” MUCH AS THERE IS IN THIS COUNTRY?
Simons: Oh, it’s a big government.
Simons: I think probably the range of opinion goes across the spectrum.
Simons: I think what they're substantially agreed on is that the United States is their most important foreign policy relationship.
Simons: I think a lot of the speculation that they're turning to Europe or they're turning to Japan in that bald form is probably misplaced.
Simons: So they all agree that America is their main problem.
Simons: Now how to deal with America, I think there's a whole range of opinion.
Simons: But the kind of toughness and aggressiveness which they’d showed in the 1970s in terms of promoting their interests against ours, and in the 1980s in terms of stonewalling, hadn’t worked.
Simons: So I think probably there's, in addition to a normal constituency of people who say, “Well, you need to negotiate give and take with the United States,” I think that had spread out to include people who were quite skeptical that over the long term you can deal adequately with the United States but who felt that in these conditions, you really needed to make a shot at it.
Interviewer: LET ME GO BACK TO OCTOBER 1ST AND YOU GUYS ARE PREPARING FOR THE SUMMIT.
Interviewer: AND LET ME SAY THIS IS LEADING UP TO A STATEMENT THAT THE SOVIETS ALSO HAVE MADE TO US, WHICH IS THAT, “WE CAME TO THE SUMMIT PREPARED.
Interviewer: THE AMERICANS CAME TO THE SUMMIT VERY UNPREPARED.”
Simons: I think that's false.
Simons: What had happened was you had done a great deal of preparation not for the summit but for the Shultz-Shevardnadze meeting.
Simons: What had happened was that because of this dilemma which I described, the question of having accepted a summit but now needing assurance, the Soviets had kind of stonewalled on arms control all through the spring and on the question of the summit.
Simons: That started to break in the summer in May and June when they came forward with some really serious proposals on strategic offensive weapon, START.
Simons: And as that started to break, we proposed that, well, the two sides reached agreement in late July when Deputy Minister Bessmertnykh visited Washington.
Simons: That the scenario for the autumn would be a very thorough review, total review, of all the issues in the relationship in detail at expert level in preparation for the meeting of foreign ministers at the United Nations in September.
Simons: That review took place all through August.
Simons: I mean, you had what was called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Ambassador Nitze and his seven arms control colleagues went to Moscow, Soviet arms control team came here.
Simons: We also did it for bilateral, for human rights, for regional affairs.
Simons: We had the first so-called super regional with Under Secretary Armacost and First Deputy Waransaw.
Simons: So all that work had been done.
Simons: The object of it was to let the foreign ministers review thoroughly the relationship, to narrow down the issues, to push the issues forward.
Simons: And then on the basis of that, they were going to determine whether a summit was worthwhile.
Simons: So it was kind of a two-step thing that they proposed in July and we basically accepted.
Simons: Now that review, some of it, took place.
Simons: But it did get off track in New York by the whole need to manage the Daniloff-Sakharov crisis.
Simons: But the preparatory work had been done in terms of defining the issues, making progress on some, defining what needed to be done on others, and that was available for the summit.
Simons: So it’s just for them to say, we did this work together, and for them to say that we were prepared and we were unprepared, I think, misreads history.
Interviewer: INSIDE THE STATE DEPARTMENT, WAS THE DANILOFF BUSINESS AND THE SAKHAROV BUSINESS, WAS THERE A SENSE THAT THAT COULD SCRAP THE WHOLE IDEA OF A SUMMIT? OR WAS IT REALLY JUST VIEWED AS A BLIP ON THE RADAR SCREEN THAT WOULD EVENTUALLY RESOLVE ITSELF?
Simons: Well, the State Department has not been an engine for summitry under this administration.
Simons: The State Department has been an engine for dealing with issues on their merits, recognizing that a summit can push that process forward because it provides a bureaucratic deadline so you can get decisions more easily.
Simons: And to the extent you reach decisions at a summit, it’s also an impulse for these huge governments.
Simons: So that's been the context in which we've looked at the summit.
Simons: So we didn’t approach the Daniloff-Sakharov thing on the basis of whether it would or would not derail a summit.
Simons: We did approach it on the basis of whether it would or would not derail the kind of spirit and progress that we’d had in the relationship.
Simons: It’s a very crisis-prone relationship.
Simons: I mean, the history of the Reagan years is a history of crises like this.
Simons: We think that the Soviets have provoked them all.
Simons: I recognize that the Soviets are very suspicious, that just as things start to get going, one of these crises blows up.
Simons: But we're satisfied that the Korean Airliner shooting at Major Nicholson and the Daniloff thing were not things that the US initiated.
Interviewer: CAN YOU GIVE US JUST A SENSE OF KIND OF ALMOST LIKE A TEXTURE OF WHAT IT FEELS LIKE AS YOU'RE GOING TOWARD A SUMMIT.
Interviewer: YOU ALL FLY IN THE PLANE TOGETHER, ARE YOU TALKING ON THE WAY, ARE YOU EXCITED? WHAT'S THE KIND OF, JUST IN A NARRATIVE SENSE, THE TRANSITION FROM HERE TO THERE AND THEN THE FIRST HOURS IN REYKJAVIK?
Simons: Well, to begin with, you're tired because you've done a lot of work.
Simons: So a lot of the drama that the public sees and feels is dampened for actual participants because you've done a lot of work, you're very engaged in the issues.
Simons: You're close to the issues.
Simons: And you lack the distance, I think, which outside observers have.
Simons: That's the first thing.
Simons: Second, you are focused on practicality, on what kind of business can be done.
Simons: So that's the background.
Simons: You have worked for whatever period you've been preparing.
Simons: In the case of Reykjavik, a couple of weeks, short.
Simons: And then you get on the plane and you're reviewing in your head what you need to do to organize these meetings, what sequence you want issues to come up, what flexibility, if any, you have in your position if the Soviets prove to be forthcoming.
Simons: So that’s the kind of thing you're concentrated on rather than elation or the historic judgment.
Interviewer: WHAT TIME OF DAY DID YOU, I MEAN, I'VE FORGOTTEN.
Interviewer: WHAT TIME OF DAY DID YOU ARRIVE? YOU'RE GOING TO THE HOTEL, YOU JUMP RIGHT IN THE MEETING?
Simons: We flew all day.
Simons: We left in the morning here and we came into Reykjavik in late afternoon.
Simons: And basically, you had the evening to rest or to prepare and a large delegation like that does both.
Simons: I mean, you need to get settled, you're in different hotels, you need to occupy the offices.
Simons: And the next day, you had basically delegation meetings with the President and among the delegations.
Simons: And there were a certain number of protocol things.
Simons: I mean, after all, the Icelanders were our hosts and you had things to do with them, with the meetings with Gorbachev I think beginning the next day.
Simons: It was Saturday and Sunday with Gorbachev and we arrived on Thursday night.
Simons: I think that was the sequence.
Interviewer: NOW, IS THE NATURE OF THE DELEGATION THAT GOES TO THE SUMMIT PRETTY CONSISTENT THROUGHOUT? THAT IS, IS THERE AN ATTEMPT TO HAVE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE STATE DEPARTMENT AND THE VARIOUS SPECIALTIES AND THE JOINT CHIEFS? OR IS THERE NO PATTERN TO, OR IS IT JUST...?
Simons: Well, we've had two, now three, under this administration.
Simons: Reykjavik was a little special.
Simons: It was a small team because Reykjavik is a small town.
Simons: But the normal pattern, which was reflected in Petto, I mean in small format in Reykjavik, is that all the major agencies are represented and represented to the extent possible at authoritative level.
Simons: That's also been the practice of the foreign ministers’ meeting between Shultz and Shevardnadze since early 1985 when we agreed to go back into arms control.
Simons: That was the first time where you had all the players represented on the delegation.
Simons: So, it’s consistent up and down.
Interviewer: SOVIETS COME IN WITH A SERIES OF PROPOSALS.
Interviewer: WERE WE STARTLED BY THOSE PROPOSALS? WERE WE SURPRISED AT WHAT...
