The Politics of Vulnerability: 1980-83
As the Soviet Union has steadily improved its strategic nuclear and other military forces in recent years, it has become increasingly clear to Americans that the United States is vulnerable in a sense that was never true before the advent of nuclear weapons.
R. James Woolsey is a partner in the Washington, D.C., law firm of Shea and Gardner, and counsel to the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. In 1977-79 he was Under Secretary of the Navy; in 1970-73, General Counsel of the Senate Armed Services Committee; and in 1969-70, an adviser on the SALT I delegation. During 1983 he was a member of the President's Commission on Strategic Forces (Scowcroft Commission) and in 1981 he served on the first Townes Committee-both described herein. In October 1983 he was appointed Delegate-at-Large on the U.S. START delegation at Geneva.
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For the Reagan Administration, 1983 was to be "the year of the missile." It was to be the moment of truth in the American effort to introduce new intermediate-range weapons into Western Europe and to "modernize" the U.S. strategic arsenal, primarily with the development of the MX intercontinental missile. Until this buildup in defenses was well under way, nuclear arms control would be a matter of keeping up appearances, of limiting damage, of buying time, and of laying the ground for possible agreement later.
Negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union on nuclear arms control are at an impasse. Following the deployment in Europe of the first U.S. Pershing II and cruise missiles in the fall of 1983, the Soviet Union walked out of the negotiations on intermediate-range forces (INF) and refused to agree to a resumption date for the negotiations on strategic nuclear forces (START). Whether and under what conditions the negotiations will resume is uncertain.
It is a delicate matter to defend deterrence, the doctrine that it is the very lethality of nuclear weapons that lessens the likelihood of their use sufficiently to make us safe. That the consciousness of that lethality in the corridors of power in Washington and Moscow has played an important role in the keeping of the peace since the advent of the nuclear age is beyond doubting, as is the unwisdom of tampering with that consciousness, of accepting theories or technologies that will diminish the terror with which the prospect of nuclear war has been traditionally regarded and make nuclear weapons in any way less inhibiting to use. Still, if it is possible to underestimate the contribution that nuclear weapons make to the prevention of nuclear war, it is possible to overestimate it, too.
