The Nitze Approach: Hard Line, Deft Touch

If by last July, Paul Nitze and Yuli Kvitsinsky were not precisely friends, the American and his much younger Soviet counterpart nevertheless knew each other well. For more than eight months, Nitze, 76, and Kvitsinsky, 46, had been assigned to Geneva, meeting twice weekly to negotiate a diminution of both sides' European missile arsenals, the goal of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) talks. The men met more casually as well. Their final informal meeting before last summer's two-month recess took place on the afternoon of July 16 at a mountainside restaurant near the town of Saint-Cergue, overlooking Geneva. Leaving the lodge, as they strolled together down a forest path on the way to their car, Nitze passed to Kvitsinsky a typed document. The paper outlined a possible agreement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union on the INF issues. The Soviet official studied the document, then, in his perfect English, told Nitze that he thought such a compromise seemed plausible. The Soviets would dismantle more of their missiles than they publicly intended, although not as many as the U.S. publicly demanded. Both men agreed to take the plan back to their governments for consideration.

As it turned out, the U.S. and the Soviet Union rejected the proposals. In fact, only a few weeks later, Nitze and his boss, Eugene Rostow, were rebuked by the White House for even exploring such a missile compromise with the Soviets. And when Rostow was fired earlier this month, he suggested a bit misleadingly that it was Nitze's abortive breakthrough last July that had clinched his downfall, and not his own sometimes imperious style. Yet Nitze remains, by every account, the most experienced, respected hawk in the defense Establishment.

In 1976, two years after resigning as Pentagon representative on the SALT negotiating team because he feared the Watergate-obsessed Nixon Administration might concede too much, he and Rostow helped form the hard-line Committee on the Present Danger to lobby against the SALT II treaty and for bigger defense budgets. But he is not an unreasoning zealot. Indeed, even his critics, on the left and the right, admit Nitze's pragmatism and acute intellectual power.

Last spring and summer, Nitze came to believe that the chances of realizing the Administration's goal—the zero option—were close to nil. Instead, the compromise on which he and Kvitsinsky agreed called for Moscow, most significantly, to shrink the European SS-20 force from 240 to 75. In return, the U.S. and NATO would cancel the deployment of the Pershing II and cut the number of planned Tomahawk cruise-missile launchers from 116 to 75. Each SS-20 carries three warheads, while each cruise-missile launcher holds four Tomahawks. Thus, the U.S. would have been left with a one-third numerical advantage in intermediate-range land-based European warheads (300 vs. 225).