Monday, Feb. 26, 1979

"The White-Haired Hawk"

By Hugh Sidey

Paul Nitze may know more about the world's periodic outbursts of devastation than any other person. He was seven, and climbing in the Tyrol with his parents, when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914, triggering World War I. He was traveling in Germany in 1937 as Hitler was preparing for his conquests. As vice chairman of the World War II U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, he assessed the hellish aftermath of the raids on Dresden and Hamburg. He studied the fire bombing of Tokyo and was among the first Americans to stand in the scorched nuclear wasteland that had been Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He remembers staring at the tiles that had bubbled from the atomic heat.

Along this unusual journey he once welcomed Neville Chamberlain's attempt to win peace by accommodation. It was a rude but enduring lesson for Nitze. He became the insistent intellectual scold arguing for greater American strength. He directed policy planning at the State Department, served eight years in the Pentagon, including a term as Secretary of the Navy, then was a SALT negotiator for five years in Geneva. Today, at 72, Nitze is a large part of the firepower against SALT II.

"We should reject the treaty," he says flatly. "We should add $4 billion or $5 billion to the defense budget." Nitze believes that accepting SALT II as it now stands could be "the point of no return" for the U.S., a point after which the nation would be locked into trends that would assure the Soviets nuclear superiority.

Nitze's charts and analyses are almost impossible for laymen to follow, but buried in them are ominous figures. They conclude that from 1978 to 1985, under a SALT II treaty, the Soviet Union would increase its nuclear warheads threefold, the U.S. by a half; the Russian capacity for area destruction would go up a half, the U.S.'s equivalent capacity by onefourth; the Soviet ability to destroy our buried missiles would increase tenfold, ours to destroy theirs would go up fourfold. Nitze rejects the notion that the Soviets want only to be equal. "To them a big-SALT II Critic Paul Nitzeger advantage is a bigger advantage," he says.

There is a vaguely James Bondian flavor to the wiry Nitze. As chief strategist for the Committee on the Present Danger, he resides in a Virginia penthouse office with a glass wall. The Soviets call him "the white-haired hawk." Many U.S. arms experts would agree, believing that Nitze has narrowed his vision to statistics, which cannot tell the full story of power. They counter his figures with compelling arguments that without a treaty the arms race will grow, and the Russians will gain even more unless the U.S. adds massively to its own arsenal.

Nitze does not believe the Soviets want war. He does believe they seek a clear superiority of power through which they can tilt the world their way. "It is hard to see what factors in the future are apt to disconnect international politics and diplomacy from the underlying real power balances," Nitze testified a few days ago on the Hill. "The nuclear balance is only one element in the overall power balance. But in the Soviet view, it is the fulcrum upon which all other levers of influence -military, economic or political -rest."

Nitze doubts that President Carter fully understands the nuclear game he is playing. Nitze went to the White House once, and Carter gently upbraided him. The President urged Nitze to join his team and help work out a treaty that would both be good for the U.S. and be an agreement that "the Russians would think is fair." That disturbed Nitze. "The Russians do not understand what we mean by fairness," he insists, and so he told the President.

Nitze's hope is that after long years of relative indifference, the U.S. people are now beginning to listen to what he says. This week he is back testifying on the Hill. Fragments from his arguments echo in the questions of key Senators like Georgia's Sam Nunn and Tennessee's Howard Baker. And suddenly Nitze finds he is marching at times with old adversaries like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Says Nitze: ''I think it is running our way."

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