TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100791/1007100.000

Text File | 1992-10-20 | 10.1 KB | 211 lines

                8&t                          Z=              ▌<            ╚NATION, Page 18

COVER STORIES

Toward a Safer World


Breaking the dusty rules of arms control, Bush cuts the U.S.
arsenal and invites Gorbachev to do the same. But Moscow should
read the fine print.

By STROBE TALBOTT


     It was a solid Bush-plus performance. In his televised
address to the nation from the Oval Office on Friday evening,
the President was proposing nothing less than a new set of
guidelines for nuclear peace in the post-cold war world. He was,
for once, ahead of the curve, demonstrating real leadership in
his capacity as Commander in Chief of the doomsday arsenal.

    Yet this was no nuclear abolitionist, no Jimmy Carter
daring to dream about the "elimination of all nuclear weapons
from this earth." Nor was it Ronald Reagan, putting his faith
in a pure defense that would render nuclear weapons "impotent
and obsolete." Instead, it was classic George Bush, a
traditionalist and pragmatist, striving for boldness without
undermining a quality he values even more: prudence.

    Bush did his best -- which was very good indeed -- to make
his initiative seem visionary, equitable, even magnanimous. For a
sweetener, he announced several unilateral steps, such as
removing all nuclear-tipped cruise missiles from U.S. surface
ships and attack submarines. But these are for the most part
minor gestures that will leave intact the main concepts and
structures of American defense. In some cases, Bush was doing
little more than accepting recommendations that experts have
long been making for strictly military reasons. For example, a
number of prominent specialists on naval warfare have argued for
years that sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles are a bad idea
in their own right.

    The implications of Bush's proposals are far more onerous
for the U.S.S.R. In his own polite and statesmanlike way, he
was all but dictating to the Kremlin how it should restructure
its nuclear forces so as to diminish even further the threat
they pose to the rest of the world.

    Bush's essential purpose is to accelerate the retirement
of some of the Soviet Union's most advanced military programs
while protecting key elements of the U.S.'s "strategic
modernization": the B-2 Stealth bomber, the Trident II submarine
missile, and a scaled-back version of the Star Wars antimissile
defense.

    Arms-control proposals, like the arms themselves, have
targets. Bush's plan is aimed squarely at two categories of
nuclear weaponry: 1) intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)
with multiple warheads, known as independently targetable
re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), and 2) short-range missiles and other
so-called tactical weapons. Not coincidentally, those are the
Soviet systems that most worry the U.S.

    MIRVed ICBMs have long been the principal villains in
American strategists' scenarios for a "bolt from the blue"
Soviet attack. Because the U.S.S.R. is a land power with a
historical preference for heavy artillery, it has more of these
hydra-headed monsters than the U.S.

    Until last Friday it was U.S. policy to redress this
imbalance in two ways: through negotiations, like the Strategic
Arms Reduction Talks (START), that whittled away the Soviet
advantage; and by developing America's own large, heavily MIRVed
land-based missile, the 10-warhead MX. Bush said in effect,
Let's go straight to the bottom line, which is zero; let's agree
to eliminate MIRVed ICBMs altogether.

    That is a fairly easy sacrifice for the U.S. The MX is
highly controversial in Congress, and only 50 have been
deployed. The U.S. has 300 other, older MIRVed ICBMs. For their
part, the Soviets would have to give up 763 such weapons.

    In targeting tactical nukes, Bush was addressing what has
been a growing Western concern about the disintegration of the
Soviet Union. For months, an interagency committee of the U.S.
government has been quietly studying the danger that rebel or
dissident groups might seize weapons and use them for
intimidation or worse.

    "We've got the makings of one hell of a Tom Clancy novel
here," said an Administration official during a White House
meeting in January. The issue is not entirely hypothetical.
There was at least one incident, in Azerbaijan, in which a band
of reb els briefly broke into an installation at which nukes
were stored. The U.S. committee concluded that the greatest risk
was that tactical nuclear weapons, such as artillery shells,
might fall into the wrong hands.

    Bush calculates, no doubt correctly, that Mikhail
Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin are every bit as frightened of that
prospect as he is, especially in the wake of the aborted coup
in August.

    The central feature of last week's initiative -- the
elimination of MIRVed ICBMs -- is recycled from a proposal that
Bush first thought about putting to Gorbachev two years ago. In
November 1989, when Bush was preparing for his first meeting as
President with Gorbachev at Malta, the State Department floated
the idea that the U.S. should seek a ban on mobile MIRVed ICBMs.
The department tried to promote the plan at the White House as
a way of giving a "Bush stamp" to a START treaty that was
otherwise largely the inherited handiwork of the Reagan
Administration.

