Disturbing the Strategic Balance

By Strobe Talbott

By making the Soviets feel more vulnerable, the MX could derail arms control

President Reagan's nationally televised speech last week was a tour de force. It is difficult to imagine a more effective, persuasive and reassuring presentation of his decision to pack the MX densely into a remote corner of Wyoming. He demonstrated something like perfect pitch in fine-tuning his appeal for support of the largest nuclear weapons system in American history and the simultaneous pursuit of deep reductions in the arsenals of the superpowers. But it will take more than rhetorical skills to dissolve the doubts that have been cast on the wisdom of the MX decision. In fact, the way in which the President sought to justify Dense Pack intensifies questions not only about this particular weapons program but about the Administration's management of national security and arms control as a whole.

If, as the Administration maintains, the MX is absolutely vital to American safety--if we quite literally cannot live without it--then why put a hundred of the missiles in one spot? Does not the basing plan exacerbate the problem it is supposed to solve, which is the vulnerability of American missiles to a Soviet preemptive first strike? Asked this question on the eve of the President's speech, an Administration official charged with helping to sell the program shrugged his shoulders and conceded that there was "something counterintuitive" about the concept. That is a fancy way of saying it defies common sense. Many experts suspect it does not make scientific sense either.

For years, viewers of the TV evening news have been treated to animated illustrations of ways that the Soviets might be able to destroy the MX in its various Rube Goldberg basing schemes, including this latest one. Designers of the various plans have responded that the Soviets could not be sure of knocking out all of the MXs. Therefore the existence of the MX would introduce a cautionary, salutary factor of uncertainty into Soviet calculations. Maybe so. But the same argument can be turned around. There is always some doubt about any new weapons system, especially a nuclear one that cannot be put to the ultimate test except in a nuclear war. But with Dense Pack, the level of doubt is more than normal--and more than acceptable. Uncertainty on the American side about whether the MX could withstand and retaliate against a Soviet attack is just exactly what the U.S. does not need in its own defense planning.

Making American intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) invulnerable to pre-emptive attack is nearly impossible as long as the Soviets can "beat" any system by adding great numbers of warheads and barraging U.S. targets. Even if a theoretically unbeatable system could be devised, and that is highly doubtful, it would be obstructed, as Dense Pack is, by a whole raft of political problems. For one, the cost of such a scheme would probably be prohibitive. It is as though the nation were being asked to buy an extremely expensive insurance policy with very small print warning that it might never pay off. For another, most members of Congress are sure to howl, "Not in my backyard, thank you!" The skinny Dense Pack basing mode, like the Race Track and the Shell Game and 29 others before it, is an accommodation to the hard fact that any large-scale MX scheme is subject to this double jeopardy. Political objections could, and should, be overcome if the weapon were truly essential to our defense. But in this instance, its military shortcomings magnify its political liabilities.

Reagan also made an arms-control case for the system. By hinting broadly that the MX is to be a bargaining chip in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) in Geneva, he implied that the U.S. will cancel the MX program if the U.S.S.R. accepts the proposal for deep reductions in strategic weapons that Reagan unveiled last May. That possibility, however, is at odds with the official Administration position, reiterated privately after the President spoke, that the U.S. needs the densely packed MX in any event. The Administration has proposed a ceiling on ICBM warheads of 2,500 per side. The U.S. now has 2,152. A hundred MXs could have as many as 1,000 warheads. Therefore, in order to stay within its own proposed ceiling, the U.S. would have to give up some 600 warheads. But it could do that by retiring older, less destructive ones and replacing them with MXs.

Reagan made the bargaining-chip argument because he is concerned about securing congressional approval for the system. He hopes to patch together an uneasy alliance in support of the program made up of hawks who want the MX for its own sake and doves who want it so the U.S. can give it away. That ploy may well backfire. By implying that the U.S. might be able to live without the MX in certain circumstances after all, Reagan has produced a self-contradiction that weakens the case for the missile as indispensable, a fact congressional skeptics have quickly pointed out. There is an acute irony here. Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter, supported two of Dense Pack's forerunners, in part because he hoped to prove he was pro-defense and thereby win the support of Pentagon and congressional hawks for the beleaguered SALT II treaty. In the end, the Shell Game and Race Track ideas fell of their own weight, and Carter still failed to get SALT II ratified.

