Office of the Historian

252. Summary of Conclusions of a Special Coordination Committee Meeting1

Washington, July 2, 1980, 10:00–11:30 a.m.

SUBJECT

  • SCC Meeting on CTB

PARTICIPANTS

  • State

    • Deputy Secretary Warren Christopher
    • Reginald Bartholomew, Director Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs

  • Defense

    • Walter Slocombe, Deputy Under Secretary for Policy Planning

  • JCS

    • General David Jones
    • Lt. General John Pustay

  • DCI

    • [name not declassified] Deputy Director for Scientific Weapons Research

  • ACDA

    • Director Ralph Earle
    • Spurgeon Keeny, Deputy Director

  • Energy

    • Under Secretary Worth Bateman
    • Julio Torres, Special Assistant

  • OSTP

    • Director Frank Press
    • John Marcum, Senior Policy Analyst

  • White House

    • Zbigniew Brzezinski
    • David Aaron

  • NSC

    • General Jasper Welch
    • Benjamin Huberman

At the SCC Meeting on CTB today, a consensus was reached on four issues which do not involve significant changes in your current instructions but taken together will move us into a more defensible position for the upcoming CD and NPT Review Conferences. They will also enable us to seek some limited progress on verification consistent with your post-Afghanistan decision that CTB should continue at a slow pace. (C)

The first issue involved a long-standing dispute with JCS over whether the US should table a draft preamble text as have the UK and Soviets referring to the objective of halting testing “for all time” as well as other objectives from preambles of treaties to which we are party. The Chiefs were concerned that this could be inconsistent with the limited-duration treaty we are pursuing. We pointed out that our [Page 622] policy is protected fully by the operative duration and review conference provisions we are negotiating, and in the end, they agreed to tabling a slightly modified text referring to this as a long-term goal.2 (S)

There was also agreement on three related national seismic station (NSS) issues. Based on an interagency review of NSS technology transfer,3 it was agreed that a high-capacity tape recorder and a bubble memory should be replaced with less sensitive components. This will reinforce our tightened post-Afghanistan export controls and will involve only minimal impact on NSS availability and capability. Pending completion of this review, we had deferred any followup to the proposal we made last December to lend the Soviets an NSS prototype for joint testing and evaluation.4 Since this issue is now resolved, there was agreement that we should reaffirm this proposal as a means of keeping the pressure on the Russians for some progress on verification.5 (S)

The final point concerned continued UK intransigence in refusing your urging that they accept four NSSs (with three in the Southern Hemisphere), vice the one in Scotland they have agreed to. In an effort to make some progress on this issue, there was agreement that we should broaden the prototype offer to include loan of an NSS to the UK on the same basis as the USSR. As part of this offer, we should suggest that the UK install the NSS prototype in the Southern Hemisphere, thereby enabling them to show some flexibility in Geneva. We should continue to maintain as our eventual objective that they should accept four NSSs.6 (S)

  1. Source: Carter Library, National Security Council, Institutional Files, Box 114, SCC 325, CTB, 7/2/80. Secret. The meeting took place in the White House Situation Room. Brzezinski forwarded the Summary to Carter under cover of a July 3 memorandum. (Ibid.) The Department of Defense’s version of the meeting is in Memorandum For the Record, July 3; Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Harold Brown Papers, Box 82, CTB: Negotiation Issues 1979.↩
  2. In the right-hand margin, Carter wrote “ok.”↩
  3. See Document 246.↩
  4. See footnote 8, Document 245.↩
  5. In the right-hand margin, Carter wrote “ok.”↩
  6. In the right-hand margin, Carter wrote “ok.”↩