Dr. CAMPBELL. Oh, yes, I think you can find that tendency reflected in many ways. One of the interesting things found about the communications satellite program is they have orbited a tremendous payload weight to get a very much smaller capacity than our system has. You know they have launched, I have forgotten the exact number but something on the order of 15 of these communications satellites, and have created a very small capacity system. The explanation is that they had the booster power to do it with. The ways of saving on pay load weight, such as better reliability seemed difficult to achieve. I think this is the kind of trade-off they often face. They then choose the simpler method. Mr. PERLE. It always has seemed to me that the Soviets have a tendency to use some of their technology in a spectacular way. For example, when they ended the American-Soviet nuclear test moratorium in 1961, on the eve of the Belgrade conference of nonaligned nations, they did so with a nuclear burst in the vicinity of a hundred megatons. Again, they fired the first Sputnik at a time when some prudent leaders may have counseled that they continue to develop their ICBM capability before revealing to the world that they had this technology under control; and given the reaction in the United States, those advisers might have been right. I can recall grotesque photographs of a surgically-created twoheaded dog that was supposed to indicate advances in Soviet medical research. In your examination of Soviet technology, have you noticed a tendency to make a deliberate effort to develop spectacular systems? Dr. CAMPBELL. Well, I can't think of many more cases than those you mention. I would describe the situation somewhat differently. I think they are extremely sensitive to the political impact of potential breakthroughs and if they achieve breakthroughs they make the most of them. But I would doubt that this objective really distorts the decisions about technology or about the directions research takes. Dr. WOLFE. It is my impression that the events in the space program, while highly publicized, were not timed in order to try to take advantage of some particular evanescent political situation. Rather, they were part of a technically-planned program, and were exploited in whatever context they happened to occur. THE POLITICAL UTILITY OF STRATEGIC WEAPONS Mr. PERLE. You mentioned the sensitivity of the Soviet leadership to the political implications of technological developments. Some in this country have argued that strategic weapons have little or no political utility. McGeorge Bundy, writing in Foreign Affairs (October, 1969), discounted the political utility of strategic weapons. Others who adopt the minimum deterrence view hold that once you have a level of armaments sufficient to deter, anything beyond that is of little or no political utility. Do you think the Soviets would agree with McGeorge Bundy that there is no political utility attached to having more, rather than fewer, nuclear weapons so long as some minimum level is achieved? Dr. WOLFE. Well, I am sure that there are some Soviets who agree with him. In fact the Pravda "Observer" article of March 7, 1970, on the general question of the arms talks and the obstacles to it being posed by U.S. programs, cited McGeorge Bundy's view. On the other hand, I don't think one can make the case that the Soviet leadership itself has discounted the political value of these weapons. Otherwise, it is hard to explain why the Soviet leaders for the last 5 years have devoted such a large share of what are admittedly tight resources to this program if they didn't have some fairly strong convictions about their political utility. The only other grounds on which one could find a justification for the program is if the Soviet leadership felt they had to prepare themselves for war, and even if they happened to feel this way, I think primarily their reasons would be political ones. So it seems to me that the relative evaluation of the political utility of military power, and particularly of nuclear weapons, that has prevailed up to now at any rate, has been somewhat different in the Soviet case. We were in the position perhaps of déjà arrivé, while the Russians are just now arriving. It may be that their views will change. I don't want to labor the point too much, but it seems obvious that they must have placed some great store on what it would mean to the Soviet Union politically to spend these resources on strategic forces, especially to do this in the face of a military tradition which, in the past, had not particularly emphasized strategic forces. U.S. INFLUENCE ON SOVIET STRATEGIC POLICY Mr. PERLE. Dr. Wolfe, you have suggested that Soviet decisions on the direction their strategic programs could take are in a state of flux. Many people have argued that the recent Soviet buildup can be explained by their desire for parity with the United States, arising out of the Cuban missile crisis when they acutely felt their strategic inferiority. And one often hears the view expressed that, having achieved parity, it is reasonable to assume the Soviets have no interest in further increases in their strategic forces. Now, if we set aside, for the moment, the fact that further increments to the