Observing this current episode as it unfolds, the Soviets must be asking themselves why they need worry about giving up anything in Geneva when the U.S. legislative branch may kill the MX before both sides in the negotiations stop stonewalling and start genuine trading. But even if Congress does approve the MX, and thus makes it a possible bargaining chip, the missile is still a flawed idea.

Reagan faces a similar dilemma, one that could become similarly desperate, in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) talks that are proceeding, but not very productively, in parallel with START in Geneva. In INF, Reagan is offering the Soviets a trade between a weapons program they have been deploying since 1977, the SS-20 rocket, and one that the U.S. hopes to introduce into Western Europe next year. The trouble is, the American bargaining chips in those negotiations--the Pershing II ballistic missile and Tomahawk ground-launched cruise missile--face a battery of technical and political problems in the U.S. More seriously, they face considerable grassroots and parliamentary resistance among the NATO member states that agreed in 1979 to base the new missiles on their territory. While there are legitimate criticisms of the Pershing II and Tomahawk, the new missiles make considerably more sense than the MX Dense Pack on both military and political grounds. Unless the Soviets agree to reciprocal restraints on the SS-20, it is essential that the deployment of the new NATO missiles go forward. Otherwise, the alliance will appear, to itself and to the rest of the world, incapable of following through on its own supposedly irreversible multilateral decisions. That would be far more damaging to the West than a further postponement in the U.S.'s deliberation over what to do with the MX. Moreover, in arms control, if not in poker, chips are more likely to come into play if the players see themselves as bargaining from positions of rough equality.

Yet Reagan believes that the U.S. has lost that position. As he put it last week, "In virtually every measure of military power, the Soviet Union enjoys a decided advantage." Therefore it follows that unilateral rearmament on the part of the U.S. must be a precondition for bilateral disarmament with the Soviet Union. As No. 2, the U.S. must try harder; it must build up while the Soviet Union scales down. That is the premise on which both his START and INF proposals are based, and it is dubious. While there are areas where the Soviets do have an edge, notably in nuclear missiles in Europe, the contention that the U.S. has fallen behind in overall military strength, including strategic nuclear forces, derives from measurements that give too much weight to American weaknesses, too little to American strengths, and vice versa on the Soviet side of the scales.

For example, in one of the Pentagon charts that Reagan used to illustrate his address, much was made of the Soviet buildup in ICBMs since the 1960s. Both the graphics and Reagan's accompanying explanation made it seem as though the U.S. has stood still during this period of alarming Soviet expansion. That is so narrowly true as not to be true at all.

Yes, it is a fact that the number of U.S. ICBM launchers, or underground silos, has remained constant at around 1,050 while the Soviets have been building new silos apace. But during the period so starkly represented on the chart, the U.S. replaced 550 single-warhead Minuteman ICBMS with triple-warhead ones, thus adding 1,100 warheads to its force. It has also greatly increased the "yield" (destructive capability) and accuracy of many of those weapons, turning them into "time-urgent, hard-target killers," instruments of "counterforce," or "silo-busters." What all these terms mean is that a significant number of American ICBMs can threaten concrete-hardened Soviet silos in much the same way that the Soviet missiles in those silos have made the Minuteman theoretically vulnerable.

And, yes, the Soviets have a worrisome edge in land-based (ICBM) warheads despite U.S. improvements in this area. But that particular component of their forces was capped under the SALT II treaty, which Reagan has often denounced as "fatally flawed" and refused to submit for ratification but which his Administration, to its credit, continues to observe. Under the ceilings established by SALT II the U.S.S.R., with its huge land-based force, can have 5,540 ICBM warheads, while the U.S. has chosen to deploy only 2,152. The rationale for the MX is largely to fill that gap in counterforce, or the ability to threaten a knockout blow against the other side's ICBMS.

