Clinton’s Reckless Nuclear Agenda Revealed? Study Co-Authored By Candidate For Top Pentagon Job Is Alarming

(Washington, D.C.): Last month, the
National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
Committee on International Security and
Arms Control issued a report entitled The
Future of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy.
This study advocating a series of highly
controversial actions with respect to the
American nuclear deterrent — steps that,
taken together, could have the result
effectively of unilaterally disarming the
United States — might have been
dismissed as just another polemic by
individuals who are by and large
“the usual suspects” when it
comes to anti-nuclear agitation href=”97-D96.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
but for one signatory: Rose
Gottemoeller, President
Clinton’s former Director for Russian,
Ukrainian and Eurasian Affairs at the
National Security Council and his
reported choice to fill the long-vacant
position of Assistant Secretary of
Defense for International Security
Policy.

The position that Ms. Gottemoeller
hopes to fill at the Pentagon has
traditionally been the Department of
Defense’s senior position with day-to-day
responsibility for U.S. nuclear weapons
policy. Her endorsement of the NAS study,
at a minimum, demands careful
consideration by the Senate Armed
Services Committee which would be obliged
to consider the Gottemoeller nomination. More
importantly, it should serve as a warning
that the views, judgments and
recommendations contained in this
document may be more consistent than is
widely recognized with the policies of
the Clinton Administration concerning the
future of U.S. nuclear weaponry.

A Bill of Appalling
Particulars

The following are among the most
important — and dubious — of the
Gottemoeller et.al. study’s
recommendations:

Proposal: Begin Immediate
Negotiations on START III

The National Academy of Sciences
study claims that the best way to deal
with the intransigence of the Russian
Duma with respect to ratification of the
START II Treaty⁽²⁾
is by immediately starting negotiations
on a new accord that would promise to
“correct” START II’s perceived
deficiencies from the Duma’s point of
view. (These include most of the
provisions that commended the Treaty to
the United States and were used to argue
for its ratification.)

Such a
recommendation misses the larger point: Russia
has come to place increasing
reliance upon its nuclear forces
as its conventional military capabilities
have rapidly eroded. Neither the Duma nor
the Yeltsin government evinces real
interest in reducing the size and
offensive capabilities of the Russian
nuclear arsenal. Such an attitude is
hardly surprising insofar as the
intimidating effect of the Kremlin’s
residual nuclear threat translates into
virtually the only grounds for
considering Russian policy preferences
— to say nothing of making the sorts of
extraordinary political, strategic and
economic concessions that have
characterized Clinton Administration
policy toward Russia in recent years. href=”97-D96.html#N_3_”>⁽³⁾

Whatever the rationale, the reality is
that — although the block obsolescence
facing many front-line Russian strategic
weapon systems⁽⁴⁾
would seem to argue for Moscow to be
anxious for agreements that would
foreclose the option to undertake
expensive modernization programs — in
practice Moscow seems determined to
retain the latitude to keep at least
START I-size forces.

What the Kremlin evidently
appreciates, moreover, is that the
mere process of negotiating new
agreements prompts reductions in U.S.
strategic arms, even if Russia fails to
ratify, implement or comply with the
resulting treaty obligations.
Pentagon planners have repeatedly built
their budgets for strategic forces on the
assumption that American forces will be
reduced pursuant to successive arms
control accords — including some in
prospect. This gives rise to enormous
pressure from a cash-strapped American
military to implement the anticipated
reductions whether the Russians are
doing so or not. The net result
tends to be an attenuating U.S. nuclear
force posture relative to that of Russia
— an arrangement that clearly suits the
Kremlin. Any recommendation, like the
NAS’ concerning START III that tends to
reward Russia for its bad faith and
reinforces this pattern, is unlikely to
produce desirable results in the future.

Proposal: Limit Accountable
Warheads

The NAS study argues that
future arms control efforts should shift
from focusing on (relatively verifiable)
limitations on nuclear delivery vehicles
(i.e., land- and sea-based launchers for
intercontinental-range missiles and
strategic bombers) to (extremely
unverifiable) limits on nuclear warheads.
Ms. Gottemoeller and Company claim that
such a focus would “minimize the
reversibility of reductions and diminish
the possibility of rapid breakout.”

In point of fact, this proposal
would entail levels of transparency that
would almost certainly work
asymmetrically — and to the detriment of
American security interests. In
the United States, extremely sensitive
information concerning the status, design
and vulnerabilities of nuclear weapons
would likely be made available to the
Russians. For its part, the Kremlin can
be expected to be as cagey, not to say
duplicitous, as ever about the truth
concerning the exact whereabouts, numbers
and characteristics of Russian nuclear
weaponry.

