OPINION – One way to remember Brent Scowcroft’s major contributions to U.S. national security and foreign policy is to read the oral history he recorded over two sessions back in August 2002.
The transcript was to be released after his death, so when he died on August 6, the Miller Center at the University of Virginia made it public.
For me, reading the transcripts brought back memories of our more than two decades of monthly 7:30 a.m. breakfasts at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, or more recently 12:30 p.m. lunches at the Equinox.
We spent a lot of time talking about arms control and nuclear weapons, and although we covered a lot of ground over the years, the Miller Center transcripts gave me insights into how Brent came to focus on what became one of his favorite subjects.
For example, he said he was surprised that back in the 1950s, General, then President Eisenhower’s “attitude toward nuclear weapons…was that they were a bigger and better way to wage war. But in actual practice, his understanding was that that really wasn’t right, and they were different in a way that set them aside. So that was the evolution of my thinking about that.”
He said he was “not very sympathetic to the whole notion of massive retaliation,” the John Foster Dulles threat to respond to any major conventional attack with a larger nuclear response.
But Scowcroft “applauded the introduction of [President Kennedy’s] flexible response, as what I thought a more realistic way that, if we in response to some minor event had to use our strategic nuclear weapons, we would have started something incommensurate with the nature of what was happening.”
He said it was after working for Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration and even after his time as National Security Advisor to President Ford that, “I turned my attention to arms control and so on and focused on that sort of thing until I became really comfortable with it.”
One reason may have been the failure of Ford to follow through on a November 1974 arms control agreement with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev for a treaty that would limit both nations to an “equal aggregate number” of various nuclear weapons.
As Brent put it during the Miller interview, “In January of ’76, we could have had an arms control agreement that would have put a cap on MIRVing [Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles] and balanced off the Soviet missile force and the U.S. force in a way that would have given us a leg up on future arms control.”
He said Ford “did not go forward with that, and I think it was probably a mistake. He didn’t go forward with it because of the political climate. [Ronald Reagan attacked Ford from the right; Jimmy Carter from the left] So when it came to the general election, Ford had nothing to point to as an achievement. If he had an arms control agreement, it might have made a difference” in Ford’s 1976 election loss to Jimmy Carter.
President Reagan in 1982, made Scowcroft chairman of the President’s Commission on Strategic Forces, which ended up advocating the giant MX intercontinental ballistic missile to be based in hardened silos and a small, mobile, single-warhead ICBM.
Brent described it as “partly a political decision, how to get something done, and that solution appealed to both sides. But I think it had a strategic rationale. That is, we were at a deficit with the Soviet Union in heavy, large MIRV [multi-independently targeted re-entry vehicles] systems. They had the SS-18 [carrying ten warheads]. We had nothing even close to comparable.
“So psychologically, I thought it was useful to develop the MX as a short-term deterrent to any Soviet ideas that their forces were better equipped to launch a first strike than ours. For the long term, my notion was a small, mobile, single-warhead missile, for two things: single warhead, so that it was not an attractive target for a Russian first strike. Indeed, a first strike would leave them worse off in terms of warheads, assuming two-on-one targeting. Then they had nowhere to start targeting, since it was mobile. So that was a great step towards stability—mobile, so they couldn’t find it. I was a strong believer in that. Subsequently, START II [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty] was partial fulfillment of my dream about stability.”
Scowcroft said he was opposed to Reagan’s SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative] the so-called Star Wars plan. “The combination of not knowing how to do it well, but the process of trying to do it—inducing a new arms race that would almost by its nature be destabilizing—I was opposed to it,” he said.
He was also opposed to the INF [Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces] agreement that eliminated those ground-based missiles, but not the shorter-range, battlefield ones which, he said, “Were increasingly difficult politically to maintain, and…have acceptable in Germany. Actually, when the Cold War began to collapse in 1989 and things started to break down, it created a tremendous problem for us, especially with German unification coming up. Those weapons would all go off in Germany.”