But that gap becomes less gaping, and the rationale for the MX less compelling, when the picture is redrawn to take account of two important considerations that the Administration has consistently underplayed and that the President ignored last week. First, there are the so-called asymmetries between the two sides in the composition and capabilities of their forces. Some of those asymmetries favor the U.S.S.R., but others favor the U.S. The Soviets have, for a combination of historical, geographical and technological reasons, concentrated their firepower on gargantuan land-based missiles with large numbers of multiple warheads. The U.S. has diversified its deterrent among the three legs of the strategic triad--on land (ICBMS), in the air (bombs and cruise missiles aboard aircraft) and at sea (submarine-launched ballistic missiles, or SLBMs). That means that the theoretical vulnerability of land-based forces is by definition more of a problem for the U.S.S.R. than for the U.S.

The largest of the Soviet ICBMs, the SS-18, can carry ten warheads. If it performed flawlessly, it could knock out ten Minuteman silos or, more likely, five, since most scenarios assume that the Soviets would attack every U.S. silo with two warheads. But while that SS-18 is sitting in the ground waiting to be launched, it represents not American but Soviet vulnerability. One U.S. warhead can destroy it, removing not just one Soviet launcher but ten Soviet warheads.

The second element that lessens the severity of the counterforce gap is the new American SLBM, the Trident II, which will be a seagoing missile powerful and accurate enough to knock out Soviet silos. In the sea-based leg of its triad, the U.S. already has a huge advantage over the Soviet Union in three respects: geography makes it far easier for the U.S. to get its subs to sea and keep them there; U.S. subs are much quieter than Soviet ones and therefore harder to track and destroy in a conflict; and American SLBMs are more numerous, more accurate and altogether more potent than Soviet ones.

Reagan's lecture last week would have been more instructive if he had used a chart showing total strategic ballistic missile warheads rather than just ICBM launchers. Such a chart would have shown the two sides roughly equal with upwards of 7,000 warheads, since America's 5-to-2 advantage in SLBM warheads helps offset the Soviets' 5-to-2 advantage in ICBM warheads.

Nonetheless there are ominous trends. While the U.S. is prone to lengthy, agonizing national debate over the acquisition of even one new strategic weapon, such as the MX, the Soviets are cranking out new, more powerful models--or "generations"--of missiles and honing their accuracy all the time. So there is certainly a need for the U.S. to modernize its deterrent. But it can do that without Dense Pack, leaving the job of attacking silos to the Trident II and the most accurate, multiple-warhead version of the Minuteman. Perhaps at some point in the future, a portion of those Minuteman missiles could be replaced by MXs--in existing silos, rather than in some elaborate "protective/deceptive" basing plan. That might be necessary if the Soviets have not, in the meantime, agreed to significant cutbacks in their own land-based, silo-busting warheads. For the sake of deterrence, the U.S. needs a credible capability to attack hardened Soviet military targets. Therefore Congress should continue to fund the development of the MX missile, even as it sends the Pentagon back to the drawing board for the umpteenth time to figure out a place to put it. That would mitigate the embarrassment for the Administration, and indeed for the nation, of cancellation of the entire program. Killing the MX missile outright would be particularly imprudent at a time when the U.S. is trying so hard to keep the nervous West Europeans from reneging on their commitment to accept the Pershing IIs and cruise missiles. The U.S. does not need the MX in Dense Pack. But it does not need to have the world see a spectacular rebuff of the Executive Branch by the Congress either.

With the MX on the back burner, the U.S. should concentrate in the near term on building up its conventional forces and its more purely retaliatory weapons systems like cruise missiles, which are too slow to threaten a sneak attack. Reagan himself, in presenting his START proposal, has argued that ICBM warheads, because they can be hurled at their targets so quickly, are potential first-strike weapons and therefore destabilizing, while slower-flying cruise missiles and bombers enhance stability. Some of the money allocated for Dense Pack would be better spent on what Reagan calls "slow-flyers" in the next few years.

The U.S. should also use strategic arms control to maintain, and over time lower, the ceilings on Soviet ICBMS. The limits achieved to date have been, in the words of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "modest but significant"--and useful as precedents. The Soviets agreed in SALT II to dismantle some of their older weapons. Had the treaty gone into force, they would have been obliged under its terms to scrap more. And their proposal in START calls for still further reductions.

