The NATO Summit: Will Bush’s “Double Hit” Become A Soviet Triple Play?

In the afterglow of self-congratulations and favorable press notices following the just-concluded summit, the leaders of the NATO nations are accentuating the positive and manfully ignoring the negative. President Bush, in particular, has proclaimed a powerful "double hit" with his initiatives on short-range nuclear forces (SNF) and conventional weapons arms control. Unfortunately, if the West dwells on the good news and fails to address the serious, adverse implications of the bad news, NATO’s "double hit" could lead to a dangerous Soviet triple play.

In each of three important areas, NATO has fashioned positions that, at first blush, seem promising and laudable. On nuclear deterrence, the allies have reaffirmed the need to maintain "an adequate and effective mix of nuclear and conventional forces which will continue to be kept up to date where necessary." On conventional arms control, they have proposed a new initiative aimed at dramatically reducing Soviet force disparities "prejudicial to stability and security." And with respect to economic, financial and technology security, the NATO nations have committed themselves to "expand the scope of…contacts and cooperation [with the East in]…a sustained effort geared to specific tasks which will help deepen openness and promote democracy within Eastern European countries."

On closer inspection, however, the United States and its allies have agreed to specific steps that stand to complicate enormously — if not prevent — the achievement of these high-minded objectives.

Nuclear Deterrence in Europe:

Despite the lip-service paid to the continuing requirement for NATO’s Flexible Response strategy and the role played by theater (or "sub-strategic") nuclear weapons in it, the NATO summit formalized understandings that will seriously erode the viability of that strategy and the alliance’s ability to implement its military doctrine:

 

• NATO has postponed a decision to modernize one of the most important sub-strategic systems — the Lance short-range nuclear missile — until 1992.

This is the result of increasingly strident West German opposition to replacement of the obsolescing Lance.

Allied agreement to such a deferral will make it extremely difficult to deploy a replacement before Lance becomes utterly unsupportable.

 

• NATO has also agreed to enter into negotiations with the East to achieve a "partial reduction of American and Soviet land-based nuclear missile forces of shorter range to equal and verifiable levels."

   

  • Unfortunately, this appears to be precisely what West German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher had in mind when he described the NATO summit meeting as forging "an agreement to negotiations without modernization."

While great emphasis is being placed upon the word "partial" as evidence of a shared commitment not to allow such negotiations to result in the complete elimination from Europe of all SNF missiles, it is reasonable to expect that the pressure that obliged the allies to enter into these negotiations in the first place will ultimately mount to produce a third "zero outcome."

Moreover, unless the allies agree to modernize such forces as they are permitted to retain under a new SNF deal, the result would be effectively the same as agreeing to their elimination, i.e., structural disarmament through obsolescence.

Finally, there is no such thing as verifiable limits on systems with the inherently small size, ready mobility and attendant easy concealability of short-range nuclear forces; even if an outcome other than zero SNF could be achieved, it would be utterly impossible to ensure Soviet compliance.

In short, despite the welcome recognition of the need for credible sub-strategic nuclear deterrent forces for the foreseeable future, the actual decisions taken at the NATO summit set the stage for inaction on replacement of obsolescing systems and for new negotiations that will make it problematic even to retain the aging ones now deployed.

Conventional Arms Control:

President Bush is credited with rescuing the NATO summit from a possibly divisive exercise and turning it into a display of alliance unity by announcing a major initiative on conventional forces. He proposed that the talks on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) include limits heretofore resisted by NATO, namely on troops (notably a common ceiling requiring a 30,000-man reduction in U.S. forces there) and on aircraft. The President also called for the completion of these negotiations by the spring or fall of 1990. Such an ambitious acceleration of the pace of the conventional negotiations was designed to sate West German pressure for immediate negotiations on SNF.

Far from improving the prospects for "a secure and stable balance of conventional forces at lower levels," however, the new NATO initiative is likely to exacerbate the CFE negotiation’s already considerable potential for weakening Western security:

• The proposal to limit aircraft and troops under the conventional talks enormously complicates the CFE negotiations.

   

  • At least two of the allies — Britain and France — have already made known their objection to inclusion of their air forces under such limitations.

   

  These differences offer dangerous new opportunities for the Soviet Union to fracture the Western alliance; this time-honored objective of Soviet foreign policy has been much in evidence lately in connection with the alliance divisions over SNF.

   

  • From a military point of view, the argument made by the West prior to the summit for excluding aircraft from at least the first phase of the CFE limits still holds: aircraft are not able to seize and hold territory — the sort of weapons that give rise to concerns about the prospects for aggression.

   

  To the contrary, aircraft may be decisive in helping the West repulse such attacks — provided they may be introduced into the theater flexibly and supported effectively.

