QUADRUPLE WHAMMY FOR NATIONAL DEFENSE: CONGRESS, NATO AND BUSH DEAL SETBACKS TO U.S. SECURITY

(Washington, D.C.): Within the past
few days, four serious blows have been
dealt to future U.S. and allied security
interests. Taken individually, each of
these would be worrisome; taken together,
they constitute reckless disregard for
long-term defense requirements and
capabilities.

Effective Cancellation of
the B-2 Bomber

The House-Senate conference committee
on the FY1992 Defense authorization bill
agreed last week to deny authorization
for the production of four B-2 bombers as
requested by the Bush Administration.
While the conferees did preserve the
option of buying one further bomber above
the fifteen already authorized — and
therefore nominally kept the B-2
manufacturing line alive — as a
practical matter this option probably
cannot be exercised. (To do so would,
after all, require a favorable vote by
the full House of Representatives. The
House has refused, however, to give its
assent to additional B-2 production for
two years running.)

The conferees have, therefore, greatly
circumscribed the United States’ ability
to field one of its most important
power-projection assets. This is most
ironic insofar as it comes at a moment
when such forces are arguably more
likely
to be needed rather than
less. This is true thanks to the combined
effects of a substantial reduction in
access to foreign bases overseas and the
increasing need — so much in evidence in
the Gulf war — for stealthy bombers
capable of penetrating sophisticated air
defenses.

Cashiering the New
Production Reactor

On 1 November 1991, Secretary of
Energy James Watkins made a
breathtakingly bad call on a major
nuclear weapons-related program. He
decided to postpone for two years a
decision on the design and siting of a
New Production Reactor (NPR) to
manufacture tritium, a radioactive gas
used in modern U.S. nuclear weapons.

Secretary Watkins logic is hard to
follow. He correctly claims that
President Bush’s September decision to
eliminate a large number of tactical
land- and sea-based nuclear weapons
substantially reduced the requirement to
produce new tritium to replace quantities
of the gas that are currently in the
inventory (a step made necessary by the
natural degradation of tritium’s
radioactive properties).

The Secretary contends, however, that
the appropriate response to this sudden, near-term
surplus
of tritium — one which
will, inevitably, be followed by a
significant, longer-term need for new
production of the gas — is to press
ahead with an expensive and technically
dubious effort to reestablish a short-run
tritium production capability
.
This effort is supposed to restart the
troubled, obsolescent and shut-down
“K” reactor — and possibly its
sister, the “L” reactor — at
Savannah River. Many experts are
skeptical that either of these reactors
can be safely restarted, let alone
operated for a decade or more into the
future.

This fact makes really bizarre Admiral
Watkins’ decision not to proceed with the
NPR. In so doing, he is ensuring that the
United States will have no solution to
the long-run tritium production problem for
at least twelve years
. Put
bluntly, the Secretary of Energy has got
it exactly backwards
squandering resources on what may be a
vain quest to build excess capacity for
the near-term, while adding billions to
the cost of building a vitally needed
longer-term production capability.

Worse yet, his action could have the
effect of denying the United States the
opportunity to validate rapidly a new,
safer means of generating electricity. As
described in the Center’s recent Decision
Brief entitled Should the
U.S. Proceed With a New Tritium
Production Reactor? Absolutely, But Make
It The Right One!
href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=91-D_103″>(No. 91-D 103, 6
October 1991), a failure to move out
smartly to select and field the High
Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor (HTGR)
candidate for the NPR likely means that
this particular system will be a less
well-established competitor for the next
generation of U.S. civil nuclear power
plants. Both the domestic industry’s
efforts to secure public and official
approval for replacements as current
plants face block obsolescence and the
potential for overseas sales of American
technology will suffer accordingly.

Kiss NATO Goodbye?

Published reports from NATO and allied
capitals indicate that the new strategy
scheduled to be approved by President
Bush and his counterparts in Rome later
this week will formally dispense with the
Soviet threat. In its place, the alliance
is supposed to worry about defending
member nations from terrorists, the drug
trade and contingencies arising from
instability on its southern and
southeastern flanks.

There are two obvious problems with
this strategy. The first is that the
Soviet threat has not disappeared
altogether. While it is true that NATO is
less in danger of a massive, short-notice
conventional attack from the former USSR
than it once was, it is also true that
tens of thousands of nuclear weapons
remain pointed at member nations; the
immense Soviet military-industrial
complex continues to churn out large
quantities of ordnance and equipment that
could be brought to bear to the detriment
of allied interests; the former Soviet
Union remains highly unstable
politically; and sensitive dual-use
technology continues to find its way into
the wrong hands in Moscow center. NATO’s
claims to the contrary are, at best,
premature and wishful thinking.

