QandO

March 24, 2004

Bush's nuclear hypocrisy?
Posted by Jon Henke

Recently, on an e-list, I came across an exchange on the (more complex than you may initially think) nuclear issue. I think it's worth sharing. As a jumping off point, this column at CommonDreams.org....

Though U.S. citizens typically have a self-indulgent belief that their country can be trusted with such weapons (despite the painful reality that the United States is the only country to have ever dropped an atomic bomb), the world's fears are not irrational. Again, Bush's own words, from his 2002 speech at West Point, make the point: "We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systemically break them."

Every "civilized nation" has a stake not only in preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, but also pressuring the nuclear powers to honor the Non-Proliferation Treaty and move toward a more secure world in which no nation can threaten the ultimate horror. It is the task of U.S. citizens to push our own government toward that civilized policy.

Quoth David:

First, the US, UK, France, Russia and China are allowed to posess nuclear weapons under the terms of the NPT. Second, the quote from that treaty in the article is actually something that people should be celebrating in that it has already come to pass. The US and Russia _HAVE_ stopped the nuclear arms race. For a decade and a half now we HAVE been reducing our nuclear arsenals. The US for example has gone from over 20,000 active nuclear warheads to less than 7,000 and an agreement between Bush and Putin two years ago calls for cutting THAT number by two thirds too. This is cause for
celebration, not criticism!

The article is also full of inaccuracies, such as saying we are spending more on nuclear weapons now than ever before, which is not even true in numerical dollars, let alone dollars adjusted for inflation since the 1950s.

But let's get to the heart of the intellectual attack, which is focussed on the US policy intended to develop low yield, deep penetrating tactical nuclear weapons capable of striking undregroud bunkers without destroying the cities or countries above them. How is this a bad thing? Does the author prefer that we use megatons of Mass Destruction when all we need is precision kiloton or sub-kiloton bunker buster?

One measure of nuclear arsenals, and the only one in which the feared specters of "overkill", "nuclear winter", and "doomsday" can be measured is "Throw Weight". This measures the megatonage of destructive force contained in a weapons system or nuclear arsenal. For example, because the Soviets always had less accurate missiles they built larger warheads. Their SS-18 carried a 20 megaton nuclear warhead, whereas a US Minuteman carried either a 1 megaton warhead or three MIRVed warhead of less than 200 kilotons each (1/100th the power of a single warhead SS-18). In fact, even when the US had a few thousand more warheads than the USSR at the height of the Cold
War, the USSR outgunned the US arsenal 6 to 1 in Throw Weight -- meaning their fewer warheads would release 6 times as much destructive force if both of us had shot our wads at eachother.

Many liberals see these figures as meaningless and say it is like two men standing in a basement full of gasoline when one of them has three matches and the other has five matches. In the Cold War that was probably correct. We did live (or die) under the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). But as we decrease our arsenals we approach a point where that doctrine no longer applies. If we follow the present trend of arms reductions out a few more decades, nuclear war will no longer be "unthinkable." Think about that... At some point some generals will be able to tell their leaders that nuclear war is not only survivable, but winable (especially if they strike first). And, if we get past that point alive to a time when nuclear weapons are actually eliminated completely, we will have made the world safe for all out conventional wars like WWII.

These are not issues that advocates of disarmament can shrug off. They are REAL issues that deserve serious consideration.

I spent 4 years in the 1980s pursuing Strategic Studies as the focus of my BA in International Relations. I studied the thoughts of nuclear strategists from all the major powers. Trust me when I say that those who control nuclear weapons take these issues very seriously and the rest of us should too. Let me briefly recap the evolution of American nuclear strategy to show not only the wisdom,
but the moral justification for the current policy of the Bush Administration.

The first official American Nuclear strategy was called Massive Retaliation and it was introduced by Eisenhower. It said that America would respond to ever conventional attack with full scale nuclear war and it was backed by over 10,000 bombers carrying up to 50,000 nuclear bombs. This was Doomsday writ large and thankfully we never went there. It may have prevented war in Europe, but subsiquent events, such as Vietnam and development of tactical
battlied nukes (not to mention concerns of the people of the world) showed that plan to seriously flawed. When JFK took office he was shocked that our strategy consisted of one big nuclear orgasim. He asked for alternatives.

These issues led to development of the strategy of Flexible Response that said we would respond in a manner comensurate with the aggression. We would meet conventional attack with conventional forces and escilate only if we were losing. Escilation would move first to tactical nuclear weapons and a strategic intercontinental exchange would opnly be a last resort. But technology did not stand still. Soon both sides were deploying large numbers of ICBMs and sub
launched SLBMs, until thousands of missiles were pointed both directions Eur-Asia and North America.

