George F. Kennan : an American life

thunder dire warnings, as at Garmisch, or to descend into details, as in his recent historical writing, or to redesign America, as he had tried to do in The Cloud of Danger and in the Encounter interview. Nor did he contradict himself, as in his puzzling congressional testimony the previous year. Rather, he spoke softly, reasoned strategically, and put forward a single striking proposal, the logic of which swept aside conventional wisdoms almost effectively as the “long telegram” had done three and a half decades earlier.

Kennan began with the question he and Oppenheimer had often posed to each other: why, if nuclear weapons were so destructive, did there have to be so many of them? With the megatonnage of more than a million Hiroshima bombs between them, Soviet and American arsenals were “fantastically redundant to the purpose in question,” which was supposed to be deterrence. The superpowers had no excuse for holding themselves hostage to such devastation, along with the rest of the northern hemisphere. Their leaders seemed hypnotized, “like men in a dream, like lemmings heading for the sea, like the children of Hamlin marching blindly behind their Pied Piper.”

However well intentioned, the SALT agreements of the 1970s had worsened the situation by exaggerating the importance of intricate balances, so that even slight shifts could set off clamorous alarms. What was needed, instead, was an acknowledgment, on all sides, of lethal redundancies. This should then lead to

an immediate across-the-boards reduction by 50 percent of the nuclear arsenals now being maintained by the two superpowers; a reduction affecting in equal measure all forms of the weapon, strategic, medium-range, and tactical, as well as their means of delivery: all this to be implemented at once and without further wrangling among the experts, and to be subject to such national means of verification as now lie at the disposal of the two powers.

A 50 percent cut would be more symbolic than systematic, but it would be a start. For if the superpowers could accept that arbitrary number, then why continue haggling over the complex calculations that had stalemated SALT? Why not cut the arsenals by half again, and then by half after that, until nuclear stockpiles were approaching the point at which, as President Reagan had recently and “very wisely” said, “neither side threatens the survival of the other”? Kennan concluded his address with an exhortation from Bertrand Russell, endorsed by Einstein just before his death: “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”³

I.

“It was a radical proposal from a figure not known for radicalism,” Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer aptly observed. Certainly it was no small thing for Kennan to have enlisted Einstein, Russell, and Reagan in an attack on SALT, the centerpiece of detente. His speech was not just a challenge to orthodoxy: it was a scrambling of orthodoxies, and it produced surprising responses. Nitze, when asked the next day, acknowledged that a 50 percent reduction might make sense, provided the cuts started with the heaviest multiple-warhead ICBMs. Eugene V. Rostow, who in 1978 had dismissed Kennan as “not an earthling,” now told The New York Times that “[w]e are taking a careful look at [his] proposal.” Reagan had nominated Rostow to run the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and at his confirmation hearing a month later, he suggested replacing the acronym SALT— Strategic Arms Limitation Talks—with START—Strategic Arms Reduction Talks: “Such proposals have been made from time to time—notably by Paul H. Nitze in 1971 and by George Kennan a few weeks ago.... No American administration could reject such a possibility out of hand.”⁴

So how did Kennan, Nitze, and Reagan (for whom Rostow was speaking) wind up suddenly on almost the same page? The answer had to do with what the SALT process had become. Nitze had indeed proposed cuts of roughly 50 percent in ICBM launchers during the initial stages of the SALT I talks—the date was 1969, not 1971—on the assumption that the word “limitation” in the acronym meant reduction. His idea went nowhere, though, and “arms control” came to be seen as a way of stabilizing existing numbers of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. By the time Carter and Brezhnev signed the SALT II treaty in 1979, its provisions had become so arcane that only experts could understand them. That allowed Nitze, himself an expert but now also a vociferous critic, to claim that technocrats were squandering American assets while the Soviets were surging ahead. It ought to be possible, with a new and simpler approach, to do better.⁵

Kennan also saw SALT as having lost its way but worried more about its dependence on “mutual assured destruction.” This was the idea, which had earned the acronym MAD, that each side’s safety lay in its capacity to annihilate the other many times over. Costs would be cataclysmic if the slightest miscalculation should ever occur, as had indeed happened, Kennan knew well, with the outbreak of World War I. Unlike Nitze, he supported SALT II, not on its merits but out of fear for the effect on Soviet-American relations if it should be rejected. After Carter withdrew the treaty from the Senate, however, Kennan too was ready for something new: hence his Einstein Prize proposal.⁶

Reagan, it turned out, agreed with both Nitze and Kennan. He wanted a more straightforward approach to arms control that would complement his efforts to regain American strategic superiority: that put him in Nitze’s camp. But his abhorrence of nuclear weapons went back at least as far as Kennan’s. Throughout Reagan’s slow shift from Hollywood liberalism to Goldwater conservatism, he had always believed that nuclear weapons should be abolished. They could be the means, he worried quite literally, by which the biblical prophecy of Armageddon might be fulfilled. Making no secret of his aversion to MAD, Reagan asked repeatedly during the 1980 campaign why there could not be “an honest, verifiable reduction in nuclear weapons.” He opposed SALT II because it failed to provide that.⁷

Whether by accident or design, the State Department chose the day of Kennan’s address to announce that the United States would no longer be bound by either SALT agreement, thereby ending twelve years of Soviet-American negotiations on “arms limitation.” In the fall of 1981, however, Reagan proposed a new round of talks on a different problem: the upgraded intermediate-range ballistic missiles the U.S.S.R. had deployed against Western European targets during the late 1970s, against which NATO now planned a counterdeployment. Kennan saw an opportunity to “denuclearize” Europe, by exchanging a Soviet removal of IRBMs for an American withdrawal of tactical nuclear weapons from West Germany. Reagan did not go that far, but he came close. He put Nitze in charge of the negotiations, and then accepted a proposal from Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy Richard Perle to offer a “zero option”—not a 50 percent cut but a verifiable ban on any IRBMs aimed at European targets by either side.⁸

Reagan announced the plan in his first major “arms reduction” speech—his preferred term—on November 18, 1981. He called also for cutting conventional forces in Europe, while resuming talks on strategic weapons under the acronym START, the one Rostow had suggested, which Kennan and Nitze had inspired. Reagan did so a day after Kennan, speaking at Dartmouth, had condemned the “systematic dehumanization” of the Soviet leadership in administration rhetoric, but the president was ready for that criticism too. He revealed that while recovering from an assassination attempt the previous spring, he had sent a handwritten letter to Brezhnev emphasizing the aspirations Americans and Russians held in common: “They want to raise their families in peace without harming anyone or suffering harm themselves.” The juxtapositions were striking enough for The New York Times to suggest editorially that some kind of Reagan-Kennan dialogue must be under way.⁹

II.

Despite his gloomy postelection letter to Durbrow, Kennan had reconciled himself quickly to Reagan’s victory, if only because the alternative would have been Carter. “I am hopeful that things will now be somewhat better,” he wrote in a 1980 Thanksgiving note. When the new president shocked even his own advisers by claiming, at his first