Thomas Schelling explains the dialogue of competitive armament in Arms and Influence:
Nuclear age communications were dramatized by the Soviet-American hot line, a leased transatlantic cable with teletype machinery at both ends. Some people hailed it as a notable innovation; others were simply astonished that, in an age when one can directly dial his mother 3,000 miles away to wish her happy birthday, facilities did not already exist for a more urgent conversation. The hot line is a reminder that even in the era of Telstar and radio-dispatched taxis, facilities for quick communication between heads of government may not exist unless somebody has thought to provide them.
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In fact, the germ of the hot-line idea has to be sought still further back. Neither Gromyko nor Herter, nor any modern writer on arms control, has expressed the problem more lucidly than Xenophon did in the fourth century before Christ. Mutual suspicion arose between the Greek army departing Persia and the Persian army that escorted them. The Greek leader called for an interview with the Persian, to try “to put a stop to these suspicions before they ended in open hostility.” When they met, he said,
I observe that you are watching our moves as though we were enemies, and we, noticing this, are watching yours, too. On looking into things, I am unable to find evidence that you are trying to do us any harm, and I am perfectly sure that, as far as we are concerned, we do not even contemplate such a thing; and so I decided to discuss matters with you, to see if we could put an end to this mutual mistrust. I know, too, of cases that have occurred in the past when people sometimes as the result of slanderous information and sometimes merely on the strength of suspicion, have become frightened of each other and then, in their anxiety to strike first before anything is done to them have done irreparable harm to those who neither intended nor even wanted to do them any harm at all. I have come then in the conviction that misunderstandings of this sort can best be ended by personal contact, and I want to make it clear to you that you have no reason to distrust us.
The upshot of this incident is chastening. The “personal contact” so established was used by the Persians to slay the entire leadership of the Greek host; and while we owe to their treachery one of the most rewarding books on strategy in print, we can lament that they did not get arms control off to a more creditable start. The mistake was apparently in thinking that the only way to take the danger out of distrust is to replace it with trust.
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Upon reflection almost anyone will agree that the communication that takes place between enemies is the most urgent and that what is “unnatural” in the modern era is the notion that in case of war there could be nothing legitimate for enemies to talk about.
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This was no novelty; Julius Caesar in Gaul, or Xenophon in Persia, understood the crucial importance of communication with the enemy and inflicted the severest penalties on subordinates who did not respect the personal safety of enemy ambassadors.
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The Soviets may not have realized when they lofted their first Sputnik into orbit that they were doing for American strategic forces what the Korean invasion had done earlier to Western military programs. They might have guessed it; and even if they did not, in retrospect they must be aware that their early achievements in rocketry were a powerful stimulus to American strategic weapon development. The American bomber buildup in the 1950s was a reflection of the expected Soviet bomber forces and air defenses; the “missile gap” of the late 1950s spurred not only research and development in the United States but also weapon procurement. Whether the Soviets got a net gain from making the West believe in the missile gap in the late 1950s may be questionable, but it is beyond question that American bomber and missile forces were enhanced in qualitative performance, and some of them in quantity, by American beliefs.
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The Korean War, in retrospect, can hardly have served the Soviet interest; it did more than anything else to get the United States engaged in the arms race and to get NATO taken seriously. The Soviets may have been under strong temptation to get short-run prestige gains out of their initial space successes; perhaps they lamented the necessity to appeal to a public audience in a fashion that was bound to stimulate the United States. Whatever political gains they got out of the short-lived missile gap which they either created or acquiesced in, it not only stimulated Western strategic programs but possibly gave rise to a reaction that causes the Soviets to be viewed more skeptically at the present time than their accomplishments may actually warrant.
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Samuel P. Huntington examined a number of qualitative and quantitative arms races during the century since about 1840, and he does find instances in which one power eventually gave up challenging the supremacy of another. “Thus, a twenty-five year sporadic naval race between France and England ended in the middle 1860s when France gave up any serious effort to challenge the 3: 2 ratio which England had demonstrated the will and the capacity to maintain.” He points out, though, that “in nine out of ten races the slogan of the challenging state is either ‘parity’ or ‘superiority,’ only in rare cases does the challenger aim for less than this, for unless equality or superiority is achieved, the arms race is hardly likely to be worthwhile.”
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In America we have been suffering from proliferation in recent years—of cigarette brands, not nuclear weapons—and smokers eager to try new brands are usually anxious to discriminate between mentholated and ordinary. As far as I know, there has been no collusion between cigarette manufacturers and their millions of customers on a signal, and there may not have been even among the manufacturers, yet there has arisen a fairly reliable color signal: mentholated cigarettes are to be in green or blue-green packages. I think by now the Soviet leaders have discerned that statements datelined Geneva are mentholated.
