Secretary Baker’s Collapse On Mobile Missiles: First Step Toward An Unratifiable Start Treaty

The Center for Security Policy today sharply criticized Secretary of State James Baker’s hastily announced decision to accede to Soviet demands that the evolving Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) permit deployments of mobile missiles.

"By agreeing that mobile missiles should be limited — instead of totally banned — Secretary Baker has ensured that the START Treaty will be unverifiable," Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director said today. "In so doing, he has granted the Soviet Union a first-class means of circumventing the treaty’s limits. Allowing the USSR to have essentially uncountable mobile missiles is an invitation to Soviet cheating and calls into question the advisability of an agreement predicated on sharp reductions in both sides’ strategic forces."

In the INF Treaty, it was recognized that there was no way to limit mobile missiles effectively. Verification concerns prompted the United States and its NATO allies to insist that the agreement eliminate all INF-range missiles. The Soviets ultimately agreed to this arrangement, despite the fact that they had invested enormous sums in the deployment of hundreds of SS-20s.

Gaffney added, "The Bush Administration would have us believe that mobile missiles of intercontinental range can be verifiably limited whereas those of intermediate range could not be. This is simply wrong; no effective means has been developed to date to verify Soviet mobile ICBM deployments."

"Nearly as troubling as the content of Secretary Baker’s announcement — and its devastating impact on the acceptability of a START agreement — is its contingent quality," Gaffney continued. "The notion that the United States will now agree to permit mobiles ICBMs, provided Congress will buy some in the future, is ludicrous. Once such systems are legitimized, the Soviet Union will not agree to ban them simply because the Congress decides down the road not to allocate the billions required for counterpart U.S. mobile missile programs."

Gaffney concluded, "As a result of the Baker initiative on mobile missiles, Capitol Hill is being put in a bizarre position: Congress is being told to spend upwards of $40-50 billion for U.S. ICBMs — systems that at least the House of Representatives is increasingly disinclined to support — if it wants to obtain a START agreement. Such an agreement, however, if it permits any mobile ICBMs, would be unverifiable and potentially highly destabilizing."

The Center for Security Policy believes that this is an offer Congress must refuse. It recommends, instead, that a different approach to strategic force modernization and arms control be adopted. As outlined in its paper An Assessment of Future Requirements for U.S. Strategic Forces and Strategic Arms Control, the Center judges the ban on mobile ICBMs both essential to a sound START agreement and compatible with a survivable and verifiable basing system for U.S. ICBM deployments utilizing limited transportability, austere silos and preferential protection using strategic defenses.