PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. ADRIAN S. FISHER The first problem set forth in your checklist of possible recommendations relates to the position of the Arms Control Disarmament Agency in the United States government. I think the position established by the Arms Control and Disarmament Act, a position in which the Agency is under the Secretary of State, particularly as far as negotiations are concerned, but not a part of the Department of State and has the right of independent access to the President, is a proper one. I realize this position was established thirteen years ago and much has happened since then but in my judgment the developments of the past thirteen years have made arms control considerations-and hence the position of the Agency in the U.S. Government-more, rather than less important. Now I sense, although I cannot document, that the position of the Agency established by the Act of Congress is not fully respected. I think, however, that this is not a reason for Congress to change its position but rather a reason for Congress to insist that a sensible structure of organization be complied with. Structure in the government is important but, without qualified top level personnel, it will not do the job. On page 13 of your staff report certain observations are made on this subject. I do not disagree with these observations. Another area of importance is, of course, the relationship of the negotiators to the Arms Control Disarmament Agency. I cannot say that the Arms Control Disarmament Act requires that every arms control agreement be negotiated by an official of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Many of the negotiations on the Test Ban were conducted by Ambassador Deane who was not formally an official of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the final agreement on the Test Ban was negotiated in Moscow by Averell Harriman, Assistant Secretary of State, although there were many Arms Control officials on his delegation. On the other hand, in the first eight years of the Act the second important arms control negotiation on NPT was conducted almost entirely by Arms Control officials, primarily the Director, Mr. Foster, and myself. I think it is fair to conclude that the activities of the government in this regard would be conducted more effectively if ACDA officials had a larger role in negotiations than is now the case. Your checklist also raises the issue of the research activities of ACDA. This is undoubtedly an area deserving the most careful study. It may be that the research activities of the Agency are either too small or too big. A good case could be made for the position that they are much too small and that such programs as the ARPA, seismic detection of nuclear tests, should be in ACDA rather than in the Defense Department which cannot help but be suspected of being in a conflicting position. My own conclusion is that this is probably unlikely that Congress will fund programs of this kind in ACDA at the level they deserve, but I think it would be unwise to cut back any further the quite limited funds available to ACDA for research. One item on this list is whether or not ACDA analysis and comments should be required on defense programs and policies. I would strongly urge that you amend the Act to make such requirement. Under the terms of the Act which provide that arms control policy must be consistent with national security policy as a whole, any arms control proposal must be subjected to detailed scrutiny by the entire national security establishment. The opposite is not true. A program involving new weapons systems which can be damaging to the prospect for advancing national security through arms control, can be put forward without any requirement of scrutiny by ACDA. ACDA has to find out about the program by gossip or intergovernment intelligence, and has to fight its way into the councils for government for its point of view to be considered. Very often it does not get into the decision making process until it is too late. I think the Harrington amendment would be a very good thing. It should not be a provision in DOD Authorization Act because that Act is, in the main, handled in Congress by representatives of the Department of Defense who are not sympathetic to the provisions of the Harrington Act and any such provisions in the DOD Authorization Act would not stay in the Act very long. Some provision requiring ACDA input to an executive decision on major weapons systems and requiring that that decision be ultimately made available to the Congress, would be desirable. At various places in your Report, there is substantial criticism of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency as being much too modest in its public infor mation program. I agree that this is the case but I believe that this criticism should be shared by the Congress, which inserted Section 49 (d) into the Arms Control and Disarmament Act and which, in its appropriation process, has allocated very little money to the public information program. It is easy to make a superficial case for 49 (d) of the Act which merely prohibits dissemination within the United States of "propaganda" concerning the work of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. One can argue that propaganda is bad and therefore should be prohibited. This is a very superficial argument because 49 (d) which imposes sanctions for too much public information but none for too little. can only have one effect. The notion that an agency of this size, with some 200 employees and a relatively small budget, could somehow propagandize the United States into accepting unilateral disarmament, is ludicrous. So far as I know there is no such restriction on the Defense Department that spends hundreds of millions on public information concerning the virtues of new weapons systems. I think it is politically unrealistic to suggest a similar restriction be placed in the authorizing legislation of the Department of Defense