Workers World Vol. 19, No. 14
April 4 – Now that the arms negotiations between the U.S. and the USSR have been broken up, the bourgeois press here is going through the process of a post mortem analysis. Some pretend to be saddened by the collapse of the talks, others disappointed, and some are fearful.
Of course, the breakup of the talks is solely the responsibility of the Carter administration and the arrogant and unbridled militaristic posture it adopted long before Vance and his group arrived in Moscow. Needless to say, the faceless men behind the military-industrial complex are all too happy with the results. So are those in its current political front, the Committee on the Present Danger, led by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze and other members of the military adventurist wing of the bourgeoisie.
In reality they insured the breakup of the talks through months of endless propagandizing and efforts to galvanize the liberal element in the capitalist establishment and fuse it to the ultra-rightist coalition both on matters of broad military as well as political policy regarding the USSR. Before Vance left on his mission to Moscow, all had more or less joined the coalition, including former President Ford, and an appearance of “national unity” was quickly conjured up just prior to the commencement of negotiations.
The tough line of the administration seemed all but assured of success, if only because the disparate elements of American finance capital seemed at last to stand shoulder to shoulder with Carter in a gaudy, chauvinist display of imperialist solidarity.
It was not that the Carter administration expected a swift and full capitulation by the Soviet Union to what was virtually a political and military ultimatum. Washington did, however, expect a partial capitulation. This would have confirmed the thesis that a hardline, unbridled, militarist posture, backed up by all the formidable elements in the capitalist establishment, would bring success. It would have confirmed in their minds that the joining of the so-called human rights issue with extremist military demands was the way to impose their military superiority on the USSR.
As it happened, the rebuff the Carter administration got from the Soviet Union jolted them. It definitely had the opposite psychological and political effect than that desired by the Carter administration and the capitalist media.
Hence the expression of disappointment, the beginnings of some criticism, and an element of internecine rancor in the ruling class. Something did go wrong with their calculations. There was no capitulation by the USSR to what was obviously a provocative set of demands which no sovereign socialist government could accept.
The dissension in the ruling class over the collapse of the talks is best express by George Kennan, a former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and one-time head of the important State Department Policy Planning staff. His comments (see James Reston’s column, Sunday New York Times, April 3) are important.
Kennan was the literary initiator of the first salvo from the U.S. in the opening of its broad counter-revolutionary offensive soon after the Second World War. He wrote the infamous foreign policy article in Foreign Affairs in 1947 under the pen name “X” which was immediately recognized everywhere as the opening gun in the huge and costly struggle against the USSR and against all the revolutionary struggles which at that time were reaching a climax and which culminated in the Chinese Revolution.
He was at that time the exponent of the hardline position of containing and rolling back the revolutionary tide and making the USSR the object of American imperialist attacks. In the ensuing years the military itself began to kick him around as not being responsive enough to their views. Late in his career he is said to have become “mellowed” and his views now reflect those elements in the imperialist establishment who are for a less militaristic foreign policy.
“The questions involved in the strategic arms talks,” says Kennan, “should not in my opinion have been taken up in isolation. We should have been talking about wider things ... and wider political relations too, because it’s all one package.”
What Kennan means here is that the U.S. negotiating team should have squarely brought up to the USSR the question of southern Africa and Washington’s horror over the progressive, revolutionary role the USSR is playing there. Since Carter had really opened a broad political offensive originally aimed at the successful revolutions in Angola, Mozambique, and other areas and was attempting to intimidate the USSR leadership by military threats, Kennan argues that the political questions should have been raised along with the SALT talks. That apparently didn’t happen.
Because of that, “The Secretary of State [Cyrus Vance],” says Kennan, “should not have been involved in all this [meaning the arms negotiations], since that was why Paul Warnke was appointed arms negotiator in the first place – unless there was a pretty good prospect that something helpful was going to come out of it. And finally – this is a wider question I feel very strongly about – these SALT talks have very poor chances of success unless they are accompanied by certain unilateral military measures of restraint by both sides, which of course have to be understood privately and informally ...”
Brushing aside his suggestion for secret diplomacy and translating this diplomatic jargon into plainer English, Kennan is saying here that if the Carter administration wanted an arms agreement, then it should have gone about it somewhat in the manner of the Test Ban Treaty. This agreement prohibited atomic tests in the atmosphere. First both sides stopped testing and then the agreement was more or less assured.
This is what we indicated in the last issue of WW when we wrote that a SALT agreement did not have to be in the form of a treaty with a two-thirds majority of the Senate needed for ratification. This was merely a ploy. A serious effort to negotiate an agreement could first be arrived at between the parties, put into operation the way the Test Ban Treaty was, and then the agreement would be ratified if Carter and the military really wanted it.
The criticism by Kennan so far has been more or less over the procedure and style of the Carter administration. None of this goes to the essence of the matter and is part and parcel of the factional struggles within the U.S. ruling cliques on how best to maintain and extend their would military, political and diplomatic hegemony.
But he also brings up an aspect of the negotiations which points up an essential difference between the U.S. and USSR deriving from their diametrically opposed social systems and which expresses itself in military matters. It relates to “the development of military nuclear technology.” He says that it “is moving so rapidly that the diplomatic SALT talks can hardly keep up with it. It usually takes months and not just a couple of days in Moscow to reach an agreement. Usually the technological facts that existed at the beginning of the talks are no longer relevant at the end of them.”