  Unfortunately, limits of the kind now envisioned by the NATO proposal will work against needed flexibility and effectiveness; if, as is currently the case, nuclear-capable aircraft are withheld from use in the conventional stage of a conflict, reductions in NATO’s air forces will compound the problem.

   

  • There are persistent and significant disagreements between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in counting the number of forces deployed by the Soviet bloc.

   

  Such differences over data and counting rules proved to be insurmountable obstacles to earlier efforts at conventional disarmament.

   

  • Similarly, no effective means have been found to date to monitor the implementation of and compliance with limits on troops.

   

  Communist forces in Afghanistan and Angola have shown a remarkable ability to exploit this shortcoming so as to defeat the purpose of troop withdrawal agreements; it is only reasonable to expect that similar opportunities might be abused in Eastern Europe.

  Gorbachev’s announcement yesterday of the size of the "real" Soviet defense budget — a figure four times larger than that previously announced by the USSR but still only half the size of most Western intelligence estimates –is yet another indication of the need for stringent verification regimes as part of any arms control accord with the USSR.

 

Aircraft:

Troops:

 

• Even as NATO has made the negotiation of a CFE agreement vastly more difficult by expanding its scope, it has greatly inflated expectations about the speed with which agreement can be reached.

 

The net effect of encouraging European public opinion to expect an accord within roughly a year will be to intensify the pressure to complete a conventional forces treaty irrespective of its terms or flaws.

In the absence of such a speedy accord, Germans and others will feel justified in insisting that SNF negotiations be begun at once.

The prospect of an "imminent" conventional arms control agreement will also make it much more difficult to maintain the readiness and effectiveness of Western non-nuclear defenses.

In other words, the short-term benefits of President Bush’s conventional forces proposal will almost certainly be more than offset by the long-term damage done by the erosion it entails in the Western negotiating position.

Undoing Export Controls:

Largely overlooked in the publicity associated with the military and arms control dimensions of the NATO summit has been another, possibly even more momentous Bush initiative: the decision to jettison a policy vital to safeguarding militarily relevant Western technologies sought by the Soviet bloc. By agreeing to eliminate the "no exceptions" policy that has governed COCOM deliberations on technology transfer for most of the last decade, NATO has set the stage for the wholesale retooling of the USSR’s military apparatus. This hardly seems the sort of activity envisioned by the NATO communique in its call for "specific tasks which will help deepen openness and promote democracy" called for in the summit communique.

 

• There is considerable reason to believe that the appetite of the Soviet armed forces for advanced technology has been a crucial factor in containing the unhappiness the military might otherwise have felt over various aspects of Gorbachev’s program (e.g., unilateral force reductions, arms control initiatives, reported spending cuts, etc.)

 

Indeed, Marshall Ogarkov — a preeminent Soviet strategic thinker — has been calling for a leaner but more technologically competitive military for years.

 

• In ending the "no exceptions" policy, the West will by definition be providing the USSR access to dual-use technology and know-how of direct relevance to Soviet efforts to enhance its military power.

 

At best, the successor policy will preclude the sale of some of the potentially dangerous technologies whose transfer to the Soviet bloc is presently proscribed; at worst, the COCOM mechanism may prove unable to function in the face of so undisciplined a Western policy environment, enabling the USSR to acquire virtually whatever it wishes.

The Bush Administration evidently failed to utilize the NATO summit — as it was urged to do two weeks ago by the United States Senate — as a forum for engaging America’s allies in a new, more coherent strategy, one designed to exploit the West’s economic, financial and technological leverage so as to transform fundamentally and irreversibly the Soviet threat. Instead, even as it espoused communique rhetoric along these lines, NATO actually took a step destined to worsen the prospects for greater discipline and transparency in East-West relations in these areas. That fateful step may also, ironically, worsen the prospects for real reform in the Soviet bloc permitting the USSR to avoid some of the hard choices it would otherwise have to make.

Recommended Actions:

It is imperative that NATO act quickly in the aftermath of the summit to build upon the positive themes of its communique and to limit the damage likely to arise from some of the ill-considered decisions taken there. In particular, the United States should:

 

• Insist upon a firm allied commitment to modernized theater nuclear weapons deployed in Europe to meet the requirements of NATO’s Flexible Response strategy and as a necessary condition if American forces are to remain there.

 

• Stipulate that serious, outstanding problems (e.g., data, counting rules, zonal and verification questions) be resolved in the CFE talks as a precondition to expanding the scope of the negotiations. The past record of Soviet non-compliance with arms control agreements makes such resolution absolutely mandatory.

 

• Condition the elimination of the "no exceptions" policy on the demonstration of fundamental, structural change in the Soviet political and economic systems — change of the sort that would genuinely transform the threat currently posed to Western interests by the USSR (e.g., the institution of real checks and balances in a Soviet government accountable to its people, the wholesale diversion of resources from the military to the civilian sector, the adoption of true transparency in all aspects of Soviet activities, etc.)