Workers World Vol. 19, No. 13
As we go to press, it has been announced that the strategic arms limitation talks (SALT) in Moscow have collapsed. This analysis, written a day earlier, explains the forces driving U.S. imperialism toward renewed military adventure and expanded weapons production.
March 29 – The arms negotiations in Moscow between the U.S. and the USSR are now only two days old. Judging by the way the leading capitalist newspapers are going about their reporting, public opinion is being prepared so that if the talks fail, the blame will seem to be all on the shoulders of the Soviet government.
For weeks now, the press and media have joined in a chorus that presents the arms talks as a matter of the gravest urgency. If they should collapse, it is implied, the arms race will be on. All stops will be pulled out and anything can happen.
All that need be added to round out this cheerful prognosis is that the existence of the human race itself is at stake.
The inevitable conclusion from all this is: rally round the flag – around Vance, Warnke, Schlesinger, and the entire Carter administration.
If an arms agreement with the USSR is of such urgency to the U.S., it is only proper to ask: What ever happened to the Vladivostok agreement? Before it was signed, it was also pictured in the press as a matter of the greatest urgency. What indeed happened to it?
It was respectfully signed by both the U.S. and the USSR. But the Senate failed to ratify it! As a matter of fact, it was never presented for ratification.
The Ford-Kissinger administration simply reneged on their agreement. They never really tried to get it passed in the Senate. Nor was there ever any campaign in the capitalist press to get it ratified.
One may ask, was it even necessary to get it ratified by the Senate? The popular misconception is that such an agreement, frequently misnamed a treaty, must be approved by two-thirds of the Senate according to the Constitutional provision.
But wait a minute. To make a war in Vietnam, Kampuchea or Laos, to carry out the more than 200 military adventures the U.S. has admitted to since World War II – those also require not only Senate ratification, but approval by both houses of Congress. Yet as experience has shown, Congress was not consulted, it never passed on those wars, and the little bit of noise made by Congressional liberals over this “technicality” never really made much of a difference.
So we see that to make war doesn’t need Congressional ratification – but an innocuous peace gesture (and that’s what the arms negotiations in the long run may really amount to) requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate.
The Senate for many, many decades has been referred to as a millionaires’ club. It is even more so now. The faces changed very little in the last election. A handful of the old guard have gone, but if anything it’s been the so-called liberals who have been whittled down. Senator Fulbright, former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, lost his seat in 1974 and is now gone and forgotten. And just recently Senate Majority leader Mike Mansfield, who had on occasion given lip service to a “softer” foreign policy and military stature, retired.
But, in addition, it would be utterly false to believe that the real power lied in the Senate, especially as concerns crucial matters of military and foreign policy, and particularly with regard to the USSR, China, and other socialist countries. No, this power is wielded by the executive branch of the government, by the White House, which above all includes the cornerstones of the military and the secret services. Which particular grouping predominates at a given moment is another matter.
If the capitalist establishment were really intent on a meaningful arms agreement but found a reluctant Senate, it could find a million ways for the President to legally and constitutionally get around it. The Roosevelt administration and its successors showed that time and again.
All that would have been necessary in the arms agreement consummated at Vladivostok was to have presented it as an agreement and not necessarily as a treaty. This would have obviated the necessity of presenting it to the Senate for ratification. If Ford and Carter were intent on getting such an agreement through, they could make it operational immediately. There would be no objection from the American people.
Of course the USSR could insist upon having a treaty in order to strengthen the significance of the agreement. But they ought to know that a bourgeois parliament is not a very reliable bulwark for carrying out agreements with an imperialist government.
The fact of the matter is that leaving the matter up to the Senate, which under the circumstances was bound not to ratify the agreement, was merely a ploy to delay the whole thing and get a greater military advantage over the USSR, thereby accelerating the arms race.
Most of the powerful Senators are intimately linked to the military-industrial complex. These is not one of them who ever dares to strongly attack the adventuristic and unbridled character of the military.
The “opposition” of such Senators as Proxmire and others is in reality a huge swindle. Their criticism never goes to the essence of fundamental policies but is on piddling issues which just serve as a platform for the liberals to dish out their brand of demagogy.
Where, for instance, is the big outcry against General George Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for his recent statements? His brutally frank and insolent leaks to the capitalist press reveal him to be a full-fledged, neo-fascist militarist.
He virtually dragged Congress through the mud the other day and then rubbed their noses in it. And what happened? Hardly a voice of protest from Capitol Hill.
Brown compared Congress to “kibitzers in a chess game who occasionally reach in and move a piece and thereby screw it all up.” Considering that one of the supposedly cherished virtues of an imperialist democracy is the responsibility of the military to the civilian arm of government, this statement is not merely outlandish. In reality it poses a grave threat to whatever democratic forms still remain in this country.
Brown also had some tough words in defense of the intelligence agencies that illegally open mail and spy on the people. “If any citizen of this country is so concerned about his mail being read,” he said,” “or is concerned about his presence at a meeting being noted, I’d say we ought to read his mail and we ought to know what the hell he has done.”
It is superfluous to recall his statements of earlier years which were not really directed against Israel but were blatantly anti-Semitic, or his virulently chauvinist attitude to the imperialist allies of the U.S.