    National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, who had been
pushing "de-MIRVing" for years, persuaded Bush to go the State
Department one better and propose a ban on all MIRVed ICBMs,
stationary as well as mobile. Scowcroft sold Bush on the idea,
but Defense Secretary Dick Cheney objected so strenuously that
the plan was dropped.

    Now that it has been revived, the objections may come from
the Defense Ministry in Moscow. Since the Soviets have many
more MIRVed ICBMs than does the U.S., Gorbachev's military
advisers are likely to tell him that a prohibition on such
weapons is a net disadvantage to them. Therefore, instead of
merely accepting the U.S. proposal, the Soviets may carry the
logic of Scowcroft's position a step further; they may say, If
we're going to be truly serious about de-MIRVing, why stop at
the water's edge? Why not ban MIRVs on submarine-launched
ballistic missiles (SLBMs) as well?

    In the mind game of deterrence, MIRVed submarine missiles
are the trump card in the American deck: even if American ICBMs
were destroyed in their silos and American bombers vaporized on
their runways or shot down trying to penetrate Soviet airspace,
U.S. submarines would still be at the bottom of the ocean,
running silent and running deep, invulnerable to pre-emption and
bristling with missiles, each capable of exacting terrible
revenge on the U.S.S.R. Older U.S. boats are equipped with
missiles that carry as many as 14 warheads each, while the newer
ones have missiles with eight to 12 warheads. The notion of
limiting them to one each is almost unthinkable, particularly
to the U.S. Navy.

    Beyond fine-tuning the balance of terror, Bush's proposal
was intended to help him get a grip on a more general political
problem: the difficulty that statesmen have in keeping up with
events, particularly in a period of seismic changes in the
geopolitical landscape. Bush opened his speech with the image
of the world facing a "fresh page of history before yesterday's
ink has even dried." He might have been speaking about the ink
on two documents in particular.

    Last November the leaders of 22 nations met in Paris to
sign a treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) that had
been under negotiation for nearly 17 years. In July, during
their summit meeting in Moscow, Bush and Gorbachev signed
another pact capping a decade of START talks.

    By any reasonable standard, both treaties were estimable
accomplishments. CFE blunted the threat of a Soviet-led
blitzkrieg by the Warsaw Pact against Western Europe; START
brought about a substantial reduction in MIRVed ICBMs,
particularly Soviet ones, the potential instruments of a
nuclear-age Pearl Harbor. However, by the time CFE was signed,
the Warsaw Pact was nearly defunct, and one of its member
states, East Germany, had ceased to exist -- or more to the
point, had defected to NATO. Soviet divisions were pulling out
of Eastern Europe for reasons that had nothing to do with CFE
and everything to do with the anticommunist revolution that had
swept the region. START too needs to be updated before it is
even submitted to the Supreme Soviet and the U.S. Senate for
ratification.

    Gorbachev had trouble getting his marshals, generals and
admirals to accept numerous concessions in the negotiations.
Granted, that was before the coup, and the military was still
throwing its weight around. Now many of the more obstreperous
senior officers have been summarily retired. Still, there are
plenty of people in Moscow -- not all of them in uniform -- who
are desperate to cling to Soviet strategic nuclear strength as
the last symbol of their country's superpower status. For that
reason alone they will resist further cuts.

    Yet the U.S.S.R. itself is shrinking. Ukraine is not only
asserting its independence but, almost incidentally, moving to
make itself a nuclear-free zone. There has been a similar
reaction against the Soviet nuclear-weapons program in the
Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan. Thus many if not all of
the Soviet nukes in those two republics will be pulled out.
Either they can be removed to new sites in the Russian
Federation, or they can be taken out of commission altogether
and destroyed.

    From the U.S. point of view, the fewer Soviet (or Russian)
nukes the better. Moreover, it would be easier to verify the
dismantling and destruction of weapons than keep track of them
as they're redeployed.

    In planning what he would say Friday, Bush calculated that
the Soviet leader will have an easier time persuading his
military to swallow these additional cuts if they're part of a
bilateral deal with the U.S.

    In that sense too, the initiative was classic Bush. Once
again, part of his strategy is to help his pal Gorbachev. That's
only prudent. But in this case, it's also plenty bold.