A negotiator of the nuclear age
When he headed the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, Smith proposed a direct Moscow–Washington link that met resistance from State and the military, yet once it became the 'hot line,' President Kennedy credited Smith with the original idea.
Gerard C. Smith was an American lawyer and nuclear-policy specialist who treated arms control and nonproliferation as problems of statecraft. As the U.S. lead negotiator at SALT I, he organized the practical work of limitation talks amid competing nuclear strategies, later recording their tensions and judgments in Doubletalk. He continued to oppose measures he believed would undermine the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, making his career a study in both managing and questioning the arms race.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1935Graduated from Yale College
- 1938Graduated from Yale Law School; practiced law in New York
- 1942–1945Procurement officer, U.S. Department of the Navy
- 1950–1954Special assistant to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
- 1954–1961State Department special assistant for atomic energy and Director of Policy Planning
- 1969–1973Director of ACDA and chief U.S. negotiator at SALT I
- 1977–1980Special presidential representative for nonproliferation
- 1981Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom
Related historical events
Running the SALT I Talks in the Shadow of the Back Channel
At the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) that opened in Helsinki on November 17, 1969, Smith, appointed by President Nixon, served simultaneously as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and chief U.S. negotiator, directing the working level of the talks. The sessions alternated between Helsinki and Vienna over several months, and in his opening statement he said that "the limitation of strategic arms is in the mutual interests of our country and the Soviet Union." From the start the two sides revealed wide differences over what counted as "strategic" weapons and over the asymmetries between their arsenals: the Soviet Union was rapidly expanding its heavy intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) forces, while the United States had programs under way to increase its warhead count substantially by deploying multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs).
The difficulty was internal as well as external. To break the impasse, Nixon and Kissinger bypassed the normal interagency process and shaped the basic framework through the private back channel Kissinger had established with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, without informing senior U.S. national security officials of its existence or substance. Smith thus had to negotiate the formal talks around a framework already settled elsewhere.
The interim SALT agreement and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, signed on May 26, 1972, froze certain offensive forces for five years and restricted ABM systems. They were the first limits on U.S. and Soviet strategic arms and opened a period of detente, but left strategic bombers and warhead numbers unrestricted and kept the path to MIRV deployment open. In his 1980 memoir Doubletalk Smith weighed the process's gains and limits soberly, concluding that it was better to have strategic arms under some international control than not.