Battling The Bomb

A nuclear device "not much more than twice the size of this table," Thomas Graham, Jr., notes over lunch one day, "could level Washington from here past the Beltway, in all directions."

It was a table for two, looking across a grassy square at the White House. "I’ve held one in my hand, about the size of a basketball," Graham adds. That one, a crude nuclear land mine, could wipe out ten square blocks or so.

Graham has been using the tools of the law to keep that sort of thing from happening for 23 years at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, including 14 years as ACDA’s general counsel. Most recently, since becoming acting director when the Bush administration left office in January, he has steered the agency with signal success through two high-stakes battles.

The arms control job is not getting any easier, what with thousands of warheads rattling around in a Russia threatened by anarchy and racked by organized crime, with thousands more in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, with Pakistan already boasting nuclear weapons, with North Korea and Iran seeking to build them or buy them on the black market.

"Americans should feel more threatened now than they were during the Cold War," Graham explains in another conversation, in his office. "Whereas a full-scale thermonuclear war is now unlikely in the extreme, it never was very likely. On the other hand, the prospect of some terrorist group or criminal organization acquiring a nuclear device and smuggling one or more into an American city is much greater than it was during the Cold War." Take note, New Yorkers.

Graham drove home this deadly danger of nuclear proliferation during two policy debates this year, in which he and more powerful allies in Congress prevailed over high-level Clinton political appointees at the Defense and State Departments.

The first of these debates centered on a push by the Pentagon and the rest of the national security establishment to conduct a series of new underground nuclear weapons tests. Graham argued that such testing would severely undermine U.S. efforts to dissuade other nations from seeking to join the nuclear bomb club. In July President Bill Clinton adopted the position Graham had advocated by extending a U.S. moratorium on testing and by calling on other nuclear powers to do the same. "I believe it’s a historic watershed," says Graham, "in that this decision probably means the end of all nuclear weapons testing everywhere, forever. It’s potentially the most important issue I’ve ever worked on."

The second debate involved a State Department effort to dismantle and absorb the quasi-independent arms control agency. In staving off that threat, with the help of others (including, this time, the Defense Department), Graham contended convincingly that ACDA’s role as a single-minded advocate of nonproliferation and arms control was a useful counterweight to the State Department’s "proper" institutional tendency to subordinate such interests to its more immediate diplomatic goals.

The self-effacing, 59-year-old career government lawyer stresses that his debates with powerful Clinton appointees have been "collegial and professional" – especially when compared with his wrangles during the 1980s with Reagan appointees, including Edwin Meese III, Robert McFarlane, Edward Rowny, Richard Perle, Abraham Sofaer, Caspar Weinberger, and George Shultz. Graham’s lonely insistence that certain tenets of Reaganite gospel conflicted with binding arms control treaties almost cost him his job then. Now Reagan and his men are gone. But Tom Graham is still at ACDA, fighting the good fight for arms control.

This is a story about how a Harvard law graduate, after three years in international banking law at a big Manhattan firm, got into the business of drafting some of the most momentous and complex arms control deals in history; about how, at a small agency perennially buffeted by ideological storms, he has outlasted five presidents and nine politically appointed ACDA directors, while shuttling between interagency struggles in Washington and negotiating sessions in Moscow, Geneva, Brussels, and Vienna; and about how he has accumulated a bipartisan reservoir of respect as one of the world’s leading authorities on the law of arms control, and as a career bureaucrat with the courage to take on more powerful political appointees.

"Tom has been an indefatigable warrior for the true and just in the twenty-year-long battle against Soviet expansionism and for reduction in the risk of war through equitable and verifiable arms control measures," Paul Nitze, the elder statesman who directed the Reagan administration team (including Graham) negotiating cuts in medium-range missiles in Europe, said in a 1991 testimonial. "Tom has been at the center of these controversies longer than anyone else. He has known the history, the semantics, the ambiguities, the politics of these issues. Through it all he has kept his objectivity and common sense."

