The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Carter and the Neutron Bomb

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. Nothing President Carter has done in foreign affairs has brought him such criticism at home and abroad as his decision on the neutron bomb. On Friday the President announced he wanted to defer production of the bomb, which Soviet propagandists have called inhumane, the ultimate capitalist weapon, because it kills people, supposedly without destroying property. The neutron bomb in fact is a warhead for artillery which confines nuclear destruction to a small battlefield area.

As Newsweek points out today, the decision has caused a furor. Some right- wing European newspapers had far stronger language. In Paris, L`Aurore ran a headline yesterday saying, "Carter gives in to Brezhnev." The London Sunday Express headline read, "Carter...`This weak, scared man."` Reaction was almost as strong at home from Republicans like former President Gerald Ford, and Democrats who had backed the bomb as a good weapon to counter massive Soviet tank superiority in NATO or as a bargaining chip for arms control. Tonight, an anatomy of the Carter decision, and its consequences. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, some perspective chronology before we charge forward. The first decision to develop this new radiation warhead was made in secret in the early `70s by U.S. and NATO military and technical people. The Nixon administration and then the Ford administration approved, also secretly. It was such a well-kept secret, in fact, that the new Carter administration didn`t know it was in a Pentagon budget it sent to Congress last spring. But a Washington Post reporter spotted it, there was a story about the secret development o new killer warheads, and suddenly the whole world knew about something called a neutron bomb. President Carter reportedly was not that crazy about the new weapon, but he did press Congress for approval in July. That left only the formal okay for deployment by several NATO countries, particularly West Germany, where news of the neutron bomb had triggered much domestic controversy. Then, a week ago, the New York Times ran a story saying President Carter had decided a few days before to scuttle production plans for the warhead. The Times reporter who broke that story was Richard Burt, and he`s been covering and unraveling the story ever since Mr. Burt, as you know, the White House has repeatedly denied your story that the President had actually decided not to proceed with the warhead, and Time magazine said today in fact that your report was erroneous. Is there no question in your mind, as far as you`re concerned, that that was in fact the President`s decision?

RICHARD BURT: Well, I think it`s very important to recognize that there are different sorts of decisions. There`s no doubt in my mind that Carter decided in mid-March that he didn`t want to go ahead with production of the system, but that left certain options open, and towards the end of the month he was leaning towards canceling the program altogether. Many of his advisers, however, wanted him to keep the option open; but towards the very end of the month he still seemed to be moving towards canceling rather than deferring or trying to postpone some kind of production decision. It was really, though, the beginning of last week, when Helmut Schmidt sent an urgent cable to Carter while he was en route from Africa, actually, back to the United States from his trip, that some of his advisers used German anxiety over the possible cancellation, I think, to ask Carter to begin reviewing his decision -- not his decision to stop production, but at least his decision to cancel the weapon. I think that the reports then that Carter didn`t want to produce the weapon, the Congressional backlash, gave added impetus to efforts by his advisers, and I think we got the result we saw on Friday -- the decision to postpone, but not to cancel.

LEHRER: What do your sources tell you was the reason the President had these second thoughts that brought him that close to canceling the weapon altogether?

BURT: I don`t think that Jimmy Carter, in one sense, ever had real second thoughts. I never think, from the very beginning, that he liked this weapon very much; I think it ran counter to some of his own very deep personal feelings about the arms race, about the image he wanted to have as a President, a President who wanted to rid the world of nuclear weapons, as he said in his inaugural address. The interesting thing is that while he felt this way, many people in the administration -- second-echelon officials in the State Department, the Pentagon and the National Security Council -- went ahead with a plan which would have combined an American production decision on the one hand with a vague commitment from the Europeans concerning deployment. The second thoughts came in mid-March, when Jimmy Carter recognized that if he didn`t turn off this process he was in fact going to be committing the United States to production. And this is when he had to scrap a rather complicated NATO plan which would have led to an immediate American production decision.

