Loose Nukes: Arms Control Is No Place for Folly

EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE

With his usual farsightedness, Jonathan Schell ("The Folly of Arms Control," September/October 2000) warns of a gradual international drift toward arms proliferation unless the nuclear states together develop and implement plans to eliminate their arsenals. But in the meantime, Washington's strategic policies pose even more immediate dangers. Moreover, Schell's suggested public debate on nuclear policy would actually erode the chances of meaningful change unless it were preceded by presidentially directed reforms. Nuclear experts must equip the executive with informed proposals with which the White House can begin rethinking current strategy and impose reforms on resistant bureaucracies.

DR. STRANGELOVE

Nuclear accidents pose the greatest threat to the precariously balanced Russian-American nuclear equation. The two countries' thousands of nuclear weapons still stand poised on hair-trigger alert against each other. Even when the system is healthy, technological malfunctions, faulty intelligence, misperceptions, and crisis mismanagement are only a misstep away. Today the system is failing. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia's doomsday machine has been allowed to fall into disrepair. Indeed, the Russian nuclear infrastructure and command system are so frayed that if they belonged to the United States, regulations would compel the secretary of defense to declare the force unsafe and stand it down.

Yet, instead of dismantling this overworked machine, Russia's January 2000 national security doctrine extends nuclear weapons' missions to "repel armed aggression," a formulation that encompasses almost any scenario. In a future crisis -- with NATO, to take an often-invoked example -- this unrealistic strategy could pressure the Russian leadership to make nuclear threats to bolster the doctrine's credibility. NATO leaders would feel compelled to counter such threats. Any escalation thereafter would put the United States at the mercy of Russia's intelligence, warning, and command-and-control capacities. The sinking of the Kursk submarine revealed Russia's technological, operational, and decision-making competence today. And that was an exercise, not a conflict.

Even if it manages to avoid accidents, the ongoing American-Russian preoccupation with oversized, hair-triggered nuclear deterrence will preclude Russia's integration into the Western-oriented international system. Russia already feels undermined by NATO expansion and the conduct of war in the former Yugoslavia, an area of great Russian interest, without even an attempt to obtain U.N. approval. When the Clinton administration states that it will not consider reductions below 2,500 nuclear weapons, retrograde Russian nationalists and enterprising arms manufacturers justify selling advanced military technology and know-how to Iran, China, and other potential U.S. adversaries. When American politicians of both parties pursue national missile defense outside the agreed boundaries of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, they drive those Russians who do want to cooperate with the West underground.

Russia simply does not have the resources to compete militarily with the United States. But until Washington and Moscow admit that they do not need to keep thousands of nuclear weapons poised on alert against each other, Russia will rely on cheap and dangerous nuclear solutions to balance the United States. President Vladimir Putin may try to save money by shrinking Russia's arsenal, but the anachronistic attachment to mutually assured destruction remains at the core of both countries' systems.

The thousands of American nuclear weapons under a first-use doctrine will also eventually compel China to make its own long-range force, currently a mere 20 nuclear weapons, more threatening. Beijing was inevitably going to expand its arsenal, but Washington's nuclear strategy -- plus the prospect of ballistic missile defenses -- will push China to put a hair trigger on its growing forces as well. The two countries lack any agreed and verifiable "rules of the road" to avoid driving off a nuclear cliff in the fog of crisis.

Many defense officials believe that the United States is caught in the middle of a China-Taiwan political faceoff that is brewing a major military crisis. A Taiwanese bid for independence would provoke a perilous spiral of progressive confrontations: China would likely launch conventionally armed ballistic missiles across the Taiwan Strait; U.S. naval forces could become engaged; and for the first time in history, two nuclear-armed states might fire missiles at each other. Once missiles fly and casualties mount, how confident can Chinese and American officials be that nuclear weapons are not going to drop from the next sortie?

The U.S. bombing of China's Belgrade embassy during the war over Kosovo gives a sobering reminder that even the best-equipped military is not immune to intelligence failures or miscalculation during a crisis. Current American policies assume that China's military is bluffing and that U.S. nuclear superiority and missile defenses could intimidate the People's Liberation Army (PLA) at the critical moment. Yet Washington presses Taiwan not to declare independence precisely because the PLA may not be deterred, and the consequent risk of armed conflict is high. Indeed, President Jiang Zemin did not hesitate to threaten military force in 1996, when the Clinton administration merely allowed then Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui a "private" visit to his American alma mater, Cornell University.