Enter MAD. This doctrine was embraced by both the US and USSR as a recognition of the de facto state of affairs in which both sides could and would destroy each other and that nothing could stop them from doing so except keeping the peace between them. This situation was neither desirable or planned. It just was and MAD formalized it through SALT One and the ABM Treaty. But still the technology did not stop. By the 1970s those missiles were being fitted with MIRV (multiple independently targetable re-entry Vehicles) which meant that one missile could carry up to ten warheads and destroy ten
different targets. Now one missile could destroy up to ten enemy missiles, but only if you fired them before the other guys had a chance to fire theirs... Such technology destablized the concept of MAD.

Enter the First Strike Counterforce Strategy. Whereas Massive Retaliation and the highest levels of Flexible Response had always been aimed at Countervalue targets (that is cities). The Counterforce strategy of the 80s relied on the improved accuracy of nuclear weapons to strike at an enemy's nuclear arsenal before they could be used. With highly accurate MIRVs it was realized that one
side could use as little as a tenth of their warheads to destroy as much as 90% of the enemy's retaliatory capability. After such an exchange the other side might be left with only a few missiles and the one who attacked first would still have the majority of their arsenal intact. Surrender was seen as probable in that scenario.

What few people realize is the this counterforce first strike strategy did NOT come from the Reagan Administration, but was first proposed in Soviet military journals in the 1970s. However, the US read those ideas, got spooked, and realized that we were in a better position technologically to make it work than the Soviets were. So we shifted our strategy accordingly. Still, to make it work, we also needed to let the other side know that we would not make it easy for them to use the same strategy on us. That is where Star Wars came in. We needed to make the Soviets think that they could not succeed in disarming us through a first strike, while making them think we COULD do that to them. It worked.

These perceptions and realities that destabilzed MAD and put us all in great danger actually led to fundamental advances in nuclear dissarmament. First came the INF Treaty that got rid of the Soviet SS-20 and US land based Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe. Then came START 1. And before you knew it the USSR had collapsed under its own weight. Since then we entered into START 2 the combination of which reduced the combined nuclear arsenals of the US and Russia from 50,000 warheads to less than 14,000. Then, in May 2002, Bush and Putin signed an addition arms reduction accord that will cut both
arsenals by another two thirds by 2012, bringing the arsenals of both countries down to a total of between 1,700 and 2,200 each.

We already have less nukes in the world now than at any in the last 50 years, and we are about to reduce them by another 2/3! So why would the article dadyck quotes neglect to mention these facts and actually quote part of the NPT that calls for the exact actions that we ARE taking -- and then act as if none of that were happening????? The bias evident in that article is EXTEME.

Now let me tie the pieces together and show why the Bush strategy is most sane and humane nuclear policy in history. I have shown how we used to point multi-megaton warheads at the world and how the evolution of technolgy led to smalled and smaller warheads, which would cause less and less destruction. That is already a done deal. But we still rely on warheads in the 100 to 300 kiloton range (more than ten times more powerful than the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs) to deter agression. Bush thinks that is TOO MUCH. He understands that even one such warhead would still destroy entire cities (or small countries) and that our aging arsenal of smaller tactical nukes (the
kind you can fire out of a canon or drop from a fighter) are either too much or too little for the real jobs that precision warfare would call upon them for.

What jobs? Well Bush does not want weapons that destroy whole cities. He wants little nukes that can be used to kill ONE person (and whoever is close to him). He doesn't want to kill the people of our enemies. He wants to be able to kill their leaders. This is a total reverse of most of our enemies' strategies, such as terrorists who prefer to kill civilians in soft targets. Bush wants to be able to use minimal force to target the command and control (leaders) of
our enemies.

The best example of this is perhaps North Korea, where Kim Jung Il has thousands (some experts say as many as 11,000) hardened underground bunkers, as well as nuclear weapons aimed at American troops and allied civilians. IF we ever got into a crisis where that madman was about to actually launch those weapons, the only option Bush has now to stop that is to launch a multi-kiloton warhead set for ground burst at Pyongyang (or wherever we think he is at the time) and hope it has the force to either penetrate and destroy or
cut-off his command bunker (some of which we know to be at least 1,000 feet below ground from the European contractors who built them). Such a strike would kill everyone in Pyongyang (and create deadly fallout that would spread much farther, including either South Korea or China). Why shouldn't Bush have the option of firing a deep penetrating warhead that would arrive at a speed of 10,000 MPH and wait for a second or two as it drove hundreds of feet underground before exploding?

Have you ever seen film of the underground nuclear test in Nevada? Where the ground ripples and collapses in on it self? Where no mushroom cloud or fallout spreads death or mass destruction? That is what the Bush strategy hopes to create. Isn't that a damn sight more wise and humane than sending megatons of mass destruction at the same target? Note that such a strike would only be appropriate if the leader or command and control apparatus were in that bunker, and that such a decision would only be called for if it could prevent a wider nuclear war. THAT is the capability that Bush is asking for.

Without it, the only option we have today is WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.

The whole point of this rambling post is to show that US nuclear strategy has moved from Massive Retaliation (where whole cities and countries would be destroyed) to Precision Decapitation (where we shoot at the actual Bad Guys). So, I challenge anyone to argue that this policy is immoral or "wrong".

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