Schlesinger Doctrine - Controversy

Controversy

The basic outline of the Schlesinger Doctrine remained in effect until the period of rapid disarmament in the 1980s, although it saw numerous modifications. Throughout this period it remained highly controversial for a variety of reasons.

The announcement of the Doctrine immediately caused problems during the SALT I negotiations. At the start of negotiations, the U.S. delegation had assured their Soviet counterparts that the U.S. was not seeking a counterforce ability, but the Schlesinger Doctrine clearly stated that they were. During the June 1974 summit, Leonid Brezhnev vehemently criticized the Doctrine as a threat to the Soviet's forces, whose parity was a key concept of the SALT negotiations. Schlesinger's concerns about the SALT process would eventually lead to his resignation in 1975.

Another concern was that while Schlesinger stated the U.S. would not invest in first strike weapons, through the 1970s and 1980s a number of weapon systems were developed that would be only be useful in a first strike scenario. The most obvious example was the AGM-86 ALCM cruise missile, a highly-accurate weapon designed primarily to attack hardened military targets. Observers both in the USSR and elsewhere, noted that such a weapon was only really useful in a "sneak attack" scenario, which would allow it to attack ICBM sites and thereby so reduce the Soviet's own counterforce abilities to render them impotent. In a MAD scenario, those targets would have already been hit by ICBMs or SLBMs.