Cold War Thinking Persists
By Bruce G. Blair

I left for Moscow ten days ago for a week, for discussions with officials there, expecting in the wake of the romance in Crawford to be warmly received and to experience some very wonderful rapport and positive exchange of views with the Russians. Instead, what I encountered was a tidal wave of criticism and suspicion.

What appears to be taking place at the presidential level certainly masks what's happening a level below. And no wonder, given the jumble of contradictions in U.S.-Russian relations, including in the nuclear arena. For example, not long ago, I went to the headquarters of Strategic Command at Omaha, Nebraska, which controls all of the land-based and sea-based nuclear missiles and armors. While I was there I encountered a flight crew that had just returned from a secret mission flying a reconnaissance plane around the border of a country considered a threat to the U.S. national interest. The quiz: Which country, and what was the mission? The answer: Russia, and the mission was to identify holes in Russia's air defense network, through which our strategic bombers could fly in the event of a nuclear war to drop bombs on Russia. We're still doing that. Very frequently.

After Omaha, I went up to Wyoming, where I visited a young crew responsible for flying nuclear missiles out of silos, a job that I once held; I was very nostalgic to return to the scene of the crime, so to speak. The crew went through their procedures for the launch of their missiles, starting with the receipt of a launch order and culminating with the notorious turning of the keys, which in their case would have unleashed 500 weapons on 50 ICBMs--50 land-based rockets under the control of a two-person crew, both in their early to mid-twenties. I was astonished about the experience, primarily because of how little had changed in a quarter of a century. Even the procedures are almost identical, and I'm sure I could have done it myself, although, one goes to war now on military versions of Windows 98, instead of the system in place in the 1970s. But even more astonishing really were the identical attitudes held by this crew. It could have been me 25 years ago, except it was in the present.

The really incredible story here is that our two countries still operate nuclear weapons as though we remain our primary enemies--as though one or the other of us could launch a massive, cold-blooded, surprise nuclear strike on a moment's notice, and as though we need to continue to prepare to fight a large-scale nuclear war with each other in order to maintain our security. If this order went out today, not only to that launch crew in Wyoming, but to all the crews around the world, in Russia and the United States, how long do you think it would take them, from right now, from a standing start--no prior alerting or warning--to fire all of the missiles that are on alert today? And how much firepower would be unleashed right now? The answer is that that crew in Wyoming would--from the time they received the message until the time the 500 warheads were leaving their silos--take two minutes. It would take another ten minutes for the submarine crews to carry out their orders.

All in all, 4,000 strategic warheads could be fired collectively by Russia and the United States in a matter of just a few minutes, dispatching them on their 15-40 minute trips halfway around the planet to targets in our respective countries. And we have today requirements in our nuclear war planning to destroy 2,260 targets in Russia. That's the requirement of deterrence today.

Well, 4,000 weapons that could be exchanged like this is the equivalent of about 80,000 Hiroshima bombs. We currently have a nuclear review under way in the Pentagon that is going to dramatically downgrade the Russia threat. Of course, this newfound confidence that the United States has toward Russia--confidence in the stability of Russia and its cooperation with the United States for the foreseeable future--is the basis for the cuts announced at Crawford that would bring us down to around 2,200 strategic warheads. That is after ten years.

Ten years from now, we will have 2,200 warheads, and Strategic Command estimates that of those 2,200 warheads, some 600 of them will remain on hair-trigger alert. In other words, we can look forward a decade from now to having only about 10,000 or so Hiroshima-equivalent weapons on hair-trigger alert aimed at Russia. All clear indications, to my mind at least, of how slowly security thinking evolves in our country. How we always seem to be preparing to fight the last war, in this case, the cold war. How is our security served by keeping this awesome firepower on hair-trigger alert aimed at Russia, with which we have a virtual alliance today on counterterrorism? How does that serve our security? Why are we spending $20 billion on this strategic arsenal aimed at Russia when we are spending less than $2 billion today on homeland security? A gross misallocation of priorities and a grossly misguided set of defense and security priorities.

The discrepancies and contradictions are too numerous to mention here. But let me just cover a couple more of them. I think the most striking irony of all is that since the end of the cold war--if you want to call it the end of the Soviet Union ten years ago--since that time, we have managed not to raise the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, but to lower the threshold for their use. Let me explain. First of all, in relation to China, President Clinton signed a White House decree in 1997 that resulted in putting China back in the U.S. nuclear war plan, as the emerging designated enemy for the United States, until Osama Bin Laden emerged recently to grab for that dubious distinction. The war plan recreated options in 1998 that allow us to go to war very quickly with China. We lowered the nuclear threshold. That same Presidential Guidance by Clinton also expanded the roles and the missions of nuclear weapons to deal with weapons of mass destruction that include chemical and biological. This moved us further away from a no-first use policy, and in the process, encouraged other countries around the world to view the first use of nuclear weapons as legitimate in dealing with threats from chemical and biological weapons.

Russia also lowered the nuclear threshold. Why? Two reasons: First, they abandoned no-first-use in November 1993, and grew to rely increasingly on the early first use of nuclear weapons to compensate for their weakening conventional force. Nuclear weapons have become a security blanket for Russia. Second, not only did the conventional forces deteriorate, so did the nuclear command-and-control infrastructure of Russia, resulting in a lowering of the nuclear threshold by the fact that the risk of mistaken or unauthorized use of Russian nuclear warheads increased.

Lastly, China, Pakistan, India, all moved slowly but surely in the direction of weaponization of their arsenal. Taking the bomb out of the basement or out of storage. Moving to a day in the future when the weapons are mated up to delivery systems on hair-trigger alert.

So, what's to be done? Let me just mention three recommendations. First, the success of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program that secures Russian fissile materials and weapons is more important to American security than anything else on the table--and that includes the Test Ban Treaty, the next round of START, ballistic missiles, you name it. Nunn-Lugar is the key to our future security.

Second, we need to accelerate the process of nuclear arms reduction and disarmament. At least to follow the Russians down as far as they go, and at the same time, to get our nuclear weapons off this dangerous hair-trigger that exists because we continue to prepare to fight a nuclear war at the drop of a hat. A completely unnecessary and misguided view of U.S.-Russian deterrence requirements. Lastly, I think we've made a grave mistake in expanding the roles and the missions of nuclear weapons to make them responsible for dealing with threats of chemical and biological weapons.

We are the last nation on earth that needs to resort to nuclear weapons for any kind of international mission. We have a conventional juggernaut, a political, diplomatic, and economic juggernaut sufficient to achieve any feasible international objective. Nuclear weapons won't solve any of these problems. Nuclear weapons didn't deter terrorists. We discovered, of course, that nuclear weapons can't be used in Afghanistan, to try to suppress terrorism. All nuclear weapons represent are a threat to us if they fall into the wrong hands. And the position we are adopting now, which allows other countries to think of using nuclear weapons to deal with chemical and biological threats, will be the bane of our existence. Because there are too many possibilities in the world that could evoke the legitimacy--or the apparent legitimacy--of resorting to nuclear weapons in other regions of the world by other countries. We don't want Iran, Iraq, or Israel, or any other country to imagine that it's reasonable to think that they could get away with the use of nuclear weapons to deal with non-nuclear threats.

(Bruce G. Blair <bblair@cdi.org> is president of the Center for Defense Information Washington, DC. Previously, he was a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution.)

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