Interviewer: LET ME BACK UP THERE.
Interviewer: YOU HAD SAID EARLIER THAT THE SOVIETS NEED REYKJAVIK IN ORDER TO GET ASSURANCES ABOUT WHAT WOULD BE SUBSTANTIVE SUMMITS IN WASHINGTON AND MOSCOW.
Interviewer: AND YET, MY IMPRESSION FROM THE...
Simons: No, it was to get off of that problem.
Simons: In other words, they could take something less, by going to a third country, they could take something less than the whole hog, which they would have needed to come to Washington.
Simons: In other words, less than a treaty signed, sealed and delivered on a major arms control topic, which is the way they were defining that.
Simons: Therefore, it was possible to do a lot of work at Reykjavik without it being a make or break political question within the Soviet Union because it was the Washington summit which they were defining.
Simons: We weren't defining, I mean, the President’s invitation was open.
Simons: So it was their political problem of needing a result.
Simons: By going to Reykjavik, they could get less than a full result and still have a productive meeting.
Simons: That was the beauty of it, and that was what happened.
Interviewer: AND THEN EITHER GO TO WASHINGTON OR NOT DEPENDING ON WHAT HAPPENS AT REYKJAVIK?
Simons: Yeah, but you had a little time.
Simons: Having had a summit, you had a little time to prepare and to work for the next one.
Interviewer: WHAT WAS THE FIRST MEETING BETWEEN THE PRESIDENT AND GORBACHEV? WHEN DID THAT TAKE, WHEN WAS THAT, HOW’D THAT HAPPEN?
Simons: Well, it took place on Saturday morning.
Simons: They met privately first and then they called in their foreign ministers.
Simons: And it was a review of relations across the board and after general comments on where we are, which I think is proper when two leaders meet at that level, they had a discussion of human rights, which is always at the top of the President’s agenda, and Secretary Shultz.
Simons: It's something that the United States always raises if not first, very close to first.
Simons: And then Gorbachev began his presentation on his package of arms control proposals.
Simons: Now, that was surprising to us for its scope because it was comprehensive.
Simons: And because with regard to strategic offensive weapons, well, surprising for two reasons.
Simons: First, the Soviets had been hinting that they wanted to concentrate on INF.
Simons: And they came forward with a comprehensive package into which INF was locked.
Simons: In other words, everything had to be solved in order for INF to be solved.
Simons: That was the first element.
Simons: Second, however, with regard to strategic offensive weapons, the trend of the negotiations up to then had been for reductions less than 50 percent, although in principle the two leaders had agreed at Geneva in November of ’85 on 50 percent reduction.
Simons: So that had been shaved down in the intervening months to something in the 30s, percentage reductions in the 30s.
Simons: And Gorbachev at that meeting returned foursquare to 50 percent reductions as the basis for further negotiations.
Simons: Now, the one surprise, the re-linkage of INF, or the confirmation of the linkage to INF, was unpleasant.
Simons: The 50 percent reduction was a very pleasant surprise indeed.
Interviewer: ALL THIS HAPPENS IN THE FIRST MEETING?
Simons: Yeah.
Simons: He sketches it out.
Simons: I mean, he does not go into detail, but all the elements were there.
Interviewer: NOW WHEN YOU SAY THEY MET PRIVATELY, YOU DON’T MEAN THERE...
Simons: With interpreters.
Interviewer: WITH INTERPRETERS AND NOTE TAKERS? I MEAN, JUST DESCRIBE THAT LITTLE SCENE IF YOU COULD.
Interviewer: ARE YOU THERE?
Simons: No, I wasn’t there in that meeting.
Simons: I was there in that afternoon’s meeting and Sunday afternoon’s meeting.
Simons: I was the note taker for that.
Simons: And others were in the earlier meetings taking notes.
Interviewer: DO YOU HAVE ANY SENSE OF THE PERSONAL CHEMISTRY BETWEEN THESE TWO MEN? I MEAN IS THERE ANY SENSE OF A PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP?
Simons: Oh, yeah.
Simons: No, no, they, I think they feel they’ve gotten to know each other, they respect each other, discussion is intense and it’s direct and it’s respectful.
Simons: I mean, they really don’t pound the table or yell and scream and the kind of forensic tricks which can infect negotiations at any level are notably absent.
Interviewer: SPEAKING VERY NAIVELY, IT’S HARD TO RECONCILE FROM THE AMATEUR, FROM THE OUTSIDER’S POINT OF VIEW, IS THE, AND THIS IS A BIG LEAP RIGHT NOW, BUT I WANT TO GET BACK TO REYKJAVIK, IS THE RHETORIC THAT THE PRESIDENT USED TOWARD THE BEGINNING OF HIS ADMINISTRATIONS, THE EVIL EMPIRE, REALLY THE INHERENT, THE BAD GUYS, SUPER BAD GUYS.
Interviewer: AND YET, WE ALL HAVE A SENSE THAT THERE WAS A, AS YOU SAY, THERE WAS A PERSONAL RAPPORT BETWEEN THESE TWO MEN.
Interviewer: DO YOU HAVE ANY SENSE OF HOW THE PRESIDENT, HOW THAT WORKS IN THE PRESIDENT’S MIND OR...?
Simons: Well, don’t forget that Gorbachev didn't become General Secretary until March of ’85 and they didn’t meet until November of ’85.
Simons: You need a larger answer.
Simons: Do you want a larger answer? Yeah.
Simons: It's a larger answer because it’s a major question: what changed over the course of the administration to get us to where we are now.
Simons: And I think you have to go back to the basics to deal with that.
Simons: By the end of the 1970s, there were a couple of things that were clear about U.S./Soviet relations which were on the rocks in terms of American politics.
Simons: First was that the American people wanted two things, and the electorate wanted two things from its government in terms of dealing with the Soviets.
Simons: They wanted strength, they wanted us to be clear eyed and if necessary hairy-handed.
Simons: And they wanted consistent negotiations.
Simons: They wanted negotiations on all the topics.
Simons: Now, that's something new, I think, in terms of the American political tradition in dealing with adversaries.
Simons: Because traditionally if we’d been strong, we haven’t seen the need to negotiate.
Simons: In other words, unconditional surrender is really the American paradigm.
Simons: And if we have negotiated, there's always been a suspicion of weakness.
Simons: And that was one of the things that afflicted the détente policy.
Simons: Détente was associated in the 1970s, I think unfairly but very clearly, in conjunction with Watergate and Vietnam and inadequate defense budgets, détente was associated with weakness.
Simons: So they wanted strength and they wanted negotiation.
Simons: The other thing that was apparent was that most Americans always feel that there is a Soviet threat.
Simons: But the shape that that threat takes for them changes over time.
Simons: Sometimes, it’s a threat of nuclear war or the Soviet military buildup, and they tend to be linked.
Simons: Sometimes, it’s Soviet expansion in third areas, Afghanistan in the late ‘70s.
Simons: Sometimes it’s the way they treat their own population, the human rights issue.
Simons: It varies and it’s not easy to predict how it’s going to vary.
Simons: Now, another of the defects of détente was that it had a fairly narrow agenda and there were reasons for that, because we were new at negotiating for the Soviets.
Simons: And you identified the nuclear issue as the one issue in which the elites of both countries felt that the two countries had something in common.
Simons: If you couldn’t agree on other things, you could at least agree that we needed to work to reduce the risk of nuclear war.
Simons: But that narrow agenda, primarily nuclear arms control, and some economic relations and a little respect in the conditions of the ‘70s proved too narrow to capture a stable consensus in American politics.
Simons: So the Reagan Administration when it came in from the beginning really tried to do two things.
Simons: First was to build a policy, an actual policy, on the makings of that consensus, both strength and negotiation.
Simons: And second, it tried to do this by putting forth a so-called broad agenda, the four-party agenda which included not only arms control but also regional issues, as they're now called.
Simons: They began by being called geopolitical issues, a little hard to say.
Simons: They're now regional issues.