LEHRER: There have been reports -- you mentioned it, in fact, in one of your stories, and it`s been in other stories, too -- that Andrew Young, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., played a big role in influencing the President in that. Is there anything to that story?

BURT: I`m not too sure that there is. I think that he may have had a role. His people say that in fact he is opposed to the weapon, and I think that he does have a close relationship with the President. Also there`s a special session on disarmament that`s coming at the United Nations, and I think maybe Ambassador Young might have feared that the neutron bomb, a production decision at this point, would have put the United States in a difficult position at that session. But I think the most important factor is Jimmy Carter`s thinking about the allies. I think Jimmy Carter felt that for thirty years the President of the United States had had to take the most difficult decisions concerning sensitive nuclear deployment questions; and looking across the Atlantic he saw a group of mature, full-fledged economic powers that for the first time would have to share in taking the political heat of these very controversial issues. The problem in my own mind was that he didn`t tell the Europeans that he was changing the rules of the game, and that when he asked Helmut Schmidt and other European countries to bear the responsibility, this ran counter to twenty years` experience in which the United States normally took the lead on sensitive nuclear matters.

LEHRER: In other words, what the allies were telling him was, All right, if you want us to do it, we`ll do it, but at least appear to force it on us rather than make us publicly accept it. Is that essentially what you`re saying?

BURT: I think that`s absolutely right. In all of these countries there were critics, and I think what the government leaders in those countries wanted to do was go to those critics and say, Listen, we don`t like this weapon very much but the Americans think it`s important and of course we want to do what the Americans think is right because we depend on American military might in the final analysis for security.

LEHRER: And the President said, No dice, everything`s out front; and that`s what caused the problem.

BURT: I think so.

LEHRER: All right, thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: When the direction of Mr. Carter`s decision was first revealed, sixty-two Congressmen signed a letter supporting the President and asking him to stand firm under pressure to reverse his decision. Democratic Congressman Ted Weiss of New York was the author of the letter.. He`s been leading the fight in the House against development of enhanced radiation weapons -- that is, the neutron bomb. Why do you think it was such a good decision, Congressman?

Rep. TED WEISS: Well, it`s not the greatest decision, for starters. I would have been more pleased if he had in fact made the decision outright to cancel production and therefore, automatically, deployment of the weapon. But I think that it was a good decision as far as it went, because it recognizes that, disguise it as you will, call it whatever you want, the neutron bomb is nothing but a nuclear weapon. And we`ve come an awfully long way, if we accept using nuclear weapons as battlefield weapons against tanks, from the point where we started out some thirty years ago when it was supposed to be a weapon of last resort that either side would only use as an ultimate, last resort weapon.

MacNEIL: Well, do you feel that deploying it- would have made escalation to greater nuclear warfare more likely?

Rep. WEISS: I think that all the people who`ve spoken about this, including the President himself, including Harold Brown, the Secretary of Defense, going back to President Kennedy -- because there have been discussions about the neutron bomb as the neutron bomb going back as far as 1963, at least; maybe even before that -- and at all times it`s been acknowledged that once you use any kind of nuclear weapon, whether it`s a neutron bomb or not, the escalation would be automatic, that in fact you would be engaged in all-out, full-scale nuclear war. And that`s the real danger. And indeed, the argument that, Well, this is a weapon that is disguised, it doesn`t even seem like a regular nuclear weapon because it doesn`t cause all the blast and all the heat and all the conventional problems you attribute to nuclear bombs, I think makes it even more likely that it would be used, and if it were used that in fact it would end up being an all-out war.

MacNEIL: Well, what do you say to those who argue that Mr. Carter having gone ahead with it as far as he did last summer and then gone through this diplomatic campaign to either persuade the European allies to want it or to explore whether they would, that by delaying production now or -- as it was rumored -- canceling production, he`s given away a bargaining chip that could have been used with the Soviet Union in the arms negotiations?

