John Wohlstetter - Sleepwalking with the Bomb

American negotiators ardently seek agreement, and thus look for ways to break deadlocks with initiatives, find some compromise. They even at times urge far-reaching concessions to reach a provisional accord, secure that other officials will oppose them and thus temper the final result. They continually seek to convince their opposite numbers of America’s good intentions, in hope of getting a reciprocal conciliatory gesture. Soviet negotiators were almost the polar opposite in approach and temperament. Their diplomacy “substitute[d] persistence for imagination.” They derived no reward for making proposals or concessions. They could sit rigid for years without any domestic pressure, and wait for the other side, under heavy domestic pressure, to give in. (So can Russian negotiators today. Neither their bargaining culture, nor ours, has changed.)

The SALT treaties followed the regnant doctrine of the day: mutual assured destruction—founded on the idea that holding mass populations hostage better preserved deterrence than protecting them by shelters or missile defense, given vast amounts of offensive weapons. The Nixon administration enshrined MAD in SALT I, via the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The ABM Treaty—which the Senate ratified 88 votes to 2—sharply limited the deployment of missiles designed to intercept and destroy other missiles in flight. Of the many objections to this treaty, three were most salient:

1. The vast throw-weight (payload deliverable over distance capability) of Russia’s missiles, concentrated in highly accurate, land-based ICBMs.

2. The inability to verify actual numbers of Russian warheads.

3. The limits the treaty placed on missile defense.

Russia had deployed huge missiles—far larger than any in the American arsenal. The missiles possessed the requisite combination of accuracy and yield so that they could plausibly destroy large numbers of American missiles inside their silos. Russia’s monster SS-18 ICBM had seven to eight times the payload capacity of America’s mainstay Minuteman III ICBM. Its multiwarhead SS-19 missile, taking advantage of loose treaty language, replaced a far smaller (and less accurate) single warhead missile (SS-11); its monster SS-9 missile was topped with a 25-megaton warhead, the largest ever deployed on an ICBM. The SS-18 was the 1970s equivalent (on a vastly more destructive scale) of Japan’s leviathan battleships armed with 18-inch guns. Just as those guns could hurl a heavier shell farther than a U.S. 16-inch bore, so the throw-weight of Russia’s largest missiles was superior to anything in America’s forces.

The Soviets refused to consent to on-site inspections, and would not even tell the United States how many warheads and missiles they had or confirm U.S. estimates. So the treaty was based upon our counting what could be verified—silos in the ground, detectable by surveillance satellite cameras. [8] Military surveillance satellites, in contrast to the communications satellites we use every day, usually make a highly elliptical orbit of Earth—for example, 700 miles perigee (lowest point) and 12,000 miles apogee (highest point). At low altitude over their photo reconnaissance target, they can photograph objects as small as a tennis ball and clearly display license plate numbers. But weather over the target area can complicate observation, and—as its orbital path is a matter of the laws of physics—the people whose assets are under surveillance can enhance concealment every 90 minutes when the satellite passes overhead. As to things that could not be seen, like warheads inside a missile nose cone, the United States devised “counting rules”—based upon the observed size of nose cones—to apply limits. [9] Counting rules were complex. Rules had to be devised not only for missiles based on land, but also for those carried deep underwater by missile submarines. Rules for the latter were devised by counting launching tubes, with estimates of possible extra missiles based upon the size of the submarine and the types of missiles it carried. Counting warheads on bombers also proved very hard: rules had to be devised for bomb bay sizes and the size of bombs carried externally—under wings or under the fuselage. SALT I limited launchers , not missiles or warheads, for precisely this reason. A complex technical and strategic calculus underlay judgments as to the balance between offensive and defensive systems. [10] Appendix 4 discusses SALT trade-offs and judgments balancing MIRV and ABM.

As to missile defense, SALT I limited each side to radar to protect one major city and one ICBM base, a compromise designed so that the Russians could keep their primitive systems protecting Moscow and one missile base. (The United States briefly deployed an ABM under treaty rules, but scrapped it later in the 1970s.) The treaty decreed that ABM radars could be deployed only on the periphery of the country. This was to prevent them from being used for the “battle management” of a national missile defense system—that is, for the countrywide detection and interception of incoming hostile objects (and damage assessment after a hit). In the 1980s the Soviets deployed a massive battle-management radar installation in central Russia, in violation of the treaty, but denied it until the Cold War ended. SALT I’s Standing Consultative Commission regulating treaty implementation was a two-party affair with no final outside arbiter (none existed). Thus the U.S. could not force the Soviets to comply.

Disenchantment with SALT I did not stop the arms-control process—the new Carter administration unilaterally cancelled the strategic B-1 heavy bomber in 1977. [11] President Reagan put the B-1 back in production in 1981. It remains part of America’s bomber force. The next year, Carter did away with the proposed battlefield weapon known colloquially as the “neutron bomb.” Formally termed the “enhanced radiation, reduced blast” warhead, it combined intense neutron radiation with relatively limited explosive and heat energy. Covering a small area—typically, within a quarter-mile radius of the bomb’s low-altitude airburst detonation, half the physically destructive radius of the Hiroshima bomb—the highly lethal neutron radiation penetrated tanks and buildings, killing personnel inside (or outside) within hours. As any tank battle in Germany would have to take place close to heavily populated cities, German chancellor Helmut Schmidt had staked his prestige on the deployment of this weapon, and was enraged at Carter’s unilateral cancellation of it. [12] In order to boost support for the SALT II treaty, Carter committed to developing the Trident submarine-launched missile, and deployed it in 1979. Its intercontinental range and MIRV warhead payload greatly enhanced the sea leg of the U.S. triad.

The Carter administration signed the SALT II treaty in June 1979, essentially freezing new missile development at levels that left the Soviet heavy-missile arsenal intact. Its ratification—already an acrimonious subject in the Senate—became impossible when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve.

THE ADVENT of the Reagan administration in 1981 bid fair to change the arms-control picture. Reagan had campaigned against the SALT II treaty as a symbol of the deteriorating military balance between the United States and the Soviet Union. Despite never ratifying the treaty, as president he informally adhered to its limits, for want of congressional support to build beyond them. In Paul Nitze’s view, by not seeking Senate ratification of SALT II Reagan allowed future arms talks to begin from scratch, rather than be treated as a continuation of SALT II and thus bound by SALT II’s foundation principles.