Scowcroft Is Partly Right: The Administration Should Start Over On Mobile ICBMs

The Center for Security Policy today noted with concern the latest evidence of disarray in the Bush Administration’s management of strategic arms modernization programs and associated arms control negotiations.

Today’s Washington Post reports that the President’s National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, wants the United States to propose a ban on multiple-warheaded (MIRVed) intercontinental ballistic missiles in the course of Secretary of State James Baker’s meeting next month with Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze. If adopted, such a proposal would reverse a position announced by the Bush Administration at the last such meeting in September 1989. At that time, it summarily dropped a longstanding U.S. demand that the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) prohibit all mobile missiles — irrespective of whether they bore a single warhead or more than one. 

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director, said "Apparently, General Scowcroft has belatedly accepted what the Center has argued all along: Mobile missiles constitute a first-class means for the Soviet Union to cheat on any negotiated reduction in strategic forces; they are impossible to verify and, if permitted, will greatly complicate the prospects for Senate ratification of the START treaty. He evidently also accepts that budgetary pressures are going to make U.S. deployments of mobile missiles problematic."

Gaffney added, "What is mystifying, however, is why Gen. Scowcroft seems to accept these arguments only as they apply to MIRVed mobile missiles. While the Soviet Union’s rail-mobile SS-24 capable of carrying at least 10 warheads lends itself very well to maintaining covert deployments in excess of START’s limits, so too can the USSR’s SS-25. The latter is a road-mobile system that nominally carries only one warhead but which is — like its intermediate-range predecessor, the SS-20 — eminently capable of lofting up to three warheads. Why should the Soviets be allowed to retain the option of exploiting the SS-25’s cheating potential?"

"What is more, if any U.S. mobile ICBM is going to run into problems on budgetary grounds, it is the Midgetman single-warheaded missile," Gaffney said. "At a cost conservatively estimated to run to $27 billion for 500 warheads, the Midgetman will cost several times what the MIRVed, rail-mobile MX will for a comparable deployment."

The Center believes that the Scowcroft initiative offers an extraordinary opportunity to revisit the seriously flawed decision to abandon the U.S. position banning mobile ICBMs. It calls upon the Bush Administration to jettison its present, self-imposed and ill-considered deadline for completing the START treaty by the June Bush-Gorbachev summit and to take such time as is required to ensure that the agreement it is negotiating will actually support U.S. strategic interests.