Scrap ’Em
A bad arms idea.

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.