Disarmament advocates may not like the idea that any understandings with the Soviet Union on force levels are reached through the process of military planning and a half-conscious, inarticulate dialogue with the enemy, unenforceable when reached, subject to inspection only by unilateral intelligence procedures, and reflecting each side’s notion of adequate superiority or tolerable inferiority. Opponents of disarmament may not like the idea that the executive branch or the Defense Department, even inadvertently, may accommodate its goals to Soviet behavior or try to discern and manipulate enemy intentions. But the process is too important to be ignored and too natural to be surprising. Nor is it a new idea.
In 1912 Churchill was chagrined at the naval procurement plans of the Kaiser’s government, which was about to purchase a quarter again as many dreadnoughts as Churchill had expected them to. He wondered whether the Germans appreciated that the result of their naval expansion would be a corresponding British expansion, with more money spent, tensions aggravated, and no net gain to either from the competition. The Cabinet sent the Secretary of State for War to Berlin to communicate that if the Germans would hold to their original plan, the British would hold to theirs; otherwise Great Britain would match the Germans two-for-one in additional ships. Churchill thought that if the Germans really did not want war they would be amenable to the suggestion, and that nothing could be lost by trying.
Nothing was lost by trying. In his memoirs, Churchill displays no regrets at having had the idea and having made the attempt. He had not had a “disarmament agreement” in mind; he simply hoped to deter an expensive acceleration of the arms race by communicating what the British reaction would be. He did it with his eyes open and with neither humility nor arrogance.
Essentially, this process of discouraging the Soviets in the arms race is no different from trying to persuade them that they are getting nowhere by pushing us around in Berlin. In Berlin, as in Cuba, we have tried to teach them a lesson about what might have been called “peaceful coexistence,” if the term had not already been discredited by Soviet use.
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The principle of “containment” ought to be applicable to Soviet military preparation. However constrained they are by an ideology that makes it difficult for them to acknowledge that they are bested or contained, they must have some capacity for acceptance of the facts of life. Perhaps the American response can be made to appear to be a fact of life.
This is a kind of “arms control” objective. But it differs from the usual formulation of arms control in several respects. First, it does not begin with the premise that arms agreements with potential enemies are intrinsically obliged to acknowledge some kind of parity. (But since there are many different ways of measuring military potency, it might be possible to permit an inferior power to claim—possibly even to believe in—parity according to certain measures.) Second, it explicitly rests on the notion that arms bargaining involves threats as well as offers.
It may be impolite in disarmament negotiations explicitly to threaten an aggravated arms race as the cost of disagreement. But, of course, the inducement to agree to any reciprocated modification of armaments must be some implicit threat of the consequences of failure to agree. The first step toward inducing a potential enemy to moderate his arms buildup is to persuade him that he has more to lose than to gain by failing to take our reaction into account. (It could even be wise deliberately to plan and to communicate a somewhat excessive military buildup ratio relative to the Soviet force in order to enhance their inducements to moderate their own program. This sort of thing is not unknown in tariff bargaining.)
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A good many military facilities and assets are not competitive: facilities to minimize false alarm, facilities to prevent accidental and unauthorized acts that might lead to war, and many other improvements in reliability that would help to maintain control in peacetime or even in war.
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A missile-hardening race is not the same as a missile-numbers race. Getting across to the Soviet Union the kind of reaction they can expect from us, therefore, involves more than a quantitative plan; it involves getting across a notion of the kinds of weapon programs that appear less provocative and those that would appear more so. The Cuban affair is a reminder that there can be a difference.
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For the strategically inferior power there is a dilemma to be taken quite seriously: to maximize deterrence by seeming incapable of anything but massive retaliation, or to hedge against the possibility of war by taking restraints and limitations seriously.
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You get somebody’s attention much more effectively by listening to him than by talking at him. You may make him much more self-conscious in what he communicates if you show that you are listening carefully and taking it seriously.
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There was every sign that it was being carefully read within the government and by scholars, military commentators, journalists, and even students. No wonder the Soviet authors in their second edition reacted to some of the Western commentary, “corrected” some of the “misconceptions” of their overseas readers, and quietly corrected some of their own text. There are indications that some of the more extreme doctrinal assertions have been softened, as though in fear the West might take them too seriously!
This strange, momentous dialogue may illustrate two principles for the kind of noncommittal bargaining we are forever engaged in with the potential enemy. First, don’t speak directly at him, but speak seriously to some serious audience and let him overhear. Second, to get his ear, listen.