That, we believe, is very true. But why should it be such a worrisome aspect to the U.S. military-industrial complex and to Kennan, since the U.S. is allegedly so far ahead in military technology? On the surface, it would seem that since military technology is moving so far ahead of diplomacy for both sides, there is a common ground for agreement.
Nuclear technology is an element, and of course an exceptionally important element, in the development of the productive forces. The productive forces in capitalist society tend continually to run way ahead of social and political conditions. From a socio-historic point of view, the growth of the productive forces under capitalism is in a state of rebellion against the social relations, which hinder and retard it. Ultimately the forces of production far outgrow the outmoded social relations and this inevitably leads not only to collisions but to the overthrow of the reactionary outmoded class relations and to socialist revolution.
It is otherwise with the USSR. Since the early 1920s the productive forces of the USSR have grown immensely, but the principal contradiction in Soviet society, unlike capitalist society, has been that, far from the productive forces having outgrown the social relations in the USSR, the productive forces were inadequate to fully assure the rapid development of socialist relations.
The productive forces of the USSR today are strong and formidable enough to have assured firm, public ownership and socialist construction without the anarchy of capitalist production. Of course, they have not yet assured a fully developed socialist society; the USSR is still in the stage of being a workers’ state.
What all this has to do with nuclear technology development and arms negotiations is extremely important.
Notwithstanding the breakneck speed with which weapons development systems are conjured up by the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, there is also an element of retardation in the development of nuclear and other sophisticated military and civilian technology that grows out of the very nature of monopoly capitalism and which hinders the growth of the productive forces generally.
Rockwell International, General Dynamics, and Bell Laboratories (to take some arbitrary examples) may all be working at breakneck speed to contribute their share to the weapons systems and to nuclear technology devices of all kinds. The counterparts to Bell Laboratories, Rockwell International, and General Dynamics in the Soviet Union are also working on weapons development. But these is a marked and fundamental difference which in the long run gives the USSR, because production there is based on socialist planning, an indubitable advantage.
Rockwell International, General Dynamics, and Bell Laboratories are intimately connected with the military-industrial complex and as government contractors or prime defense contractors are obligated to inform the government of any discoveries or inventions which come as byproducts of these huge contracts – which run into millions and billions of dollars and involve many engineers, scientists, and technicians.
But while they are obligated to fulfill these government contracts faithfully, this is almost never done. Years of litigation usually follow any dispute. In a case involving the Department of Defense vs. AT&T, for example, even this powerful arm of the state can rarely get the upper hand because a corporation like AT&T is like a sovereign state itself. What is discovered in the lab by its scientists is finders-keepers.
It is no wonder that industrial espionage on a large scale, particularly as it affects secrets of highly industrial technology, has become virtually an industry in itself.
Because these corporations like all other companies are based on private property, their motivation is principally concerned with the profit that comes from the contract. If something important is invented or discovered in their labs while working under government contract, and this happens very frequently, it will not become the public property of the government for a long time, and sometimes never.
Just as Gimbel’s is not likely to inform Macy’s on what line of fall clothing it will bring out, so Rockwell International is not likely to tell General Dynamics, Bell, or anybody else of any discovery or potentially lucrative invention before it decides on how it can use it for its own special private interest.
Thus, in spite of the rapidly developing weapons systems and nuclear technology in the U.S. in particular and in the other imperialist countries, there is also a retarding element in the productive forces here which is altogether absent in the Soviet industrial, scientific, and technological establishments. They derive no advantage from keeping any invention or discovery secret from one another.
The Soviet government has complete access to and is able to coordinate all the various enterprises, both military and civilian, and make available to itself all the findings of science and technology without the encumbrance of private property interests.
The best answer to the latter-day exponents of the theory of “social-imperialism,” who claim that a market economy has replaced the planned economy in the USSR, lies precisely in the vast field of scientific, technological, and industrial development. Competition, if any, is based on who can bring out these various findings with greater speed and efficiency. Not even the most prejudiced mind could say that any of these industrial enterprises is owned privately by individual bureaucrats.
Take the Ministry of Medium Industry, which is said by Western sources to be in charge of atomic facilities in the USSR. No one would think of claiming that there is private ownership there, yet everyone knows that the atomic installations in this country are owned by the biggest private utilities, even if under so-called government regulation.
Because of the centrally planned economy, it is much easier for the USSR to overcome the discrepancy between technological development and the diplomatic and political use of it. Socialist planning shows itself to be superior to capitalist chaos, based on private property and the chase after super-profits, particularly in the sensitive field of sophisticated technology, including nuclear and space technology.
This explains why the world was so astounded in 1957 when what was then one of the most backward countries in Europe, the USSR, was able to launch the first satellite into orbit ahead of the most advanced capitalist country. Only socialist planning accounts for this staggering achievement, when one considers the legacy of Czarist backwardness, imperialist encirclement, and the economic blockade imposed upon the USSR which to this day still exists to some extent.
This does not mean that the USSR has achieved military superiority overall over the U.S., but it does show that it has a tremendous potential which is frightening to the bourgeoisie – not because they fear military aggression by the USSR but because of its industrial and technological potentialities.
But this potential in industrial and technological development based on socialist concepts of planning can, as we stated in our earlier article, be more advantageously used for peaceful purposes. The turnaround from military to peaceful purposes is wholly consistent and harmonious with the planned economic system and socialist aspirations of the Soviet people.
It is otherwise with the military-industrial complex. And therein lies the main and fundamental social contradiction between the USSR and the imperialist countries as a whole.
Last updated: 11 May 2026