That led to what Scowcroft took great pride in, President George H.W. Bush’s arms control commitments, collectively known as the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNIs).
As he described it, under Bush, with Scowcroft egging him on, the PNI took form “in September 1991, in recognition of the breakup of the Eastern bloc and out of concern for the Kremlin’s ability to maintain control of its vast nuclear arsenal as political changes swept the Soviet Union. By pledging to end foreign deployments of entire categories of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons, Bush hoped that leaders in Moscow would follow suit; and they did, at least in part. All Soviet nuclear weapons were reportedly successfully consolidated on Russian soil.”
Scowcroft had long been concerned with an “aspect of nuclear strategy that I thought needed to be changed, for a variety of reasons, [which] was our tactical nuclear weapons. They were increasingly troubling politically and—to me—increasingly meaningless militarily. We had three kinds of elements to them. First was in Europe, where the Germans, especially with German unification coming up, were not just aggressive, but were really recalcitrant about nuclear weapons that would go off inside any part of Germany—including East Germany. In Korea, there was a momentary thaw and both Koreas seemed to want the elimination of U.S. nuclear weapons in South Korea. At sea, there was a general acknowledgment that, especially in ASW [antisubmarine warfare], that nuclear weapons were not the way to go.”
In September 1991, Bush and Scowcroft discussed possible tactical and strategic nuclear arms reductions over the Labor Day weekend in Kennebunkport, Maine, the Bush family summer home.
Scowcroft quoted Bush as saying, “‘Let's change—let's not keep the same posture.’ So I went to [then-Defense Secretary Dick] Cheney and said, ‘Why don't we propose getting rid of tactical nuclear weapons—other than aircraft carried weapons in Europe?’"
"Absolutely not," was Cheney’s initial reaction, but Scowcroft said, “But I patiently pointed out to him—in terms of military utility—that these things really were more of a problem. The additional Navy problem, of course, not only ASW—but the notion that as they sail into a port, they would neither confirm nor deny that they had nuclear weapons on board. That was really getting very complicated.”
Cheney “finally came back and said, ‘OK, you're right—the military utility is gone.’” Scowcroft said, adding, “So we did it in a way…By making it a part of a worldwide change, there were no adverse signals, and we got a force that was much more controllable.”
Cheney had already done a study of strategic nuclear weapons and agreed that force was too large. “That was more like pushing on an open door than these others,” Scowcroft admitted. “Everybody recognized that things had changed. The status of Eastern Europe, the status of China, the whole way we would conduct nuclear operations—so that was a cooperative venture. That was not an antagonistic effort. The way I recall it, Defense was friendly.”
In a September 27, 1991, speech, President Bush took a bold step, showing unappreciated leadership at that time, something hardly remembered today. “America must lead again as it always has, as only it can.” He said. “We can now take steps to make the world a less dangerous place than ever before in the nuclear age…If we and the Soviet leaders take the right steps—some on our own, some on their own, some together—we can dramatically shrink the arsenal of the world's nuclear weapons."
He declared, “We will bring home or destroy all of our nuclear artillery shells and short-range ballistic missile warheads. We will, of course, ensure that we preserve an effective air-delivered nuclear capability in Europe.”
Bush’s initiatives of 1991 and 1992, dismantled several thousand U.S. tactical nuclear weapons, but also eliminated 24-hour alerts for nuclear-armed B-52s and other strategic bombers. In addition, the Minuteman II ICBMs, scheduled to be eliminated under the START treaty signed two months earlier, were taken off alert ahead of agreed-upon deadlines.
Bush also cancelled a handful of new nuclear weapons, including a mobile version of the MX, a newer single-warhead ICBM called Midgetman, and a short-range, air-to-surface missile called SRAM II.
In typically modest fashion, Scowcroft ended this oral history discussion of what Bush and he had accomplished in arms control by remembering: “So it worked fine, and that we did [it] unilaterally.”
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