Worse yet, even if Moscow were equally
forthcoming and candid about its arsenal,
measures designed to
“minimize the reversibility of
reductions and diminish the possibility
of rapid breakout” clearly have
quite different effects on a nation that
has essentially lost its capacity to
produce in a timely way significant
quantities of new nuclear weapons and a
nation that has not: One will
have minimal capability promptly to
reverse reductions discovered to have
been ill-advised; the other will retain
ample capability to “breakout”
of a reductions regime. Thanks to the
policies pursued by the U.S. government
in recent years, the former describes the
situation in the United States. It no
longer has, as Russia does, hot
production lines for nuclear weapons and
the capacity to generate additional
“special nuclear materials,”
notably tritium. When combined with the
virtual certainty that Moscow will cheat
on any future arms control obligations,
as it has repeatedly done in the past —
especially with respect to those
obligations that are inherently difficult
to verify — this asymmetrical situation
is a formula for very undesirable
results.

Proposal: De-alert Nuclear
Forces

The NAS team recommends degrading the
“operational and technical readiness
of nuclear weapons for use” as a
means of “decreas[ing] the chance of
erroneous launch of nuclear weapons or a
launch in response to a spurious or
incorrectly interpreted indication of
impending attack.”

As has
increasingly come to be the case with the
agenda of contemporary arms control
activists, this proposal
identifies a real problem — the danger
of Russian “loose nukes” (i.e.,
Moscow’s evidently deteriorating command
and control of its nuclear arsenal) —
and proposes a “solution” that
will have an assured effect only on American
defensive capabilities which are not
the problem. href=”97-D96.html#N_5_”>⁽⁵⁾
With its stocks of
“non-deployed” (and
unaccounted-for) intercontinental-range
missiles, mobile launchers and nuclear
warheads, Russia could retain substantial
capability to launch strategic nuclear
strikes even if other elements of its
arsenal were genuinely
“de-alerted.”

What is more, if past experience is
any guide, the negotiating process
leading to a “de-alerting”
accord will produce, at Russian
insistence, various alternative means of
reducing the continuous alert posture of
the two sides’ nuclear forces. The United
States tends to choose the most
verifiable and irreversible; the Kremlin
tends to opt for those that are most
ambiguous and immaterial. Here again, the
result will surely be less, not greater,
security for the United States.

Proposal: Perpetuate
American Vulnerability to Missile
Attack

Ms. Gottemoeller and her
colleagues subscribe to the orthodoxy
that American vulnerability to missile
attack — from all quarters — is not
only desirable in its own right but also
an unalterable precondition to Russian
adherence to existing arms reduction
agreements and Moscow’s willingness to
negotiate new ones. The NAS study
concluded that:

“The [1972] Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty must remain the
‘cornerstone of strategic
stability’ as it was described by
Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin at
the conclusion of the Helsinki
Summit. The ABM Treaty is by no
means a relic of the Cold War
thinking as some assert. On the
contrary, it remains a logical
adjunct of the continuing reality
of offense dominance in conflicts
involving nuclear weapons.”

The authors nonetheless agree that
defending other nations and U.S. forces
overseas against attacks from
shorter-range ballistic missiles is
“desirable.”

As the Center
has repeatedly noted in the past, href=”97-D96.html#N_6_”>⁽⁶⁾
the post-Cold War world is one in which
the United States clearly cannot afford
to remain any more vulnerable to
ballistic missile attack than can its
allies and forward-deployed troops. Ironically,
the case for the U.S. promptly
to deploy an effective, global missile
defense is made — at least implicitly,
and certainly unintentionally — by the
authors of the NAS study.

For one thing, the concerns expressed
in the study about the dangers of
accidental or unauthorized Russian
missile launches at the United States
actually argue for the creation of an
American insurance policy. This is
particularly true since the existing
Chinese capabilities to launch missiles
at the United States, and those emerging
elsewhere around the world, will clearly
be unaffected even if an effective
“de-alerting” agreement could
be fashioned and implemented with the
Kremlin. The more irrational the actors
controlling such capabilities, the less
certain becomes the prospect that they
will be deterred from attacking the
United States by the threat of nuclear
retaliation.

