Alternative Arms-Control Reality
Nuclearization games.

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president & CEO of the Center for Security Policy
January 21, 2002 10:40 a.m.

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.