Post-Cold War World Demands New Ways to Deal with Warheads

We should be thankful that the Russian Duma has once again postponed even discussing the START II nuclear arms control treaty. Perhaps this latest procrastination will help us to recognize that we need a new approach to dealing with the problems that 37,000 nuclear warheads in the world today present. Recently there have been significant developments that make the treaty process irrelevant, at least for the time being:

* It is doubtful START II will ever come into force. Even if both the Duma and the Russian Federation Council ratify it, they are likely to do so with amendments which will jeopardize the necessary re-passage by the U.S. Senate.

* The proposed ceiling of 3,500 nuclear warheads for each side under the treaty does not go far enough. It is unsafe for Russia to have that many nuclear weapons, and there is no conceivable reason for us to want to inflict that amount of damage on anyone. What is worse, there are loopholes in the treaty allowing the U.S. to retain an incredible total of 10,000 warheads.

* START II will not come into full effect until the end of 2007. Considering the uncertainties today in nations like Russia, China, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, that is a long time to wait for such a minimal reduction. The START II treaty may pave the way for future treaties, but we cannot wait that long.

Last October, Russia’s deputy prime minister acknowledged that Russia’s nuclear arsenal is suffering from lack of maintenance and replacement. He indicated that by 2007 Russia would not be able to deliver even 1,000 intercontinental nuclear warheads. Focus on a treaty that permits us to have 10,000 warheads at that time is simply ridiculous.

The treaty process is attempting to do more than is necessary at this time. First, there is our insistence on actually destroying missiles and warheads. Even if the Russians were willing and could afford it, neither they nor the U.S. could destroy more than about 1,500 a year. Our insistence on detailed rules for treaty verification complicates and delays the process for no real benefit.

For instance, in 1978 senators asked me as director of Central Intelligence how much the Soviets could cheat under the SALT II Treaty. I estimated Russia could secretly maintain about 1,000 warheads without our knowledge, but at that time the Soviets had 40,000 of them. That estimate of 1,000 was irrelevant as we were many treaties away from the point where cheating on that scale would make the slightest difference.

Although, these standards of absolute verification and total destruction may have been appropriate during the Cold War when our concern was all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union, the nuclear dangers we face today are very different. Above all, there is the possibility of the accidental firing of Russian nuclear weapons due to the physical deterioration of Russia’s nuclear plant or the lack of adequate command and control. In countering that danger, a more limited goal than total destruction will suffice. Our immediate objective should be to get Russia’s nuclear arsenal as far from hair-trigger alert as possible. There are three quick, safe steps for doing this.

* Abandon our doctrine of being ready to fire nuclear weapons upon indications of an incoming nuclear attack. No such attack could destroy our nuclear retaliatory capability because it is secure in submarines. Moreover, a doctrine that expects a president to decide to launch nuclear weapons for the first time since Nagasaki with, at most, 10 minutes warning, is unrealistic. A decision to launch would certainly lead to nuclear war, but the presumption about an incoming attack could easily be a mistake. Our dropping this doctrine might or might not encourage the Russians to follow, but they certainly will not if we do not. Either way, we only stand to gain by increasing our own safety.

* Abandon our doctrine that we would be the first to employ nuclear weapons under some circumstances. We made a pledge in 1952 to use our nuclear strength to protect our European allies from a conventional assault from the Warsaw Pact. Although this guarantee is not necessary today, the argument is made that the allies do not want to forsake it. That argument has been undercut, though, by the German and Canadian governments, which recently suggested NATO renounce any first-use of nuclear weapons. The argument for reserving the right of first use has had to shift to deterring a biological or chemical attack by the threat of nuclear retaliation. Not only does our vast superiority in conventional weapons pose an adequate deterrent, but a nuclear response to such attacks would be vastly disproportionate.

* Lessen the risks of small, accidental attacks from Russia by looking more objectively on antiballistic missile defenses. The traditional argument that the Russians would be forced to retain larger offensive forces should we build defenses evaporated when the Russians acknowledged their inability to do that even if they wanted. We need to consider the costs and capabilities of defenses, not abstract arguments against them.

Our arsenal today is still about what it was in 1972! As part of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty we signed that year, we pledged to reduce the size of our nuclear arsenal dramatically as a price for other signatories renouncing their nuclear ambitions. Unfortunately, we are, in effect, telling the world that we need the right to use a nuclear arsenal, which will still number 10,000 warheads in 2007, but that no additional nation should have even a small number of them.

This is not only untenable morally but makes it close to impossible to persuade even friendly countries to desist from selling nuclear components or know-how to would-be nuclear proliferators.

U.S. and Russian arsenals must be reduced significantly and quickly in order to persuade the world we are serious about arresting proliferation. This is impossible if we insist on immediate, verifiable destruction. Instead, we should place nuclear warheads in strategic escrow. That is, we could immediately remove some increment of warheads, perhaps 1,000, from their missiles and place them in storage a minimum of 200 miles away. We would invite the Russians to place observers at the storage site with authority only to count what went in and out.

This would not destroy the weapons, just lengthen the time it would take to fire them. It is, though, the only way we can defuse a thousand warheads in a matter of months, not decades, as we are planning. It would tell the world we are downgrading these weapons and trying to comply with the nonproliferation treaty. Hopefully, the Russians would follow suit. They have the incentive that if they do not by 2007, they, by their own calculations, will have fewer than 1,000 usable nuclear warheads and we will still have 10,000. If, however, they accepted the concept of strategic escrow and placed 1,000 warheads in remote storage, we would cut another increment of 1,000. This could start a process which in a few years could take the arsenals of the two nuclear superpowers below 1,000 ready warheads.

This process of strategic escrow is a very practicable way to re-energize the arms control process at no risk, because both the Russians and we should be able to quickly find or build suitable storage. Neither of us would store warheads in ways that would be vulnerable to a surprise attack. Vulnerability, however, would not be an issue until the numbers of warheads not in escrow were in the low hundreds. At that point, the other six nuclear powers would have to be brought into this process of strategic escrow. Eventually, all nuclear warheads in the world could be in escrow under international observation. The START process would continue to destroy them at the best pace possible to a treaty-agreed level.

If at any point one of the nuclear powers appeared to be cheating, or if some new nuclear power appeared on the scene, neither could gain advantage as the other nuclear powers would simply reconstitute enough ready weapons to deter the one that was cheating.

The Duma’s recent procrastination on START II, Russia’s admission that its nuclear arsenal is inexorably declining, German renunciation of first use and the growing evidence of efforts toward nuclear proliferation all tell us that the climate surrounding nuclear weapons is changing markedly. Yet, we continue to berate a beleaguered President Boris Yeltsin to use his political capital on a treaty that will have little effect for some years to come.

We also continue to waste time and effort speculating on what START III and IV should look like somewhere well past 2007. In all this, we are deluding ourselves into believing we are doing something meaningful to alleviate the dangerous uncertainty those 37,000 nuclear warheads certainly pose.

If President Clinton were to renounce our plans to respond under attack and to use nuclear weapons first and to initiate strategic escrow, under his authorities as commander in chief, he could, without the least risk to our nation’s security, lay the foundation for a legacy of immense importance to all humankind.