Russia Faces an Unsafe Reliance on Nukes : NATO: Don’t risk forcing them into a more highly reactive posture to expand the alliance.

The American electorate is badly in need of a wake-up call on the issue of NATO expansion. At the insistence of our president, who is pursuing a campaign promise, the alliance is scheduled to vote in July on the accelerated admission of a few favored states in Central Europe. Since NATO is the dominant security organization in Europe, selective admission unavoidably will introduce discrimination against those states that are not accepted. It will also seriously provoke the Russians, who believe themselves to be the implicit threat against which the favored applicants are to be protected.

Efforts to mollify the Russians have been so feeble that they probably will do more to intensify suspicion than to convey reassurance.

No amount of soothing rhetoric can obscure the fact that the selective expansion of NATO again will divide the security of Europe. Internal deterioration of the Russian military establishment is generating grave dangers that are categorically different from the classic forms of aggression that NATO was organized to prevent. In terms of the real security interest of all the parties, the United States included, this insistence on expansion is an egregious misjudgment--a train wreck in progress. Nearly all of the opportunities for graceful correction have been forfeited.

In theory, the open political processes of the Western democracies are supposed to correct executive misadventures of this sort. In this case, however, those who know better within the American military establishment have mumbled their reservations but then have aligned with their civilian bosses’ position, as in fact they are supposed to do. The general public’s attention is seized with many things that appear to be more important. Most of the members of Congress are either political loyalists or clueless on the subject.

The NATO question is not about immediate political sentiment or feelings of cultural affinity. Ultimately it is about the disposition of military forces and in particular about the management of nuclear weapons. As the most ominous of several perverse effects, the current formula for expansion will predictably degrade the operational safety of nuclear weapons deployments. The United States and Russia still are conducting the deterrent operations developed during the Cold War. Each country keeps its nuclear forces on continuous alert status, prepared to initiate a massive attack on the other within a few minutes. The number of weapons involved has declined and the designated targets nominally have been removed. Despite those changes, neither the timing nor the magnitude of underlying threat has been fundamentally altered. The target assignments could be restored in a matter of seconds and the firepower available is capable of devastating both societies.

There is a new feature of the situation, however. Russia has lost segments of the Soviet-era early warning network, and Russia’s strategic forces are not as able to withstand an initial attack as the Soviet forces were in the latter stages of the Cold War. In particular, Russian forces are more vulnerable to the increasingly sophisticated capabilities of U.S. conventional forces. With the Russian government’s urgent domestic priorities, there is no serious prospect that the military establishment could redress this imbalance anytime soon. The question is the extent to which they compensate by increasing reliance on nuclear weapons deployments. Official Russian military doctrine already has indicated an intention to compensate in this manner, but that leaves open other important questions. Active implementation of this intention requires an increase in the reactiveness of Russian nuclear forces to U.S. and NATO conventional force operations, and that cannot be done without accepting safety standards lower than a less reactive force could achieve. Since Russian conventional forces are seriously underfinanced and are deteriorating, the compensating increase in the scope and reactiveness of their tactical nuclear weapons component is the last thing any member of NATO or any citizen of Europe should want.

As a practical matter, NATO expansion as now designed will bring U.S. tactical air potential that much closer to sensitive Russian targets and almost certainly will increase their reactiveness. That is an irresponsible thing for the Western alliance to do. Correcting this problem would have to go far beyond the reassurances currently contemplated. Credible measures logically would include the removal of all tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, the complete integration of Russia and all the other states of the region into a common military air traffic control system and a much more extensive redesign of the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty arrangements than has been suggested.

The more fundamental point is that we need to redirect our focus of concern and balance of policy. The operational safety of nuclear weapons is a much more urgent matter than extension of traditional deterrent protection. Constructive engagement with Russia is a far more urgent matter than the expansion of NATO, even for the favored few of Central Europe.

We have this one badly wrong, and we had better wake up before irretrievable damage is done.