John Wohlstetter - Sleepwalking with the Bomb

Just over a year after that double blunder in Reykjavik, the two leaders met in Washington to sign the Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (known as the INF Treaty), which eliminated missiles with ranges between roughly 300 and 3,500 miles). This treaty of late 1987 was the culmination of something Reagan had been proposing since 1981—if the Soviets dismantled their ballistic and cruise missiles aimed at Europe, then the U.S. would cancel the 464 cruise missiles and 108 Pershing II ballistic missiles it planned to deploy there. The Russians were petrified of the 1,000-mile range Pershing II, which could have hit Moscow with 100-foot accuracy within eight minutes of launch from West Germany. In late 1983 they walked out of arms talks to protest the initial NATO “Euromissile” deployments. Despite intense pressure to remove the missiles and suspend deployment, not only from Democrats, but also from much of the media and even some prominent Republicans, Reagan stood fast. Eight months after Gorbachev became General Secretary, the Soviets returned to the table, ending a two-year arms talk hiatus. So Reagan’s arms-control legacy, the INF Treaty—under which the U.S. destroyed 846 nuclear weapons and Russia 1,846—became the first nuclear arms accord to eliminate an entire class of weapons. [15] The INF Treaty has not worked perfectly. Reportedly Russia shipped two rocket motor models—the RD-214 and RD-216 motors, stripped from scrapped INF Treaty–covered missiles (SS-4 and SS-5) and sent them to Iran for testing.

THE NOVEMBER after Reagan left office, the Berlin Wall fell. Before George H. W. Bush’s presidential term ended, the Soviet Union exited the world stage. In 1992, President Bush Sr.’s last year, the country passed three arms-control milestones. Firstly, the United States unilaterally ended nuclear warhead modernization, a step even our allies did not follow, let alone our adversaries. (Modernized warheads can be made both safer and more reliable.) Secondly, Senators Sam Nunn (DGA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) created the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program to secure from theft loose nuclear materials at hundreds of sites inside Russia and find work for thousands of Russian nuclear scientists. Nunn-Lugar is nearing the end, with the close of 2013 set for completion of its myriad monumental tasks.

Nunn came to the view early in his career that nuclear material must be stored far more securely than it typically was. As a 24-year-old congressional intern he visited NATO’s massive Ramstein Air Base (in what then was West Germany) during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was told by an air force general that in event of a Soviet attack he had one minute to get his planes aloft so they could escape destruction. Visiting NATO sites in 1974 as a freshman senator, Nunn was stunned to learn that ground commanders facing Warsaw Pact forces far larger than their own envisioned early recourse to nuclear weapons, to prevent the Soviet Union’s huge army from overrunning Western Europe. On that same visit one base security officer told Nunn that a team of terrorists could conceivably storm the base and make off with a nuclear weapon; three or four terrorists might not succeed, but a team of 10 possibly could. Safety procedures were subsequently stepped up. By the end of 1976 all tactical nuclear weapons were equipped with trigger locks known as Permissive Action Links (PALs), which made unauthorized detonation of a U.S. nuclear weapon virtually impossible.

The third arms-control milestone was the adoption by the U.S. and Russia of a pact scrapping long-range nuclear missiles. Russia’s nuclear arsenal had surpassed America’s in 1978 (when the U.S. level fell below 23,000), and it peaked at around 45,000 weapons in 1986. The end of the Cold War made deep arms reductions possible. Bush Sr. negotiated the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Gorbachev in 1991. At the time the superpowers had 12,000 deployed strategic nuclear weapons. The treaty cut the total to 6,000, but Bush also unilaterally reduced America’s 6,000 tactical nuclear weapons to 500.

Bush Sr. and Gorbachev’s successor, Boris Yeltsin, signed the START II (De-MIRVing) Treaty in 1993, to replace multiple-warhead missiles with single-warhead missiles. The Senate ratified it 87 to 4 three years later, but—in a case of the Russians practicing linkage—the Duma (parliament) delayed it, protesting the enlargement of NATO into Eastern Europe and the American interventions in Kosovo and Iraq. Though the Duma finally ratified the treaty in 2000, it attached conditions on missile defense that the George W. Bush administration could not accept, and the treaty never came into force.

In 2002, George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin negotiated the steepest weapons cut yet, slashing deployed strategic weapons to 2,200, in a treaty known as Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty (SORT, or the Moscow Treaty). In the same year Bush exercised America’s legal right to exit the 1972 ABM Treaty upon six months’ notice, a step Moscow did not protest.

President Obama came into office determined to go for nuclear zero sooner rather than later, based upon his belief that all countries have a genuine common interest in abolishing nuclear weapons. But in pushing this goal he has been speeding through yellow caution signals.

In April 2010 he signed the New START Treaty, which cut American nuclear weapons while permitting the Russians to increase theirs, since they were already below the treaty levels—despite the fact that they could not maintain their existing weapons. Further, Russia’s rail-mobile missiles (shuttled around Russia’s vast rural interior) did not count towards treaty limits. Verification was more limited than under START: Russia was required to decrypt telemetry information—radio signals with missile flight data, immensely valuable for understanding how a missile performs in actual flight—for only five missile tests. Thus Russia can conceal data on its newest missiles, about which we know least, by revealing decrypted information only for obsolete models about which we already know a great deal.

In his eagerness to “reset” relations with Russia, Obama threw away all the negotiating leverage that would have enabled him to extract concessions from an economically strapped Moscow. U.S. negotiators allowed treaty preamble language relinking missile defense to offensive deployment—in other words, Russia could assert that U.S. deployment of missile defense negates Russia’s offensive missiles, and thus impairs Russian deterrence. Washington says this language does not legally bind; Moscow says it does. (Russia also objects to the limited missile defense deployments slated for Eastern Europe.) This in practical terms means an unenforceable standoff on missile defense.

Officials selected exclusively by the U.S. and Russia make up the Bilateral Consultative Commission in charge of adjudication. This legal arrangement yielded serial stalemates under SALT I a generation ago, and figures to produce more of the same this time around. The United States is in the odd position of having a legal right dependent upon Russia’s acceptance of guilt. The U.S. has, in effect, the right to sue—but can win only if its adversary admits liability.

In a landmark 1961 article, “After Detection, What?,” nuclear and arms-control strategist Fred C. Ikle, later to become the third-ranking defense official in the Reagan administration, presciently warned that detecting an arms agreement violation is only the beginning:

If the violator resumes testing, the injured country will do likewise; if the violator reoccupies his part of a neutralized zone, the other will move back into his; and if the violator rearms, his opponent will rearm to the same extent.