Missilegate: U.S.-Soviet Collusion in Misrepresenting Moscow’s ICBM Threat?

Introduction

In the aftermath of Secretary of State
James Baker’s concession-riddled
negotiating session in Moscow last week,
fresh focus has been placed on the Soviet
heavy missile force and the extent to
which the threat it poses to the United
States will be meaningfully limited by
the impending Strategic Arms Reduction
Treaty (START) “framework
agreement.” Such focus is long
overdue, both because the current SS-18s
and their replacement missiles continue
to represent the backbone of the Soviet
Union’s intercontinental ballistic
missile (ICBM) force and because it now
appears that START will not appreciably
lessen the USSR’s first-strike potential,
of which such weapons are key components.

Overselling START

Several years ago, the Soviet Union
agreed in the START talks to a deployment
cap of 154 SS-18 missiles, or fifty
percent of Moscow’s existing inventory of
308. Coupled with a purported ban on
“new types” of heavy missiles href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
and a limit of ten warheads on the
SS-18s, this cut in the Soviet arsenal
has been pointed to as one of START’s
most significant contributions. Indeed,
Secretary Baker underscored this point in
a White House news conference on 23 May
1990:

Let me remind you that this
treaty will achieve a fifty
percent cut in SS-18s, the heavy
missiles that the Soviet Union
has and that we don’t have.
They’ve got 308 of them and
they’ll only have 154 after this
treaty, and that’s very important
from the standpoint of the United
States. And it will represent a
50 percent cut in Soviet
ballistic missile warheads as
well.

In fact, START will not impose a
50 percent cut in Soviet ballistic
missile warheads; the actual
number will be closer to 30 percent —
assuming the Soviets comply with the
terms of the emerging treaty. Given the
inherent verification uncertainties
involved in monitoring missile loadings
and the Soviet Union’s previous record of
non-compliance with arms control
agreements — including that compiled
under the Gorbachev regime — such an
assumption is probably unduly optimistic.

Misrepresenting the SS-18
Threat

An even more significant
misrepresentation of the effect of the
START treaty on the lethal power of the
SS-18 force arises from the Bush
Administration’s unwillingness to
characterize accurately the capabilities
of the heavy missiles Moscow will field
under this accord.

A missile described in U.S. government
publications as a modification to the
latest version of the SS-18, the SS-18
Mod 4, is now being introduced into the
Soviet arsenal. This missile has been
designated the “SS-18 Mod 5” by
the U.S. intelligence community, despite
the fact that it is no more a modification
of the SS-18 than preposterous assertion
that the American MX represents is
nothing but a modification of the
Minuteman III ICBM.

Indeed, by any virtually any
reasonable definition, the so-called
“Mod 5” must be considered a new
type of heavy ICBM. It is assessed
to have roughly twice the payload (or
“throwweight”) capability of
its predecessor, higher yield warheads
and vastly improved accuracy, thanks to
important innovations in Soviet
propellant and guidance systems. As a
result, the expected force of 154
“Mod 5s” will provide Moscow
with the same — if not better —
capacity to attack U.S. hard-targets than
the predecessor system did with 308
missiles. While propounding the
line that the latest Soviet heavy ICBM is
simply a new version of the SS-18, the
Department of Defense publication, Soviet
Military Power put it this
way: “The Mod 5 would, under a START
Treaty, help allow the Soviets to
maintain their hard-target-kill wartime
requirements even with the 50 percent cut
in heavy ICBMs START requires.”

Arms Control’s Corrupting
Influence on U.S. Intelligence

Why, one might ask, would U.S.
intelligence experts and the Bush
Administration be party to such a
misrepresentation of an incipient and
dangerous Soviet military capability? The
answer is to be found in the deleterious
implications for past and on-going arms
control initiatives of accurately
identifying the “SS-18 Mod 5”
as a new heavy missile type.
While this is hardly the only example of
the corrosive effect of arms control
considerations on the veracity of U.S.
estimates of Soviet power, this is a
particular egregious one.

The SALT II Treaty of 1979 prohibited
the deployment of new heavy missiles.
While the United States no longer
considers itself formally constrained by
this unratified, expired and
Soviet-violated agreement, the Soviets
have maintained that they continue to be
bound by SALT II’s terms. Consequently, a
determination that the “Mod 5”
is actually a new type of heavy
missile would be tantamount to finding
the Soviet Union in violation of yet
another of its major and freely assumed
commitments — a step even the Reagan
Administration was reluctant to
take. The Bush Administration has shown
still less appetite for the
confrontations with Moscow and arms
control enthusiasts in this country and
allied capitals that inevitably ensue
from such findings.

