Systems Beat Assessment Phase Deadline
Many (but not all) STRATCOM systems are listed as having been certified as compliant with the Assessment Phase of DoD’s five-phase compliance effort as of 31 March 1997, a few months prior to DoD’s initial goal, and well ahead of the current DoD deadline. USSPACECOM systems were generally certified as compliant with this phase as of 02 October 1997.
As of April 1998, however, essentially no STRATCOM or USSPACECOM systems was reported to have passed the more important, and difficult, subsequent phases of Renovation, Validation or Implementation. The DoD goal for completion of the final Implementation Phase for mission-critical systems is 31 December 1998. If these nuclear warfighting commands have made substantial progress towards this goal, much less the critical intervening Renovation and Validation phases, they had apparently not reported this to the Joint Staff as of nine months prior to deadline. -JEP
Visit to STRATCOM
At the invitation of its Commander, General Eugene Habiger, a five person FAS delegation visited the Strategic Command (STRATCOM) Headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska. While there, FAS received a briefing and, in turn, described the FAS proposal to reduce START levels to 1,000 strategic warheads, while de-MIRVing the U.S. and Russian forces (and securing the de-MIRVing of the forces of Britain and France). This article is based on information received there and elsewhere.
Disarmament and Presidential Guidance
If and when the Russian Duma ratifies START II, the biggest remaining obstacle to further disarmament will lie in the U.S. Presidential guidance for strategic forces, Presidential Decision Directive 60 (PDD60) . Here are outlined, in general terms, what U.S. policy requires of strategic forces. Currently this requires more than 2,000 deployed U.S. nuclear warheads.
This is more than is necessary. For example, notwithstanding the Sino-Soviet split of 1954, and the ability of missiles to be retargeted instantly, the current guidance is interpreted to mean that the United States be able to target both Russia and China simultaneously. It also appears to require that the U.S. be able to “dig out” and destroy about 18 highly hardened underground command posts in Russia–even though some of these, at least, would harbor the decision-makers required for negotiations to halt the war.
PDD60 requires that the U.S. target large numbers of Russian military bases as if they were poised, as they once were, to invade Western Europe, instead of being manned now by often unpaid, and sometimes starving, Russian recruits. It requires that the strategic force be able to strike large numbers of Russian industrial targets–making somewhat irrelevant U.S. guidance to avoid metropolitan areas since the metropolitan population would eventually die anyway without survival industry.
New Guidance for Reduced Forces Needed
The current STRATCOM command has told the Administration that it will require new guidance if projected START III levels of 2,000-2,500 are to be reduced. Having watched the force come down from more than 10,000 deployed strategic weapons, no doubt many STRATCOM officials feel that 2,000 warheads at the ready would be a skeleton force, every bit of which is required to maintain “deterrence as we know it.”
In fact, however, 2,000 deployed strategic nuclear warheads, even 1,000, is an enormous number, capable of destroying Russia many times over. Since Russia is no longer communist, and lacks both the ideology and the economy to mount a world threat, why are so many U.S. weapons being kept at the ready? Instead, we should mothball them through disarmament with a view to getting Russian forces down in number and off alert–something that is not possible while their weapons are being targeted by us with such effectiveness.
Deterrence as STRATCOM knows it seems to be tied up with the notion of “extended deterrence” which appears on many graphs shown at STRATCOM. Extended deterrence, a term invented by Herman Kahn, was distinguished from ordinary deterrence and was sometimes called by him “Type II” deterrence. According to the theory, an attack upon ones own country could be credibly deterred by threats to reply in kind. But deterrence of an attack upon allies required, for its credibility, being able to substantially disarm the forces of the other side. Without this ability, the U.S. who initiated a nuclear attack on behalf of an ally, would fear having its own country attacked in response. According to informed officials, the US does not “depend” upon extended deterrence and it will, in any case, “run out at low enough START levels”, i.e. at low START levels extended deterrence will cease to be an option.
The proper guidance, today, would embody policy goals of simple deterrence and flexibility. This would require a U.S. strategic force of no more than a few hundred warheads targeted simultaneously on nothing and everything. Based on a revised guidance, which would require less than a year to organize, START could continue a steady decline rather than the leveling off indicated by the current START III goal.
Today, however, with the Russian strategic force in some decline, and our highly accurate Trident submarines poised to attack from off the Norwegian coast, (only 15 minutes of missile flight time), even
such an experienced expert as Senator Sam Nunn, former Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has written that “from the conservative perspective of the Russian military, the only way to preserve Russia’s deterrent credibility is to declare–as Russia recently did–its readiness to ‘launch on warning’.”
Moreover, in the calculations describing the outcome of a U.S. attack, STRATCOM uses the dangerous assumption that any residual Russian missiles will be targeted on U.S. forces rather than on U.S. cities–something that could, in any case, be changed by the Russians quickly in a crisis.
On May 12, for the third time, President Yeltsin referred to the possibility of going far below 2,000 warheads by asserting that START III could see “even deeper cuts–of two or three times” beyond START II’s limits of 3,000 to 3,500. We should be willing to go as low as the Russians will. And if it requires changing the current guidance, so much the better.