Press Barrage Signals New Phase of Denuclearization Campaign

(Washington, D.C.): In recent days, the Washington Post and New York
Times devoted a huge
number of column inches to promote several convoluted — and, in some cases, contradictory —
arguments for U.S. denuclearization. These salvos from two of the Fourth Estate’s trend-setters
bear close analysis insofar as they will almost certainly be exploited by the Clinton Administration
in its planned spring offensive to advance this dangerous goal.

On Sunday and Monday of this week, the Post gave front-page, above-the-fold
treatment (with
jumps to one-and-a-half and full-page spreads, respectively, inside the paper) to a series entitled
“Shattered Shield: The Decline of Russia’s Nuclear Forces.” Not to be outdone, the
Times on
Sunday placed an article under the headline “So You Think the Cold War Is Over?” on the cover
of its Magazine.

The main points of these articles fall into several broad categories. These might be described
as
follows: The Russians’ nuclear arsenal poses a terrible threat. The Russians’ nuclear arsenal is
going away. The United States is building up its nuclear capabilities. The United States must
take the initiative, even through unilateral action, to reduce the perceived nuclear danger.
Concerns about emerging nuclear (and chemical/biological weapons) powers and what is
needed to deter them — and the contribution that strategic defenses could make to
minimizing risks without jeopardizing U.S. deterrent capabilities — were largely
ignored.

Russia’s Hair-Trigger

The Washington Post kicked off its series with a dramatic rendering of an episode
in January
1995, when a scientific experiment involving the launch of a Norwegian sounding rocket roused
Russia’s nuclear forces to a high state of alert. This episode, it is said, demonstrates the
deteriorating condition of the Russian strategic command and control system.

According to anti-nuclear activists, this episode is a cautionary tale against allowing the
Russian
nuclear inventory to remain capable of “launch on warning.” In the hope of prevailing upon the
Kremlin to do away with this hair-trigger posture, American denuclearizers like the Brookings
Institution’s Bruce Blair and MIT’s Theodore Postol want
U.S. strategic forces to be made
incapable of rapid launches, thereby setting an example Russia might follow. As the
Times put it:

“‘De-alerting’ [Blair] said ‘means we increase the time needed to launch forces from
the current minutes to hours, days, weeks or longer, through a variety of measures like
taking the warheads off the missiles.’ He added, ‘It would take them out of play, so
there is a much lower risk of their mistaken use.'”

There is, of course, no obvious basis for believing that the Russians would
emulate
such a radical American step. To the contrary, as these articles make clear, Moscow is
if
anything placing greater emphasis on its nuclear arsenal today than in the past. The
New York
Times article noted:

“…While [its] nuclear shield is shrinking, Russian leaders have decided to rely
on the
deterrent power of the nuclear weapons more than ever — to compensate for their
even weaker and more chaotic conventional forces. President Boris Yeltsin recently
signed a new national security doctrine that enshrines this idea. Russia also has
dropped its pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons.

“‘All we have is the nuclear stick,’ said Lev Volkov, a prominent Russian military
strategist. ‘Of course, we should all together decrease this nuclear danger. But
right now, we have nothing else. We’re naked.‘”

Russia’s Shrinking Nuclear Power

The Washington Post series suggests, though, that Russia is on the threshold of
being stripped as
well of much of its nuclear arsenal as a result of its inability to halt or compensate for block
obsolescence of its present inventory. Importantly, this decline is expected to occur over
the
next few years — with or without further arms control agreements. The
Post reported:

• On 15 March: “The degradation of Russia’s early-warning system comes as its strategic
  forces
  are also shrinking. The forces made up of nuclear-armed submarines, long-range bombers and
  intercontinental ballistic missiles built by the Soviets during the Cold War are declining
  dramatically in both numbers and quality. Within a decade, experts predict, Russia will
  have a nuclear arsenal just one-tenth the size of the Soviet Union’s at the peak of the
  superpower rivalry, because of arms control treaties, looming obsolescence and Russia’s
  economic depression.”
• On 16 March: “Independent estimates by authoritative Russian and Western experts show
  the
  same outcome in the next 10 to 15 years — movement toward a drastically reduced nuclear
  force …. According to the estimates, Russia’s nuclear forces are shrinking even faster than the
  START II treaty will require …. More likely, Russian and Western specialists said,
  Russia
  will wind up with an arsenal of 1,000 to 1,500 warheads a decade from now. However, it
  could fall to half that if the economy does not recover.“
• “If START II is not ratified, the Russian missile forces will nonetheless hit a brick
  wall of
  obsolescence in the next decade. Gen. Vladimir Yakovlev, chief of the strategic rocket
  forces, said recently that 62 percent of Russia’s missiles are already beyond their
  guaranteed service life.“

(Interestingly, “Shattered Shield” gives generally short shrift to the fact that
Russia —
unlike the United States — continues to modernize its nuclear forces. It is
manufacturing
special nuclear material, introducing new, post-Cold War generations of mobile land-based and
submarine-launched ballistic missiles, strategic submarines. It is also continuing to invest
mind-boggling sums in the construction and expansion of deep-underground facilities.
Such facilities
are almost certainly designed to enable key Russian personnel and activities to fight and
survive a nuclear war.)

The Post and Times articles argue that the fact that the bilateral arms
control process is “at an
impasse” is cause for concern. The transparent, if unstated, premise is that the United
States
must not be permitted to enjoy superiority in nuclear forces. American denuclearizers
abhor
this prospect and believe that the U.S. must either engage in unilateral acts of disarmament or take
steps to jump-start the stalled negotiations, so as to ensure Russia’s ratification of START II and
the completion of a START III accord.