Simons: Human rights, not as a bilateral issue but as an issue of international order.
Simons: And the whole range of bilateral issues.
Simons: So you started off and you got something like that in place, really late ’81, ’82.
Simons: But it has to be said that the administration came into power almost overwhelmed by the sense of American weakness.
Simons: So even though the negotiation track was there in terms of the policy, the administration really spent its first years building up strength.
Simons: You did that in a whole variety of ways because when you're talking about strength, you're talking about not just rearmament, you're talking in the first instance because the administration was very domestically oriented.
Simons: I mean, its main priorities were domestic.
Simons: You're talking about economic recovery which will underpin a rearmament effort, but it’s much broader.
Simons: It also has a moral aspect.
Simons: You're talking about repairing and consolidating relations with friends and allies because one of the charges was that we had rewarded our enemies and penalized our friends in the 1970s.
Simons: So you wanted to rectify that.
Simons: And Soviet policy really came only as a residual, in a way, in those first years of the major priority effort on those three other fronts.
Simons: So the break point was not 1984, the election year.
Simons: I can say that looking back because I was experienced it.
Simons: But it was 1983 because it was in the middle of 1983 that the administration looked out at its priorities, economic recovery, rearmament, repairing relations with friends and allies, and observe that it hadn’t gotten everything it wanted, but by golly it was not doing badly.
Simons: You had a degree of economic recovery under way.
Simons: The defense budget had not become a political target.
Simons: That was one of the mysterious secrets of the first two years of the administration.
Simons: And relations after the Williamsburg summit, relations with allies, remember, after the gas pipeline controversy, were substantially better, maybe better than we deserve, but substantially better in any case than we’d expected.
Simons: And you could feel the terrain change around this town when it came to Soviet affairs.
Simons: Because as a result of having been able to set objectives and to make some progress toward objectives, the administration looked out and said to itself, “Hey, maybe not we can negotiate with the Soviet Union.” So it was in the summer of ’83 that you got a whole series of small steps forward which would have been impossible the year before.
Simons: We got agreement to move forward on reopening consulates, to negotiate a new cultural exchanges agreement.
Simons: You got some movement in both START and INF; small, but significant.
Simons: And that showed a new buoyancy and the recovery of confidence to be able to negotiate with the Soviets.
Simons: Now, the President reflected that because one of the elements of building strength, I mentioned it was military, it was economic and it was also moral.
Simons: In other words, one of the President’s main purposes in those first years was to tell Americans that they were a good and decent people, and that included a very unfavorable comparison with our adversaries, if I may put it so chastely at this point.
Simons: But moral rearmament was also a part of the program and I think more than anything that explains the rhetoric.
Simons: Now, once you get into negotiations, you don’t cut your rhetoric in order to facilitate negotiations.
Simons: You cut your rhetoric because you feel stronger and you feel more confident and you don’t need that rhetoric anymore as you engage with the Soviets.
Simons: So I think basically that’s what happened.
Simons: Now, ’83 was a big year...
Interviewer: LET ME INTERRUPT THERE.
Interviewer: I'M NOT GOING TO ASK A QUESTION, HE’S SO YOU BETTER GO IN.
Interviewer: I SAID I'M NOT GOING TO ASK A QUESTION, HE’S JUST GOING TO GIVE AN ANECDOTE SO YOU MIGHT WANT TO GO IN.
Interviewer: OKAY.
Simons: Well, I think that there were two telltale signs that summer that this was happening, the landscape was shifting.
Simons: One was happenstance.
Simons: In the middle of June, 1983, Secretary Shultz was called on to give a presentation to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Simons: And the timing was happenstance because it had been scheduled for earlier in the year by then-Chairman Percy.
Simons: He’d agreed to do it and then it was deferred because of Middle East activity.
Simons: So the timing just came up.
Simons: And the presentation which we prepared had no political signal in it at all.
Simons: It was absolutely flat and accurate.
Simons: It had strength, it had realism, it had negotiation, it had slow, steady work.
Simons: It had the four part agenda, the human rights and regional and arms control and bilateral.
Simons: So it was not intended to signal and it was reported in exactly opposite directions by the New York Times and the Washington Post the next day.
Simons: The Washington Post picked out what was hard, and headlined “Shultz signals tougher stance toward the Soviet Union.” And the New York Times picked out what was, I won't say soft, but what was more flexible and said, “Shultz signals new flexibility vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.” And we had to decide how to brief.
Simons: Who was right? I had a journalist call me and say, “What was your boss saying?” And at that point, we decided that indeed we had recovered our confidence to the point where we were going to remain tough.
Simons: We were going to be very clear-eyed and very realistic and we were going to keep talking about the things that the Soviet Union did that we thought were dangerous or irresponsible and things we didn’t like about Soviet domestic arrangements which under this administration are considered a part of the reason why the Soviets are not a good partner in world affairs.
Simons: But basically, we were ready to negotiate.
Simons: So that's one anecdote of how it happened, and I think it also shows you the very uncertain balance of that time.
Simons: But it was in that summer, as I say, through diplomatic channels that we got a number of things going.
Simons: And, of course, that was brought to a very abrupt halt by the KAL shoot down.
Interviewer: TELL US ABOUT THAT.
Interviewer: WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE? YOU'RE IN A, THAT HAPPENS AND WHAT HAPPENS HERE?
Simons: What happens is that you have task forces immediately formed at various levels which are simply trying to get a handle on the situation which you're getting vast amounts of disparate information in a situation of very high passion.
Simons: And the State Department, by habit, attempts to sort of manage all those elements into a framework which fits with the policy.
Simons: And it is high bureaucratic battle because something this outrageous as this murder of the 269 innocent civilians is something that simply galvanizes.
Simons: It reminds everyone of what is monstrous about the Soviet Union.
Simons: And we, indeed, led world outrage at the incident.
Simons: If we were talking rhetoric, it was probably the highest pitch of American rhetoric led by the President and it was justified.
Simons: At the same time for me, looking at it trying to look at this with some perspective and some distance, the way we handled it was a proof that we had indeed recovered our confidence because unlike Afghanistan, and unlike even Poland, in terms of a sanctions program, the President decided very early that as we lead this worldwide outrage and this effort to reprimand and to hold the Soviet Union up to the bar of international morality, we were going to limit our sanctions, the specific sanctions that we took, to things that were directly related to the reasons why world opinion was outraged.
Simons: And that had to do with the safety of peaceful air travel.
Simons: So our sanctions were limited to the transportation field.
Simons: I mean, we pulled back a cooperative agreement on transportation for renewal.
Simons: We mobilized the ICOW, we carried forward an effort to make sure that this could never happen again, to assign blame.
Simons: But it really was within the transportation field.
Simons: And at the same time against advice to the contrary from some quarters, the President decided to send back to the negotiating table his arms control negotiators and really to pursue these objectives in relations with the Soviets which we had defined as in our own interests.
Simons: I mean, we felt that an INF solution, the zero option, at that time I think it was an interim solution, even in INF, was in our interest.
Simons: And you don’t stop pursuing that interest because something terrible happens in another field.
Simons: You try to deal with that on its merits.
Simons: So I think those two episodes, I mean really, were sort of proof that by, after two years, by mid 1983, the United States had recovered confidence enough politically, had a policy in place which enjoyed broad acceptance and could then begin to negotiate seriously with the Soviets.
Simons: Now after that, the difficulty was that actual transactions with the Soviets stopped through the fall and both sides concentrated, really, on the INF battle in Europe and there wasn’t much energy for anything else.
Simons: By the time you came out of that, by the time we had deployed, the Soviets had walked out and had unsuccessfully tried to gin up a war scare, which was their reaction in November and December, they stopped in mid-December because I think it was having repercussions on their own public opinion.
Simons: But by the time you arrived at the new year and the President reaffirmed in his speech of January 1984, which is really the key presidential document on U.S./Soviet relations his willingness to negotiate on the basis of the four-point agenda, to move forward, his desire and it was an election year.