Soviet force would have to be met by an American response, and assume, rather, that American strategic forces are likely to remain relatively stable in the foreseeable future, how would restraint on the part of the United States affect the decisions yet to be made by the Soviet Union as to their future strategic policy and procurement? Dr. WOLFE. It seems to me that this is somewhat analogous to the situation that has prevailed, especially for the past 5 years or so. The United States, in effect, made its strategic decisions and pretty well wrapped them up by 1962, and by 1965-66, the forces had been procured, the ceilings were set, the doctrine was enunciated over and over again: This was the level at which the United States was going to stabilize its forces. Now, under the circumstances prevailing then the Soviet response was to build up to that level of forces. I am sure everyone is aware that there have been repeated predictions in the last year and a half that the Soviets were ready to halt their buildup. When the numbers of missiles counted got somewhere between 900 and a 1,000, there was a widespread assumption that the Soviet program would stop. It has gone on. The President's February foreign policy report indicated that by the end of this current year, 1970, just on the basis of what they had started, the Soviet Union would have 1,290 missiles. I haven't kept track of the latest arithmetic, but I think there have been some additions since then so that the Soviet missile program, the land-based missile force, is now approaching a size almost one-third larger than the comparable American force. The basic point involved here seems to me to be that, whatever the balance of decisionmaking may be in the Kremlin, it has been very conservative up to now. One cannot foreclose the possibility that the Soviet leaders may hope to reach the kind of agreement in the SALT talks that will permit them to taper off. But up to now the Kremlin seems to have held to a conservative point of view, which says in effect: "Let's not be premature about stopping the momentum of these programs until we see whether the Americans are serious, or whether we are going to get anywhere in the SALT talks." Moreover, this view seems to have prevailed in the face of what has been almost a plea by the American side to the Russians to "turn it off a little now because you are putting us in an untenable position. If you go too far out ahead we are not going to be able to limit our self-restraint to defensive systems." This has been an obvious element in the dialog between the two sides. Despite indications from the American side that one consequence of the continuation of the Soviet programs could be to speed up the very thing that the Russians are polemicizing against, namely, American decisions to go ahead with new weapons programs, despite this, the thing that impresses me the most is the on-going momentum of the Soviet program and the tendency not to shut it off. INTERPRETING SOVIET PUBLICATIONS Mr. PERLE. You mentioned the recent article in Pravda that covered the SALT talks and that quoted McGeorge Bundy's article. I wonder in this case specifically, and as a general rule, how seriously we ought to take articles that appear in the public press in the Soviet Union-articles that it is assumed will be disseminated in the West. As you indicated earlier there are certain doctrinal and policy differences within the Soviet Union that were not reflected in that Pravda article. At the same time, from the Soviet point of view, the article could be a useful one in terms of establishing a context for the talks that would reinforce the Soviet negotiating position. I wonder how we should interpret articles of this type when they appear in the press? Dr. WOLFE. Well, I think your question itself has framed the answer, because I don't think one can take seriously a particular article without the whole context in which it appears also being taken into account. It is quite clear that the press is one of the weapons or one of the instruments, if you want to put it that way, of Soviet diplomacy, and it is certainly being employed in this instance to fortify the position the Soviets bring to negotiations. This doesn't mean that it doesn't also have other functions, such as expressing varient internal views in the Soviet Union. Some Soviet elite groups with access to the Soviet press, for example, probably have a different view of what the Soviet-U.S. relationship should be than one would find, say, in a collective article on the same subject by a group of Soviet marshals. But I think there is undoubtedly a lot of reassessment going on at the present time within the Soviet Union and in various leadership circles which is bound to reflect the changed power relationship. I don't think they have thought a lot of these things through. As I tried to indicate in my paper, I think the Soviet leadership will try to hold and explore and keep various options open, but I think it is quite possible that the changed nature of the power relationship may result in political conclusions being drawn that are in some sense new. One must be attentive to this possibility; it is one reason why the SALT talks themselves are, I think, an important forum for feeling the pulse