Second, it is almost inconceivable
that the United States — to say nothing
of other member nations — are going to
be willing over time to maintain anything
like the levels of forces and
expenditures
required to make NATO a
viable institution for the purposes
associated with the new strategy.
Tragically, NATO’s failure to be candid
about the grave uncertainties concerning
the future course of the former Soviet
Union, and the military responsibilities
associated with it, are very likely to
reinforce the popular perception that
NATO is unjustifiably casting about for a
mission.

A Pentagon ‘Slush Fund’ for
Moscow Center?

Finally, as part of a deal apparently
struck between the White House and the
Democratic leadership of the House and
Senate Armed Services Committees, up to a
billion dollars authorized and
appropriated for the Defense Department
may be expended on aid to the former
Soviet Union. Never mind that such an
arrangement transparently breaches the
terms of the August 1989 budget summit
agreement. Never mind either that the
food relief, technical assistance,
retraining of enlisted personnel and
officers and conversion of defense
facilities to be provided to the Soviet
Union are not going to be afforded to
needy American counterparts.

What is most troublesome
about this arrangement is the prospect
that it will be merely an opening
wedge in a campaign to offer vast new, undisciplined
assistance to Moscow center at a time
when budgetary constraints and public
scrutiny are closing down more
traditional means of providing
taxpayer-underwritten aid to the USSR
.
Instead of the $1 billion now authorized,
it is reasonable to expect a slush
fund
of $5 to $10 billion, or more,
will ultimately be dispensed in this
manner. Instead of a program operated at
the exclusive discretion of the Secretary
of Defense, it is predictable
that directives issued by OMB and/or the
Congress will soon begin to guide such
vast quantities of new money flows —
leaving to Secretary Cheney only the
unpalatable job of figuring out which
programs and capabilities will be raped
to provide the necessary funds
.

Conclusions and
Recommendations

The Center for Security Policy
strongly believes that each of these
initiatives represents an ill-advised
step, contrary to fundamental and
long-run U.S. interests. It recommends:

  • continued construction of the B-2
    as the backbone of a new and
    smaller manned bomber fleet; 50
    aircraft seem a bare minimum to
    guard against future Soviet
    contingencies and to maintain the
    sort of flexible,
    power-projection capabilities
    sure to be needed for future
    non-Soviet crises;
  • an early selection of the High
    Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor
    design for a New Production
    reactor whose development can
    facilitate the nuclear power
    industry’s standardization of
    next generation civilian plants
    on inherently-safe HTGR
    technology;
  • a reaffirmation by NATO of the
    residual dangers for allied
    security posed by a tumultuous
    and still massively over-armed
    Soviet Union and the need to
    maintain the alliance structure
    to contend with eventualities
    arising from the traditional
    source of the threat, as well as
    to deal with emerging problems;
    and
  • a requirement that any
    assistance provided by the
    Department of Defense to the
    former Soviet Union be consistent
    with U.S. laws governing other
    forms of taxpayer-underwritten
    assistance
    (e.g., the
    creditworthiness test applied to
    agricultural export credits) and
    be dispersed in a disciplined,
    transparent and fully monitorable
    manner
    . The explicit
    purpose of such assistance should
    be to encourage the
    wholesale, systemic
    transformation
    of the former
    USSR. Toward this end,
    DoD-managed assistance should
    meet, among other things, the
    following tests:
    • No aid should be provided
      to or channelled through
      the central authorities
      of the former Soviet
      Union unless the
      Secretary of Defense
      personally certifies that
      such routing of aid is
      necessary to ensure that
      it is received by those
      truly in need;
    • Instead, aid dispersed by
      the Department of Defense
      should be distributed to
      “qualifying”
      republics, i.e., those
      that are engaged in
      instituting essential
      structural economic and
      political reforms;
    • A certification should be
      made by the Secretary of
      Defense that such
      extraordinary U.S.
      intervention will
      actually contribute
      to
      — rather than
      retard — redressing the
      underlying problems
      creating Soviet food
      shortages (e.g.,
      production and
      distribution inadequacies
      and lack of price
      reform);
    • The first troops to be
      considered for any
      retraining assistance
      should be those withdrawn
      from the Baltic states
      and other
      independence-bound
      republics as well as
      those from Poland,
      eastern Germany and other
      overseas deployments;
    • A stipulation that, as a
      quid pro quo for U.S.
      technical assistance and
      high technology flows,
      Soviet technology theft
      operations in the West
      must cease; the Director
      of the FBI should be
      required to certify that
      such operations —
      recently described as
      continuing at an
      increased level relative
      to that of 1985 — have
      ceased within three
      months;
    • Selection by the Defense
      Department — not by
      Moscow center
      — of
      those Soviet
      military-industrial
      facilities to be
      considered for
      conversion; among other
      prerequisites, these
      facilities must be fully
      privatized and withdrawn
      from the residual
      military-industrial
      complex;
    • All DoD assistance
      programs to the former
      USSR — and, therefore,
      to the underlying
      recipients — should be
      subjected to the same
      rigorous monitoring and
      auditing by the General
      Accounting Office as any
      other Defense Department
      activity.
Center for Security Policy

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