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 f
there were any doubts that the theological practice known as "arms
control" is disconnected from reality, the increasingly shrill
response from its practitioners to President Bush's recent Nuclear
Posture Review (NPR) establishes the point beyond dispute.
The NPR provides
a blueprint for implementing the desire Mr. Bush expressed on the
campaign trail, namely to make dramatic reductions in America's
nuclear arsenal and to do so without waiting for the cumbersome
and time-consuming process of negotiating arms-control treaties
with the Kremlin. He repeatedly declared the Cold War era to be
over and promised a new relationship with Russia, based on friendship
not enmity.
You would think
the professional arms-control community would be grateful. After
all, they have championed such ideas for decades, assailing Cold
Warriors and their Strangelovian nuclear-warfighting doctrines while
demanding the wholesale and unilateral "denuclearization"
of the United States. Instead, they are denouncing the NPR. What's
going on here?
The problem
the arms controllers confront is that the Bush NPR recognizes a
reality they reject: The United States will need to maintain a nuclear
deterrent for the foreseeable future. What is more, it will have
to do so in the face of considerable uncertainty about emerging
geostrategic conditions. And it will have to compensate for the
insidious effects of a decade-long effort to dismantle and otherwise
erode the national technical/industrial infrastructure essential
to a safe, reliable, and credible nuclear arsenal.
To be sure,
the Nuclear Posture Review calls for cutting deployed U.S. weapons
to somewhere between 1,700 and 2200. This would represent a roughly
two-thirds cut in the number that are online on a day-to-day basis.
Under the Bush
plan, however, these reductions would be phased in over the next
decade. Most would be achieved by "downloading" weapons
from missiles and bombers that would remain in the active inventory.
As a hedge against future developments — perhaps the reemergence
in Russia of a deadly adversary or a China determined to be a "peer
competitor" to the United States, with a menacing nuclear arsenal
of its own — the United States would retain some of the nuclear
warheads and bombs that would be taken off alert. If the need arose,
they could be deployed again and, in the absence, of an arms control
treaty prohibiting or otherwise precluding such a step, it could
be taken unilaterally by Washington.
The Left is
now feverishly attacking these aspects of the NPR. They profess
grave concerns that such an approach could be destabilizing, that
it will prompt the Russians to believe that we remain locked in
a Cold War stance and compel them to retain nuclear weapons they
would otherwise destroy. They fear that, given the corrupt and insecure
system charged with safeguarding such stockpiled Russian weapons,
some might fall into terrorists' hands.
As it so often
did during the Cold War, the Kremlin is echoing, and thereby helping
to legitimate, these criticisms. Those at home and abroad who want
the U.S. disarmed are demanding that more weapons be cut than Mr.
Bush thinks can safely be "stood down." They want all
weapons removed from deployed status to be destroyed and a treaty
put into place so that there can be no legal "reconstitution"
of our nuclear forces. And, by the way, the president should forget
about pursuing the development and deployment of effective missile
defenses and honor the prohibitions on such activities imposed by
the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Only by taking
such steps, the high priests of arms control contend, can the United
States construct a new, more stable and constructive relationship
with Russia and remain secure in the 21st century. Hard as it may
be to believe, some in Congress — like Sen. Carl Levin, the
improbable, hard-Left chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee
— may try to compel such changes in the Bush plan via legislation.
As is so often
the case with the professional arms-control caste, their latest,
tendentious demands fly in the face of common sense. Take, for example,
the matter of the Russian arsenal. We have no idea how many nuclear
weapons the Russians have today, let alone where they all are or
what their precise status is. There is reason to believe though
that there are many more squirreled away than has ever been acknowledged.
This is due, in no small measure, to the fact that the Kremlin during
both Soviet and post-Soviet times has concealed some of its production
capacity and maintained covert capabilities both to deploy and to
reconstitute their offensive arsenal.
If the president
were to agree to a new Cold War-style arms-control treaty with Russia
of the kind fancied by the NPR's critics, the United States would
find itself obliged to eliminate irreplaceable weapons and capabilities
while Moscow would retain the covert capability to reconstitute
a far larger offensive arsenal. Even if all Moscow's declared weapons
were properly disposed of, the Russian mafia, terrorists, and others
could still get their hands on Moscow's unacknowledged weapons and
radioactive materials. Under these circumstances, insurance policies
in the form of nuclear hedges and missile defenses make eminent
sense.
All other things
being equal, the Left may yet prevail, however — even if they
fail to undo Mr. Bush's offensive and defensive insurance policies.
It will be impossible to maintain a safe, reliable, and credible
nuclear deterrent for the foreseeable future unless one other hedge
is adopted: The resumption of periodic, underground nuclear testing.
Such testing is needed not only to maintain and fix existing weapons;
it is essential to the force modernization we are sure to need as
such weapons become obsolete and ill-suited to our deterrence requirements.
Unfortunately,
while the NPR calls for an increased readiness to conduct such tests,
it does not order them to begin. President Bush should do so at
once. Failing that, his own plan will inexorably become a formula
for the very U.S. denuclearization he so clearly means to avoid.
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