Memorandum For Ambassador Richard Burt Concerning The Center’s Recommendations On Strategic Forces And Arms Control

Hon. Richard Burt
U.S. Ambassador to the START Talks-Designate
Department of State
S-DEL 7311
2201 C Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20520-7512

Dear Rick:

I want to thank you for taking the time on 13 March to meet at length with members of the Center’s Board of Advisors. My colleagues and I welcomed the opportunity it afforded to discuss the challenges attending the position to which you have been nominated. We very much hope that, as you suggested, our session will represent the beginning of an on-going conversation on these difficult subjects.

In that spirit, a number of us have collaborated to respond to your kind invitation to provide you with an integrated "package" approach to strategic force modernization and arms control, a package that the Bush Administration might advance as an alternative to the piecemeal — and, in important ways, flawed — strategy of its predecessor.

Enclosed herewith is a revised version of the Center’s earlier paper designed to offer inputs into the Administration’s comprehensive reassessment regarding strategic offensive and defensive forces and related arms control. We believe it sets forward the key, interrelated elements of a sound package. As with all of the Center’s products, this one is intended to invigorate and enrich the debate on vital security policy issues; it does not necessarily reflect the views of all members of the Center’s Board of Advisors.

The following seven points are among the most important features of our recommended approach:

The Soviet Union has systematically violated past arms control agreements; it must be assumed the Soviets will continue to do so in the future.

This reality is compounded by the dismal and declining prospects for effective verification of an agreement governing strategic forces. What is more, the costs to the Nation of trying to do so — both in financial terms and in the sense of opportunity costs (e.g., diverting intelligence resources and Russian linguists from more useful tasks) and of increased vulnerability to Soviet intelligence operations — are astronomical.

The mobility of a significant and growing portion of the Soviet Union’s ICBM force exacerbates this unhappy situation. Such mobile assets simply cannot be monitored reliably; they offer the USSR ready means of circumventing or otherwise defeating strategic arms limitations.

For the first time in twenty-odd years, the United States enjoys distinct technological advantages over the Soviet Union with regard to strategic defenses. Such defenses can greatly enhance the robustness and credibility of the American deterrent. They will also help protect against Soviet noncompliance. A decision to deploy them must be a precondition to any START Treaty. Obviously, arms control encumbrances to such deployments are not in the U.S. interest.

The United States can substantially reduce the costs and increase the effectiveness of its ICBM modernization program by redirecting it. We recommend a transportable, carry-hard system that, with preferential defenses, would offer better survivability for less investment than the rail- cum road-mobile alternatives now being pursued. Such a system would, moreover, be compatible with a realistic verification system should there be a START accord.

Sea-launched cruise missiles are unverifiable and cannot be limited by a START accord without imposing unacceptable constraints upon the flexibility and viability of U.S. naval forces.

By combining a deployment of the first phase of SDI — a system that would permit preferential defense of the transportable and fixed elements of the U.S. ICBM force and other assets (and, increasingly, as deployment proceeds, the territory of the United States) — and a carry-hard ICBM basing system with a ban on truly mobile ICBMs, a sound strategic posture can be established and maintained by this country. A START agreement that failed to accommodate these and the preceding conditions would, in our view, be unacceptable.