If, however, the American deterrent is reconstituted with the MX in Dense Pack as its centerpiece, the U.S. will have done more than close the counterforce gap. It will have opened a window of vulnerability on the Soviet ICBMs more serious, and harder for the Soviets to close, than the one that Reagan believes now faces the U.S. That would augur badly for strategic stability. It would mean that the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces would be more likely to go to a "launch on warning" alert. The more vulnerable its ICBMs, the more tempted the Kremlin would be to fire them off at the first indication of a U.S. attack--to "use them or lose them." The MX, in effect, would put the superpowers into the position of holding hair-trigger pistols to each other's heads. In this way, it would become part of the American strategic problem rather than the solution. Some Western experts even suspect the Soviets may already have adopted a launch-on-warning doctrine.

That doctrine puts a terrible onus on the ability of each to monitor the activity of the other and to see an attack coming. It also puts an almost inconceivable burden on the ability of a leader to react decisively yet wisely in a matter of minutes. That is why the superpowers have preferred to stick with a concept of stability posited on "mutual survivability," whereby each side could absorb a nuclear attack and then retaliate with devastating force. Dense Pack deployment of the MX would be a step toward a condition of "mutual vulnerability," in which each side would have an extra incentive to shoot first rather than retaliate, and that would be the most dangerous of all possible worlds.

The current MX plan also represents a potentially devastating setback to arms control. Reacting to Reagan's speech, the Soviets objected that Dense Pack would violate SALT prohibitions on building new launchers. They have a strong case. The American rebuttal that Dense Pack silos are shelters rather than launchers is pure casuistry. But that is not the biggest problem. Because hundreds of the new ICBMS would substantially increase the vulnerability of the Soviet Union's fixed-site ICBMS, the Kremlin might be induced to deploy a new generation of mobile ICBMS. Land-mobile missiles are a nightmare for both defense planning and arms control. Precisely because they can be moved around and hidden, they complicate the other side's confidence that treaty limits are being observed. (SLBMS, by contrast, are mobile and virtually invulnerable once they are at sea, but their launching tubes can be accurately counted by the other side as the submarines go into service.) Land-mobile missiles would also undermine confidence, on which deterrence in part depends, that one side could retaliate effectively against the other in case of attack. Deterrence would particularly suffer if land-mobiles were to end up being a Soviet monopoly.

The Soviets are on the brink of acquiring a mobile ICBM right now. They were working on one, called the SS-16, until 1977, but were persuaded during SALT II to cancel that program. The SS-16 is a three-stage big brother of the two-stage SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missile that has upset the military balance in Europe. Late last year, the old SS-16 test site at Plesetsk, near the White Sea in northwestern Russia, was the scene of fresh activity, suggesting that the program might be started up again on short notice.

Mobile ICBMs are not a realistic option for the U.S., for reasons that became painfully clear to the Air Force as it tried vainly to find a movable home for the MX. Americans, and therefore their representatives in Congress, like to keep their deterrent out of sight and as much as possible out of mind. They do not like the idea of trucks rumbling along interstate highways with cargos bound for Armageddon. The Soviets, by contrast, in addition to having more wide-open spaces in which to shuttle their missiles about, need not worry about environmentalists, constituent-minded politicians or protesters. The only reasons they have for not "going mobile" are, first, the knowledge that doing so would very likely kill what chance is left of bargaining for limits on American weapons that worry them and, second, the huge expense of putting on wheels their ICBM force.

But they might decide they have no choice. In that case, some American defense experts--and certainly those who predominate in this Administration--would argue that the U.S. must protect the MX with antimissile missiles. That would mean drastically renegotiating, and probably abrogating, the 1972 SALT II treaty limiting Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defenses. That pact, which is of indefinite duration and is currently undergoing its ten-year review in Geneva, is the only strategic nuclear arms accord still formally in force between the superpowers. Its collapse, combined with the erosion of the tacit, increasingly fragile regulation of offensive weapons that now exists, would very likely mark the end of arms control and the beginning of a new round in the arms race. This might be characterized by a double helix of two intertwined vicious spirals, one in offensive and the other in defensive weapons. What a double jeopardy that would be. And what a dramatic chart for Reagan to study a year or so from now.

--By Strobe Talbott

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