What all this has to do with the arms negotiations is extremely important. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Brown has a lot to say about signing any agreement; Warnke is merely a negotiator.
It is highly doubtful that any agreement not satisfactory to the military will ever be signed or even presented for discussion. It would have to have the OK of the leading military figures representing the imperialist establishment, especially Brown.
Brown is “probably the outstanding military leader and strategist that we have in America today,” said Carter in the final campaign debate before he took office. (Washington Post*, Mar. 28, 1977) Unlike Ford, who publicly rebuked Brown once on his own behalf and a second time through former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Carter as of now has said absolutely nothing that would in any way indicate disapproval, either on Brown’s fundamental military outlook which is extremely adventuristic, or even on his outrageous fascist pronouncements.
And the capitalist press has had only the mildest and most timid criticism of Brown. (See the New York Times’ and Washington Post’s deliberately short and almost apologetic criticisms of Brown on Mar. 29, 1977.)
This is the aspect of the negotiations in Moscow that must be carefully borne in mind in the event the talks fail and a torrent of anti-Soviet propaganda engulfs the American public.
Even if an agreement should come forward, it by no means indicates that the weapons buildup and the expansion of the military-industrial complex will be at all reduced. Certain aspects of the arms race may be reduced or stopped. But this by no means signifies that the general expansion of the military-industrial complex of imperialism and its increasing military capability will in any way be cut back.
To do that would require substantial curtailment of military research and weapons development in the highly sophisticated fields of technology which the military has completely arrogated to itself. Such a curtailment would signify a reduction in a critical area of the productive forces of capitalist imperialism.
Therein lies the real problem. This they will not do. It is all well and good to vigorously pursue the objective of “turning the swords into ploughshares” in order to bring about peace and abundance. It is of course most urgently necessary to continuously and relentlessly push for converting the $120 billion defense budget into programs to reconstruct the woefully dilapidated great cities of the United States.
The capitalists would not need a great deal of urging if they could convert swords into ploughshares. The capitalist would be for renovating and reconstructing Harlem and Newark, Watts and St. Louis, and the cities as a whole – if they could thereby make the kind of profit they make producing military hardware.
That’s the point. It is the endless and relentless search for the highest, most exorbitant, most extortionate profits that impels the imperialists to roam the four corners of the earth and dump on the rest of the world military arms and equipment. It is the arms industry which brings profits of an untold magnitude. But it also lays the basis for the downfall of the imperialist system.
Just today, the second day of the negotiations between the U.S. and the USSR in Moscow, the Pentagon deliberately revealed that Carter, in his first extensive decision making on the U.S. role as arms merchant, has approved nearly $2 billion in military sales to NATO countries and other allies in Asia and the Middle East. About 25 other military sales were approved by President Carter only last week, just as Vance was getting ready to depart to Moscow. These sales totaled about $6 billion. (Washington Post, March 29, 1977)
How serious, then, is Carter’s proposal made in his UN address last week that the U.S. and the USSR, as well as all other countries, reduce the sale of arms to the rest of the world?
If there can be no self-restraint by the military-industrial complex even on this, which is a relatively minor issue and a very palpable, easily understood one, how can the military-industrial complex restrain itself on the much more expensive, death-dealing weapons systems which run into the tens and eventually into the hundreds of billions of dollars?
Indeed, it is quite impossible for imperialist finance capital to turn the military-industrial complex around and return it to civilian purposes. In the way of it all stands the relentless profit motive and the system of private ownership of the means of production which engenders the general anarchy of capitalist production.
It is also due, however, to the general political orientation of the ruling class which has its roots in economic conditions, in that they want to maintain the overall super-exploitation of oppressed people in the U.S.
It is different with the USSR. In spite of the monstrous growth of bureaucratism, the social system of the USSR can without much effort dismantle its military system which consumes so much of the socialist fruits of the labor of the Soviet workers, peasants, and intelligentsia. The social system of the USSR is based on a different mode of production than that which rules in the capitalist countries.
Three years of the current world capitalist crisis has been long enough to demonstrate that the anarchic social forces which have produced economic havoc in the capitalist countries do not prevail in the USSR. In the capitalist countries the economic crisis has brought about millions of unemployed and reduced the standard of living everywhere. Galloping inflation and grim rates of unemployment are on an upward curve.
There is no easy exit from the situation for the bourgeoisie; all that remains available to them are political-military solutions.
It is otherwise with the USSR. The economic system there and in the other socialist countries has not been affected by the capitalist crisis except as an external factor imported through economic relations with the West, which still dominates the world market.
This in turn, however, lends itself to more efficient socialist planning, which may not overcome all the external effects of the capitalist crisis abroad but would certainly reduce them. In addition, the progress of the economic system continues on a steady and consistent upward trend, even though, as in the past, there may be periods when inefficient planning and bureaucratic practices hinder it and cause it to occasionally falter.
It should be made obvious to all the workers in the capitalist countries and the world everywhere that the Soviet Union, for the reasons stated, is the one that needs to seek peace, needs no military adventures, and can only benefit by the reduction of armaments consistent with socialist defense against imperialist aggression.
*The Washington Post is a scab newspaper that recently broke the pressmen’s union and sent several union leaders to jail. We quote from it merely to indicate the source of our information.
Last updated: 11 May 2026