Simons: And everyone was saying that Ronald Reagan is only doing this for electoral purposes.
Simons: It’s not the real Ronald Reagan and it was very hard to test that in an election year, although we continued to do so.
Interviewer: IT’S INTERESTING, YOU SAY REAFFIRM IN THE JANUARY 4TH SPEECH.
Interviewer: AND THAT, I GUESS, IS TECHNICALLY CORRECT...
Simons: January 14th, you ought to check the date, whatever the date was.
Interviewer: WHATEVER THE DAY WAS, I GOT THAT SPEECH.
Interviewer: AND THAT'S TECHNICALLY CORRECT IN THE SENSE THAT YOU HAVE FOUND WHEN YOU LOOK BACK AT THE RECORD THAT THE PRESIDENT NEVER SAID HE WASN’T WILLING TO TALK, BUT IN A NON KIND OF RECORD SPEAKING SENSE, THAT FELT TO ME LOOKING AT THE RECORD LIKE THE FIRST TIME THE PRESIDENT REALLY HAD, THE SENSE THAT I GOT AS A LISTENER OR VIEWER, THAT HE GENUINELY WAS TALKING ABOUT, HE WASN’T SAYING, “WE HAVE TO BUILD UP FIRST AND THEN WE’LL TALK.” HE WASN'T SAYING THERE WOULDN'T BE A TIME, HE WAS SAYING, “NOW WE SHOULD TALK.”
Simons: Well, maybe I'm too State Department; maybe I'm too interested in the framework because in that sense, it was a reaffirmation.
Simons: I mean, the elements of it had been there before and it reaffirmed them.
Simons: It’s also true, however, as you say, that there was kind of a new spirit and a new buoyancy to it.
Simons: The difficulty when you do that in an election year, although I think there may have been some electoral interest, but it was basically an affirmation of what had been a consistent presidential approach.
Simons: What had changed was the new confidence.
Simons: Was that it was impossible to prove that to anyone because it was an election year.
Simons: But what we did during that year was really to implement the President’s line and that new impulse.
Simons: I mean, we put so much on the table in the course of 1984 both before and after the Soviet Olympic boycott that by midsummer, at a time when the whole press was saying that the Soviets won't deal with Ronald Reagan ever and certainly not before the election, the Soviets actually sort of released the bilateral side of the relationship and allowed things to go forward and to start again.
Simons: And that, of course, what really registered that was Mr. Gromyko’s visit to Washington, willingness to talk to the United States although it was an election year.
Simons: So I think perhaps our effort to put things on the table, to prove that what the President said in January was sincere, may also have had some impact on them.
Simons: And sometimes, they watch us more closely than the American media.
Interviewer: THIS IS CURIOUS, THIS ISN'T REALLY FOR THE PROGRAM, BUT I'M CURIOUS.
Interviewer: DO YOU THINK IF IT HADN'T BEEN FOR THE KLA WE MIGHT HAVE GOTTEN THIS WHOLE PROCESS STARTED PRIOR TO PUTTING MISSILES IN WESTERN EUROPE PRIOR TO THE INF TROUBLE?
Simons: I think we would have done some of it.
Simons: Now, how far it would have gone and whether it would actually have counterbalanced or avoided the kind of political struggle you had over INF.
Simons: I mean, a political struggle was inevitable.
Simons: Whether the enrichment of the agenda and of transactions in other areas could have leeched that of some of its venom or, I doubt if it would have prevented it, but it could have been a different balance.
Interviewer: THE OTHER THING, OF COURSE, THAT HAPPENS IS THAT THE PRESIDENT, WE INVADE GRENADA WHICH BECOMES KIND OF A, I GUESS, A SYMBOL OF WHAT KRAUTHAMMER CHOOSES OR DUBBED THE REAGAN DOCTRINE; THAT IS, THE NOTION THAT NOT ONLY WILL WE NOT TOLERATE THE EXTENSION OF MARXIST LENINIST REGIMES, BUT WE WILL, IN FACT, WORK TO ROLL BACK THOSE MARXIST LENINIST REGIMES WHERE WE CAN DO SO.
Interviewer: SO IF IT GOES INTO AFGHANISTAN, AID I GUESS HAS ALREADY BEEN GOING INTO AFGHANISTAN BY THEN, THE AID HAS BEEN GOING TO THE NICARAGUAN CONTRAS, THE EL SALVADORAN GOVERNMENT IS BEING HELPED BY THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION AND WE INVADE GRENADA.
Simons: Well, I think that's a part of two things.
Simons: It’s part of the strength, increasing American strength and showing the will to use it.
Simons: And it’s part of our regional approach which from the beginning, in other words, more apparent early on in words, I think, rather than deeds, was that our approach to these regional conflicts has been that we recognize that the roots of these conflicts are usually indigenous.
Simons: I mean, they caused by social, economic, political tensions in an area.
Simons: The problem has been a pattern of Soviet exploitation of these conflicts through military means, either directly as in Afghanistan or through what used to be called proxies.
Simons: But anyway, close Soviet friends and allies, to impose political solutions which are going to start.
Simons: I mean, that's the objection.
Simons: Our response to that has been that we want to work with the parties to a conflict to encourage them to get together and solve it themselves.
Simons: In other words, it’s not something that the US and the Soviet Union can decide together and impose.
Simons: I mean, it really has to be the parties.
Simons: And that's true in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Central America, Southern Africa.
Simons: We're willing to help.
Simons: If the Soviet Union is willing to join in that effort constructively, we welcome that.
Simons: But if they don’t, we're going to do it ourselves.
Simons: And that includes supporting forces, indigenous forces, which are resisting this use of military power supplied, tolerated, some cases Afghanistan, conducted, by the Soviet Union to impose these political solutions.
Simons: So that's kind of the theory of it, but it has been consistent.
Simons: Now 1983, you had in the first years of the administration this very curious argument because most of these are arguments about America, mind you, not so much about the Soviet Union.
Simons: This very curious argument of some elements of the Department of Defense who felt that we had grown so weak relatively in the 1970s that until we had fully recovered our military strength, we could not afford to confront Soviet expansionism even at the extremities of its tentacles and that therefore we had to concentrate on economic pressure.
Simons: It was an odd argument because it said we're too weak militarily to confront, but they're so weak economically that we can bring them to their knees by a fairly gentle push, like the gas pipeline.
Simons: And you had the State Department, the diplomats, these people who are famous for negotiating at any price, saying, “No, we have a range of instruments to deal with the Soviet Union, military, diplomacy, economic, a whole bunch of things.
Simons: And we are strong enough so that we can afford to use our military power in some instances to put a stop to this expansionism.” And Grenada was a case of that.
Simons: Now, what effect that had on the Soviet Union, it’s a little bit like SDI, it’s mixed.
Simons: On the one hand, it’s very alarming for them because to the extent they felt that the Reagan Administration was a cowboy power, it frightened them.
Simons: And I'm willing to accept that a certain amount of that fear was genuine.
Simons: On the other hand, I think the main effect of it was to show them that America was back and that the cost of the kind of adventurism, taking advantage, exploiting opportunities in the third world, that they had kind of systematically indulged in in the 1970s was getting higher and higher and higher.
Simons: And so they really ought to look more carefully at the costs and risks at the kind of international conduct which had become normal for them in the ‘70s.
Simons: And I think there's been a certain amount of that happening.
Interviewer: GOOD.
Interviewer: OUR CHRONOLOGY HAD STOPPED THEM IN LIKE SEPTEMBER OF ’84 WHEN GROMYKO COMES AND MEETS YOU FOR THE FIRST TIME AND THERE ARE HINTS IN THE PRESS NOW OF THE POSSIBILITY OF A SUMMIT.
Interviewer: I WONDER IN RECOLLECTING, WAS THERE ANY TIME AT WHICH PEOPLE COULD SAY INSIDE THE PROCESS, “I KNOW THERE'S GOING TO BE A SUMMIT NOW.
