New Thoughts on The Unthinkable

For three months the U.S. has gone without an official chief thinker of the unthinkable, the man who must ponder U.S. strategies for averting nuclear destruction. Gerard C. Smith resigned last January as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) after negotiating the first round of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. The result was a treaty sharply limiting defensive anti-ballistic missile sites and an interim agreement freezing offensive missiles at roughly current levels for the next five years. To take Smith's place, President Nixon last week named Fred C. Ikle (pronounced ee-CLAY), 48, the author of three books on nuclear strategy and for the past six years head of the Rand Corporation's social science department. Swiss-born, Ikle emigrated to the U.S. in 1946, got his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago, and later taught political science at M.I.T.

Ikle will take charge of an agency that has been considerably diminished in scope and somewhat demoralized in purpose. Some Nixon advisers felt that Smith had been too soft with the Russians in the SALT talks; so did Washington Senator Henry Jackson, chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security and International Operations. Jackson criticized the fact that the U.S. had given the Soviets a 3-to-2 lead in ICBMs and permitted them a 40% edge in missile-launching submarines, even if U.S. missiles were qualitatively superior. He proposed an amendment requiring any future treaty on offensive arms to provide qualitative and quantitative equality. It passed overwhelmingly in both the House and Senate.

Jackson also pressed the White House to reduce the role and stature of the ACDA in the second round of SALT talks, which began last month. Nixon did this by splitting Smith's former job in two. To handle the new talks with the Soviets, the President appointed U. Alexis Johnson, a career diplomat, tough negotiator and former Under Secretary of State. As director of the ACDA, Ikle will concentrate on research and planning arms strategy.

Something of a maverick nuclear strategist, Ikle has specialized in the technical and political problems of arms control. He is credited with devising the "permissive action link," a top-secret device for making it physically impossible to arm a nuclear weapon without a release signal from a remote authorizing source. He questions what he calls the "obsolete dogmas" of U.S. nuclear strategy, specifically the idea that the U.S. missile forces must stand ready to be launched at a moment's notice from land or sea, and be capable of destroying much of the Soviet population. Instead of maintaining a vulnerable arsenal of nuclear weapons that can be instantly triggered, he says, the U.S. should develop weapons that would be totally invulnerable. Even if they were buried so deep in the ground that they could not be quickly launched, their invulnerability would serve as the ultimate deterrent to surprise attack.

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