Abstract
“The approach we've taken is to treat Russia not as an adversary but as a friendly power,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during a July hearing on the “Moscow Treaty,” the recent U.S.-Russian agreement to reduce numbers of deployed nuclear warheads to 1,700-2,200.
Although Sen. Joseph Biden, the committee chairman, badgered Rumsfeld and other administration officials to explain how they had arrived at the treaty's warhead limit, Rumsfeld did an admirable job deflecting his questions. “There are some who would have preferred to see us continue the adversarial arms control negotiations of the Soviet era,” Rumsfeld said, “where teams of lawyers drafted hundreds of pages of treaty text and each side worked to gain the upper hand while focusing on ways to preserve a balance of nuclear terror. That's an approach that President Bush rejected.”
Well, hardly. The U.S. doesn't need lawyers to gain an “upper hand,” and everything the Bush administration has done vis-á-vis its nuclear arsenal has only cemented U.S. supremacy.
When comparing nuclear arsenals, the nat-ural place to begin is with hardware: missiles, submarines, and warheads. Lost in the background is the software: the information technologies that improve the reliability, capability, and flexibility of nuclear weapons. Because of software improvements, U.S. nuclear capability as measured by “damage expectancy” has grown, even as hardware numbers have declined.
When the Bidens of the world focus solely on the size of the arsenal, they lose sight of the enhancements in systems and databases, which is where real nuclear might has been generated in the past decade: the Strategic Weapons Planning System, the Nuclear Planning and Execution System (NPES), the Nuclear Weapons Contingency Operations Module, the National Desired Ground Zero List Integrated Development System (NIDS II), the Theater Integrated Planning System, the NATO Nuclear Planning System (NNPS), and the Integrated Target Planning Tool Set.
All of these systems are being aggressively upgraded to bring them into the twenty-first century. NIDS II, for example, went into production in May 2000 and was tested in war games the following October. Last September, new contracts were signed to upgrade the NPES to incorporate new capabilities. NATO's planning system is also being upgraded. Meanwhile, the last major revision of the Single Integrated Operational Plan took place in April.
At seven survivable locations worldwide— Site R on the Pennsylvania/Maryland border, Stratcom, Pacific Command, Space Command, the National Airborne Operations Center, and the Space and Strategic Command's mobile command centers—fully operating and upgraded suites of planning and software activities are kept running 24/7, ready on a moment's notice to conduct nuclear warfare. Other nuclear command functions are practiced 365 days a year at the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon, and at European and Central Commands.
All of these capabilities are rehearsed in a battery of exercises—like the annual Global Guardian and quarterly Polo Hat—and are increasingly integrated into newer “signals intelligence, nuclear weapons employment support exercises.” Making better use of intelligence collection capabilities will improve initial strikes and aid in protracted nuclear war-fighting. Cyber warfare is also increasingly viewed as a strategic enhancement that could help deliver a first strike against a nuclear adversary.
“There's no question in my mind but that weakness is provocative,” Rumsfeld told Biden. “If we were to go down to some very low level, some country might decide that that is an area of weakness, an asymmetry that they could take advantage of.”
This sort of double talk shouldn't confuse anyone. •