Worse yet, for an Administration bent
on rapidly securing its own agreement
with Moscow on strategic arms, a finding
that the Soviets were deploying a new
heavy missile would mean that the USSR
was breaching a position advanced by the
Soviet Union– namely, that the START
Talks carry forward the SALT II ban on
such deployments. By calling this missile
what it is not — namely, a mere
modification of the earlier versions of
the SS-18 — the United States,
nevertheless, had to deal with the
problem of securing limits on further
modernization and testing of the
“Mod 5.”

That has proved to be a relatively
manageable negotiating problem, however,
for Secretary Baker. At Moscow, he
resolved it by simply dropping the
longstanding U.S. insistence on such
constraints. Now, according to a press
briefing by a senior White House official
on 22 May 1990, the only question is
whether, in the face of concerted Soviet
resistance and under the pressure of the
summit-imposed negotiating deadline, the
United States will continue to seek any
limits on Soviet heavy missile
developments beyond the “Mod 5“?

Impact on START

The effect of allowing the Soviets to
introduce a new generation of heavy ICBMs
— yet another version of which, the
so-called SS-18 Mod 6, is being readied
for deployment — will greatly degrade
the putative value of the START
agreement. By taking full advantage of
the “Mod 5s'” accuracy
improvements and the serious verification
uncertainties concerning MIRVed warhead
loadings so as to exploit the throwweight
capability of the new missiles, Moscow
can more than offset the effect of even a
fifty percent cut in its heavy missile
force.

When combined with other unsound
elements of the evolving START accord —
especially several resulting from
Secretary Baker’s negotiating sessions in
Moscow last week — however, the impact
of the “Mod 5” will be even
more insidious. Recent U.S. concessions
allowing the Soviets to maintain
unverifiable mobile ICBMs and unlimited
quantities of “non-deployed”
non-mobile ICBMs, for example, is
virtually sure to result in a far larger
number of Soviet missiles and warheads
than are nominally permitted under
START’s “deep reductions”
regime.

Conclusions and
Recommendations

The Center for Security Policy
believes that the deplorable, officially
sanctioned U.S. misrepresentations of the
Soviet heavy ICBM program must cease at
once. Perpetuating the fraudulent
description — and legitimization — of
the newest Soviet heavy missile does more
than exaggerate the security benefits of
the emerging START treaty. More
importantly, it encourages a public
misapprehension about a declining Soviet
threat and the benign intentions of the
Gorbachev regime that are both unfounded
and inimical to maintaining the requisite
popular support for appropriate U.S.
defensive responses.

At the summit, President Bush should
demand that — in accordance with
Moscow’s own position banning new heavy
missiles — this weapon be removed from
the silos into which it has already been
deployed and that no further upgrading of
the SS-18 force (including flight testing
of variants) be allowed. Only then would
the Soviet “concession” to
reduce its SS-18 inventory be of
appreciable value to the United States.

While this eminently reasonable
position will be criticized by some
determined to achieve an agreement at
seemingly any price, on the grounds that
it would represent regression from
understandings recently reached by
Secretary Baker with the Soviet Union in
START, that should not be determinative.
Indeed, there is no reason why only the
Soviets should be entitled to reverse
field in the negotiating
“end-game” so as to derive
terms more to their liking than what they
had previously accepted. The United
States should take a tip from Gorbachev’s
arms control playbook (as manifested by
his extorting the U.S. to agree to limits
on German Pershing Ia’s in INF and
inequitable and/or ill-advised limits on
air- and sea-launched cruise missile in
START) and fix at least this one of
START’s many, manifestly flawed
provisions.

The Center also believes that this
example of the U.S. intelligence
community’s faulty judgments is yet
another — if a particularly compelling
— example of the need for an independent
analytical effort to be mounted as a
“sanity check” on the official
estimates of Soviet military capabilities
and future prospects. Such a “Team
B” effort is way past due and cannot
prudently, or safely, be further
deferred.

Finally, the Center is convinced that
the enormous military potential of the
Soviet ballistic missile force — even as
if it ultimately is somewhat reduced by
START — demands that the United States
field an effective strategic defense.
President Bush should reaffirm his stated
intention to deploy such a system and
should eschew Soviet efforts, such as the
phony “delinkage” of SDI and
START announced last September, that
would make such a deployment problematic
if not impossible.

1. The history of
the definition of the term “heavy
missile” involves its own sorry
story of official American subterfuge and
accommodation to the Soviet Union’s
blatant violation of the SALT I Interim
Agreement on Offensive Arms. As recounted
in an article by Senator Jake Garn
entitled “The Suppression of
Information Concerning Soviet SALT
Violations by the U.S. Government,” Policy
Review, Summer 1979, Washington
simply looked the other way when the
Soviets massively disregarded the only
formal definition — one unilaterally
advanced by the American delegation — in
the course of negotiating the SALT I
accord.