Interviewer: WE'VE TURNED SOME CORNER, IT’S ONLY A QUESTION OF TIME.” OR WAS IT ALWAYS KIND OF, EVEN UP TO GENEVA, WAS IT KIND OF UP IN THE AIR?
Simons: Well, it was up in the air in particular ways.
Simons: I was confident there was going to be a summit when the Soviets finally agreed to a summit and that was in July of 1985.
Simons: I think before that, there were a number of tasks and a number of steps.
Simons: Right after the election, in other words after the President’s victory in 1984, we immediately reaffirmed our desire to get things going again.
Simons: And I think that had an effect on the Soviet leadership because, of course, many of them had been dealing with the theory that all this is an electoral sham.
Simons: So that reaffirming it immediately after the election had some credibility.
Simons: Then you had the meeting in January of ’85 in Geneva, Secretary Shultz and Gromyko at which it was agreed to begin arms control negotiations again and that started in March.
Simons: Then in March, Mr. Chernenko died and Gorbachev succeeded him as General Secretary.
Simons: And you begin to get the infiltration of the new spirit into the Soviet approach to some of these issues.
Simons: But it was not until July where you had the rearrangement of the Politburo and Gorbachev really got himself some solid support in the top leadership.
Simons: And they agreed definitively to the summit within days, actually within hours, of that leadership reshuffle that I was confident that we were going to have a summit.
Simons: Now that said, they had a problem all the way through, as I mentioned earlier up until a week before Geneva, with what to do with SDI.
Simons: And they tried for a very long time to make it a precondition for a successful summit; in other words, they said we will have a summit but it will not be successful unless the United States makes this concession on SDI.
Simons: I think they learned in that process a couple of things, which is that direct pressure on SDI tends to increase support for it.
Simons: The converse is not necessarily true.
Simons: In other words, reducing pressure doesn’t necessarily reduce support and they’ve been dealing with that kind of problem.
Simons: But that they learned.
Simons: And I think the second thing they learned was that there's some mileage in adopting the four part agenda; in other words, being willing to talk to us about everything and in being practical.
Interviewer: VELIKHOV SAYS THAT THE OUTCOME OF THE GENEVA SUMMIT, THE SUBSTANTIVE OUTCOME OF THE GENEVA SUMMIT ON WHICH REYKJAVIK WAS BUILT WAS REAGAN’S STATED DESIRE TO ELIMINATE NUCLEAR ARMS.
Interviewer: DID THAT COME UP IN GENEVA IN THAT WAY?
Simons: See, I had a year off, and so I wasn’t, that was not my year.
Simons: I know there was agreement on the proposition that nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
Simons: The President does have a long-term vision of a world without nuclear terror.
Simons: He expressed that to Gromyko.
Simons: You'll need to check out whether it’s actually in the Geneva summit document.
Interviewer: I'LL DO THAT.
Simons: But I think the Soviets also learned at Geneva that the President is not going to be driven off SDI per se, and they have respected that really ever since.
Simons: I mean, we think the kinds of assurances that the Soviets are requiring with regard to strategic defense are designed to have the political effect of killing SDI.
Simons: But their stated position, and you have to take it at face value, is that they recognize that the President will not be talked off SDI and they are not talking about stopping the SDI program.
Simons: They're talking about putting it within agreed limits which permit the two sides to take these 50 percent reductions in offensive weapons.
Simons: And I would say, I have a lot of admiration for Mr. Velikhov, but I still feel free to differ from him.
Simons: I would say that the major achievement of the Geneva summit was agreement on that 50 percent reduction in strategic offensive weapons.
Simons: Now, obviously the Soviets have their own view and so that the, how shall I say? The distrust of nuclear weapons which the President feels may have been important to them because then it served as the programmatic basis for their own approach to arms control, which was Gorbachev’s January 15th, 1986, program for eliminating nuclear weapons by the year 2000.
Simons: And that has been the basis to which they have referred at every step of the way and I think it’s because it’s a leadership agreed basis just before their party congress, which was then blessed at the party congress.
Simons: And for them, it has the value of a leadership decision document supported in the most solemn fashion by the party.
Simons: And therefore, they're stuck with it.
Interviewer: IT’S INTERESTING BECAUSE THIS NEXT QUESTION ALMOST BECOMES RIDICULOUS, BUT VELIKHOV SAYS ALSO, HE SAYS “WE MADE THE PROPOSAL AT REYKJAVIK AND THE PRESIDENT WAS TOTALLY UNPREPARED FOR THEM.” BUT IN FACT, YOU'RE RIGHT, THEY DIDN’T MAKE ANY PROPOSAL AT REYKJAVIK THAT WENT BEYOND WHAT HE SAID IN HIS JANUARY SPEECH, ISN'T THAT CORRECT?
Simons: Oh, I think that's right.
Simons: And moreover, part of what you got into at Reykjavik, you had Saturday morning at Reykjavik, these fabulous reductions offered.
Simons: I mean, these 50 percent reductions.
Simons: You had an offer on INF which was inadequate and which has subsequently been overtaken, but it was impressive.
Simons: And you had the idea of the, they came down to ten years on a commitment not to withdraw from the ABM Treaty with some definitions as to what that meant.
Simons: That's a fabulous offer.
Simons: But, what it does is if you say ten years of non-withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and 50 percent reductions on the offensive side within five years, that gives you a framework for what to do on offense, what to do on defense, which defines the inner relationship between offense and defense which had been agreed in principle in January of ’85, but which the two sides have never had a practical way of wrestling with or grappling with.
Simons: The problem at that point became what to do with the extra five years on the offensive side.
Simons: Ten years defense, five years offense.
Simons: That left a hole.
Simons: And what the President did was he went back to the proposal that he had made in his letter of late July to Gorbachev which was a treaty for the elimination of all ballistic missiles within ten years.
Simons: So, he wasn’t even, I mean, not only was Gorbachev not doing anything fundamentally new, but the President himself was also using guidance which had been debated, cleared, I mean controversial in some ways within the government, but which had been debated, cleared, decided.
Simons: So it was an elaboration of things that had gone before and, I don't know, maybe Mr. Velikhov should be familiar with these things, but I feel confident that what he gave, it seems to me, to be a misreading of what actually happened.
Interviewer: DID ALL THOSE PROPOSALS THAT YOU MENTIONED, DID THEY ALL TAKE PLACE ON SATURDAY? DID THE PRESIDENT LEAVE THE MEETING, GO BACK AND THEN COME BACK? TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THAT.
Interviewer: THE SOVIETS, AS I UNDERSTAND IT, CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG, THE SOVIETS COME IN AND THEY SAY 50 PERCENT CUT IN STRATEGIC ARMS OVER FIVE YEARS AND A TEN YEAR BAN ON SPACE BASED DEFENSIVE SYSTEMS.
Interviewer: THEY PUT THAT ON THE TABLE?
Simons: Right.
Simons: And then, in the afternoon, you really had an elaboration of what that 50 percent offer meant on the offensive side.
Simons: And we, in turn, explained our position on the offensive side.
Simons: And you set up this working group at night and you set up the other working group, which covered human rights and regional and bilateral issues.
Simons: They met all night.
Simons: Then you came back the next morning and you basically did two things.
Simons: We had developed a bilateral work program, 10 or 12 or 13 steps that the two sides ought to be taking.
Simons: The two leaders blessed that, and that turned out to be an important accomplishment because with the breakdown of the arms control thing, that gave a certain underpinning to moving forward with the relationship even though you were having trouble on the arms control side.
Simons: And then they talked mainly about INF.
Simons: They spent the rest of the morning talking principally about INF, Sunday morning.
Simons: And it was at that meeting that you got, the Soviets having satisfied themselves because I think it took that long, satisfied themselves that the President was genuinely sincere in being willing to eliminate our missiles in Europe.
Simons: They were very skeptical about that.
Simons: They thought that even if he were sincere, dark forces in the United States or the allies would prevent him from doing that.
Simons: So it was very important for them to assure themselves that he was sincere.
Simons: And it was on Sunday morning that they agreed to go down to 100 outside Europe.