of change in Soviet thinking, if there is indeed a change. Mr. PERLE. Was there any significance in the fact that the Pravda article of March 7 was signed "Observer." Dr. WOLFE. No. This is a fairly common device, a traditional one intended to suggest that the statement has quasi-official weight. There is often speculation about just who has written a particular "Observer" article. In this case, for example, I have heard speculation that the amanuensis who wrote the "Observer" article was either Yuri Zhukov or Georgi Arbatov. I don't know myself who actually wrote this article. CONFRONTATION AND NEGOTIATION Mr. PERLE. I have just one last question. It is popular now, in official and press circles here, to contrast a prior period of confrontation with a present era of negotiation. This view suggests that confrontation and negotiation are alternative or inconsistent postures. Clearly many American students don't accept this distinction since they promote confrontations in order to precipitate negotiations. I wonder if you think this is a realistic view to apply to international politics and more specifically to the Soviet Union. Do the Soviets view confrontation and negotiations as alternative or inconsistent postures? Dr. WOLFE. I would feel that the Soviet Union does not regard these as alternatives but that they are coexistent with each other. Certainly, one only has to look at the world scene just at this moment. In some areas there is something close to confrontation going on, in other areas there is a sort of hectic negotiation. It seems to me that putting the question in terms of alternatives is erecting a kind of artificial distinction. This may have very useful political purposes if political ideas have to be greatly simplified in order to take hold of large segments of opinion. Then I suppose there is political utility in counterposing an era of negotiation against one of confrontation. But as one tries to relate to the real world of diplomacy and foreign policy that is actually being conducted, both negotiation and confrontation seem to be part of the process. Mr. PERLE. That was certainly Clausewitz's view. Dr. CAMPBELL. I agree, negotiation is one form of confrontation. Mr. PERLE. Thank you very much, gentlemen. Senator JACKSON. I wish to thank both of you gentlemen for your excellent statements and lucid comments. The subcommittee will now stand in recess. (Whereupon, at 1:10 p.m., the subcommittee recessed, subject to the call of the Chair.) Personal data BIOGRAPHIES OF WITNESSES Wednesday, May 20, 1970 ROBERT WELLINGTON CAMPBELL Date and place of birth: February 4, 1926, Wichita, Kansas. Address: Department of Economics, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47401. Marital Status: Married, six children. Education University of Kansas, A.B., Economics, 1948. Harvard University, M.A., Russian Area Studies, 1952. Harvard University, Ph.D., Economics, 1956. Teaching experience and employment Sept. 1955-June 1960: Instructor and Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. Sept. 1960-Feb. 1961: Visiting Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley, California. Feb. 1960 to Present: Professor of Economics, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Sept. 1958-Sept. 1959: On leave from the University of Southern California under a Ford Foundation Faculty Research Fellowship to work at the Russian Research Center, Harvard University. June 1968-June 1969: Not teaching to work full time on a study of the impact of the space program on the Soviet economy under a grant from NASA. Consultant to: General Analysis Corporation (now the Los Angeles office of the Council for Economic and Industry Research) in 1958-1960; Batelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, Ohio, in 1960; Stanford Research Institute, 1959present; Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1967-present. Professional affiliations Member: American Economics Association; American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies; Association for the Study of Soviet-type Economies (ASTE); Executive Secretary, ASTE. Publications Author, Soviet Economic Power, Its Structure, Growth, and Prospects, Houghton Mifflin, 1960. (2nd edition, 1966.) There is also a Japanese version of the first edition. (With Francis P. Hoeber) Soviet Economic Potential, 1960-1970, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California, 1961. Accounting in Soviet Planning and Management, Harvard University Press, 1963. There is also a Japanese edition put out by Miraisa, Tokyo. Economics of the Soviet Oil and Gas Industry, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968. Space Spillovers in the Soviet Economy, 200 pages, ms. completed, and now out for review. As collaborator with John Elliot, Comparative Economic Systems, Prentice Hall, in press. Author of articles in: World Politics, American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Management Science, Mercurio, Problems of Communism, American Slavic and East European Review and others. THOMAS W. WOLFE Present Position: Senior Staff Member, The RAND Corporation (Washington Office); also: Retired Colonel, U.S. Air Force; member of faculty of SinoSoviet Institute, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. |