Abstract
The cuts in the arsenal announced at the Bush-Putin meeting in Crawford weren't really cuts at all–
At the November 2001 Crawford Summit, president George W. Bush announced unilateral cuts that would bring the number of U.S. “operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads” down to 1,700-2,200 over the next 10 years. Described as a bold step, in reality it was business as usual.
Although the president frequently criticizes nuclear treaties, his use of terms like the number of “operationally deployed” warheads, and debates over “strategic” versus tactical nuclear weapons, sounds a lot like old-fashioned arms control talk.
And why will reductions be made so slowly? The 10-year timeframe means that even if Bush is reelected to a second term, we won't see the results until well after he leaves office. And isn't 10 years about the same length of time it took to negotiate the START I treaty?
Details of how the cuts will be distributed among bombers, strategic submarines, and land-based missiles will be revealed with the results of the Nuclear Posture Review, which was scheduled for completion in December by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But the Crawford reduction is the bottom line, and it doesn't cut any deeper than START III levels.
Nuclear diehards have resisted the kind of change that would challenge current widespread counterforce targeting of Russia and China. And, as if 2,000 modern warheads aren't enough to threaten those countries, they also insist that thousands of the “cut” warheads be kept in reserve in case Russia backs out of its agreements or in the unlikely case that one or more operational weapon types suffer catastrophic failure.
Bush is apparently unaware of their thinking. Soon after saying that his cuts meant “reducing and destroying the number of warheads to get down to specific levels,” National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice corrected him: “I believe that what the president was referring to is [that] we will not have these warheads near the places at which they could be deployed. In other words, they will truly not be deployable warheads. In that sense, their capability will not be accessible to the United States.”
What Rice is talking about is the hedge, a reserve of thousands of nuclear warheads that were removed from operational status by arms control measures calling for the destruction of their platforms, but leaving warheads intact. Since it was established in 1991, this reserve has steadily increased, so much so that these non-accountable nuclear warheads will soon represent more than half the total U.S. stockpile. The suggestion that these warheads “will not be accessible” is plain wrong. Accessibility is the whole point of not destroying them.
An example of holding weapons in reserve are the B61 and B83 nuclear bombs being held in reserve for B-1 bombers. Although the B-1 is now described as “conventional only” (the aircraft was removed from the U.S. nuclear war plan in 1997), the air force and Strategic Command (Stratcom) continue to maintain its nuclear capability under a recently declassified “Nuclear Re-role Plan” (available at nautilus.org). Under this plan, Strat-com keeps extra B61 and B83 bombs in active reserve–so that the air force can return the B-1 to its nuclear strike mission in less than six months if necessary.
If the Bush administration is serious about developing a new strategic framework with Russia, then it has to stop hiding thousands of nuclear weapons in the reserve. Hiding warheads in secret bunkers–in case we have to destroy Russia after all–can only undermine the trust that Bush claims is the basis for the new U.S. relationship with Russia.
The Bush administration could have used the Crawford summit to make the nuclear posture transparent and reductions irreversible. Transparency and irreversibility were among the most impressive accomplishments of the START III framework reached by President Clinton and President Yeltsin in 1997. Even Stratcom is arguing for transparency in arms control these days. But the Bush administration has yet to incorporate transparency into its vision, and instead used the Crawford announcement to recycle the old-fashioned treaty language that so effectively undermined arms control in the past. The Crawford announcement itself is hardly transparent. No one explained how they came up with a range of 1,700-2,200 warheads. And why include 25 percent wiggle room?
The warhead level was actually determined in the early 1990s when Stratcom conducted a series of force structure analyses leading to a range of post-START II options. The analyses examined how the nuclear posture would have to be structured at various force levels to fulfill presidential guidance. The studies were so effective that Stratcom essentially determined the broad outlines of the U.S. position on START II and the 1994 Nuclear Posture Review, and they continue to guide force planning today. In fact, the Crawford force level appears to come from three force structure options–describing levels “well below 3,500” warheads–outlined in the recently declassified 1993 Sun City study (available at nautilus.org).
Once implemented in 2011, the Crawford force level will protect a “stable nucleus” of modern and flexible nuclear forces capable of fulfilling all the military's nuclear scenarios, including destruction of more than 1,000 Russian and Chinese targets.
Why the ability to deliver a greater level of destruction than 1,700 warheads would be needed to deter any enemy is difficult to imagine. Yet the Bush administration's decision to continue storing thousands of unaccountable nuclear warheads in the reserve seems intended to ensure that nuclear planners can bring us back to that unimaginable level quickly.