Then, there is the whole question of
what happens should the United States
decide to eliminate its nuclear deterrent
altogether, as the National Academy’s
committee urges (see below). While the
NAS study confidently declares that,
“In a world in which the number of
offensive nuclear arms is reduced
drastically and the role of nuclear
weapons is diminished, the ABM Treaty
will continue to play a crucial
role,” it is not self-evident that
the “continuing reality of offense
dominance” will apply should nuclear
weapons be “prohibited.” The
United States would clearly want to have
the means of protecting against the sorts
of “illegal” nuclear weapons
that even the NAS team acknowledges will
exist in a “nuclear free”
world.

Proposal: Renounce the
Policy Option of ‘First-Use’ of
Nuclear Weapons

The National Academy of
Science’s committee argues that “the
United States should adopt no-first-use
of nuclear weapons as its declaratory
policy at an early date.” It goes on
to observe almost as an afterthought the
real problem with such a recommendation:
“Changing to a no-first-use policy
will, of course, require consultation
with allies to reassure them that the
United States will meet, by non-nuclear
means, its obligations to come to their
aid in the event of a non-nuclear attack
against them.”

Under
circumstances when the U.S. ability to
come to the aid of its allies with
conventional power is being steadily
diminished by force structure cuts, the
requirements of myriad peacekeeping and
humanitarian missions, lack of
modernization and maintenance and
over-extended personnel, the
United States needs, if anything, to
maximize the credibility of its overall
deterrent posture — including
the prospect of nuclear retaliation in
the face of attacks on its allies.
Unfortunately, successive American
administrations have already added to the
considerable uncertainty about the
reliability of U.S. treaty commitments
with various (and sometimes conflicting)
“negative security guarantees.”

In this connection it is worth calling
to mind two recent experiences: 1) A few
months back, then-Secretary of Defense
William Perry felt constrained to
intimate that a nuclear weapon might be
used to destroy an underground chemical
weapons factory in Libya. This threat may
have contributed to the reported
cessation of work on that facility. And
2) Saddam Hussein is widely believed to
have been dissuaded from authorizing
Iraqi use of chemical and biological
weapons against allied forces in the Gulf
War by his conviction that such use would
have precipitated U.S. nuclear
retaliation. It is far from clear that
U.S. interests would have been served had
the opportunity to achieve these
desirable results without actually
using nuclear weapons been
foreclosed by the renunciation of a
willingness to credibly threaten such
first-use.

Proposal: Eventually
Prohibit All Nuclear Weapons

Rose Gottemoeller and her co-authors
argue that their initial objective of:

“…Achiev[ing] U.S.-Russian
reductions to a mutually agreed
level of about 1,000 total
warheads each should not
represent the final level for
nuclear arms reductions. There
will still be powerful reasons to
continue down to a level of a few
hundred nuclear warheads on each
side, with the other three
declared nuclear powers at lower
levels or with no remaining
nuclear forces.” href=”97-D96.html#N_7_”>⁽⁷⁾
(Emphasis added.)

They go on to assert that there are
circumstances under which the
“prohibition” of nuclear
weapons would, “on balance…enhance
the security of the United States and the
rest of the world.”

Interestingly,
this highly debatable assertion is
undercut by the National Academy
committee’s own words:

“It is not clear today how
or when [comprehensive nuclear
disarmament] could be
achieved….Even the most
effective verification system
that could be envisioned would
not produce complete confidence
that a small number of nuclear
weapons had not been hidden or
fabricated in secret. More
fundamentally, the knowledge of
how to build nuclear weapons
cannot be erased from the human
mind, and the capacity of states
to build such weapons cannot be
eliminated. Even if every
nuclear warhead were destroyed,
the current nuclear weapons
states, and a growing number of
other technologically advanced
states would be able to build new
weapons within a few months or a
few years of a national decision
to do so.”
(Emphasis added)

Elsewhere in the report the authors
actually go so far as to fall back on the
prospect that “inherent nuclear
capabilities to rebuild” dismantled
nuclear arsenals “could act as a
deterrent to the outbreak of major
wars” in the event they turn out to
be wrong about the peaceableness of a
“nuclear-free” world.

Since
even the architects of this report cannot
envision a way to achieve a total nuclear
ban, it is dangerous and irresponsible to
lend credibility to such a goal.
Wiser heads argue for recognizing that —
under present and foreseeable
circumstances — nuclear states must plan
on retaining a credible nuclear arsenal
and reject policies that would have the
direct or indirect effect of making it
problematic to do so.

