WILL CLINTON DE-NUCLEARIZERS UNILATERALLY DISMANTLE THE U.S.STRATEGIC TRIAD, SECURITY POLICY?

(Washington, D.C.): At a hearing of
the Senate Armed Services Committee this
week, the Committee’s ranking Republican
— Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina
— alerted his colleagues to an alarming
possibility: Clinton
Administration appointees at the Pentagon
appear poised to recommend the unilateral
elimination of the land-based leg of the
U.S. Strategic “Triad.”

A Destabilizing ‘Dyad’?

In a statement at a full Committee
hearing involving the Commander-in-Chief
of the U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral
Henry Chiles, and the Commander-in-Chief
of U.S. Space Command, Gen. Charles
Horner, on 20 April 1994, Sen. Thurmond
said:

“…Reports…are now coming
to me of the outcomes being
considered in the Nuclear Posture
Review [or NPR, the “bottom-up
review” of nuclear force
requirements and structures launched
by Secretary of Defense Aspin before
he was relieved of his duties by
President Clinton last December]. The
working group looking at future force
structure looked at a list of 21
options. They recommended a force
roughly like what we have now — a
strong Triad.

“But the Chairman of the
group, Assistant Secretary [of
Defense Ashton] Carter, is reportedly
going to recommend to the Secretary
[of Defense] that we abandon
Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles
(ICBMs)! He is going to recommend
that we give up the Triad!

“Admiral Chiles, your
prepared testimony shows that you are
still counting on ICBMs, that
‘Minuteman III is the ICBM
force of the future.’ Mr. Chairman, I
sincerely hope I am wrong, that I
have been misinformed. I
sincerely hope that the
Administration will reconsider this
move, and I will be asking
Admiral Chiles about the risks and
dangers of such a move.”

Adm. Chiles’ response to
Senator Thurmond’s questioning on this
point was hardly reassuring.
While the CINCSTRAT averred that he
believed no final decisions had been
taken about the NPR force structure, he
told the Armed Services Committee that he
had not been asked his advice on this
point.

An End to Bipartisan
National Security Policy?

Beyond raising the alarm about what
would be, arguably, the most
radical step of unilateral
disarmament ever undertaken by the
U.S. government, Senator
Thurmond served notice on the Clinton
Administration and his colleagues as to
the implications of such an action:

“…For fifty years
now we have had a bipartisan national
security policy in areas where the
very survival of the United States
was at issue. Ten
administrations agreed that we would
deter the nuclear threat with nuclear
threat, that we would enforce a
policy of deterrence with a surely
survivable Triad of nuclear forces,
that no potential enemy could have
any hope of survival if he unleashed
a nuclear attack on us.

“Now I am afraid we may be
seeing that unanimity of policy in
the face of nuclear danger begin to
slip away. I hope I am wrong because
the world is more dangerous,
not less; there are more
nuclear foes, not less; the United
States is more vulnerable,
not less. But in certain
decisions the Administration is
apparently now taking, I see the end
of the object of our bipartisan
agreement, the nuclear Triad.”

The ‘Denuclearization’
Agenda

Sen. Thurmond went on to elaborate a
number of the specific areas in which
Clinton decisions are endangering U.S.
nuclear deterrence and bipartisan
security policy — areas that have long
been of grave concern to the Center for
Security Policy:

“At a time when weapons of
mass destruction are proliferating
around the world and falling into the
hands of outlaw states, the
U.S. appears determined to go out of
the nuclear weapons business, by
default if not by design.
Strategic forces are falling to below
START II levels. We are canceling
weapons production, scrapping vital
facilities, losing the rare human
skills needed to fabricate, maintain
and test weapons and putting an end
to [nuclear] testing.

“With the loss of
hard-to-replace scientists and
engineers, and the projected shortage
of tritium, I can foresee a
time early in the next century when
America will no longer be a nuclear
power. It is
going to happen, and it is going to
be because of this Administration’s
overthrow of fifty years of
bipartisan agreement.”

Taking It To the Secretary
of Defense

The Center has been advised that Assistant
Secretary Carter is supposed to brief
Secretary of Defense William Perry about
his recommendations for U.S. nuclear
forces tomorrow. Such a briefing
— and the decisions that emanate from it
— had better address the following,
unacceptable features of present American
nuclear-related policies:

• The absence of any
  reliable source of the
  radioactive gas, tritium, without
  which all U.S. nuclear arms will
  be rendered ineffective
  by the middle of the next decade;
• The absurdity of
  scrapping the most modern U.S.
  ICBM — the MX — and
  having, as a result, to spend
  hundreds of millions to try to
  preserve indefinitely obsolescing
  Minuteman III missiles;
• The grievous shortfalls
  — even by the standards of the
  Clinton Administration’s own
  “Bottom-Up Review” —
  in the numbers of effective,
  modern manned bombers
  available for future conventional
  and nuclear missions;
• The dismantling U.S.
  nuclear forces that is proceeding
  at a pace far faster than
  Russia’s START-related
  dismantlements, that is greatly
  in excess of American obligations
  under arms control treaties in
  force today and that is
  practically speaking irreversible
  (i.e., by destroying
  ICBM silos and missiles, versus
  simply removing the missiles and
  their warheads from their silos
  — as the Russians appear to be
  doing);
• The folly of maintaining
  emergency communications and
  command and control assets
  associated with U.S. strategic
  forces (e.g., the Navy’s
  TACAMO aircraft and the Air
  Force’s airborne command posts) at
  low levels of readiness,
  making them dangerously
  susceptible to preemptive attack
  — if not inviting such an
  attack;
• Administration
  incoherence on the question of
  whether the U.S. is prepared to
  threaten the use of nuclear arms
  against non-nuclear weapon states
  should they employ other weaponry
  of mass destruction (e.g.,
  chemical and biological arms) against
  America personnel, assets or
  allies;
• The technical
  infeasability —
  notwithstanding the
  Administration’s arms control
  theology and political
  preferences — of maintaining for
  the foreseeable future a
  credible, safe and reliable
  nuclear deterrent without
  conducting routine underground
  nuclear tests; and
• The reckless
  irresponsibility of not providing
  as a matter of the utmost urgency
  a national defense against
  ballistic and cruise missile
  attack in light of
  emerging threats from many
  quarters.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy
commends Senator Thurmond for his clarion
call concerning the Clinton
Administration’s denuclearization policy.
It strongly encourages him and his
colleagues to become directly engaged
in the emerging Nuclear Policy Review, in
particular with a view to correcting the
critical problems identified above.
Needless to say, the
Commander-in-Chief of Strategic Command
should be allowed to become similarly
engaged.

Should adult supervision continue to
be absent in this process, it seems clear
that the cabal of anti-nuclear activists
— who are now running the Department of
Energy⁽¹⁾
as well as other key parts of the U.S.
government — will, in due course,
succeed in their objective: to
dismantle not only the American ICBM
force but the nation’s entire nuclear
arsenal. Sen. Thurmond’s warning
on this score is particularly timely and
entirely justified:

“…I hope I am wrong, but it
appears from episodes like this that
the Clinton Administration is
committed to a nuclear policy far
different from what was the basis of
fifty years of bipartisan agreement
— a new policy based on guilt and
shame, a policy that tells the world
that the U.S. is ashamed of having
nuclear weapons, a policy
dictated by the Natural Resources
Defense Council and Greenpeace.”

– 30 –

1. See in this
regard the Center for Security Policy’s
recent Decision Brief entitled, Why
the Department of Energy is
Self-Destructing: The ‘De-Nuclearizer’
Foxes are Running the Chicken Coop,
(No. 93-D
103, 9 December 1993).