Rep. WEISS: Robin, I`m not an unswerving and unquestioning supporter of the President. There are a lot of major foreign policies, domestic policies on which I disagree with him. But I think he`s getting an absolutely bum rap on this one. The fact is that not only did he in his inaugural address make very clear his position on nuclear weapons; last summer, when the Congress, both houses, adopted the appropriation measure there was affixed to that measure an amendment offered by Senator Byrd which said that before production could go ahead, before it could be ordered by the President of the United States, he would have to submit his decision to go forward, couching it in the national interest, to both houses of Congress, giving both houses the right to veto it. And that`s clearly a matter of law, and so it shouldn`t be a matter of surprise. I think what`s happened is that some of the military advisers around the President have arrogated onto themselves the decision-making process, and now, because the President has exercised his powers as the President, they are screaming bloody murder.

MacNEIL: In other words, you think that the fuss has been created by people within the administration who don`t like the decision.

Rep. WEISS: I think that basically that`s absolutely so; I think that they were going pell-mell from heygone down and up, going forward with this decision, they were trying desperately to get the NATO people to agree to deployment; and when the President finally decided that, no he wanted to at least buy additional time -- you know, originally his decision was supposed to have been made last October; so he, without saying so, had deferred his decision to begin with. When he deferred the decision and indicated that he might cancel it, then the people in his own administration started striking out at him.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Some of the strongest words of criticism for what the President did and the way he did it have come from Senator Sam Nunn, Democrat of Georgia. Senator Nunn has been the leader of the pro-neutron bomb forces in Congress. He`s a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and an acknowledged expert on NATO. You think it was a bad decision, right, Senator?

Sen. SAM NUNN: Yes, I do, Jim, I think it was bad.

LEHRER: Why?

NUNN: I think it caused, first of all, a tremendous amount of disarray in the NATO alliance -- I know more disarray in the alliance than at any time since I`ve been in the United States Senate, and perhaps much longer than that.

LEHRER: Disarray on the decision itself, or disarray on the way it was handled?

NUNN: I think twofold: on the decision itself, but the process by which it was handled. We actually got the Europeans right up to the table after about eight months of going back and forth across the Atlantic to try to get them in the position they finally arrived at, and then all of a sudden once they got there we jerked the rug out from under them. Now, that`s the way I see the decision. But I also see it as a bad decision as far as the overall negotiating process with the Soviet Union, and most of all as far as the defense of NATO. We keep talking about Soviet restraint; I`m not so much concerned about restraint in the future on the part of the Soviet Union, I think we`ve got to look at what they already have on line in NATO: they`ve got a three-to-one armor advantage, and that is the reason we developed this weapon in the first place.

LEHRER: As you know, the President, in his statement on Friday announcing this decision to defer, said that this decision to defer was in fact going to be a bargaining chip, that if the Soviet Union showed some willingness to make concessions on the other side then they might not go ahead, but if they didn`t, we would go ahead. You don`t think that`s valid.

NUNN: Well, I would prefer this decision to an outright cancellation, but I put it only one small notch above that. I think what we have is an invisible bargaining chip. I think we`ve got a situation where we are asking the Soviets to really give us a quid pro quo -- that is, restrain themselves on developing or deploying a weapon that they already have displayed that they`re going to employ. And what we`re doing is saying we don`t have enough courage at this point as an alliance -- not just the President, but as an alliance -- to face this issue and to produce it and to make it clear we`re going to deploy it. Now, unless we make it clear we`re going to deploy it, unless we get a quid pro quo, then I don`t think we have a bargaining chip, and I think the Soviet statement this week backs that up.

LEHRER: You heard what Richard Burt said, Senator, and you were very much involved in this vote in Congress in July which endorsed the neutron bomb. Was the President reluctant then -- you talked to him about it at the time, and to his people -- was he reluctant to go along even at that point?

