“Stay on Alert”

Wall Street Journal , 20 January 1998

President Clinton is fond of saying that for the first time since the Cold War began there are
no
Russian missiles targeted at American children as they sleep in their beds. It’s a swell applause
line, used dozens of times. But somehow this assertion–even if it could be verified–doesn’t sound
like a lullaby to us.

For one thing, re-targeting a missile takes only a matter of seconds, an inconvenient fact that
makes the President’s reassuring words disingenuous at best. More to the point, if somehow,
somewhere in the disorganized remnants of the former Soviet Union, a ballistic missile actually
got launched–either by intention or by accident–the U.S. doesn’t have the means to shoot it down
before it hits the mainland. The Clinton Administration says there’s no need for a national defense
against ballistic-missile attack. Sleep tight.

Now, having lulled the country to sleep on defenses against missiles, the same group of
Clintonites and old-time arm-controllers have come up with another idea: “de-alerting,” which
would take our nuclear forces off alert status. The aim would be to increase the amount of time
necessary to launch a nuclear weapon from minutes to hours or even days.

“De-alerting” (a word so awkward only arms-control bureaucrats could have thought of it)
could
take a number of forms and the suggestions being put forward are disconcerting. They include:
removing the integrated circuit boards from ICBMs and storing them hundreds of miles away;
taking the warheads off the MX missiles or possibly the Minuteman ICBMs; welding shut the
missile hatches of some submarines; and doubling the number of orders a
hard-to-communicate-with submarine would have to receive before it could launch a missile. Any
one of these measures is the nuclear equivalent of giving a beat cop an unloaded gun and requiring
that he radio back to headquarters for bullets when he wants to use it.

The gospel according to the de-alerting evangelists is set forth in a long article by Bruce Blair
of
Brookings and Frank von Hippel and Harold Feiveson of Princeton University in November’s
Scientific American magazine. They urge the Administration to de-alert the long-range missiles
scheduled for retirement under the Start II agreement that the Duma refuses to ratify. The Russian
command-and-control system is falling apart, they argue, and unilateral action on the part of the
U.S. would encourage the Russians to de-alert their own missiles, thus reducing the risk of
accidental or unauthorized launch.

There are a number of flaws in this argument, starting with the familiar belief that Russia will
buy
it and then abide by it. Russia is spending heavily to maintain and modernize its nuclear arsenal
even as some of its soldiers starve, as Kathleen Bailey points out nearby. But the biggest flaw
pertains not to Russia but to rogue states like North Korea, Iran and Iraq, all of them developing
long-range ballistic missiles. If the Saddam Husseins of the world believe that our nuclear
deterrent is susceptible to a pre-emptive strike, they at least have an incentive to try it, in the
expectation that any effort to reassemble a counterattack would be difficult and that in any event
the arms-controllers would try hard to thwart any such reaction.

Messrs. Blair, von Hippel and Feiveson don’t mince words about their long-term goals.
De-alerting the Start II missiles and others would be only a first step. “The ultimate goal,” they
write, “would be to separate most, if not all, nuclear warheads from their missiles and then,
eventually, to eliminate most of the stored warheads and missiles.”

The President has ordered the Pentagon to review his de-alerting options and we can only
hope
that the Joint Chiefs of Staff will take as strong a stand against de-alerting as they did with
success when Mr. Clinton was flirting with joining the international ban on land mines. Someone
needs to inject some common sense into this debate.

In the meantime, “The Proliferation Primer,” just out from the Senate Subcommittee on
International Security deserves a wide readership (www.senate.gov/~gov_affairs/ispfs.htm).
Based on 11 hearings that Chairman Thad Cochran held last year, it reviews the spread of
weapons of mass destruction world-wide, notably the increasing availability of ballistic-missile
technology. Even if nonproliferation efforts were much improved, it reports, they would only slow
the spread of ballistic missiles–already in the hands of roughly 25 nations. It concludes that we
need to quickly build and deploy a national missile defense system.

But again, national missile defense isn’t part of this President’s vision of national security. For
now, our only deterrent is nuclear, and to keep that viable, we ought to stay on alert.