Simons: I mean, we didn’t agree where they would be, whether ours would be in Alaska.
Simons: And as you know, we've since gone beyond that.
Simons: But that took most of Sunday morning.
Simons: Sunday afternoon, we came back briefly with some numbers.
Simons: I mean, you reached agreement on the 6,000, 1,600 numbers, early Sunday afternoon and then most of the rest of the time was spent talking about defense, the ABM Treaty.
Simons: And, of course, it was on that that the meeting broke.
Simons: But that was the general sequence.
Interviewer: NOW, THE IMPRESSION YOU GET FROM READING THE PRESS AT THE TIME, AND ALSO EVEN I THINK THAT LITTLE PLAYLET THAT WAS DONE ON PUBLIC TV, DID YOU SEE THAT?
Simons: Yeah, I did.
Interviewer: IS AMERICANS IN SOME CONFUSION AND DISARRAY AND SCRIBBLING NOTES IN THE BATHROOM AND TRYING TO SOMEHOW COUNTER AND THE SOVIETS TOGETHER, SOLID, PROPOSING.
Interviewer: WAS THERE A SENSE OF DISORGANIZATION AND CONFUSION IN THE AMERICAN DELEGATION?
Simons: Well, yeah, I think there was more urgency and uncertainty probably on our side because the Soviets had come with a comprehensive, vetted I'm sure Politburo approved document, which is what they were working against.
Simons: Now, that gave them trouble in the aftermath, and I'd like to describe that for you.
Simons: The Americans, as I say, were surprised at the magnitude, at the return to 50 percent, and had to deal with some proposals which they hadn’t expected, this question of laboratory testing, on SDI.
Simons: So there was more work to be done for us because the soviets basically laid out this thing and then sort of stuck by it.
Simons: They also made some movement on the bomber counting rule during the course of the night between Nitze and Akramav so they weren't totally without flexibility, but basically they had their matrix there and they stuck to it.
Simons: But the effect of that afterwards was that the two sides had different political problems.
Simons: And my feeling is that Gorbachev’s political problem was more difficult than ours because he came in with all or nothing instructions.
Simons: Our political problem Sunday night at Reykjavik was that we needed to do, we needed somehow to avoid having SDI identified as the single obstacle to progress in arms control.
Simons: And it was clear that the Soviets were going to try to pin that charge on us.
Simons: I think Gorbachev’s problem was more severe because he had all or nothing instructions.
Simons: In other words, either you get your SDI concession or all these fabulous offers go off the board, go off the negotiating table.
Simons: They become null and void.
Simons: So when he faced the press that evening, the world press, but also he was speaking to the Soviet Union, he had to decide whether to take everything off the board and basically return, in political terms to the situation of November 1983 where they’d walked out.
Simons: They had walked out of Geneva because of INF deployments.
Simons: Now, he was going to take all that stuff off the table would have been a walkout because he didn’t get the concession he needed on SDI.
Simons: He decided not to do that.
Simons: He decided to say it all remains on the table, but SDI is still the single obstacle.
Simons: And they tried to square that little circle because the truth is we’d made progress in some areas and there were differences in other areas of which the question of strict observance and laboratory testing were only two.
Simons: But they tried through Vienna, really until the start of 1987, they tried to stick to the, to square that circle of having everything on the table but trying to define SDI as the only obstacle.
Simons: And that was the content of the Vienna meeting between Shultz and Shevardnadze when we proposed that we put together two documents which outlined the agreements and the differences, and they refused and walked out and said SDI is the only obstacle.
Simons: I think they really didn’t make their decision to come off of that until early in ’87.
Simons: At that point, we were in Iran contra.
Simons: So it was not until Mr. Baker and Mr. Carlucci took over at the White House that they de-linked INF, that was in February.
Simons: Again within hours, it was the converse of 1985 when some hours after Gromyko was elevated to the chairmanship of the Council of State, we got agreement on the summit.
Simons: In this case, it was some hours after Mr. Baker and Mr. Carlucci took over at the White House that Gorbachev de-linked INF and allowed that negotiation to go forward.
Simons: So they are in relationships to these things, but I have to say that I think that the policy quandary...
Interviewer: PROPOSE IN PRINCIPLE THE ELIMINATION OF ALL BALLISTIC MISSILES WITHIN A FIVE YEAR PERIOD?
Simons: I think it was ten years.
Interviewer: TEN YEARS?
Simons: Yeah, he’d proposed that in his letter of late July 1986 to Gorbachev a treaty to eliminate all ballistic missiles within ten years.
Simons: And he reaffirmed that, basically, at Reykjavik as a way of filling what to do with that extra five years when you had agreed to do 50 percent reductions of all strategic offensive weapons in five years and you had a ten year ABM.
Simons: That was the Soviet proposal.
Interviewer: GIVEN THE FACT THAT OUR SECURITY HAS BEEN BASED ON THE NOTION OF OUR TRIAD, OF WHICH THE BALLISTIC MISSILE IS A SIGNIFICANT COMPONENT, THAT WAS ONE OF THE LEGS OF THE TRIAD, AND THAT WE HAD ALWAYS, AS I UNDERSTAND AMERICAN POLICY, IT’S BEEN THAT OUR NUCLEAR CAPABILITY WAS A WAY OF REDRESSING NOT ONLY-- WAS A WAY OF DETERRING NOT ONLY A NUCLEAR STRIKE BUT A CONVENTIONAL STRIKE.
Interviewer: THAT IS, WE HAVE,AM I RIGHT ABOUT THAT? THAT SEEMS LIKE A STRANGE PROPOSAL FOR US TO MAKE.
Interviewer: IT’S ELIMINATING A LEG OF OUR TRIAD.
Interviewer: AM I MAKING SENSE?
Simons: Well, you are and I don't have a good answer because I'm not a good strategic thinker.
Simons: I'm probably not the fellow to pose a question to and what I say would be speculation.
Simons: I think probably it has to do with the increasing vulnerability of our land based ICBMs because of technological developments, accuracy, those kinds of things, which was a problem well identified in the ‘70s.
Simons: Still exists, and the prospect of eliminating all Soviet ballistic missiles, even at the cost of offering up that leg of our triad, seemed worth contemplating.
Interviewer: FAIR ENOUGH.
Interviewer: WERE YOU AT THE END OF THE MEETING? WERE YOU THERE TAKING NOTES? TELL US JUST NARRATIVELY WHAT HAPPENS AT THE END OF THIS DAY?
Simons: Well, the last period was really focused on this question of laboratory testing as all that would be permitted beyond research for the SDI program.
Simons: And it was very urgent and intense.
Simons: Respectful; I mean, again, there was no screaming and shouting in the meeting, but very urgent and intense.
Simons: The two leaders recognized that the stakes were considerable.
Simons: And in the end, it was deadlocked.
Simons: I mean, it was gridlocked on that issue.
Simons: Both leaders felt that they could not return to their capitals having made a concession on that issue.
Simons: And they tried.
Simons: I mean, they urged each other to make that one concession.
Simons: And after a while, after quite a while, it became apparent that that was not going to be possible.
Simons: So at a certain point, the books were closed and they stood up and left.
Simons: Now, the question has been posed as to why they didn’t roll it over, why they didn’t come back the next day and talk about it.
Simons: Actually, the proposal had been made that that issue be deferred to other fora.
Simons: I mean, either to a Washington summit or to the negotiators in Geneva.
Simons: But I think because it was part of Gorbachev’s approved matrix package, I speculate, that in any case Gorbachev was unwilling to entertain that kind of remanding to another fora.
Simons: And the President was unwilling to make that concession, which he considered, and I think rightly, if not technically then politically would have crippled or gutted the SDI program.
Simons: And so I don't think it would have done any good.
Simons: I don't think there was a fix, even as a diplomat.
Simons: I mean, I sat there, when a diplomat sees deadlock emerging, he becomes uncomfortable, and I was in that situation.
Simons: But I didn’t think that there was a fix that could be accomplished overnight or by coming back the next day.
