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.