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BRUCE BIOSSAT
-a
Nuclear Realism Goal
Os Nixon at Helsinki
By BRUCE BIOSSAT
NEA Washington Correspondent
WASHINGTON (NEA)
There is a strong bond between President Nixon’s July
25 call at Guam for a lowered U.S. profile around the
world, and the things our “arms limitation” team at Hel
sinki seems ready to negotiate with the Soviet Union on
nuclear weapons.
At Guam the President ventured one kind of new real
ism, rooted in awareness we are over-represented in many
parts of the earth, underscored by widening popular dis
taste for distant military involvements like Vietnam—
which a majority once could believe were linked to our
and the free world’s survival.
At Helsinki Nixon is moving toward another sort of
realism. The overriding, operative fact—though hereto
fore no leader in either the United States or Russia has
dared to stress it—is that we two great nuclear powers are
in a condition of practical parity.
We may in truth still have, as some of our experts be
lieve, a nuclear edge over Moscow. But it matters no more
than if the Soviets had a modest margin over us.
The decisive point is that each nation has sufficient nu
clear strength to crush the other even if it is hit by a sur
prise first strike.
Not just Nixon but many U.S. leaders have known this
elemental fact for a long time, yet most have felt com
pelled to talk of maintaining or restoring “superiority” in
nuclear arms as if by that means some special safety
could be attained.
As one high U.S. official puts it:
“At Helsinki we are going to the very heart of the image
on which free world security has been built. . . . Whatever
is done there (assuming an agreement) is going to shake
that image.”
In the American political realm, the turn toward nuclear
realism began earlier this year when the President, who
had campaigned in 1968 on a promise of nuclear superi
ority, substituted the word “sufficiency”—meaning enough
nuclear might to deter the Soviet Union from striking.
That was a significant signal. Conveyed down through
the military bureaucracy, it led to a very searching ex
amination by key planners as to how this country might
limit or trim some of its nuclear arms development - with
out losing that “sufficiency.”
When top officials assert that they, better than their
counterparts in prior administrations, have labored unique
ly to offer flexible alternatives at Helsinki, one may sus
pect self-serving utterance.
But this reporter’s checks within the military establish
ment indicate that the Nixon administration’s quest for a
flexible posture for the Helsinki talks is indeed without
precedent.
The President’s advisers began with the intent not to
set out a rigid formula to be tested first against our own
military disputants and then against a probably similar
rigidity from Moscow.
We are not going to talk in Helsinki about unrealizable
“on-site” inspections to prove the Soviets are not cheat
ing on some future accord. The Nixon view: argument on
that alone would waste two years. We are working on other
ways of verifying Soviet performance.
There is an even tougher matter at stake. Though we
and the Russians enjoy practical nuclear parity, our high
ly sophisticated nuclear weapons systems are distinctively
individual.
When the hard process of mutual limitation is under
taken, how do you equate nuclear systems that are not
really alike in important particulars and do not, in fact, do
the same jobs?
Even before a date for the SALT talks was set, we tried
to give the Kremlin an earnest of our intent on this score.
We told Moscow we were grappling hard with the com
plexities of equating diverse systems, looking for varied
answers that would be taken as “acceptably safe” by both
our military men and our people. We expressed hope
Russia would come to the table similarly prepared.
The initial signs are judged promising. At least in the
vital nuclear field, Soviet leaders seem to see the costly
folly of overreaching—as Richard Nixon, from Guam on,
suggests he sees it across the whole economic, diplomatic
and military spectrum of great power rivalry.
Memphis Monument
William C. Handy, the
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Tenn., by a park named for
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the city he immortalized in
his music.
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