Kenneth Adelman, the Reagan-appointed conservative who was ACDA’s director (and Graham’s boss) from 1983 through 1988, adds that Graham’s position "was an ideological hot seat, and to go from Paul Warnke [President Jimmy Carter’s first ACDA director] to Ken Adelman is a big jump. But Tom’s manner was so pleasant, and his work was so professional, and his historical knowledge was so deep, that every ACDA director wanted to have him right there when decisions were being made."

Graham traveled a circuitous route to ACDA during the decade after he finished Harvard Law School in 1961. He moved from a judicial clerkship in Washington, D.C., to jobs with a congressional committee, then with the Comptroller of the Currency, and then with law firms in his native Louisville and in Manhattan, where he was an associate at Shearman & Sterling from 1966 to 1969.

Graham says he enjoyed the big firm’s practice, "but it didn’t seem to me as though that kind of career was best for me." So after working in Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, he grabbed a chance to get a civil service job as a lawyer for the U.S. Air Force. "I hoped that might lead me toward work in public international law," Graham recalls. And so it did. In 1970 Graham snagged a vacancy in the ACDA general counsel’s office.

DOING DEALS WITH THE RUSSIANS

Graham’s original duties focused on congressional relations. But soon he was deeply engaged in the negotiation and drafting of arms control treaties with the Soviet Union. He served as chief legal adviser to a succession of U.S. delegations, from the SALT II talks in the 1970s down to the recent U.S. efforts to buy (for use in fueling nuclear power plants) enriched uranium from Russian nuclear weapons, which are being dismantled under arms control agreements that Graham helped draft.

All this has involved dealing with a colorful cast of Russians and others, often in Geneva, where Graham spent about a quarter of his time between 1975 and 1989. Meanwhile, Graham has been running his shop of almost a dozen lawyers at ACDA in Washington; coordinating (and sometimes grappling) with the State and Defense Departments, with the White House staff, and with member of Congress and their staffs; and teaching arms control negotiation seminars, currently at Georgetown University’s Law Center and School of Foreign Service. As ACDA’s acting director since January 20, he has been running the entire 250-person agency. (As this goes to press. President Clinton reportedly plans to nominate John Holum of O’Melveny & Myers to be ACDA’s new director.)

"In 1992 I went to Moscow live times, for example," Graham says when asked to sketch his routine. "I was in Vienna nonstop from September 1989 to January 1990, and then, between January 1990 and November 1990, probably a third of the time." He served there as legal adviser to the U.S. delegation negotiating a multilateral treaty to curb conventional armed forces in Europe.

Graham was a principal drafted that treaty, as well as of the 1979 SALT II agreement, of the 1987 t…

A nuclear device "not much more than twice the size of this table," Thomas Graham, Jr., notes over lunch one day, "could level Washington from here past the Beltway, in all directions."

DOING DEALS WITH THE RUSSIANS

Graham was a principal drafted that treaty, as well as of the 1979 SALT II agreement, of the 1987 treaty to curb intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, and of the START I and START II treaties that were signed by the U.S. and Russia in 1991 and this January.

The legal and technical problems posed by such negotiations dwarf those presented by, say, the complex corporate merger deals for which Wall Street lawyers are so richly rewarded. The still-unratified START I treaty, for example, is a 1,000-page document – "a unique international contract that deals in detail with weapons of mass destruction and the security of two major powers," in the words of Graham’s friend Jack Mendelsohn, deputy director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based nonprofit group supporting arms control.

Graham has done a lot more than drafting. "His warm and engaging personality enabled him to establish very useful relations with the members of the Soviet SALT delegation," Warnke recalled in a 1991 letter he wrote in connection with a public service award given to Graham by his Princeton University undergraduate classmates. "On several occasions, our first indication of a significant change in a Soviet position was a sideline conversation between Tom and a lawyer member of the Soviet learn."

