US businesses complained about President Carter’s Soviet policy — archives

MOSCOW, October 16. /TASS/. Major US businesses were dissatisfied with rising tensions in relations with the Soviet Union under President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), who updated the US nuclear doctrine to make it possible to carry out a pre-emptive nuclear strike, as evidenced by the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB) Chairman Yury Andropov’s memo to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party dated June 16, 1980.
A copy of the memo is kept at the Central Archives of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).
According to the FSB, relations between Moscow and Washington escalated once again during Carter’s tenure as US president. “Although the Soviet Union and the United States signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) in June 1979, Washington forced the NATO Council to make a decision in December of the same year to deploy US medium-range missiles to a number of Western European countries. The US Congress did not ratify START II,” the FSB pointed out in a statement.
On July 25, 1980, Carter signed Presidential Directive 59, a secret document clarifying the country’s updated nuclear doctrine, which provided for the potential start of a full-scale nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Then-US Secretary of Defense Harold Brown claimed that the directive did not enshrine the first strike strategy but his clarifications showed that the document was based on the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear strike, through which the US expected to win the nuclear war.
“There is a growing perception in the business community that the further raising of tensions in the world is far too dangerous a game, which can lead to devastating consequences,” the memo says, citing Vice President of the Board at General Electric Edward Hood.
The Carter administration was pressuring corporations to cut business ties with the Soviet Union, threatening to deny them defense contracts. The memo cites some businessmen who said in informal conversations that “the current abnormal situation in US-Soviet relations cannot continue for long.” Notably, many entrepreneurs said “not all American firms are interested in producing weapons.”
“Generally, judging by numerous conversations with members of business and political circles, there is an increasing understanding in the US that relations with the Soviet Union need to be normalized, and hope that the situation will change for the better after the election, regardless of who wins the White House,” the KGB chief said in his memo.
Republican candidate Ronald Reagan won the US presidential vote in November 1980.