Simons: So I thought it was probably politically accurate way to end the meeting.
Simons: Although I think both sides had built up such, beginning Saturday, I mean, you had a period of 24 hours and really it was 24 hours because we hadn’t slept that night, where the consciousness that all of these things that you've been talking about for years could become real.
Simons: I think we had become more and more convinced of the reality of what we were doing and of the magnitude of what we were doing, so the psychological letdown was considerable, but both sides recoup because for different reasons, which I've described, Gorbachev’s problem, our problem, both Secretary Shultz when he briefed that night and Gorbachev in his lengthier briefing, basically asserted that everything that's been offered is on the table and that was the key result which has allowed us to...
Simons: which allowed us to go on despite that psychological letdown.
Interviewer: FOOTNOTE, I DON'T KNOW IF THIS IS SIGNIFICANT OR NOT, BUT DOES REAGAN CLOSE HIS PAPER BOOK FIRST AND STAMP, DOES GORBACHEV GRAB HIS BRIEFCASE AND WALK OUT? DO THEY SAY TOGETHER, “MR.
Interviewer: PRESIDENT, I'M AFRAID WE'VE GONE AS FAR...“ I MEAN, WHAT...?
Simons: I don’t have a clear enough memory of that.
Interviewer: IT WAS NOT A DRAMATIC MOMENT, IT WAS JUST A MOMENT?
Simons: Well, it was dramatic but muted.
Simons: It was dramatic.
Interviewer: BOTH VELIKHOV AND GERASIMOV AND OTHERS IN THE SOVIET DELEGATION WHO WERE THERE COMPLAINED THAT THE US DELEGATION SPOKE WITH MANY VOICES.
Interviewer: IN FACT, THEY SAID MORE SPECIFICALLY THAT ALTHOUGH THEY HAD THE FEELING THAT AGREEMENT AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS WERE POSSIBLE, I GUESS THEY MEANT BETWEEN THE PRESIDENT AND GORBACHEV, THAT AT THE LOWER LEVELS, A LOT OF PEOPLE DIDN’T, ON THE AMERICAN SIDE, DID NOT WANT TO MAKE PROGRESS AND BROUGHT UP ALL KINDS OF ACCUSATIONS.
Simons: Yeah.
Simons: Well, that's just the oldest of Soviet old thinking.
Simons: The Soviets always go to the top and they always complain about the guys down below.
Simons: And they always blame evil counselors, dark forces.
Simons: I mean, the ruling circles or the military industrial complex or unrealistically thinking people if they don’t get what they want.
Simons: So, I mean, those are guys who represent, who purport to represent the newest of the new thinking and it’s a little disillusioning to hear them so spectacularly engaged in old thinking with that kind of charge.
Interviewer: I SEE PARTICULARLY EXORCIZED BY THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS, AS IF HE OFFERED THE PENTAGON IN THOSE DAYS.
Simons: Yeah.
Simons: Although one of the secrets of the progress that we've made was that beginning January 1985, Assistant Secretary Perle was part of the team and he was constructive.
Simons: I mean, he's very skeptical of arms control, as you know.
Simons: I mean, soporific and it’s, once again, it’s mainly the effect on the Americans rather than the effect on the Russians that worries him.
Simons: And he’s more pessimistic about the capacity of this country, this polity, to defend and promote its interests with the Soviet Union than I am.
Simons: But that said, he is an original and creative and constructive member of a negotiating team.
Simons: And, of course, they're blinded to that.
Interviewer: THEY'RE ALSO HODDING TELLS, THIS IS A SIDE, BUT HODDING TELLS ME THEY ARE FASCINATED, HE WOULD DO A RECEPTION WITH A WHOLE BUNCH OF SOVIETS AND A WHOLE BUNCH OF AMERICANS.
Interviewer: THE SOVIETS ONLY WANT TO TALK TO PERLE.
Interviewer: HE TO THEM WAS THE MOST INTERESTING PERSON, AND THIS WAS A ROOM FULL OF QUITE INTERESTING AMERICANS, BUT IT WAS PERLE WHO REALLY FASCINATED THEM.
Simons: Well, he’s a real mensch and they can't figure him out because they want to type him.
Simons: They want to, but they sense that there's something more to it than they’ve been told or that they feel and so they kind of keep digging.
Simons: Of course, he loves it.
Interviewer: I THINK YOU'VE ANSWERED ALREADY, BUT LET ME JUST ASK IT AGAIN TO MAKE SURE YOU DON'T WANT TO ADD ANYTHING TO IT.
Interviewer: SHULTZ AND REAGAN COME OUT, AS DOES GORBACHEV, BUT SHULTZ AND REAGAN WERE TALKING ABOUT OUR SIDE, THEY LOOK EXHAUSTED, THEY LOOK “DEPRESSED” AT THAT FINAL THING.
Interviewer: THEY GO BACK ON THE PLANE AND ALMOST BY THE TIME THEY GET BACK TO THE STATES, A WHOLE NEW COMPLEXION HAS BEEN PUT ON THE EVENTS.
Interviewer: ANY COMMENT ON THAT?
Simons: Well first, they were exhausted.
Simons: Everybody was exhausted, Gorbachev didn’t look too brisk and snappy at his press conference, either.
Simons: I mean, we were all tired.
Simons: Second, there was this psychological sort of walking off the cliff that I've mentioned because all these things which had sort of been in the nature of negotiating positions more or less sincere over the years were becoming real.
Simons: But it didn’t happen just on Saturday morning, it happened Saturday morning and then it built for a whole day of sort of urgency and tension.
Simons: So I think the failure to reach agreement was more severe, had that impact which was apparent.
Simons: But politically, you then.
Simons: I think you looked at it and you had more time on the plane.
Simons: We had a particular problem because the Secretary and some of the rest of us were going to Brussels and the President was returning to address the nation without high level State Department accompaniment and with this psychological impact.
Simons: And I have to say that the line the President took that night with the, I think it was the joint session, was it not? Or was it television address, I forget, was his line.
Interviewer: JOINT SESSION.
Interviewer: GO BACK AND SAY...
Simons: The line the President took that night at the joint session was his line.
Simons: He was the one who developed that himself.
Simons: I mean, Secretary Shultz was in Brussels briefing the North Atlantic Council.
Simons: And so that was the President’s line and it was absolutely consistent with everything, as I have argued throughout this interview, that the President has represented and has wanted throughout his tenure since January 20th, 1981.
Simons: So, it is seen as a public relations coup, something that the wordsmiths, the great communicator, somehow put together to mask a real failure.
Simons: I would say that it is the dawning of reality after sort of an urgent and turbulent experience, as to what had been accomplished, how little indeed, but also how much, trying to put that in balance and then trying to move forward.
Interviewer: WHAT YOU'RE ALMOST SAYING IS THAT IT’S LIKE A LETDOWN, I MEAN, IF YOU EVER PERFORMED A PLAY OR SOMETHING, YOU KNOW WHEN THE PLAY IS OVER, YOU CAN FEEL VERY DEPRESSED EVEN THOUGH, AND THEN YOU GET THE REVIEWS AND IF THEY'RE RAVE REVIEWS YOU FEEL GOOD AGAIN.
Interviewer: BUT THERE'S AN EMOTIONAL LETDOWN AT THE END OF AN INTENSE EXPERIENCE IN RESPONSE TO...
Simons: Yeah, but it didn’t depend on the reviews because...
Interviewer: YOU HAVE NEGATIVE REVIEWS, YOU GOT VERY NEGATIVE REVIEWS.
Simons: Reviews were negative and you knew you were going to have to go on within hours so you couldn't wait until the next night, you had to do it right there.
Simons: And for the Secretary, it was briefing because he briefed on the plane and briefed the allies the next morning.
Simons: For the President, it was appearing before a joint session of Congress and they reached exactly the same conclusion.
Interviewer: TWO MORE QUESTIONS, WE'RE GETTING THERE.
Interviewer: BURLATSKY SAYS, I GUESS HE WAS THERE? I THINK HE WAS THERE.
