The Death of Ambassador Raymond Garthoff and Disarmament
The mainstream media ignored the passing of a beloved former colleague of mine, Ambassador Raymond Garthoff, whose career spanned the most important years of arms control and disarmament between the United States and the Soviet Union. Over the years, the media have devoted much attention to the opponents of arms control such as George W. Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, and Casper Weinberger, but have done little to explore the importance of its advocates and practitioners.
One of the key reasons for the ignorance of the American public regarding the importance of arms control is the media’s failure to explain the intricacies and complexities of disarmament and to understate the overall importance of arms control to secure strategic stability in the nuclear age. Too many national security reporters want “room service” on the key aspects of disarmament, expecting stories to be brought to them rather than to conduct their own research that is required.
Garthoff’s career included tours at the Rand Corporation, the Department of State, and the Central Intelligence Agency. He played a key role in the negotiations of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. From 1969 to 1972, he was the senior negotiator at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in Helsinki and Vienna, and he was responsible for the completion of both the SALT and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaties in 1972.
He was a student of Soviet strategic doctrine as well as a student of Soviet-American relations. His two books on that relationship are classics. No other work approaches them for their in-depth view of political and military events between the two superpowers in the key decades before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The only critic of his writings on Soviet-American relations was Harvard Professor Richard Pipes, whose ideological bias prevented him from giving a judicious review of Garthoff’s work. Pipes’ review in “Foreign Affairs” was an embarrassment to that journal.
Gradually, the seminal arms control agreements between Washington and Moscow have been abrogated, leaving the New START Treaty as the last remaining arms control agreement, set to expire in February 2026. There is no sign that either the White House or the Kremlin is prepared to bolster and extend the treaty or to negotiate a new one. Neither the Biden nor Trump administrations over the past eight years has had a serious arms control expert on their staffs.
Disarmament opponents have had an easy time of it due to the decline of the arms control community. For this, President Bill Clinton is largely responsible. He bowed to right-wing pressure from Senator Jesse Helms and Representative Newt Gingrich, who had support from the Pentagon, and accepted the destruction of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which had insured that arms control would be funded and staffed on a long-term basis. Some of the strongest participants at the SALT talks in 1971 and 1972 were from ACDA. Pentagon pressure also led Clinton to abandon the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Just as Clinton wouldn’t stand up to right-wing pressures, President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger refused to stand up to pressure from Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson. The Democratic senator was an ideological opponent of negotiations with the Soviets, and forced Kissinger to accept the demotion of the treaties’ key negotiators, such as Garthoff, in return for voting for the SALT and ABM treaties. Garthoff was sent to Bulgaria as ambassador in the 1970s, a backwater post that wasted the energies and intelligence of this gifted civil servant.
More recently, John Bolton played a central role in the George W. Bush and Trump administrations in killing the achievements of arms control and disarmament. Bolton occupied key roles in the Department of State and the White House where he lobbied successfully for abrogating the ABM Treaty, which was an essential predicate for reducing offensive strategy weaponry. He was Trump’s national security adviser when he lobbied for abrogating the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty and Outer Space Treaty. The INF Treaty had been responsible for the destruction of more nuclear weapons than any other disarmament treaty in history.
Thus far, Trump has appointed to his administration no one with an interest or background in arms control. His national security appointees have been supporters of increased defense spending, greater nuclear inventories, and ideological opponents of both Russia and China. What could go wrong?
Biden surprisingly ignored the issue of disarmament over the past four years for the most part. A troglodyte such as Trump wouldn’t be expected to have any respect for disarmament, but it is puzzling that a president such as Biden, with five decades of experience in dealing with the arcane aspects of strategic stability and nuclear deterrence, would not have been fully staffed on the subject of disarmament.
This disarmament vacuum, unfortunately, coincides with the worsening of relations between the three major nuclear powers (China, Russia, and the United States) as well as the risky nuclear activities of several of the minor nuclear powers (India, Israel, and Pakistan). These lesser powers represent a particularly worrisome group because of their authoritarian governments and their unwillingness to partake in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was introduced to the disarmament scene in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union feared the efforts of the United States to put West Germany’s finger on the nuclear button.
Most worrisome of all is the nuclear programs of the three major nuclear powers who are conducting unnecessary expansions of their strategic programs at a time when nuclear overkill capabilities are more than obvious. The current arms race is worsening the Cold War relations between the United States and Russia as well as between the United States and China. The United States is committed to a long-term modernization of its strategic forces, and China is maintaining the rapid growth of its nuclear arsenal. Russian President Vladimir Putin is even threatening the actual use of nuclear forces against Ukraine and its Western supporters.
The hawkish credentials of nearly all of Trump’s national security appointees suggest that the nuclear competition will worsen and that we should anticipate increased tension and even confrontation between the United States and Russia and even the United States and China. The art of strategic communication, which Ray Garthoff understood, has been lost for the most part, and the major nuclear powers are mindlessly adding to their nuclear weaponry. A future column will address the dangers of nuclear escalation such as the Soviet war fears in 1983, when U.S. aggressive nuclear exercises caused a war scare in the Kremlin.