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Note:
The opinions are those of the author and not of any agency of the
U.S. government.
 fter
a dramatic announcement that the United States is willing, unilaterally,
to slash the size of its nuclear forces, the Bush administration
is now considering a way to snatch an arms-control defeat from the
jaws of a diplomatic victory. Instead of destroying the weapons
taken out of service, some military planners in Washington are apparently
suggesting they could be mothballed and held as a "reserve."
The Russians — rightly, for once — are crying foul. It's
a bad idea.
During the
Cold War, the United States had to endure a lot of pompous lectures
from aspiring nuclear states, as well as from the usual anti-American
sources in Europe and the Third World, about the huge inventories
of nuclear arms kept by both superpowers. (Amazingly, the Soviets
were largely spared this hectoring — go figure.) How, we were
asked, could Washington and the rest of the nuclear "club"
tell smaller powers to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty when both
East and West were sitting on tens of thousands of missiles and
bombs? The American response was always to point out, sensibly enough,
that the Soviets, for their own deluded reasons, were obsessed with
numbers, and that if it took 20,000 warheads to deter them, then
we had little choice but to stock 20,000 warheads. To be sure, there
were military planners in the U.S. and NATO who spent long hours
figuring out where to place thousands of nuclear explosions, in
an often-hallucinatory game of scenario building. However, for the
Soviet Union — an impoverished and detested empire — nuclear
weapons were the only claim to superpower status, and they were
determined to have as many of them as possible.
Needless to
say, the American rationale often drew smirks from allies and enemies
alike, an all-around cynical dismissal of the idea that the United
States would ever really choose to forego being surrounded by a
moat of plutonium. The test of sincerity could come only after the
defeat of the Soviet Union, and both President Bush and his father
(who also made unilateral cuts in nuclear arms) passed that test
with flying colors. The voluntary reduction of the American nuclear
stockpile has left many of our enemies speechless, so that they
are now reduced to braying about the dangers of missile defense
— as though interceptors in Alaska are as dangerous as enough
mega tonnage to turn the Northern Hemisphere into a desert.
But the plan
to hold those warheads in "reserve" sends exactly the
wrong message at the wrong time — and makes Washington look
as if it's playing the kind of sneaky shell game the Soviets were
so fond of. Indeed, if the Russians were promoting this idea,
we'd be slamming them mercilessly for it, and we would be well within
our rights to do so. It is reminiscent of the bickering, in the
1980s, over where to put the intermediate-range Pershing and SS-20
missiles that were then based in Europe: We would put ours in Alaska,
they would put theirs in Siberia, and that would theoretically make
the world safer. Except, of course, that it was all silliness: The
systems were mobile and could be moved fairly quickly, and in the
end it was easier to just destroy them than to play diplomatic footsie
shuttling them around.
Russia may
not have much to say about the whole matter; their own weapons are
aging, and will have to be destroyed in any case. But to use our
superior negotiating position to ram this down Moscow's throat would
be an act of ham-fisted diplomacy that does little to enhance U.S.
security (much like what was done on NATO expansion and Kosovo…
say, come to think of it, is Madeleine Albright back and secretly
running the Russian desk at State?).
Of course,
it would be worth aggravating the Russians if national security
were truly at stake. But the real question is whether we need
to stockpile those weapons — or if an American deterrent numbering
some 1,500-2,000 weapons would be ineffective. Only Dr. Strangelove
could argue that several hundred nuclear strikes (let's assume we
only fire half the inventory and only half the weapons actually
arrive on target) aren't enough to deter even the dumbest or craziest
leaders. It may even have been enough, in the end, to deter the
Soviet Union — look at the effect of a single nuclear meltdown,
much less a nuclear strike, on Soviet thinking after Chernobyl.
Or imagine even 20 or 30 nuclear strikes on the United States, or
the U.K., or even China. A small nuclear attack (and in the world
of nuclear strategy, "small" is a relative term) is enough
to deter any nation, and if it's not, then an arsenal of 10,000
weapons isn't going to do what an arsenal a half — or a tenth
— of that size can't do.
The CIA is
reporting that China could field as many as 100 nuclear missiles
by 2015, and that for this reason alone we should keep our powder
— er, uranium — dry. But again, how much force will it
take to deter an attack by a hundred missiles as opposed to, say,
by 25? Would the Chinese be less likely to launch against us knowing
they'll only take, say, 500 nuclear strikes (and the utter devastation
of China) as opposed to 5,000 (which in any case would lay waste
to swaths of Russia, Korea, and Japan)?
One possible
compromise is to agree that a very small fraction of the reduction
on both sides can be turned to a reserve; but in general, the Americans
should take this opportunity to emphasize that when the President
takes a position, he means what he says, and that in this case,
"reductions" means "reductions" — and nothing
less.
The Chinese
are going to build up their nuclear forces no matter what we do,
and we had best accept the fact that we will soon face another Cold
War standoff with another aggressive, nuclear-armed power. If that
means building up our nuclear forces again in 15 years, so be it
— and we should make plain to the Russians that we reserve
the right to do so if China and other states pose an increased threat
to us. Indeed, for this reason alone the Bush administration should
hold firm to its refusal to codify these numbers in a treaty; treaties
are notoriously persistent things and in this case could only hamper
American flexibility in a fast-changing world.
But in the
meantime, destroying the weapons we reduce only makes sense. It's
a concession we can afford to offer the Russians (who have accepted
the end of the ABM Treaty with a minimum of unseemly complaining),
and is it hardly detrimental to our ability to deter, and if need
be to destroy, a nuclear aggressor. To do otherwise at this point
is to needlessly hand America's enemies a diplomatic victory, without
any consequent gain to our security.
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