In fact, the world would be a safer place if the Russians had as few nuclear forces as
the
British, French and Chinese, while the United States retained a significantly larger,
robustly secure and credible nuclear arsenal. After all, Moscow’s inventory would be
ample
to ensure there was no attack against Russia while the more formidable American capability could
serve as a deterrent to the use — and perhaps even the acquisition — of nuclear arms by other
“wannabe” states. If properly configured and accompanied by a coherent doctrine and policy,
America’s re-established nuclear superiority should discourage Moscow, Beijing or others from
seeking a new arms race. It could also serve as a deterrent to the use of chemical, biological as
well as nuclear weapons against the U.S. and its allies. Only Americans in the thrall of Cold War
arms control theology, moral equivalence and/or a reflexive fear of U.S. power could object to
such an arrangement.

What ‘U.S. Nuclear Build-Up?’

The horror felt by the denuclearizers at such a prospect, however, is apparent in the
New York
Times Magazine essay subtitled “Overkill is Not Dead.” This voluminous article by Brian
Hill,
begins with a diatribe against the B-61-11 — a new package for the old B-61-7 nuclear gravity
bomb that enables it to penetrate the earth’s surface before detonating.

The value of such a weapon should be obvious in a world in which every
one of the United
States’ prospective adversaries is seeking to conceal and/or protect its leadership, weapons
of mass destruction programs and other valued assets in deeply buried shelters. So, too,
should the possibility afforded by this weapon of dramatically reducing so-called collateral
damage — by detonating the device below ground, rather than at or above the surface.

The denuclearizers, however, are appalled that the Clinton Administration permitted such a
device
to be introduced: They declaim that it makes nuclear weapons more “useable” (a critical
ingredient in their deterrent effectiveness). They are appalled at its possible relevance to
destroying, for example, Libya’s underground chemical weapons facility (a mixing of
WMD
apples and oranges that offends their dubious theories about how to discourage proliferation).
And they insist that the United States — pursuant to their reading of preambular language in the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the intent of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the thrust
of numerous policy statements by this and previous U.S. administrations — must never develop
“new” nuclear weapons. They hope, in short, by denouncing the B-61-11 as
a “new” nuclear
weapon to ensure that any steps taken to enhance the safety, reliability and effectiveness of
the American nuclear stockpile can be prevented. href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾

Toward this end, the denuclearizers are also mounting a fierce assault on the
Stockpile
Stewardship Program (SSP). The SSP is President Clinton’s multi-billion dollar fig-leaf,
in all
likelihood a short-lived initiative aimed at persuading the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories and
influential Senators that — despite a treaty-imposed, permanent ban on nuclear testing — his
Administration remains committed to assuring the viability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal for the
foreseeable future.⁽²⁾ As the Times caustically
put it:

“The Administration plans to spend $4.5 billion a year — more than the average annual
cost, in constant dollars, for building up the arsenal during the cold war — on the
Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program, which is a virtual nuclear testing
regime. With items like the $1.2 billion Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s
ignition facility, the program will enable the Department of Energy, in its own words,
to pursue ‘structural enhancements’ to nuclear weapons if needed because of ‘changes
in military requirements.’ (But not, of course, to develop ‘new weapons.’)”

The Bottom Line

The ominous reality is that, thanks to the denuclearization policies of the Clinton
Administration
and its predecessor⁽³⁾, the U.S. nuclear arsenal is at least as
susceptible to long-term sustainability
problems as is that of the former Soviet Union. While Russia is currently facing economic
hardships and resource shortfalls, it is working hard to maintain the infrastructure (both human
and physical) necessary to produce and operate lethal nuclear forces. In important respects, the
Clinton team is failing to do the same. And to the extent that it is doing so (e.g., the
Stockpile
Stewardship Program), there are ample grounds for suspicion that it has no intention of pursuing
such activities over time — to say nothing of for the foreseeable future.

Despite the internal contradictions and evident anti-nuclear bias in these recent New
York Times
and Washington Post articles, the Center for Security Policy nonetheless welcomes
them as
catalysts for a debate about the current condition of — and future requirements for — the U.S.
nuclear deterrent. Arguably, no other public policy of remotely comparable importance to the
national interest has advanced as far as the denuclearization agenda has without appreciable public
discourse. It is in this context that the Clinton Administration’s actions this spring aimed at
securing Senate approval of the Comprehensive Test Ban and advancing U.S. de-alerting
initiatives must be rigorously scrutinized and rigorously opposed.

– 30 –

1. The New York Times article denounced various
efforts being made to optimize the effectiveness
of the remaining nuclear force even as its numbers are steadily declining. These efforts include:
transferring MX warheads to Minuteman IIIs, replacing Trident I missiles with Trident II SLBMs,
and upgrading computer programs to improve targeting performance.

2. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Warning to the Nuclear Labs: Don’t Count on
‘Stockpile Stewardship’ to Maintain Either Overhead Or Confidence ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_183″>No. 97-D 183, 1
December 1997).

3. These run the gamut from failing to provide for the production of
the essential and rapidly
decaying radioactive gas tritium, to shutting down and dismantling the nuclear weapons
production complex, to imposing a unilateral moratorium on underground nuclear testing, to
pursuing arms control agreements that will impose radical reductions on U.S. nuclear forces with
little regard for abiding targeting requirements, to adopting a nuclear doctrine consistent with
“minimal deterrence,” to permitting the steady attrition of nuclear expertise in today’s armed
forces.