Graham recalls one Russian negotiator with special fondness – "a guy named Victor Karpov, an enormously capable individual who was nevertheless, from time to time, in an alcoholic haze." Once, Graham recalls, he was told that Karpov had been picked up by police "in the garage of an apartment building in Geneva, dancing around a car with a bottle in his hand and an attractive girl in the car. But somehow he survived all that, because of his ability and his connections. He would be periodically sent back to Moscow to be dried out and then he would come back. A very interesting and intelligent character."

WRANGLING WITH REAGANITES

Warnke, a liberal Democrat, promoted Graham to general counsel of ACDA in 1977. When the Reagan team took over the government in 1981, Graham was viewed with suspicion. This was not because he was some kind of peacenik. Indeed, Graham was a Republican, with credentials from the 1968 Nixon campaign. He publicly opposed such dovish fads as the nuclear freeze, on the ground that the U.S. needed to improve its arsenal to give the Soviets an incentive to negotiate. But "just being somebody who was in favor of arms control," Graham recalls, "automatically put me in trouble."

His standing among Reagan loyalists was not improved by an early clash with then-White House counselor Edwin Meese III. That was in 1981, when Graham prepared a memo asserting that the U.S. had an international law obligation to abide by the 1979 SALT II agreement unless and until it formally renounced the unratified treaty. Graham thereby contradicted a public statement by Meese that "there is no legal or moral commitment to abide by" SALT II.

In 1983 Graham was described as "smart" but "left-leaning" in an internal Reagan administration memo sent by Edward Rowny. the archconservative who was Reagan’s strategic arms negotiator. The wording of the memo, which leaked into The press, suggested that the principal evidence of leftist tendencies was that Graham (then ACDA’s top congressional liaison) was "closely associated with" the staff of Senate majority leader Howard Baker, Jr., who later became Reagan’s chief of staff.

"Many members of the Senate thought it was almost beyond hilarity that anyone could be left-leaning because he spent too much time with Howard Baker," Graham says with a laugh. The Rowny memo, which also took potshots at 17 other arms control officials, inspired somebody at the agency to print up T-shirts with a target on them, saying "ACDA Hit List."

When Rowny was summoned by The Senate Foreign Relations Committee to explain the memo, Graham recalls, "in an ironic twist of fate, I was assigned by the White House as the person to manage Ed’s appearance…. So I dutifully prepped Ed for his hearing, and went up with him, and sat next to him for the entire hearing." When it ended, Graham walked across the room to say hello to Cran Montgomery, Howard Baker’s chief legislative aide. "As I was saying hello," Graham recalls, "five other foreign relations committee staffers rushed up and said, ëAha! We caught you!’ "

"A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE"

Not all of the Reaganites were suspicious of Graham. He won the confidence of Max Kampelman, who headed a Reagan administration team that conducted a series of key arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union, as well as that of Adelman and Nitze. When Kampelman was starling work in early 1985, then-secretary of State George Shultz urged him to make use of Graham’s talents. "What [Shultz] conveyed to me," Kampelman recalls, "was that [Graham] was the best lawyer, certainly in the business of arms control, in the building."

But less than two years later, Shultz was gunning for Graham, who had taken a career-threatening stand against a push by the Reagan high command to gut the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972.

Graham first objected at an interagency meeting in September 1985, when Richard Perle, a high-level Pentagon official who was deeply hostile to the arms control process, unveiled a proposed new, "broad" interpretation of the ABM Treaty. This reinterpretation would free the U.S. to conduct tests of the proposed space-based antimissile systems that were the heart of the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as the "Star Wars" program, which President Reagan was touting fantastically as a kind of impenetrable astrodome shield against Soviet missiles.

Graham told Perle he was wrong.. Soon the career bureaucrat found himself lighting the lop officials of the State and Defense Departments and the White House, they all embraced the broad interpretation championed by Perle and Abraham Sofaer, a former federal district judge who was then The State Department legal adviser and is now in Hughes Hubbard & Reed’s D.C. office.