but a realistic solution would be to strike it from the basis statute and substantially increase ACDA's budget for public information activities. One of the points on which your Committee is requesting opinions is the nature of the Congressional authorization for appropriations. Here we have conflicting considerations. It is my personal view that it would be very good to have the work of the Agency reviewed by the substantive committees of the Congress every year. I think this is the only way in which the Congress can satisfy itself that its views concerning the role and status of the Agency are being carried out in the face of the overwhelming bureaucratic pressures to submerge the Agency back into another bureau of the Department of State. On the other hand, the appropriation for this Agency is contained in a bill in which this Agency is one of the few, if not the only agency, that does not have permanent authorization. Therefore in the past when there has been authorization legislation on an annual basis there has been a race between the substantive committees of the Congress and appropriations committee to avoid a point of order in the House under the rule that no appropriations can be made without authorizing legislation. The schedule set up by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 will undoubtedly decrease the tension but it should be eliminated altogether. One solution that recommends itself is to have two year authorization reviewed annually on a "rolling" basis. Let me illustrate. I would hope that the next session of Congress in the winter and spring of 1975 would enact authorizing legislation, adjusted by the change in the fiscal year to September 30 for two years so that there would be authorizing legislation on the books going through to the fiscal year ending September 30, 1977. But the enactment of such legislation is no reason for the Congress not to look at the legislation on annual basis. During the winter and spring of 1976 the Congress could add an authorization for the fiscal year ending September 30, 1978. In this manner the requirements of annual review by the substantive committees of Congress could be harmonized with the orderly processing of appropriate requests and no additional strain imposed on the new mechanism established by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. Mr. ZABLOCKI. Thank you, Mr. Fisher. Undoubtedly you recall the days when you were the acting Director of the Agency. Mr. FISHER. Yes. Mr. ZABLOCKI. Authorizing legislation at times was a year behind. Mr. FISHER. Yes. This does suggest the 2-year authorization, but with the rolling review, once we got 2-year, and once we got 3-year we said, "Boy, that is great, not up there for another 2 years." It seems to me that it should be a 2-year authorization, but a review every year tacking on an extra year. ANNUAL POLICY REVIEW IMPORTANT The sums, Mr. Chairman, are not that great in this particular agency, and the policy review, I think is so important. I think that if I were still in the executive branch I would want very much to be up before this committee once a year. Mr. ZABLOCKI. Well, Mr. McCloy, so you will not feel that we discriminated against you by recessing the hearing to go to a vote, we have to do the same to you, Mr. Fisher. There is an important vote on the amendment to cut out CIA. We have some very interesting votes today. Mr. BINGHAM. Since I am testifying in another committee and will not be able to come back after the vote, could I carry on here for a few minutes with just a couple of questions? Mr. ZABLOCKI. Please continue, but you want to get to the vote. Just a couple of things. Mr. ZABLOCKI. All right. With the permission of Mr. Brennan with whom we had the arrangement, we will hear all three. Mr. BINGHAM. I am sorry about that. I would like to welcome these witnesses very heartily, and I apologize that the schedule today has been so impossible that I have not had Mr. ZABLOCKI. You carry on; I will return immediately after the vote. IMBALANCE IN ACDA, DOD INFORMATION EFFORT Mr. BINGHAM. Mr. McCloy, I have been one of those who has been quite critical of the Agency for not doing more informational work even within the limitations we have imposed, and this is because there is such an imbalance between the enormous amount of information put out by the Pentagon and the ACDA on all kinds of things, for example, the threats of the Soviets, and the various fields and so on. We have tried to limit that public information activity of the Pentagon of a sum of $10 billion, and we have failed in that effort. It is the imbalance that concerns me. You don't seem to refer to that in your testimony, and that is why I ask. Mr. McCLOY. No; I was not so conscious of this, of the type of public information that they were putting out that was really affecting the activities of the Agency. Our information was pretty specific down a particular line. I didn't find that the Pentagon was ever attacking a particular program that the ACDA was putting up in its public relations. If it did, it didn't seem to me to be particularly effective before the decisionmaking individuals that had to give the terms of reference. AVAILABILITY OF MONEY FOR INFORMATION I don't object to increasing the amount of money that is available for information. What I don't like is the thought that sort of stimulates that-well, you should put more money in here so that it can fight the Defense Department. I just think that you lose some effectiveness in that if you do that. Mr. BINGHAM. Within the Government you mean? Mr. McCLOY. Yes, within the Government. That is the payoff. Mr. BINGHAM. Would you comment? Mr. FISHER. Again referring to the lightning bolt, I think give them some more money and knock out 49 (d); 49(d) can only have an in 41-421-743 terim effect. Every so often you put out a modest booklet on ACDA and someone asks the GAO, isn't this a violation of 49 (d)? Suppose the General Accounting Office says, yes, it is. Do the disbursing officers have