NUNN: Well, I think the President, in fairness to the President, always has had some real apprehension about the weapon. I didn`t talk to him at length about it; I went down to the White House one night about nine o`clock after we had the debate and we finally had the vote in July of last year, and Chancellor Schmidt was the guest that night, and I talked to both the President and the Chancellor about it very briefly. And I would say this, they displayed no disappointment in the Senate vote, and the administration certainly had asked the Congress to leave that money in the budget. But in fairness to the President, I don`t think he`s ever been enthusiastic about this weapon. But if he wasn`t, then I think the administration and all the people in it should not have been going back and forth to try to get the Europeans to accept it for the last eight months.

LEHRER: You feel, then, that the people in the administration did not pick up the President`s signal that he wasn`t enthusiastic and they went about their business independently?

NUNN: Well, I don`t know that. I`d leave that up to Richard; he`s done a pretty good analysis of it. I`m not pinning any roses on the NATO allies, either. I think for a long time they have looked the other way when the weapon decisions had to be made, and frankly there`s not very much understanding about tactical nuclear weapons at all in Europe, and that`s one of the reasons it`s so sensitive there. But if we were going to wean them from their detachment, then we should not have done it so suddenly and we should not have done it in this manner.

LEHRER: Do you agree with Richard Burt`s analysis of why the President finally did what he did over this last several days and the last couple of weeks?

NUNN: I think Richard has got probably more sources on that decision than I do. I would defer to him; I`m not sure that everything he said is accurate, but I have not been consulted very much on the process since the floor fight. .

LEHRER: You have not. Did you not know that the President was even considering deferring or canceling this?

NUNN: Well, I was not -- I talked to Secretary Brown about two weeks before the decision was made, but at that time all the information I had from the administration was that the allies were not going to go along with it at all, and that turned out not to be accurate information.

LEHRER: Not go along with it publicly or privately, you mean.

NUNN: Yes. And of course, the information I have now, the best information I have, is that the allies were ready to sign up; they were doing exactly what we`d asked them to do -- that is, to go along with the production, negotiate for a quid pro quo while it`s being produced, and hope we wouldn`t have to deploy it, but if the Soviets did not give us something in exchange for this weapon they would have agreed to deploy it. That was the position we asked them to take.

LEHRER: I see. Thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Reaction in NATO, as we`ve heard, to President Carter`s announcement has been vocal and varied. Former Ambassador Seymour Weiss has been monitoring this reaction. Ambassador Weiss, now a consultant on national security, was formerly Director of the State Department`s Bureau of Political Military Affairs. Ambassador Weiss, how do you read the reaction in NATO?

Amb. SEYMOUR WEISS: Well, Mr. MacNeil, I think in the first instance our NATO allies were rather shocked by the notion of the United States coming to them with a question as to the propriety of our producing a weapon to be deployed in Europe. I think it`s worth recalling in this regard that thirty years ago the United States accepted the responsibility for the nuclear umbrella over Europe, responsibility which we deemed to be wise, in our interest, in the alliance interest, in part so that we would have a unified decision-making process...

MacNEIL: And it was our hand on the trigger.

Amb. WEISS: It was our hand on the trigger; the alternative, furthermore, seemed to be to induce nuclear proliferation with a series of unrelated, uncontrolled, perhaps, nuclear forces. However, once they got over that first shock -- keeping in mind, by the way, that we have in the past deployed some 7,000 nuclear weapons, never feeling in the past the necessity to go to them with a question of whether we, the United States, should undertake their production -- when they got over that first initial shock they then were met with a certain amount of political flak in their own countries, the weapon being described in lurid and, in my view, quite unjustified terms. Nevertheless, despite that -- and this is something which I think has not been mentioned -over a period of time U.S. representatives did approach our NATO allies with what I understand was essentially the proposal that we would in fact go ahead with the production, we would make an offer to negotiate with the Soviet Union, but it was our representatives who pointed out -- in this sense, I think, quite correctly -- that to negotiate without having first gone into production would give us no leverage whatsoever. Now, under those circumstances the Europeans expended quite a bit of their own political capital to develop a political consensus which would support us. And as Senator Nunn said, his understanding is essentially the same as mine, just before the formal NATO meeting, which I think was on the 20th, we canceled it, we canceled it abruptly without very much in the way of explanation; and the next thing our NATO allies heard were rumors that the President had decided not to produce at all. Their view is that he might well have been turned around by the Congressional pressures, and they now view the current position as no decision at all. Moreover, I think one has to look at the NATO response -- and like Senator Nunn, I don`t absolve them from all of the problems associated with this -- nevertheless, from their point of view you have to look at this in the context of other ongoing things, like the SALT talks, for example, where from all I can gather from talking to senior NATO officials there is great concern that we are making certain concessions with regard to systems particularly suitable for defense of Europe, which trouble our allies a great deal.

