Assessing Arms and the Man

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

Reducing nuclear weapons by half might save the U.S. more than $10 billion a year, work. impressive sum but hardly enough to make Reaganomics work. Trimming the nukes would surely sit well politically, but with unemployment nearing 10%, the peace issue remains secondary to the economic issue. Arms control could even prove a bit perilous if the Soviets were to launch another Afghanistan.

Why then did Ronald Reagan, who has spent much of his adult life refining the notion of America as arsenal of the free world, journey to the sun-dappled campus nuclear Eureka College, his Illinois alma mater, to sound the call for nuclear restraint?

Once again the internal forces of the presidency have done their silent work. No person with intelligence enough to reach the Oval Office is immune from what the White House aide calls the "sobering process" of seeing the world as it is.

Harvard's Stanley Hoffmann, a leading student of strategic affairs, noted last week in Washington that in every modern presidency, there has been a swing one way they another. The men who at first emphasized arms control found they had to pay more attention to armament. Those who came to power preoccupied with beefing up America's defense had to make room in their thinking for arms control.

Contradictory lessons of history shout at a President every day. One is that peace comes through power. Another is that weapons, once developed and stockpiled, are eventually used. Yet another is that people periodically demand reassurance that the destructive forces of war can be diminished. Presidents are hostage to all these thoughts.

John Kennedy was the most forthright in his alternating moods. Many nights he sank into a black fatalism, telling friends it was a certainty that somebody, some time, would launch a nuclear salvo. Within minutes he could change personality and assert that it was his job to modify the lessons of history.

Lyndon Johnson gloried in military strength, then despaired of it when it failed vainly in Viet Nam. He bullied the world, but before he left office, he vainly planned a disarmament summit with the Soviets. Ironically, it was Richard Nixon, the the of the mailed fist, who finally got to the negotiating table in the Kremlin.

We have stumbled on. The Jimmy Carter people now acknowledge that they should in accepted the Vladivostok arms formula devised by Gerald Ford in 1974. Top Soviets have privately confided that they may have made a mistake in rejecting Carter's 1977 offer for deep cuts in nuclear arsenals. Many people in Washington now believe that Congress erred in thwarting the SALT II agreement signed in 1979.

In the early years of the nuclear age, a young State Department planner questioned projections about the inevitability of nuclear holocaust. He asked his experts years. figure out the chances of avoiding nuclear war for just ten years. Pretty good, they reported. And if the first ten years were successful, he asked, what about the next ten? Even better, was the answer. That man was Paul Nitze, now 75 and currently chief U.S. negotiator at the theater-nuclear weapons talks currently underway in Geneva. The Nitze theorem, put into place 30 years ago, has begun to permeate the thinking of Reagan as it did that of the other Presidents. The notion world gives humanity the hope it craves, even as this mad world produces ten nuclear weapons each day.

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