Simons: Was he?
Interviewer: YEAH, I'M SURE HE WAS THERE.
Interviewer: I MEAN, I KNOW HE WAS THERE.
Interviewer: I DON’T WANT TO BE CONFUSED, CONFUSING ABOUT THAT.
Interviewer: HE SAID THAT HE FELT THAT WE WERE, THAT A HISTORIC MOMENT TOOK PLACE AT REYKJAVIK THAT WAS FOLLOWED UP IN WASHINGTON THAT REALLY REPRESENTED A FUNDAMENTAL BREAKTHROUGH IN SOVIET/AMERICAN RELATIONS.
Interviewer: IS THAT OVERSTATING THE CASE?
Simons: I think it’s overstating it because of the Soviet habit of looking for sharp and radical changes.
Simons: You know, it has to be all black or all white.
Simons: And if you're in a positive mood, everything has to be positive and why are you raising these negative things with me? And if it’s negative as in 1983, ’84, everything has to be negative.
Simons: We can't talk about anything constructive with you.
Simons: I mean, that's just a Soviet psychological habit.
Simons: I think it’s partly Russian, I think it’s partly when you get a very centralized dictatorial kind of system.
Simons: I think it was an important move forward.
Simons: I mean, I think it was the most, I think we made more progress at Reykjavik on the most difficult issues than at any other time during this administration and in a way probably since SALT I was concluded.
Simons: But I don't think it was a breakthrough.
Simons: I don't think we're headed for a new era.
Simons: I don't think we're going back to détente, let me put it that way.
Simons: I mean, I hope we're heading for a new era in U.S./Soviet relations.
Simons: But it will be an era which will be different from détente because you will be dealing with all the issues between the countries; positive and negative.
Simons: You will be dealing with a comprehensive agenda rather than a narrow détente agenda so that you will have a political base in this country which will sustain both progress and setbacks because there are going to be setbacks.
Simons: So if that's a breakthrough, I agree with him, but I don't think that's what Mr. Burlatsky was talking about.
Simons: And I think an attempt to break back to the past, to break back to the 1970s, would be suicidal in terms of the kind of breakthrough that I'm talking about.
Interviewer: I THINK THE RUSSIANS OUGHT TO GO BACK TO 1945, BUT THAT’S, IT’S WHAT THEY ALWAYS TALK ABOUT.
Interviewer: “YOU CLEARLY DON’T UNDERSTAND DIALECTICAL THINKING, MR.
Interviewer: SIMON.”
Simons: I understand it better than they do in that comparison.
Simons: In that comparison, because simply returning to a golden age is not dialectical.
Simons: I mean, I think we've taken the fruits of détente, what's good about détente, but we're trying to go beyond it to something that's better and more solid.
Simons: That's dialectic.
Interviewer: FINALLY ON REYKJAVIK, MANY PEOPLE HAVE SAID THAT LEADERS SHOULD NOT GO TO SUMMITS TO NEGOTIATE, THAT THE NEGOTIATING SHOULD BE DONE BEFORE AND LEADERS SHOULD GO TO SUMMITS TO RATIFY.
Interviewer: I'VE GOT SOME OBSCURE QUOTE FROM CHURCHILL, I CAN'T RECALL, WHERE HE SAYS WHEN YOU GOT TO NEGOTIATE IN A SUMMIT, YOU'RE IN BIG TROUBLE.
Simons: I don't think there's any hard and fast rule.
Simons: In other words, I don't think there are rules for summitry that apply.
Simons: Summits are events in a political process which depends on the political situation.
Simons: You know, history is circumstantial, you make it as you go along.
Simons: And I don't think you can draw that kind of lesson from it.
Simons: Under this administration, with the style of presidential leadership which we have, I think it’s also true of the Soviets.
Simons: They're collegial in a way, but hierarchical where you've had a period of really intense mistrust and suspicion lasting years where you have huge governments and huge bureaucracies which have been engaged with each other, more or less.
Simons: I mean, less engaged than in some previous periods.
Simons: But when they have been engaged, even in negotiation, they have been adversarial.
Simons: I mean, they do not have the habit of reaching agreement even on a very hard-nosed and sort of clear-eyed basis.
Simons: I think that negotiation at high level is necessary to move things forward.
Simons: We may get back to a point, as U.S./Soviet relations and East/West relations proceed where the lower levels can do more of the work and where the top leaders are not required to negotiate under pressure.
Simons: But I think Reykjavik was, as I say, one of the most productive meetings in U.S./Soviet history although it didn’t do everything and didn’t solve all problems and didn’t introduce us into nirvana.
Simons: There may be other presidents and other presidencies where you'd like to do it different.
Simons: History is now.
Interviewer: GORBACHEV, WE GOT A LITTLE MORE TAPE HERE? GOT ANOTHER FIVE MINUTES, TWO MINUTES? ALMOST DONE.
Simons: Okay.
Simons: Yeah, you said that twice before.
Interviewer: YOU KNOW HOW YOU CAN TELL WHEN A PRODUCER’S LYING? HIS LIPS ARE MOVING.
Interviewer: I JUST WANT A REFLECTION ON GORBACHEV.
Interviewer: I MEAN, THE MEAN EXPLODES ON THE WORLD STAGE BEFORE CHRISTMAS OF ’84, WHENEVER THAT IS, ’85, ’84, CHRISTMAS ’84 AND THEN BECOMES PREMIER IN ’85.
Interviewer: OBVIOUSLY, GREAT DYNAMISM, ALMOST WINS THE PEACE RACE WITH REAGAN FOR A PERIOD OF TIME THERE IN WESTERN EUROPE TERMS.
Interviewer: SIGNIFICANT CHANGE OR, THIS IS THE LAST QUESTION, SIGNIFICANT CHANGE OR NEW WINDOW DRESSING FOR THE SAME OLD SOVIET UNION?
Simons: Significant change, but not much, yet.
Simons: Obviously a man who enjoys leadership, who is different from his predecessors, his leaders.
Simons: That's partly personal, I think it’s partly generational, which means he represents a different kind of people; people who are more educated, people who came of age after mass terror was an acceptable political instrument in the Soviet Union, and who came of age in a period where experimentalism was accepted but where extreme experimentalism brought the fall of the man who introduced it, Mr. Khrushchev.
Simons: So it’s a particular political generation, but in a collective leadership which represents the span, ought to represent the span of interests including conservative interests and both movement and inertia.
Simons: A country which has tremendous problems of gridlocks and deadlocks.
Simons: It’s muscle bound, it’s rigid, it’s difficult to move forward.
Simons: Moreover, as you move forward, you bring resistance.
Simons: I mean, success increases resistance in a way.
Simons: That’s a law, I think, of political life.
Simons: A man, moreover, who spent 23 years in a provincial town working his way up through the Soviet apparatus who came to power in a traditional way because people liked him.
Simons: Elders and betters considered him a worthy man to promote and eventually to be a successor.
Simons: Very Russian, I think.
Simons: He likes to work with big ideas, he likes to be philosophical, he likes to talk, he likes to exchange ideas but there are elements of sitting around a samovar in dealing with him.
Simons: And he remains, he’s learning about the outside world, he wants to learn about the outside world and I think he does want to take into account the way others see things and the desires of others.
Simons: I take seriously the concept of mutual security, which he’s introduced.
Simons: But who has lots of blind spots, who works within intellectual frameworks which make it hard for him fully to understand the outside world.
Simons: I was struck after Reykjavik that I think he had a sense that it was difficult for President Reagan to make decisions of this magnitude on a volcanic island in the middle of the North Atlantic even though he had all these senior advisors around him.
Simons: But when he tried to express that, it came out as a military industrial complex, which is one of the most traditional ways for the Soviets looking at the way the American political system shapes itself and moves forward.
Simons: So I think a complex man, an attractive man in a very mixed situation.
Simons: And so I'll go back to what I originally said, the directions that he’s trying to take, the openings, the new flexibility, the willingness to take the views and interests of others into account, those are all good things but he has a long way to go.