Another entry from Michael Krepon’s shoebox, this one from Henry Kissinger — in his days as an academic — on the right mix of offensive and defensive strategic forces:
The tensions between strategic offenses and defenses has been a constant thread in the history and arms control negotiations. In the late 1950s crude strategic missile defenses were still far more advanced than the notion of negotiating treaties with the Soviet Union.
During this time, Henry Kissinger was thinking and writing about what an ideal arms control agreement might look like that covered offenses and defenses from his academic base at Harvard University. He then was given the rare opportunity to negotiate the first strategic arms control agreements while serving as President Richard M. Nixon’s national security adviser. Negotiating outcomes in the 1972 SALT I Interim Agreement and the ABM Treaty bore little resemblance to the prescriptions found in Kissinger’s article, Arms Control, Inspections and Surprise Attack, which appeared in the July 1960 issue of Foreign Affairs:
“What measures can reduce the incentive to make a surprise attack? An all-out nuclear attack is likely to result from one of two motives. An aggressor may feel sufficiently confident that a sudden attack could reduce the counterblow to acceptable proportions. Or a threatened country may feel so vulnerable that it seeks to lessen the danger through a preemptive attack. Thus a control system will add to stability if it complicates the calculations of the attacker and facilitates those of the defender.”