Between September 1985 and January 1987, Graham wrote live memos contending that the new interpretation contradicted the clear meaning of the ABM Treaty’s plain language, its negotiating history, and the subsequent practice of the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

"People were furious at him," recalls Adelman, Graham’s boss and defender at the time. Some wanted his head, especially after a vague reference to Graham’s work on the issue leaked into The New York Time’s in early 1987. At one high-level meeting (at which Graham was not present), Adelman recalls, "George Shultz accused Tom Graham of leaking a memo. We were in the Situation Room sitting in front of the president. And it made me mad enough to tell the secretary that if he had any proof, I would like to have that proof and would take appropriate action, but that I thought it was a pretty irresponsible thing to say if he didn’t have proof. It did not strengthen my relationship with Shultz. It was a very bum rap."

Shultz had no proof. (He says through a spokeswoman that he has "no memory of tie incident.") Nor did the congressional conservatives and others who sought to use the leak charge (which Graham denied) to discredit him and his views.

But Graham’s accusers made his life uncomfortable. "That was a very, very tense period," he recalls, "because I was the only official in the entire U.S. government who spoke up for the traditional interpretation" of the ABM Treaty. (A senior Defense Department lawyer also agreed, but his memorandum was suppressed inside the Pentagon.) To Graham, "it was a matter of principle"?of law. But to conservative Reaganites, it was a test of loyalty to the president.

"It got very nasty," recalls John Rhinelander, a partner with Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge, who had been legal adviser to the ABM Treaty delegation and who himself assailed the Sofaer reinterpretation from outside the government. "Other people, once they saw how strongly the breeze was blowing, would have folded their hands and let the administration roll.ÖTom was accused of disloyalty; there were allegations of breaches of confidence; there were inspector general investigations. Tom held on through two years of absolute hell and was vindicated right up and down the line."

Graham’s objections, which he circulated to top national security officials, helped derail a Defense Department push in early 1987 to get President Reagan to commit himself in principle to deployment of space-based antimissile weapons. Graham’s lonely stand may also have helped spur Congress later that year to block any testing contrary to the traditional view of the ABM Treaty. And this July, Graham had the distinct pleasure of notifying Congress on the Clinton administration’s behalf that it had formally reversed the Reaganite reinterpretation.

Graham had smoother sailing under President Bush. Graham’s help in negotiating and drafting the historic succession of arms control agreements that accompanied the end of the Cold War won him praise from James Baker, Bush’s secretary of state, for his "keen judgment, legal and arms control expertise, and sharp pencil." Graham was also given the honor of handing the START II Treaty documents to President Bush for signing at his Moscow summit with Russian president Boris Yeltsin on January 3 of this year.

SAVING THE ARMS CONTROL AGENCY

The Bush-Baker State Department handed Graham a big problem on its way out the door: It issued a report suggesting that ACDA should be abolished and folded into the State Department, to streamline the arms control bureaucracy and save money. This suggestion was adopted with surprising alacrity by the Clinton State Department’s transition team late last year and by the State Department’s top leadership after Clinton took office.

ACDA’s political clout had already been severely eroded over the years as State had increasingly taken the lead on arms control matters. Now State Department officials were arguing that ACDA was a superfluous bureaucratic backwater whose principal mission had been negotiating big arms control deals with a Soviet Union that no longer existed, and that State and other agencies could handle future arms control treaty-making, monitoring, and non-proliferation matters.

Graham vigorously opposed this effort to dismantle ACDA. He told the Clinton White House and Congress that letting State absorb his agency would be a formula for sacrificing the nation’s critical long-term interest in arms control and nonproliferation to the more immediate diplomatic and political goals that naturally preoccupy the State Department – and for burying dissenting voices on arms control issues so deep in the bureaucracy that they would not be heard by the president or his top advisers.

Although Graham characterizes this dispute as a friendly one, it put him in a somewhat awkward position. His entire agency is housed in the State Department building. (Indeed, the huge, high-ceilinged, fifth-floor director’s office that he now occupies was the secretary of State’s office until 1960.) And while ACDA is theoretically an independent agency under the 1961 act of Congress that gave it birth, Graham stresses that it must cooperate closely with State and can accomplish little unless the White House wants it to.

