It Began with a Cigarette

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency/Hugh Sidey

It Began with a Cigarette

Nearly ten years ago, a small band of wary Americans boarded an air-worn converted C-141 tanker. They roared off into the night from Andrews Air Force Base, held their ears from the shattering sound, chewed on half-cooked steaks, and eleven hours later stumbled onto the Helsinki tarmac as the November sun set. It was the U.S. advance guard sent to begin talking with the Soviet Union about limiting strategic nuclear arms. Delegation Chief Gerard Smith turned on his hotel TV and watched the Soviets get off their train. Where will it all end? he wondered.

Starchy and suspicious, the Americans and their Soviet counterparts gathered next day at a long, polished table, read pompous statements to one another and still wondered what the hell was going to happen. David Aaron, disarmament planner--now a White House presence--reached across the table to light the cigarette of a Russian and dozens of bored cameramen came alive. Snap, click, whirr. Around the world a thin ray of hope shone from the morning's front pages immortalizing the symbolic U.S.-Soviet cooperation. By evening, with a little vodka under their collective belts, there was reason to believe the two superpowers might at last see the folly of a nuclear arms race and find some formula by which to limit it.

The search for the accommodation has been the central theme of U.S. policy for a decade, never more intense than these days, and never more troubled. Now that an agreement appears imminent, the debate in the capital is obsessive, pushing aside economics for the moment, as if the nation's historic rise or decline depended on it. A few will tell you that is the case. The political eddies from SALT I and now the near born SALT II have altered old alliances, and thrown this town into confusion.

The evening SALT I was agreed on in 1972, Henry Kissinger called reporters to a midnight briefing in an empty Moscow nightclub, and when the questions of numbers of missiles and bombers came up, he called for the U.S. to begin a dialogue. What did it mean to be able to kill another nation ten or 100 times over? It is one of the many ironies that Kissinger today is in deep doubt about the treaty he helped launch, and has become a rallying point for what is potentially the most serious defection from treaty support--a range of moderate political leaders and their bright young aides who understand the complexities of the weaponry.

Schism has developed at the Pentagon. Publicly the warriors fall in loyally behind Jimmy Carter, but privately some of them decry his disarmament crusade, believing that at times his fervor to reduce weapons makes him unheeding of the nuclear statistics, which the Soviets have altered in these ten years.

Because the entire controversy may boil down to America's faith in itself and in Jimmy Carter, the White House is gradually gearing up the nation's defense planning and spending. Within a few weeks Carter will decide whether the next step in ballistic missile planning should focus on movable barges, trucks, airplanes, or a network of underground silos where missiles can be randomly moved about. New ideas tumble over one another. There are those who are now convinced that the old submariner in Carter is quietly pushing for our major deterrent to be roving under the oceans. We lead the Soviets in that silent world and are rushing ahead with exotic new weapons barely speculated upon. Carter's idealism is being grafted to a more muscular body. But is this process taking place fast enough?

A White House man deeply involved believes we are now probing the issues that will shape the future of the U.S. How this agreement emerges, what strategic forces we decide we need, and what wealth and resources we commit will affect every other U.S. program. "We may know more about ourselves through this debate than we have in many years."

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