For example, C. Paul Robinson,
the director of Sandia National
Laboratories, and Kathleen C.
Bailey, a senior fellow at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
recently noted that, “Regardless of
how one feels about nuclear weapons…it
is the case that the United States still
faces threats that can be best deterred
— and perhaps only deterred — by the
tremendous destructive power of nuclear
weapons.”⁽⁸⁾
And in recent congressional testimony, a
man who was perhaps the most
distinguished occupant of the position to
which Ms. Gottemoeller aspires, former
Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard
Perle, observed that: “Our
possession of nuclear weapons does far
more to discourage proliferation than to
encourage it, since it reassures our
friends and allies that the protection we
afford them is ultimately backed up by
nuclear weapons.”

The Bottom Line

The otherwise deplorable
recommendations made by Ms. Gottemoeller
and her associates in the NAS study may
yet produce some benefit if they cause
the Clinton Administration’s policy in
this area to be subjected to close
scrutiny — and urgent corrective action.
The Center for Security Policy hopes to
do its part in this regard with a
High-Level Roundtable Discussion it will
be sponsoring in Washington, D.C. to
address the question “Do We Still
Need Nuclear Weapons?” on Tuesday,
15 July 1997.

It is imperative, however, that the
Congress fulfill its critical oversight
functions with regard to this supremely
high-stakes component of the Nation’s
national security posture. An
early opportunity to do so may be
afforded to the Senate Armed Services
Committee if Ms. Gottemoeller is indeed
nominated to a top Pentagon post and thus
given a chance to explain the degree to
which her radical views on the future of
U.S. nuclear weapons policy are shared by
the Administration to which she might
return.

– 30 –

1. For example,
the Brookings Institution’s John
Steinbruner, Harvard University’s Paul
Doty, John Holdren and Matthew Meselson,
scientists Wolfgang Panofsky and Richard
Garwin and the Arms Control Association’s
Spurgeon Keeney. It is absolutely
stupefying that such individuals, whose
policy recommendations during the Cold
War are now widely recognized to have
been foolish and dangerous, might be
given serious consideration in its wake.

2. Despite repeated
assurances from the Yeltsin government,
START II appears no closer to approval in
the Communist-controlled legislature now
than it was at the time the U.S. Senate
was euchred into consenting to
ratification on the grounds that doing so
would put pressure on the Duma to ratify
the Treaty.

3. For more on
these concessions, see the Center for
Security Policy’s Casey Institute Perspective
entitled First, Clinton
Mutates NATO; Now, the G-7: Why Denver
Should be the First — and Last —
‘Summit of the Eight’ ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-C_83″>No. 97-C 83, 19
June 1997).

4. The Washington
Post reported on 26 June that Duma
Defense Committee Chairman Lev Rokhlin
had described Russia’s strategic nuclear
forces as nearing “extinction.”
He was quoted as saying, “There are
no means to maintain [those forces].
There is no financing for the work to
extend the life of the missiles that are
on combat duty and have exhausted their
guaranteed term of service. The necessary
funds are not allocated to work out new
types of weapons.”

5. Other notorious
examples of this phenomenon of noblesse
oblige arms control include schemes
to ban chemical weapons and all
anti-personnel landmines. For a further
discussion, see the Center’s Decision
Brief entitled The
New Arms Control Gambit: Unilateral U.S.
Disarmament that Masquerades as Noblesse
Oblige ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_84″>No. 97-D 84, 23
June 1997).

6. For example,
see the following Center Decision
Briefs: Unhappy
Birthday: Twenty-Five Years of the A.B.M.
Treaty is Enough; Sen. Kyl Points Way to
Begin Defending America ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_72″>No. 97-D 72, 23
May 1997); Will Senate Pass
‘No-Brainer,’ Insist on Right to Advise
and Consent on Major A.B.M. Treaty
Changes? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_64″>No. 97-D 64, 12
May 1997); Smoke and Mirrors:
Even by Clinton Standards, the
President’s Misrepresentations on Missile
Defense Are Scandalous ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_49″>No. 96-D 49,
23 May 1996); Read William
Perry’s Lips: National Missile Defense Is
Definitely ‘Necessary’ ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_48″>No. 96-D 48,
21 May 1996).; Congressional
Leadership Vows to Defend America Against
Missile Attack; Will it Be Able to Do So
in Time? ( href=”96-D_30″>No. 96-D 30,
22 March 1996).

7. This is but one
of a number of unexplained and
pollyannish assertions that seem to
underpin this study. Another is the
contention that “there have been,
and continue to be, profound changes in
the structure of the international order
that are acting to reduce the probability
of major war independent of nuclear
deterrence.” (Emphasis added.)

8. See “To
Zero or Not to Zero; A U.S. Perspective
on Nuclear Disarmament,” by C. Paul
Robinson and Kathleen C. Bailey, which
appeared in Security Dialogue
(Vol. 28, No. 2, June 1997).