MacNEIL: Coming to the decision last Friday to defer production of the weapon, is the reading that you get and the reaction we see in the press from Europe concern over the decision -- or were they privately, some of them, rather relieved by the decision -- or concern over the process by which the decision was arrived at?

Amb. WEISS: I think it`s a combination of the two, because in fact most of the NATO authorities really do accept the fact that this is a weapon which is uniquely suitable for the purposes for which it was advanced, and unlike Congressman Weiss I do not think that they believe that it lowers the deterrence to a nuclear engagement. I might add, by the way, in this connection that the President on July 11 sent a letter to Senator Stennis in connection with the authorization for this particular system, pointing out that he did not accept the argument that this reduced deterrence; quite to the contrary, he believed that it enhanced deterrence, precisely because if deterrence is going to be made effective it must be a credible response so far as the aggressor is concerned, so far as our allies are concerned, and so far as our own leadership is concerned.

MacNEIL: Is the distress that this decision has produced a storm in a teapot which will blow over, or has it damaged our relations with NATO allies, particularly the West Germans, in a long-lasting way?

Amb. WEISS: Well, obviously to some extent the answer to that is, it depends what happens now. I think it has had a very serious erosive effect, particularly coming on top of some of these other factors that I mentioned, but the general impression that I have -- I had dinner just the other night with a senior NATO official -- is that they`re very concerned about what they consider to be a vacillating and indecisive U.S. leadership.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Richard Burt, what have your colleagues at the Times picked up in terms of this question of private reaction within NATO versus public reaction? Are some of them privately relieved at what the President did?

BURT: Well, I think that one has to distinguish, again, between the process and the decision. I don`t think the NATO authorities themselves are relieved; I think there was a strong cheering section within the NATO military establishment for the weapon, a recognition that they felt that one needed to modernize...

LEHRER: I meant actually the heads of governments of these various countries.

BURT: I think certainly some heads of governments are probably relieved, in private--certainly the Dutch government and the Norwegian government, where this was a potentially volatile issue and where they would have been forced, I think, to some extent to have to explain away a production decision. But for the more important countries -- and here we`re talking about namely Britain and Germany -- I think this will cause some problems; it will enhance the case of opposition parties -- the CDU in West Germany and the Conservative Party, who will argue that President Carter`s decision was taken because of unwillingness of either Prime Minister Callaghan or Helmut Schmidt to come out strongly for the weapon. They will blame the leaders in Europe for throwing away this excellent opportunity...

LEHRER: "If you had said yes, we want the neutron bomb here, then the President wouldn`t have done this." I see.

BURT: This will become a political football, and there`s one real explanation for why Mr. Schmidt sent Mr. Genscher here last week...

LEHRER: His Foreign Minister.

BURT: That`s right. Not as much to turn the administration around -- because he apparently didn`t push Mr. Carter on the question -- but so that when he came home Mr. Schmidt could tell the German public that he made one last valiant try.

LEHRER: I also want to get to this question of deterrent. You heard what Ambassador Weiss said to your argument, Congresman Weiss. How do you respond to that?