to cough up the money again? Until something like 49 (d) is in every appropriation for every agency in the Government, the notion that it is in the Arms Control Agency authorization seems to me to be demeaning. PROPAGANDA RESTRICTION IMPOSED BY CONGRESS Mr. BINGHAM. Thank you. I am sorry, I have to go. Mr. McCLOY. I would not combat that. As Mr. Fisher points out, this was put in at the insistence of the Congress. Mr. BINGHAM. I am aware of that. The subcommittee will be in recess. Mr. ZABLOCKI. The subcommittee will resume the hearing. STATEMENT OF DONALD G. BRENNAN, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY STUDIES FOR THE HUDSON INSTITUTE AND CONSULTANT TO THE ARMS CONTROL AND DISARMAMENT AGENCY Donald Brennan was born in Waterbury, Conn., and received his B.S. and Ph. D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to accepting his current position as Director of National Security Studies at the Hudson Institute, Dr. Brennan was a technical researcher at MIT. He has also been a frequent participant in international arms control conferences. Dr. Brennan has served as consultant to the Department of State, Department of Defense, ACDA, and the Executive Office of the President. He is, in addition, a prolific author and frequent witness before congressional committees. Mr. BRENNAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a pleasure for me to appear once again before you. I shall read my statement very rapidly. I have had a good deal of experience with the subject of arms control in the past 15 or 20 years as an intellectual student of strategy and arms control and as an observer of Government handling of arms control matters, and it may be appropriate for me to share some of this experience with you in connection with your review of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. My biographical sketch is attached above. It might be useful for me to supplement that sketch here with a few remarks relating to my experience with ACDA and its origins. My first contact with arms control, at least in any serious degree, came in the later 1950's when I was one of a small band of activists centered largely in Cambridge, Mass., who were concerned both with the substance of arms control and with governmental organization to deal with that subject. At that time I was associated with MIT. I first had opportunity to observe Government arrangements that then obtained for arms control at about the time of the conferences of experts on nuclear weapon testing and on surprise attack. I had opportunity to observe Government mechanisms for dealing with the subject even more closely when I became a consultant to a panel on arms limitation of the President's Science Advisory Committee in about 1958 or 1959. This panel was headed by J. R. Killian, Jr., and its work continued until perhaps 1961. In 1958-60, Government efforts connected with arms control centered in the office of the Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for Disarmament and Atomic Energy, an office headed by Dr. Philip Farley. On the basis of their experience with Government organization for arms control, several people of my acquaintance, including Richard Leghorn, Jerome Wiesner, and Senator Hubert Humphrey, had given considerable thought to, and did some writing on, this subject. My own PSAC experience also suggested some desirable lines of Government organization. In late 1959 and early 1960, I was the editor and chief architect of a special issue on arms control of the journal Daedelus, published in the fall of 1960, and one of the chapters in this volume was titled "Government Organization for Arms Control," written by Senator Hubert Humphrey. This volume (including Senator Humphrey's chapter) was published (with some modifications) in June 1961 with the title "Arms Control, Disarmament, and National Security." (This volume is mentioned, although only in the Daedelus version, in the staff review prepared for this committee for the hearings.2) In early 1961, Mr. John McCloy, who had been named President Kennedy's adviser on disarmament, asked me to come to Washington to spend some time as a consultant during the spring and summer assisting him, primarily to help integrate the substantive policy content of a number of panel reports that had been submitted to him, but also in part to help draft the statute that created ACDA. I did this, and a number of the features of the act can be traced to suggestions I made at that time. When the Agency was created by that statute, I became one of its initial consultants. Not long after, I joined Hudson Institute as its president. This became one of the early contractor organizations conducting contract research for the Agency. Hudson continued as a contractor of the Agency through two majors studies, lasting until 1965, when we discontinued our formal relationship with ACDA. In the recent past, I have been asked to resume my consulting arrangement with ACDA, and we are in the process of working this out at this time. In the interim I have, of course, had a good deal of informal contact with the Agency, or more precisely with a number of people and activities within the Agency, and I have had even more opportunity to observe the work of ACDA through the medium of other agencies concerned with national security affairs, such as the Department of Defense, with which we have maintained a continuing close contact in regard to arms control and disarmament. It is on the basis of this experience that I am prepared to offer comments about ACDA and its role in Government decisions relating to arms control. In the following discussion, I shall try to concentrate on the performance of ACDA as an organization, including its internal struc 2 Review of Arms Control Legislation and Organization Committee Print, prepared for the Subcommittee on National Security Policy and Scientific Developments of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, September 1974. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974. |