They were quite unalike. Odell was much farther to the right than Cormack and had been governor of his state. Cormack just happened to like and trust the gum-chewing man from Waco. Somehow the ticket had worked; the voters went, by a narrow margin, for the man the press (wrongly) liked to compare with Woodrow Wilson, America ’s last professor-President, and the running mate who bluntly told Dan Rather:
“Ah don’t always agree with mah friend John Cormack but, hell, this is America and I’ll flatten any man who says he doesn’t have the right to speak his mind.”
And it worked. The combination of the arrow-straight New Englander, with his powerful and persuasive delivery, and the deceptively folksy Southwesterner took the vital black, Hispanic, and Irish votes and won. Since taking office Cormack had deliberately involved Odell in decision-making at the highest level. Now they sat opposite each other to discuss a treaty Cormack knew Odell disliked profoundly. Flanking the President were four other intimates: Jim Donaldson, Secretary of State; Bill Walters, the Attorney General; Hubert Reed of the Treasury; and Morton Stannard of Defense.
On either side of Odell were Brad Johnson, a brilliant black man from Missouri who had lectured in defense studies at Cornell and was now National Security Adviser, and Lee Alexander, Director of the CIA, who had replaced Judge William Webster a few months into Cormack’s incumbency. Alexander was there because, if the Soviets intended to breach the treaty terms, America would need rapid knowledge through her satellites and intelligence community with their in-place assets on the ground.
As the eight men read the final terms, none was in any doubt that this was one of the most controversial agreements the United States would ever sign. Already there was vigorous opposition on the right and from the defense-oriented industries. Back in 1988, under Reagan, the Pentagon had agreed to cut $33 billion in planned expenditures to produce a defense budget total of $299 billion. For the fiscal years 1990 through 1994, the services were told to cut planned expenditures by $37.1 billion, $41.3 billion, $45.3 billion, and $50.7 billion respectively. But that would only have limited spending growth. The Nantucket Treaty foresaw big decreases in defense expenditures, and if the growth cuts had caused problems, Nantucket was going to cause a furor.
The difference was, as Cormack stressed repeatedly, that the previous growth cuts had not been planned against actual cuts by the U.S.S.R. In Nantucket, Moscow had agreed to slash its own forces to an unheard-of degree. Moreover, Cormack knew the superpowers had little choice. Ever since he came to power he and Secretary of the Treasury Reed had wrestled with America ’s spiraling budget and trade deficits. They were heading out of control, threatening to shatter the prosperity not just of the United States but of the entire West. He had latched onto his own experts’ analyses that the U.S.S.R. was in the same position for different reasons, and put it to Mikhail Gorbachev straight: I need to cut back and you need to redivert. The Russian had taken care of the rest of the Warsaw Pact countries; Cormack had won over NATO-first the Germans, then the Italians, the smaller members, and finally the British. These, broadly, were the terms:
In land forces, the U.S.S.R. agreed to cut her standing army in East Germany-the potential invasion force westward across the central German plain-by half of her twenty-one combat divisions in all categories. They would be not disbanded but withdrawn back beyond the Polish-Soviet frontier and not brought west again. Over and above this, the U.S.S.R. would reduce the manpower of the entire Soviet Army by 40 percent.
“Comments?” asked the President. Stannard of Defense, who not unnaturally had the gravest reservations about the treaty-the press had already speculated about his resignation-looked up.
“For the Soviets this is the meat of the treaty, because their army is their senior service,” he said, quoting directly from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but not admitting it. “For the man in the street it looks fantastic; the West Germans already think so. But it’s not as good as it looks.
“For one thing, the U.S.S.R. cannot maintain one hundred and seventy-seven line divisions as at present without extensive use of her southern ethnic groups-I mean the Moslems-and we know they’d dearly love to disband the lot. For another, what really frightens our planners is not a rambling Soviet Army; it’s an army half that size but professionalized. A small professional army is much more use than a large oafish one, which is what they’ve got.”
“But if they’re back inside the U.S.S.R.,” countered Johnson, “they can’t invade West Germany. Lee, if they shifted them back via Poland into East Germany, would we fail to spot it?”
“Nope,” said the CIA chief with finality. “Apart from satellites, which can be fooled by covered trucks and trains, I believe we and the British have too many assets in Poland not to spot it. Hell, the East Germans don’t want to become a war zone either. They’d probably tell us themselves.”
“Okay, what do we give up?” asked Odell.
“Some troops, not a lot,” Johnson replied. “The Soviets withdraw ten divisions at fifteen thousand men each. We have three hundred and twenty-six thousand personnel in Western Europe. We cut to below three hundred thousand for the first time since 1945. At twenty-five thousand of us against a hundred and fifty thousand of them, it’s still good: six to one, and we were looking at four to one.”
“Yes,” objected Stannard, “but we also have to agree not to activate our two new heavy divisions, one armored and one mechanized infantry.”
“Cost savings, Hubert?” asked the President mildly. He tended to let others talk, listen carefully, make a few succinct and usually penetrating comments, and then decide. The Treasury Secretary supported Nantucket. It would make balancing his books a lot easier.
“Three-point-five billion the armored division, three-point-four billion the infantry,” he said. “But these are just start-up costs. After that, we save three hundred million dollars a year in running costs by not having them. And now that Despot is canceled, another seventeen billion dollars for the projected three hundred units of Despot.”
“But Despot is the best tank-busting system in the world,” protested Stannard. “Hell, we need it.”
“To kill tanks that have been withdrawn east of Brest-Litovsk?” asked Johnson. “If they halve their tanks in East Germany, we can cope with what we’ve got, the A-ten aircraft and the ground-based tank-buster units. Plus, we can build more static defenses with part of the savings. That’s allowed under the treaty.”
“The Europeans like it,” said Donaldson of State mildly. “They don’t have to reduce manpower, but they do see ten to eleven Soviet divisions disappearing in front of their eyes. It seems to me we win on the ground.”
“Let’s consider the sea battle,” suggested Cormack.
The Soviet Union had agreed to destroy, under supervision, half its submarine fleet; all its nuclear-powered subs in classes Hotel, Echo, and November, and all the diesel-electric Juliets, Foxtrots, Whiskeys, Romeos, and Zulus. But as Stannard was quick to point out, its old nuclear subs were already archaic and unsafe, constantly leaking neutrons and gamma rays, and the others scheduled to go were of old designs. After that the Russians could concentrate their resources and best men in the Sierra, Mike, and Akula classes, much better technically and therefore more dangerous.