Dubya did it!

You might have expected the arms-control and disarmament crowd to be dancing in the streets. President Bush has decided that “current levels of our nuclear forces do not reflect today’s strategic realities.” Therefore, this week, he informed Russian President Putin that the United States will unilaterally reduce our “operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads” to a level between 1,700 and 2,200 over the next decade.

Why aren’t they dancing? Well, they’re out of a job. For the past 50 years, the arms-control crowd has been gainfully employed, trying to negotiate those levels. There were no negotiations this time … Dubya just did it.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, despite decades of arms-control negotiations, it still possessed more than 11,000 strategic nuclear weapons – nukes delivered by land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and by bombers with intercontinental range. The Russians inherited those nukes along with more than 15,000 tactical nuclear weapons – artillery rounds, demolition munitions and gravity bombs, as well as warheads for short-range battlefield missiles, air-defense and ballistic missile-defense interceptors, torpedoes and sea-launched cruise missiles.

Russia immediately sought U.S. technical and financial help in dismantling Soviet nukes that were excess to their needs and in peacefully disposing of the fissile materials recovered. Congress acted immediately and authorized – in the Nunn-Lugar Act of 1992 – President Bush, the elder, to provide technical assistance and up to $400 million per year in financial assistance. There were no negotiations … Congress just did it.

Yet, in early 1998, Russia’s stockpile reportedly still contained approximately 6,000 strategic nukes and between 7,000 and 12,000 tactical nukes.

Of course, there is a big difference in the cost of having nukes in stockpile and having them operationally deployed. The Russians have already decided that they can only afford to operationally deploy about a thousand strategic nukes. But they’ve got a problem.

The Soviet early-warning system consisted of sensors in satellites that would detect ICBM and SLBM launches and over-the-horizon radars to track the missiles once launched. Russia inherited all the Soviet nukes, but it did not inherit all the ground-based components of the Soviet command-and-control system. In particular, the critically important Skrunda radar was located in Latvia, which is now an independent state. Furthermore, in the summer of 1998, both of Russia’s geo-stationary early-warning satellites failed. The older satellites and remaining ground-based tracking stations of the Soviet system cannot provide continuous coverage of U.S. missile launch sites. That is, they no longer have an effective nuclear deterrent.

Then, on May 1, 2001, President Bush made a major speech wherein he noted that the world had changed, that the United States faced new threats, and that it could no longer rely on the Cold War-era doctrine of nuclear deterrence to safeguard its national security. He said, “We need new concepts of deterrence that rely on both offensive and defensive forces,” and he called on Russia to join the United States in developing a new framework for strategic stability and international security in the post-Cold War era.

He said that the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was outdated and that in order to develop that new framework the United States would need to “leave behind the constraints” of the treaty. Russia promptly indicated that if the United States withdrew from the ABM Treaty, then Russia might withdraw from the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 1992, negotiated by President Bush the Elder.

But that threat was wasted on Dubya. He apparently has no interest in rescuing the START II arms-control treaty, which has never gone into effect, but is now moot in any case. Both we and the Russians intend to go far below the levels, or even the proposed START III levels.

Both we and the Russians want to reduce the cost of operationally deploying strategic nukes against each other. We both need to address the 21st-century threats of terrorists and rogue states. To do that, what we and the Russians need is access to the kind of satellite-based, global-coverage, real-time early-warning ABM command-control-and-communication system proposed by President Bush. If the ABM Treaty stands in the way, it must be brushed aside.

Putin said that Russia will probably follow suit on the operational strategic nuke reductions. As to brushing aside the ABM Treaty, he’ll go home and think about it.