Graham’s side won the debate over ACDA’s future in early June, thanks to the support of powerful members of Congress and of the Defense and Energy Departments, and to a convincing rebuttal of State’s claims that abolishing ACDA would save over $20 million a year.

HELPING TO HALT NUCLEAR TESTING

Secretary of State Warren Christopher not only backed away from the State Department’s effort to take over ACDA; in what Graham calls "a good and forward-looking settlement," he also agreed to support legislation conferring new powers on the independent arms control agency, to equip it better for the arms control issues of the post-Cold War world. These issues include the ominous proliferation of biological and chemical weapons, which Graham and his colleagues are seeking to contain behind such parchment barriers as the Chemical Weapons Convention that nearly 150 nations have signed since January.

According to Graham admirers in the arms control community, ACDA survived at least in part because of its exemplary performance since he became acting director, and because of the reputation for expertise and balanced, apolitical judgment that he, perhaps more than anyone else at ACDA, embodies.

In particular, says Jack Mendelsohn of the Arms Control Association, on the issue of whether the administration should henceforth observe a comprehensive ban on all nuclear testing, "ACDA played out beautifully the role that most of its supporters said it would be good to have and useful to retain."

Graham and ACDA were initially alone among government agencies in stubbornly opposing efforts this year by the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department, and the Energy Department’s Nuclear Weapons Laboratories to proceed with limited underground nuclear tests that had been set to resume this summer. Graham and allies in Congress on the issue stressed that such U.S. testing, and the resumption by other nuclear powers that would inevitably follow, could destroy any chance of persuading other nations to extend their commitments to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968. That treaty’s future, and the hope of containing the spread of nuclear weapons, hang in the balance pending what Graham calls an "immensely important" international conference in May 1995 on extending the treaty.

"Beginning in February," recalls Graham, "I took the position that the nuclear moratorium should be extended as long as the other four nuclear weapons states showed comparable restraint. At first it seemed to me probably more of an exercise in option preservation for the president than [an expectation of] actually winning the debate."

Graham argued for his "no-first-test" position, as he called it, against a phalanx of national security agencies at two sub-Cabinet meetings, and, later, at two Cabinet-level meetings, against the heads of those agencies: Les Aspin, the Defense secretary; Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Warren Christopher. These were no pushovers. "All of the involved agencies presented cogent arguments for their positions,’ Graham recalls. But with strong backing in Congress, Graham’s "no-first-test" approach gradually gained support.

On July 3 President Clinton canceled nine proposed underground nuclear explosions, announced a moratorium of at least 15 months on such testing, and called for a permanent international ban.

"In effect," says Graham, "President Clinton is saying the U.S. will not be the first to test nuclear weapons. It is probable that all other nations will follow suit. It is a decision by the president for which history will always remember him. It is comparable to, and perhaps even more important than, President Kennedy’s decision some thirty years ago proclaiming that the U.S. would not be the first to test nuclear weapons in the atmosphere.

"Thirty years from now." Graham says, "historians may well see this decision as having marked the turning point from the Cold War to the New World Order, which will gradually have become more orderly. If we had gotten it wrong, historians might have seen it as marking the point when the New World Order started getting more and more disorderly, and fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, you name it, nations got nuclear weapons."

Soon Graham will have to vacate the enormous director’s office to make room for another incoming boss – his tenth. In the meanwhile, he says, "I feel pretty good about things. I was able to run the agency during a period when I was able to first, save the agency; second, help lead the government toward the cessation of nuclear weapons testing; and third, help correct the Reagan administration’s reinterpretation of the ABM Treaty."

Looking back further, over 23 years as an arms controller, Graham adds – more convincingly than many a lawyer enthusing about his career – "I’ve loved every minute of it, from start to finish".

Stuart Taylor, Jr.

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