Rep. WEISS: It seems to me that when you sell a weapon as an antitank weapon and you set it up as being the weapon which will stop those tanks and you also say to everybody else, "Look, we can use this and this is not going to cause the damage that other regular nuclear weapons cause," then the likelihood is that in fact that weapon is going to be used. And as recently as the President`s press conference in July of last year, he was asked, "Do you think that once a nuclear weapon is used -- the neutron bomb is used -- that there`s any way to halt the escalation?" And he said, absolutely not.

LEHRER: Senator Nunn, what do you think about that?

NUNN: Well, I have a fundamental disagreement with the Congressman. I think when you have a weapon that your adversary knows you will not use_ because it would cause huge destruction in the territory that you`ve sworn to defend, which is allied territory, then to that extent you have a weakened deterrent, you have an increased likelihood of a conventional attack, and you have ended up by not using that weapon which we`re discussing tonight, the enhanced radiation weapon, the neutron bomb; you have done what I call self-deterrence. That`s self-deterrence; we`re deterring ourselves, but what we mean to deter is Soviet aggression. And what I think the Congressman is making a case against is any tactical nuclear weapon, not the enhanced radiation weapon; and if we have no tactical nuclear weapons, then in the case of a conventional attack if we were thrown back we would have a choice between going to strategic weapons which would blow up the world, including this country, or we would have to capitulate. That would be our choice.

LEHRER: All right. Robin?

MacNEIL: You have a comment on that, Ambassador Weiss.

Amb. WEISS: Yes, I entirely agree with the Senator. It seems to me that the proponents of the position that we should not consider using a weapon which is especially tailored for the particular situation, which restricts damage and so forth, at the same time argue that we should reply massively. I`m not sure that the Congressman does, but I`ve heard this argument frequently. That seems to me to be totally incredible and not something that the Soviet Union -- and that`s what we`ve got to keep in mind -- would find a credible deterrent against them.

MacNEIL: Well, obviously we can`t settle this deep philosophical division which people have argued for years. Can I just bring up one last point in the couple of minutes we have left? Senator Nunn said earlier that the bargaining chip that`s left us is invisible. Is the bargaining chip invisible now in Soviet eyes, the way the decision has been made? Will it be worth anything or not?

Amb. WEISS: No, I think it will not. As a matter of fact, I would have thought that we would have learned from our previous experience in negotiating arms control agreements, something that I have been deeply involved in over the years, the only way, the only possible hope for a successful arms control arrangement is if the Soviets are absolutely persuaded that we are going ahead and doing whatever it is we think is in our own interest.

MacNEIL: I just want to get Congressman Weiss` reaction to that. Have we thrown away the bargaining chip, Congressman?

Rep. WEISS: I don`t think it`s really a matter of a bargaining chip. I think it`s a matter of demonstrating self-restraint, but what we`re talking about is blowing up the entire world; that`s what nuclear weapons are all about. And it seems to me that for us to casually talk about nuclear weapons as anti-tank weapons is to really border on madness. What the President`s trying to do is to take us one step back and saying that our demonstration of that ought to bring forth from the Russians equal demonstrations of restraint. I think that it`s really a very constructive approach to trying to de-escalate the nuclear arms race.

MacNEIL: Senator?

NUNN: Let me just interject one thing, Robin. I think that for our European friends` benefit it ought to be pointed out that when we developed the Safeguard missile system, notably the Sprint missile, to be used in this country against incoming Soviet strategic weapons, we developed at that time the enhanced radiation weapon, or the neutron bomb. And we deployed these weapons in North Dakota. We had them in this country for one simple reason, and that is that we were going to have to fire them over our own territory, and certainly we did not want to obliterate our own country. That is the same reason we would deploy them in Europe.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Well, we have to leave it there. Thank you all very much in Washington for joining us. Thank you, Ambassador Weiss. Good night, Jim.

LEHRER: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: That`s all for tonight. Jim Lehrer and I will be back tomorrow night. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.